Paper 1- Cognitive Flashcards
Discuss ethical considerations related to research studies at the cognitive level of analysis.
Sharot et al: Studied the flashbulb memories in witnesses of 9/11. Which is harmful to the participant since it forced them to recall painful events.
Newcomer: Participants were given cortisol which increased their stress levels to understand how stress impacts memory recall.
Discuss how and why particular research methods are used at the cognitive level of analysis.
Elizabeth Loftus: Labortory Experiment
- Easy to replicate
- Allows for more control over independant variables
- Low ecoloical valididty
- Findings cant be generalized
- Demand characteristics are more likely to impact the results since it is overt.
Rosenthal and Jacobson: Field Experiment
- Higher ecological validity
- Demand characteristics are less likely to impact the results since it is covert.
- Less control over confounding varibles.
Evaluate schema theory with reference to research studies.
Barlette (1932): Read the “War of the Ghosts’ ‘ to participants not familiar with the culture. When recalled the story was changed, became shorter, and more stereotypical showing how schema interfered with memory.
Loftus: Schema theory
Evaluate two models or theories of one cognitive process with reference to research studies.
Barlette (1932): Schema theory
Speisman et al: Two factor theory of emotion
Explain how biological factors may affect one cognitive process.
Newcomer
Damasio
Discuss how social or cultural factors affect one cognitive process.
Barlette (1932): Read the “War of the Ghosts’ ‘ to participants not familiar with the culture. When recalled the story was changed, became shorter, and more stereotypical showing how schema interfered with memory.
Rosenthal and Jacobson: Teachers were told that some students in their class were expected to have a great growth in intelligence. In order to test how the teachers’ expectation of the students throughout the year would impact their intelligence. Their test scores did increase.
With reference to relevant research studies, to what extent is one cognitive process reliable?
Barlette (1932): Read the “War of the Ghosts’ ‘ to participants not familiar with the culture. When recalled the story was changed, became shorter, and more stereotypical showing how schema interfered with memory. - Reconstructed memory with scema theory
Elizabeth Loftus
Reconstructed memory-
Discuss the use of technology in investigating cognitive processes.
Sharot et al: Studied the flashbulb memories in witnesses of 9/11. They were interviewed while undergoing a fMRI scan.
Tierney et al (2001) uses PET scans to understand language
To what extent do cognitive and biological factors interact in emotion?
Speisman et al: Two factor theory of emotion
Sharot et al: Studied the flashbulb memories in witnesses of 9/11. They were interviewed while undergoing a fMRI scan.
Evaluate one theory of how emotion may affect one cognitive process.
Sharot et al: Studied the flashbulb memories in witnesses of 9/11. They were interviewed while undergoing a fMRI scan. (also fmri try to find another one)
Speisman et al: Two factor theory of emotion
Sharot et al (2007)
Procedure: The sample was made up of 24 participants who were in New York City on that day. Participants were put into an fMRI. While in the scanner, they were presented with word cues on a screen. The list of words is listed in the chart below. In addition, the word “Summer” or “September” was projected along with this word in order to have the participant link the word to either summer holidays or to the events of 9-11. Participants’ brain activity was observed while they recalled the event. The memories of personal events from the summer served as a baseline of brain activity for evaluating the nature of 9/11 memories.
Findings: the activation of the amygdala for the participants who were downtown was higher when they recalled memories of the terrorist attack than when they recalled events from the preceding summer, whereas those participants who were further away from the event had equal levels of response in the amygdala when recalling both events. The strength of amygdala activation at retrieval was shown to correlate with flashbulb memories. These results suggest that close personal experience may be critical in engaging the neural mechanisms that produce the vivid memories characteristic of flashbulb memory.
Limitations: low in ecological validity
Loftus (1974)
Experiment 1
Aim: To see the extent to which memories can be altered by irrelevant external influences
Method:45 students participated in the experiment. They were divided into 5 groups of 7. 5 films of traffic accidents were shown that ranged from 5 to 30 seconds. When the participants were asked to watch the films they were asked to give an account of the accident they had seen and then they answered a questionnaire with one of the questions being the critical question, where they were asked to estimate the speed of the cars involved in the accident. It was predicted that if the word smashed was used to describe the crash the estimated speed would be higher opposed to using the word hit to describe the accident. The independent variable was the different words used in the critical question(smashed, collided, bumped, hit, contacted) and the dependant variable being the estimation of the speed.
Results:The results indicated that the critical word in the question consistently affected the participants answer to the question. Smash had a mean estimate of 41 mph, hit had a mean estimate of 34 mph, bumped had a mean estimate of 38 mph, collided had a mean estimate of 39 mph and contacted had a mean estimate of 32 mph.
Conclusion: The different speed estimates may have been due to response bias. Which means they were not sure of the speed of the car and therefore used the verb to guide their answer. But it may also have been how the question was constructed that could have impacted their answer as participants may have associated smash with being a very serious incident which therefore altered/ distorted how they remember the crash.
Experiment 2
Aim: To investigate if participants who had a high-speed estimate in the first part of the experiment would mistakenly ‘remember’ that they had seen broken glass in the second part of the experiment.
Method: 150 students participated in this experiment, They were divided into groups of different sizes. They were shown a 1-minute film depicting a multiple car accident lasting about 4 seconds. After seeing the film the participants answered a questionnaire. First, they described the accident in their own words and then they had to answer a number of other questions. 50 participants were asked: “About how fast were the cars going when they smashed each other?”, 50 participants were asked: “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” and 50 participants weren’t asked anything regarding the speeds of the cars. After 1 week participants were asked to come back to the lab to answer some questions about the accident. There was one critical question this time in a list of a total of 10 questions and it was placed randomly in the list in the questionnaire. The critical question was: “Did you see any broken glass?”. The participants simply had to answer “yes” or “no”. Although there was no broken glass at the crash the researchers assumed that broken glass would be associated with high speed.
results: In the ‘smashed’ condition 32% of participants said yes to having seen broken glass compared to 14% in the hit condition and 12% in the control condition.
Conclusion: Researchers argued that the results of the second experiment provided further support for the theory of reconstructive memory and schema processing.
Rosenthal and Jacobson
Aimed to determine whether or not teachers’ expectations of students’ performance affected the students’ learning throughout the course of the year
Procedure:
1. 18 classes of students (Kindergarten to 6th Grade)
2. Given an intelligence test to observe the development throughout the entirety of the year
3. Randomly selected 20% of the students
4. The teachers were told that this 20% had “unusual potential for intellectual growth,” and that they could be expected to “bloom” throughout the year
5. Received another test at the end of the year
The students in the 20% showed a significant increase in test scores, rather than the students who were not singled out for attention by the teacher
“Self-fulfilling prophecy”
Barrlett (1932)
Aim:
Method: Participants were told a Native American legend called ‘The war of the ghosts’. The participants were British; for the them the story was filled with unknown names and concepts, and the manner in which the story was developed was also foreign to them. The story was therefore ideal to study how memory was reconstructed based on schema processing.
Results: He found that participants changed the story as they tried to remember it- a process called distortion. he found that these patterns of distortion took place:
1. Assimilation: Details of the story were unconsciously changed to fit the norms of British culture. Words such as “Canoe” became boat.
2. Leveling: The story became shorter; often by not including elements which weren’t as important or by missing out supernatural elements of the story.
3. Sharpening: Changed the order in which the story was told to make it fit a structure which they were used to.
Conclusion: The study helps to provide empirical evidence for schema theory.
Damasio
A study by Damasio (2000) provides evidence in support of this theory. In the study, 39 participants were asked to recall emotionally charged memories while being monitored with a PET scanner. The study found that the emotional memories triggered autonomic and physical arousal before the participants ever indicated they were ‘feeling’ the intended emotion. Additionally, the somatosensory cortex, responsible for sensory information, was also activated. Overall, this supports the James-Lange idea because it shows that an emotional experience is subjectively perceived as an effect of physiological reactions.
