Test 2 weeks 6 & 7 PSYC122

Question 1

Walsh, A.T., Carmel, D., Harper, D.N., Bolitho, P., & Grimshaw, G.M. (2021)- attention

Answer 1

low perceptual load task, room for distractions, three kinds: negative (injury), neutral and positive (erotic couple), people tend to prioritise things with emotional value. Monetary rewards- get points for being fast, motivation to find the letters- with increased motivation distraction is almost completely overridden

Question 2

The Biassed Competition Model of Attention

Answer 2

at any moment in time what is winning out competition for attention, bottom up mechanism (look at me, look at me), suggests change or novelty, attracts interest/attention, sensitive to environment, top down, bias things towards what is relevant to our goals

Question 3

Sana et al. (2013)- dual-tasking in class

Answer 3

Experiment 1- all participants used laptops to take notes, half were told to complete tasks on laptop at some point during the class, at the end of the lecture students were given a test about their comprehension of lecture material, independent variable was multitasking or not, 50 v 70%
Experiment 2- view of someone multitasking, view of someone not multitasking, seeing someone on a laptop is distracting

Question 4

The Costs of Multitasking

Answer 4

What you miss
1. Attention is limited!
2. Dividing your attention results in poor attention for everything.
The Switch Cost
1. When we switch tasks, we have to activate a whole new set of cognitive processes.
2. Switching takes time (seconds to minutes)

Question 5

Fitz et al. (2019)- notifications (distractions)

Answer 5

notifications, 4 experimental conditions, notifications like usual, once an hour, three times a day, no notifications at all, at end of day a couple of quick surveys, measure well-being, attention, anxiety, phone use, fomo, control and one hour don’t really differ from each other, three times a day- less stress, more perceived productivity, fewer negative feelings, no notifications look like the control group- a lot of fomo

Question 6

an immediate, brief memory of a visual image that lasts no more than half a second

Answer 6

iconic memory

Question 7

ultra-short-term memory of auditory stimuli you’ve just heard

Answer 7

echoic memory

Question 8

Short-term/Working Memory

Answer 8

when we pay attention to something we bring it into our awareness, limited amount of things at once

Question 9

Long-term Memory- Declarative (explicit) memory

Answer 9

Autobiographical Memory- Semantic memory (knowledge) and Episodic memory (events)

Question 10

Long-term Memory- Nondeclarative (implicit) memory

Answer 10

Procedural memory
(skills, motor sequences, priming)

Question 11

Sperling (1960)- capacity and duration of sensory memory and short-term/working memory

Answer 11

Full Report- People can report 1-2 items
Partial Report (report 3 letters instead of 9)- People can report 2-3 items no matter which row is cued!- means they must have been able to see the whole thing, could report any of the rows cued
Delayed Partial Report (present arrows late, gradually increases the delay)- People lose ability to report in 1-4 seconds- if the delay is 1-4 seconds, short lived memory system

Question 12

Capacity of short-term memory

Answer 12

Our capacity is 7 plus or minus 2, 30 seconds

Question 13

Capacity of sensory memory

Answer 13

5-10 items, <1-4 seconds

Question 14

Chase & Ericsson (1981)- Increasing the capacity of short term memory

Answer 14

• Practised digit span 4 days/week for 2 years
• Digit span increased from 7 to 79
• How?- runner, familiar with running times over certain distances and dates, take sequences of numbers and make it a distance, a time and a date, random numbers became a chunk of information, number story
• Transfer?- if you give him letters/words he goes back to 7, only ability to chunk not short term memory, expertise in something create different types of chunk

Question 15

simplifies memorization by breaking down large information sets into smaller, interconnected units

Answer 15

chunking memory method

Question 16

Chase & Simon (1973)- Perception in chess

Answer 16

Chess masters have an ordinary limited span of working memory, but that they perceive chess boards with larger “chunk” sizes. memory for chess boards with expert chess players (more than 10,000 hours playing time), played a game and stopped it, showed a picture of the board, look at it for 5 seconds and then they have to fill in the pieces on empty board, novices were terrible at it, experts were really good at it, second experiment randomly put the pieces on the board (would not happen in a game), experts and novices are equally bad, when experts look at a game it looks like a pattern

Question 17

Peterson & Peterson (1969)- The Duration of Short-term Memory

Answer 17

1. Remember: J V L
2. Count backwards from 97 by 3’s
3. Report letters

Question 18

Anatomy of a Memory Experiment

Answer 18

Encoding Phase- Read/Listen/Watch, Instructions, Incidental/Intentional
——> delay (immediate/minutes/days) interference ——–>
Test/Retrieval Phase- Free Recall, Cued Recall, Recognition (list of words, half you’ve seen, half you haven’t, have to point out the ones you’ve seen, multi-option quiz)

Question 19

Levels of Processing Theory

Answer 19

The strength of encoding depends on the level of elaborative rehearsal- 1. Amount of attention paid
2. Amount of meaning information extracted
3. Connection to pre-existing knowledge

Question 20

Availability

Answer 20

item is in memory

Question 21

Accessibility

Answer 21

item can be retrieved from memory

Question 22

Jacoby (1978)- Generation

Answer 22

had to match words/generate second word themselves, immediate recognition or delayed recognition, memory better for generated words

Question 23

Bower, Clark, Lesgold, & Wincenz (1969)- Organisation

Answer 23

Structured vs Random: 112 words- studied them once, twice, or three times
First trial: 73% vs 20%
Third trial: 100% vs 52%

Question 24

Method of Loci

Answer 24

1. Imagine to-be-remembered items in familiar locations.
2. Retrace your steps

Question 25

State-Dependent Memory- Godden & Baddeley (1975)

Answer 25

1. Study words either on land or underwater
2. Recall words either on land or underwater- retrieving on land, memory much better for things learnt on land and vice versa
   State-dependent Memory also holds for
   * Classroom
   * Mood- when you’re happy better memory for what you encoded when you’re happy etc…
   * Drugs (alcohol, Ritalin)

Question 26

Cue Dependency Principle

Answer 26

The strength of a memory depends on the number and informativeness of its cues.

Question 27

Encoding Specificity Principle

Answer 27

Cues are most effective if they are encoded along with the to-be-remembered information.

Question 28

Forgetting- Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885)

Answer 28

Studied lists until he had them memorised.
Then retested himself after different intervals.- 3, 5, 20 days- Each time Ebbinghaus relearned a list, it took less time.

Question 29

Bahrick et al (1975)- How long do memories last

Answer 29

Tested memory using yearbook photos- Participants aged 18 to 70
1. Free recall
2. Recognition (choose the right name)
3. Recognition (choose the right face)
Picture recognition quite good throughout, name recognition worsens with age

Question 30

Five causes of memory failure

Answer 30

1. Failure to encode/consolidate- sleep/dreams, explaining, talking consolidates memory, making it stronger
2. Decay?- through lack of use memory pathways start to disintegrate
3. Retrieval failure
4. Interference- memories get in the way of each other
5. Intentional forgetting?- not good to have everything that has ever happened to you in memory, lose a sense of some things being more important than others, some memories are difficult

Question 31

Retroactive interference

Answer 31

Recent memories interfere with the ability to retrieve older memories

Question 32

Proactive interference

Answer 32

Old memories interfere with the ability to retrieve newer memories

Question 33

Intentional Forgetting- Nando & Anderson (2024), Same probe test (SP)

Answer 33

Think-no-think Task
Learn pairs of words
Cued recall
If the cue word is green, recall the target and think about the word
If the cue is red DON’T recall the target word, try to keep your mind blank
* Facilitation (FE)
Words that have been recalled during testing are better recalled than baseline words.
* Suppression-Induced Forgetting (SIF)
Word that have been suppressed during testing are more poorly recalled than baseline words

Question 34

Suppression

Answer 34

Consciously keeping memory out of awareness, Adaptive , Supported by experimental evidence

Question 35

Repression

Answer 35

Unconsciously blocking memory from awareness, Maladaptive, Not supported by experimental evidence

Question 36

Anterograde Amnesia

Answer 36

type of memory loss that occurs when you can’t form new memories from the moment you damage the brain

Question 37

Retrograde Amnesia

Answer 37

form of memory loss that causes an inability to remember events from the past

Question 38

Mirror tracing task, Milner (1965)

Answer 38

sit down in front of the mirror, draw shape, without looking at hand, looking at it in the mirror, trace the shape, make a lot of mistakes at first but improve quickly, H.M. knows how to do mirror drawing in 3 days, past experiences have influenced his future experiences, type of memory that we all have but not conscious

Question 39

Milner (1970)- Image recognition

Answer 39

series of pictures, slowly get closer to being interpreted, used to test neurological patients

Question 40

The Hippocampus (H.M.)

Answer 40

implicit v explicit memory, research done on animals on what happens after damage to hippocampus, the way they learn is mostly implicit, human type of memory= bringing something/a memory to consciousness, hippocampus seems to play a key role, very active during learning, binding together all the different perceptions that lead to this very moment, places/events/objects/sound, memory is all this tied together, having a memory is like perceiving-re-perceiving in the same way you experienced the original, memories are us reconstructing/recreating the original event/experience, having a memory and having an imagined feature is almost exactly the same system in your brain
- NOT where memories are stored.
- Creates memory traces by binding ideas together.
- Consolidates those memories.
- Transfers memories to cortex.

Question 41

Bartlett’s War of the Ghost study (1932)

Answer 41

aimed to measure the accuracy of reconstructive memory and identify how schemas may influence them
Read story x2 → recall 1, 15 mins →repeated reproduction ) 1 day to over a year later
With repeated reproduction:
* Narrative gist remained the same as first report- same mistakes
* Omissions
- Stories got shorter
- Culturally unfamiliar details omitted
* Normalisations
- Details changed to match participant culture;
- canoes and paddles → boats and oars
- seal hunting → fishing

Question 42

Schema

Answer 42

understanding of situation, patterns of thinking and behaviour that people use to interpret the world, what you know about something, if someone tells you about something it will activate your whole schema of the situation, used to tell you about the world some things don’t need to be said, use schema to remember

Question 43

Schema Theory

Answer 43

• Memories are not reproduced, they are reconstructed.
• We use schemas to understand the world.
• Later, we use schemas to remember the world.

Question 44

Bransford & Johnson (1972)- schema

Answer 44

read paragraph out loud and asked participants to rate how comprehensible it is, ask them to write down what they remember, they do terrible, second group is shown same paragraph with different title, activated laundry schema, shapes your understanding, guides, second group good at remembering it, recall it with schema in mind

Question 45

Brewer & Treyens (1981)- schema

Answer 45

Spend 35 seconds in an office while “waiting” for an experimenter.
Office contains
* Schema consistent items (chairs, typewriter, posters)
* Schema inconsistent items (skull, frisbee, wine bottle)- not part of a participant’s schema of an office
Shift to new room
Verbal Recall- wrote out what they could remember, 15 mins
or
Drawing Recall- draw, given a floor plan, 15 mins
or
Recognition- did you see these things
How many of these items do you remember?- mostly things that were part of a schema, much fewer people remembered skull, frisbee, wine bottle, remembered things that weren’t there, part of schema

Question 46

Bower et al. (1979)- The Dentist (script)

Answer 46

Bower et al. (1979)- gave people events
1. Group 1 generates components of the script
* High agreement across people (of the same culture)
2. Group 2 read stories using scripts
* Recall/Recognition
Script-consistent events in the story
Script-consistent events not in the story
Salient non-consistent events

Question 47

Scripts

Answer 47

Script are about sequences of events that we all culturally share, e.g. what to do in a fast food, what to do in a fancy restaurant, used to communicate and share our experiences

Question 48

Encoding

Answer 48

• We encode items/events
• We encode our inferences/assumptions (drawn from our scripts and schemas)
• New information is incorporated into our existing memory

Question 49

Retrieval

Answer 49

• We reactivate components of the memory
• We reactivate the script/schema- retrieve a slightly different memory, memory is not designed to get details right, just the just
• Every time we retrieve a memory, we revise it based on our current script/schema

Question 50

Vlach & Sandhofer (2012)- spacing

Answer 50

taught kids 4 science concepts, either 4 lessons Monday, 2 on Monday and 2 on Tuesday or one each day, pre-test to post-test improvement is seen in spaced practice

Question 51

Roediger & Karpicke (2006)- testing v study

Answer 51

testing yourself v more studying, achieved better results in final test when you test yourself