Cognitive Psyc Notes - Dr Sri U PDF

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Cognitive Psychology Notes PSYC 380 DR. SRI SIDDHI N. UPADHYAY [email protected]

January 21 Lecture Cognitive Psyc is often Multiprocess: ● ● ● ● ● ●

Intelligence Language Thinking and problem solving Memory Attention Perception

Important factors in Cognitive Psych ● Reaction time ● Accuracy ○ Often look at accuracy in combination with reaction time to examine mental processing

Different types of Processing 1. Low-level cognitive processes a. Sensation and Perception i. Bottom-up & top-down processing b. Attention 2. Higher-order cognitive processes a. Long term and working memory b. Learning c. Language i. Processing, production d. Comprehension e. Decision making f. Problem-solving

Cues that help us process and identify natural and artificial scenes, and objects: 1. Edges & vertices 2. Light- including shadow and color

Sensation vs Perception ● Sensation

○ Info about stimuli taken in from the environment ○ Travels to sensory organs (eyes/ ears, etc) ○ Then travels to the brain ● Perception ○ Mental processing and interpretation of sensory in brain ○ Decisions, judgments, and response to environment or stimuli

Chapter 6- Learning and Remembering ● A distinction can be made between declarative memory (or explicit memory) and nondeclarative memory (or implicit memory): a. declarative/ explicit memory is long-term memory knowledge that is retrieved and reflected on consciously. b. nondeclarative/ implicit memory is knowledge that influences thought and behavior without any necessary involvement of consciousness i. The key to this distinction is conscious awareness: Either one has it or one does not. ● Episodic memory: a memory of personally experienced events a. When you took your driver’s license test b. Episodic memories are integrated mental representations ● Semantic memory: your general world knowledge a. if you were asked what a driver's license is i. Both involve knowledge that you can be consciously aware of!!!

● Repetition priming: a priming effect caused by the exact repetition of a stimulus a. This happens even if you do not consciously recall having seen the word “license” ● Our memories are better than we often give ourselves credit for and worse than we are often willing to believe or admit

Preliminary Issues ● A mnemonic device is an active, strategic learning device or method ● The strengths of mnemonics include the following: a. The material to be remembered is practiced repeatedly. b. The material is integrated into an existing memory framework. c. The mnemonic provides a way to retrieve the material

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story mnemonics provide an excellent illustration of these features of mnemonics. Creating a narrative or story for a set of information will improve your memory ● The stories people created for themselves provided structure, imagery, and effort, and served as excellent sources of retrieval cues d. Rhetoric is the art of public speaking, which in those days meant speaking from memory Research has found little if any, evidence that any other so-called memory enhancer, has any real effect on memory The Ebbinghaus Tradition a. Ebbinghaus devised the relearning task (or savings task), in which a list is originally learned, set aside for a period of time, then later relearned to the same criterion of accuracy b. After relearning the list, Ebbinghaus computed a savings score as the measure of learning c. Ebbinghaus relearned the lists after one of seven intervals: 20 minutes, 1 hour, 9 hours, 1 day, 2 days, 6 days, or 31 days. i. the most dramatic forgetting occurs early after the original learning ii. Hypermnesia: the rate of reminiscence may be greater than the rate of forgetting, and a person remembers more over time d. Upon relearning, the more frequently repeated list showed about twice the savings of the less frequently repeated list (overlearning yields a stronger record in memory) i. Massed practice = cramming ii. Distributed practice = practice over time Memory Consolidation a. Consolidation does not happen all at once, but is stretched out over time and perhaps goes through two phases: i. The first is a fast synaptic consolidation phase in which memories may be stored for up to 2 weeks, perhaps in the hippocampus ii. The second is a slower systems consolidation phase in which memories are stored for up to a lifetime across the cortex b. Generally, the older a memory is, the more likely it is to have been consolidated, and so it is resistant to forgetting Metamemory a. This self-awareness about memory is metamemory, knowledge about (meta) one's own memory and how it works or fails to work i. Metamemory concerns your ability to assess when you have learned something, your realization that you need to remember something in the future, and even the basics of what you do and do not know. This captures the idea that memory is not primarily for recollecting about the past but for preparing a person to act in the present and the near future b. Part of a person's behavior in a learning task involves self-monitoring, assessing how well one is doing, and adjusting study strategies (metacognition) c. Although we do have some awareness of our memories, we are unaware of many aspects of memory d. Some of the ways in which we assess our memory:

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judgments of learning (JOLs) happen when people predict, after studying material, whether they will remember it later (Did I learn it?) ii. Self-Regulation ● labor-in-vain effect: that is, they devote more study time to difficult items and yet do not improve much at all ● region of proximal learning: studying information that is just beyond one’s current knowledge and saving the more difficult material for later iii. Feeling of knowing: examine when people fail to remember something ● when you see someone you know in a mall, and you start up a conversation even though you cannot remember the person’s name ● despite a strong feeling that you could recognize something later, you cannot say much more about the inaccessible information iv. tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) effect: where you feel like the word or name you cannot remember is on the verge of being remembered ● a feeling that retrieval is imminent ● Theories on Storing Information in Episodic Memory: a. Ebbinghaus’ Theory i. He found that increasing the number of repetitions led to a stronger memory, a trace of the information in memory that could be relearned faster. Thus, frequency has a fundamental influence on memory: Information presented more frequently is stored more strongly. b. Hasher and Zacks’ Theory i. Frequency information is automatically encoded into memory with no deliberate effort or intent. Although there is a dispute about just how automatic this is, there is no doubt that event frequency has an impact on long-term memory. c. von Restorff’s Theory i. The flip side of frequency is distinctiveness. It is easier to remember unusual, unexpected, or atypical events. Technically called the isolation effect, it is more commonly known as the von Restorff effect. The effect is simply better memory for information that is distinct from the information around it, such as printing one word in a list in red ink or changing its size (Cooper & Pantle, 1967; Kelley & Nairne, 2001). The isolation effect relies on memory for the distinctive item to be noticed as distinctive. Generally, the occurrence of unexpected and distinctive items can produce increased processing in the hippocampus. Thus, damage to the hippocampus should reduce or eliminate the von Restorff effect. d. Kishiyama, Yonelinas, and Lazzara’s Theory i. people who were amnesic (as a result of damage to their medial temporal lobes and hippocampus) did not show a von Restorff effect

Storing Information in Episodic Memory ● How do you learn and remember something new? There are three important steps to do so: ● Rehearsal ● Organization ● Imagery

● Rehearsal: deliberate recycling or practicing of information in the short-term store a. rehearsal transfers information into long-term memory b. rehearsal leads to better long-term retention ● Massed practice is when people memorize information in one long session (remember the earlier discussion about cramming) ● Distributed practice is when rehearsal is spread out across multiple, shorter occasions. a. In other words, although you can learn if you cram, you learn better if you study a bit every day ● Testing Effect a. after some initial studying, a memory may actually be better if people take a test as compared to just studying more b. taking a test can actually improve memory more than studying c. the additional experience you get from tests actually helps you remember the information better and faster—better even than studying, especially if you take a recall test d. This testing benefit applies to recognition (multiple-choice) tests and to nonverbal material such as maps ● There are two kinds of rehearsal (depth of processing): a. Maintenance rehearsal is a low-level, repetitive information recycling. This is the rehearsal you use to recycle a phone number to yourself until you dial it. Once you stop rehearsing, the information is lost. In Craik and Lockhart’s view, maintenance rehearsal holds information at a certain level in memory without storing it permanently. As long as information is maintained, it can be retrieved. However, when rehearsal stops, information will likely vanish. b. Elaborative rehearsal is a more complex rehearsal that uses the meaning of the information to store and remember it. Information that is elaboratively rehearsed is stored more deeply in memory and is remembered better. You might include imagery or mnemonic elaboration in your elaborative rehearsal. You might try to construct sentences from the words in a list. You might impose an organization on the list. Or you might even convert nonsense syllables like BEF into more meaningful items like BEEF. i. In other words, maintenance rehearsal maintains an item at its current level of storage, whereas elaborative rehearsal moves the item more deeply, and more permanently, into memory. c. items that get only incidental attention are processed at a shallow level d. if information is shallowly processed, using only maintenance rehearsal, then the information should not be well remembered later i. If you pay more attention, you will remember more!!! ● Difficulties with depth of processing: a. Circularity b. Task effects ● Factors that influence recognition: a. recollection—the actual remembering of the information b. familiarity—the general sense that you have experienced the information before

Boosting Episodic Memory

● Six ways that show how information is processed and how the amount of effort a person puts into encoding it affects performance: a. The self-reference effect i. the finding that memory is better for information that you relate to yourself in some way b. The generation effect i. the finding that information you generate or create yourself is better remembered compared to information you have only heard or read ● the generation effect is another example that the more effort you put into mentally processing information, the more likely you will remember it later and for a longer time c. The production effect i. people actually produce information rather than simply reading or hearing it d. The impact of enactment on memory i. there is improved memory for participant-performed tasks relative to those that are not participant-performed ● people remember things better if they do them themselves ○ Evidence exists that even untrained nonactors (i.e., novice actors) learn dialogue, as in the script of a play, better when they rehearse the dialogue and stage movements together ○ Physical movement, in other words, can be part of an enhanced mnemonic e. The benefits of imagery and organization i. Organization is the structuring of information as it is stored in memory ● “Clustering” is an organization technique ● Organization is not limited to sets of items with obvious, known categories ● subjective organizations—organization imposed by the participant ○ organization developed by a person for structuring and remembering information. ○ even “unrelated” items become organized through the mental activity of a person imposing an organization. ii. Visual imagery can improve memory ● dual coding hypothesis states that words that denote concrete objects, as opposed to abstract words, can be encoded into memory twice: once in terms of their verbal attributes and once in terms of their imaginal attributes f. The consequences of taking a survival-based perspective ● How Can Memory Be Improved? a. Inventing Mnemonics b. Organization Using Hierarchies of Words c. Rehearsing by Category

Context ● Episodic memory is for memory of personal experiences that happen in some sort of setting or context ● Context plays a critical role in episodic memory: It can make remembering easier or harder

a. we can even look at memory for the context or source itself ● An important influence on memory is encoding specificity ● information is encoded into memory not as a set of isolated, individual items. Instead, each item is encoded into a richer memory representation that includes the context it was in during encoding. So, when you read cat in a list of words, you are likely to store not only the word cat but also information about the context you read it in. a. This is also why witnesses may return to the scene of a crime. Being there again reinstates the context, helping them remember details they might otherwise forget. i. retrieval cue—a useful prompt or reminder for the information ii. state-dependent learning- people are more likely to remember things when their physiological state at retrieval matches that at encoding ● Context can also be used as the target of a memory search—when people seek to remember the context in which information was learned a. Source monitoring is the ability to accurately remember the source of a memory, be it something you encountered in the world or something you imagined i. Source monitoring involves trying to distinguish among things that may have come to you from various external sources as well as things that you thought of yourself ii. Cryptomnesia- people unconsciously plagiarize something they have heard or read before, but because they have forgotten the source, mistakenly think that it is a new idea that they thought of ● Cryptomnesia is more likely to occur when people have their attention and working memory resources directed elsewhere

Facts and Situation Models ● We do not usually remember superficial details, exact words, or exact phrasings, but we do remember the basic idea ● A proposition represents the meaning of a single, simple idea, the smallest unit of knowledge about which you can make true/false judgments. a. We reconstruct what must have been said based on the meaning that is stored in a propositional representation ● One of the themes of this text is embodied cognition, the idea that how we think is influenced by how we act or are otherwise involved with the world a. One way that embodied cognition manifests itself is in the idea that people create models of the situations described, and do not just create memories of the simple propositional idea in sentence ● Levels of Representation a. Surface Form b. propositional textbase c. situation model ● Four types of memory probes were used on the recognition test: a. Verbatim probes, which were exact sentences that had been read earlier b. Paraphrases, which captured the same ideas as those in the text, but with a different wording c. Inferences, which were ideas that were likely to be true, but not actually mentioned d. “Wrongs,” or incorrect probes that were thematically consistent with the passage but were incorrect if one had read and understood the passage

● Although memory for all three levels is reasonably good immediately after reading, there are big differences later on, depending on what is being assessed. a. First, for the surface form, verbatim information is lost quickly from memory and reaches chance performance by the end of the 4 days. b. Second, memory was better for the textbase level than for the surface form. So, although people may forget the exact words they read before, they are better at remembering the ideas that were presented (cf. the work by Sachs described earlier in the module). However, even memory at this level declines over time. c. But for the third level, the situation model, performance starts out high and then stays high, with little evidence of forgetting over the 4-day retention interval. i. Thus, there is something psychologically real about looking at mental representations in this way.

Autobiographical Memories ● One's lifetime collection or narrative of memories ● Wagenaar recorded daily events in his own life for more than 6 years, some 2,400 separate events, and tested his recall with combinations of 4 different cue types: 1) 2) what the event was, 3) who was involved, and 4) where and when it happened ● Although he found that pleasant events were recalled better than unpleasant ones at shorter retention intervals, his evidence also showed that none of the events could truly be said to have been forgotten (but contrast this with the Bahrick, Hall, & Berger, 1996, evidence that bias toward pleasant things affects our memories of high school grades). ● Infantile amnesia is the inability to remember early life events and very poor memory for your life at a very young age a. Freud b. implicit, procedural learning begins almost immediately as a person learns to do things such as control his or her head, arms, and legs, then more complex tasks such as sitting up, using a spoon, and dumping cereal on the floor c. Infantile amnesia resolves itself as one develops a sense of self and can start organizing information around this self-concept d. If you think about your own autobiographical memories, they are heavily influenced by language in terms of their content, their structure, and how you think about them. e. Second, this period of time is when the hippocampus is maturing, allowing more complex memories to be formed f. at this age, a child has started to develop schemas and scripts that are complex enough to begin making sense of the world in a more adultlike fashion, thereby facilitating memory for individual life experiences ● The reminiscence bump is superior memory than would otherwise be expected for life events around the age of 20, between the ages of 15 and 25 a. around the age of 20 there is a tendency to remember more events than would be expected if this were a normal forgetting curve b. One idea is that memory tends to be better for things that happen for the first time c. Another idea is that we remember so much more from this period of our lives because we expect to ● Involuntary memory consists of autobiographical memories that come unbidden, often in response to some environmental cue, such as an odor

a. These involuntary memories are often triggered by some cue—literally a retrieval cue—in the environment b. Emotional intensity is commonly a critical aspect of such triggered autobiographical memories c. odors elicit stronger emotions in the person experiencing the memory

Memory for the Future ● prospective memory is remembering to do something in the future a. Time based b. Event based c. sleeping after encoding a prospective memory goal can also help performance ● episodic future thinking is imagining future events a. is believed to use the same memory processes as episodic memory (constructive episodic simulation hypothesis)

Summary: Learning and Remembering ● Long-term memory is divided between declarative memory and nondeclarative memory. Declarative memory consists of episodic and semantic memories; nondeclarative memory includes priming and procedural or motor learning. Declarative memories can be verbalized, but non declarative memories cannot. Conscious awareness of the memory is unnecessary for implicit memory tasks but does accompany explicit memory tasks. ● A classic method ...