Topic 6B Flashcards
Selective attention
the allocation of limited processing resources: your brain can only devote attention to a limited number of stimuli.
Divided attention
the ability of the brain to attend to two different stimuli at the same time. The brain responds to multiple demands of the environment at the same time by using simultaneous attention, allowing a subject to process different information sources and carry out multiple tasks at one time.
standard information-processing model for mental development
the mind’s machinery includes attention mechanisms for bringing information in, working memory for actively manipulating information, and long-term memory for passively holding information so that it can be used in the future
Information processing theory
posits that there are three levels of memory: Sensory register, working memory, knowledge base (long term memory)
Sensory Register
Information first enters our sensory register. Sensations are continuously coming into our brains, and yet most of these sensations are never really perceived or stored in our minds. They are lost after a few seconds because they were immediately filtered out as irrelevant. If the information is not perceived or stored, it is discarded quickly.
Working Memory (Short-term Memory):
f information is meaningful (either because it reminds us of something else or because we must remember it for something like a history test we will be taking in 5 minutes), it makes its way into our working memory. This consists of information of which we are immediately aware. There is a limited amount of information that can be kept in the working memory at any given time. Information in our working memory must be stored in an effective way in order to be accessible to us for later use. It is stored in our long-term memory or knowledge base.
Knowledge Base (Long-term Memory):
This level of memory has an unlimited capacity and stores information for days, months or years. It consists of things that we know of or can remember if asked. This is where you want the information to be stored ultimately. While children are learning they process information during infancy and childhood, we see significant improvements during middle childhood. During this period, children can learn and remember due to an increase in the ways they attend to and store information. As children enter school and learn more about the world, they develop more categories for concepts and learn more efficient strategies for storing and retrieving data. One significant reason is that they continue to have more experiences on which to tie new information. New experiences are similar to old ones or remind the child of something else about which they know. This helps them file away new experiences more efficiently.
Piaget’s theory of cognitive development
four stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational and formal operational period.
sensorimotor stage
extends from birth to the acquisition of language. Here, infants progressively construct knowledge and understanding of the world by coordinating experiences (such as vision and hearing) with physical interactions with objects.
preoperational stage
starts when the child begins to learn to speak at age 2 and lasts up until the age of 7. Here, children do not yet understand concrete logic and cannot mentally manipulate information. The child can form stable concepts as well as magical beliefs. The child, however, is still not able to perform operations, which are tasks that the child can do mentally, rather than physically. In this stage, children’s perspectives are limited by egocentrism, meaning they cannot understand a perspective other than their own.
concrete operational stage:
3 rd stage; occurs from 7-11 (preadolescence) years and is characterized by the appropriate use of logic. The two important processes in the concrete operational stage are logic and the elimination of egocentrism.
formal operational stage
adolescence and into adulthood, roughly ages 11 to approximately 15-20): Intelligence is demonstrated through the logical use of symbols related to abstract concepts. At this point, the person is capable of hypothetical and deductive reasoning. During this time, people develop the ability to think about abstract concepts.
Functional fixedness
a special type of mindset that occurs when the intended purpose of an object hinders a person’s ability to see its potential other uses.
Confirmation bias
a barrier to problem-solving. This exists when a person has a tendency to look for information that supports their idea or approach instead of looking at new information that may contradict their approach or ideas.
Anchoring bias
Tendency to focus on one particular piece of information when making decisions or problem-solving
Confirmation bias
Focuses on information that confirms existing beliefs
Hindsight bias
Belief that the event just experienced was predictable
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Representative bias
Unintentional stereotyping of someone or something
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Availability bias
Decision is based upon either an available precedent or an example that may be faulty
Belief bias
casting judgment on issues using what someone believes about their conclusion. A good example is belief perseverance which is the tendency to hold on to pre-existing beliefs, despite being presented with evidence that is contradictory.
Francis Galton
was the first to propose a theory of intelligence. Galton believed intelligence had a biological basis that could be studied by measuring reaction times to certain cognitive tasks.
Edward Thorndike
1920 theorized three types of intelligence: social, mechanical, and abstract.
◦ Thorndike defined social intelligence as the ability to manage and understand people. He focused on behavior rather than consciousness in his research; as such, his studies constituted the beginning of investigations related to social intelligence.
Howard Gardner
published a book on multiple intelligence that breaks intelligence down into at least eight different modalities: logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligence.
Peter Salovey and John Mayer
coined the term “emotional intelligence” and defined it as “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.
Threat-simulation theory
suggests that dreaming should be seen as an ancient biological defense mechanism that provides an evolutionary advantage because of its capacity to repeatedly simulate potential threatening events, thus enhancing the mechanisms required for efficient threat avoidance.
Activation-synthesis theory
states that dreams don’t actually mean anything. Instead, dreams are merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. The theory posits that humans construct dream stories after they wake up, in an attempt to make sense of it all.
continual-activation theory
proposes that dreaming is a result of brain activation and synthesis; its assumption is that, during REM sleep, the unconscious part of the brain is busy processing procedural memory.
State-dependent learning
when a person remembers information based on the state of mind (or mood) they are in when they learn it.
Sensory memory
allows individuals to retain impressions of sensory information for a brief time after the original stimulus has ceased. It allows individuals to remember great sensory detail about a complex stimulus immediately following its presentation. Sensory memory is an automatic response considered to be outside of cognitive control. Information from sensory memory has the shortest retention time, ranging from mere milliseconds to five seconds. It is retained just long enough for it to be transferred to short-term (working) memory. There are two types of sensory memory, echoic memory which is the memory of sound and iconic memory which is the memory of an image.
Anterograde amnesia
the inability to store new memories
retrograde amnesia
inability to retrieve old memories
multi-trace distributed memory model
t the memories being encoded are converted to vectors (lists of values), with each value or “feature” in the vector representing a different attribute of the item to be encoded. These vectors are called memory traces. A single memory is distributed to multiple attributes so that each attribute represents one aspect of the memory being encoded. These vectors are then added into the memory array or matrix (a list of vectors). In order to retrieve the memory for the recall process, one must cue the memory matrix with a specific probe. The memory matrix is constantly growing, with new traces being added in.
neural network model
assumes that neurons form a complex network with other neurons, forming a highly interconnected network; each neuron is characterized by the activation value (how much energy it takes to activate that neuron), and the connection between two neurons is characterized by the weight value (how strong the connection between those neurons is). In this model, connections are formed in the process of memory storage, strengthened through use, and weakened through disuse.
dual-store memory search model, now referred to as the search-of-associative-memory (SAM) model,
Two types of memory storage, short-term store and long-term store, are utilized in the SAM model. In the recall process, items residing in the short-term memory store will be recalled first, followed by items residing in the long-term store, where the probability of being recalled is proportional to the strength of the association present within the long-term store. Another type of memory storage, the semantic matrix, is used to explain the semantic effect associated with memory recall.
Spreading activation
a theory proposed that relates storage of memories to the activation of a series of nodes. These nodes create an activation pattern of other related nodes and this is how singular events are remembered. For example at the mention of the color red and the word vehicles two nodes that may be activated at the same time relate a person memory of a car they owned or a fire truck.
Memory retrieval
the process of remembering information stored in long-term memory. There are three main types of memory retrieval: recall, recognition and relearning.
Serial recall
is the recall items or events in the order in which they occurred. By thinking about a string of events or even words, it is possible to use a previous memory to cue the next item in the series. This can sometimes lead to serialposition effect which is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst.
Free recall
occurs when a person must recall many items but can recall them in any order. In free recall, there is often a primacy effect in which the items that were presented first are recalled well as they have already been encoded into long-term memory. There is also a recency effect, in which the items that were presented last are also recalled well as they are still being held in the working short-term memory.
Cued recall
occurs when a person is given a list to remember and is then given cues during the testing phase to aid in the retrieval of memories. The stronger the link between the cue and the testing word, the better the participant will recall the words.
Sensitization
the strengthening of a neurological response to a stimulus due to the response to a secondary stimulus.
Neural plasticity
refers to the brains’ ability to change over time to adapt to environments, behavior and emotions through the process of potentiation.
nativism
This theory posits that infants teach themselves and that language learning is genetically programmed. The view is known as nativism and was advocated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that infants are equipped with a neurological construct referred to as the language acquisition device (LAD), which makes infants ready for language. The LAD allows children, as their brains develop, to derive the rules of grammar quickly and effectively from the speech they hear every day. Therefore, language develops as long as the infant is exposed to it. No teaching, training, or reinforcement is required for language to develop. Instead, language learning comes from a particular gene, brain maturation, and the overall human impulse to imitate.
nativism
This theory posits that infants teach themselves and that language learning is genetically programmed. The view is known as nativism and was advocated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that infants are equipped with a neurological construct referred to as the language acquisition device (LAD), which makes infants ready for language. The LAD allows children, as their brains develop, to derive the rules of grammar quickly and effectively from the speech they hear every day. Therefore, language develops as long as the infant is exposed to it. No teaching, training, or reinforcement is required for language to develop. Instead, language learning comes from a particular gene, brain maturation, and the overall human impulse to imitate.
nativism
This theory posits that infants teach themselves and that language learning is genetically programmed. The view is known as nativism and was advocated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that infants are equipped with a neurological construct referred to as the language acquisition device (LAD), which makes infants ready for language. The LAD allows children, as their brains develop, to derive the rules of grammar quickly and effectively from the speech they hear every day. Therefore, language develops as long as the infant is exposed to it. No teaching, training, or reinforcement is required for language to develop. Instead, language learning comes from a particular gene, brain maturation, and the overall human impulse to imitate.
nativism
This theory posits that infants teach themselves and that language learning is genetically programmed. The view is known as nativism and was advocated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that infants are equipped with a neurological construct referred to as the language acquisition device (LAD), which makes infants ready for language. The LAD allows children, as their brains develop, to derive the rules of grammar quickly and effectively from the speech they hear every day. Therefore, language develops as long as the infant is exposed to it. No teaching, training, or reinforcement is required for language to develop. Instead, language learning comes from a particular gene, brain maturation, and the overall human impulse to imitate.
nativism
This theory posits that infants teach themselves and that language learning is genetically programmed. The view is known as nativism and was advocated by Noam Chomsky, who suggested that infants are equipped with a neurological construct referred to as the language acquisition device (LAD), which makes infants ready for language. The LAD allows children, as their brains develop, to derive the rules of grammar quickly and effectively from the speech they hear every day. Therefore, language develops as long as the infant is exposed to it. No teaching, training, or reinforcement is required for language to develop. Instead, language learning comes from a particular gene, brain maturation, and the overall human impulse to imitate.
Assimilation and Accommodation
Jean Piaget’s theory of language development suggests that children use both assimilation and accommodation to learn a language. Assimilation is the process of changing one’s environment to place information into an already-existing schema (or idea). Accommodation is the process of changing one’s schema to adapt to the new environment. Piaget believed children need to first develop mentally before language acquisition can occur. According to him, children first create mental structures within the mind (schemas) and from these schemas, language development happens.
Interactionist theory
has its basis in social interaction theory and posits that language is acquired and perfects through interactions with more experienced linguistic figures. For example, a child speaking to an adult, through this process they learn to improve their development
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
the grammatical structure of a person’s language influences the way he or she perceives the world. The hypothesis has been widely abandoned by linguists as it has found at best minimal experimental support, and it does not hold much merit in psychology.
Broca’s area
located in the frontal lobe of the brain, is linked to speech production, and recent studies have shown that it also plays a significant role in language comprehension.
Damage to Broca’s area can result in productive aphasia (Broca’s aphasia), or an inability to speak. Patients with Broca’s can often still understand language, but they cannot speak fluently.
Wernicke’s area,
located in the cerebral cortex, is the part of the brain involved in understanding written and spoken language. Damage to this area results in receptive aphasia (Wernicke’s aphasia). This type of aphasia manifests itself as a loss of comprehension, so sometimes while the patient can apparently still speak, their language is nonsensical and incomprehensible.
primary auditory cortex
located in the temporal lobe and connected to the auditory system, is organized so that it responds to neighboring frequencies in the other cells of the cortex. It is responsible for identifying pitch and loudness of sounds.
angular gyrus
located in the parietal lobe of the brain, is responsible for several language processes, including number processing, spatial recognition, and attention.
