Cognitive Psychology 3

• •Remembering to perform intended actions
• Event-based prospective memory involves remembering to do a certain action when the specific circumstances are present.
• Time-based prospective memory involves remembering to do an action at a particular point in time. 10pm TV Show

• •Recollected events that belong to a person’s past.
• Episodic personal experiences and specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place
• Semantic general knowledge and facts about the world.

• He or she can recall the vast majority of personal experiences and events in his or her life.
• Hyperthymestic individuals appear to have poorer than average memory for arbitrary information.
• Multidimensional because it uses more than 1 part of the brain?

–Comparing brain activation caused by autobiographical memory and laboratory memory

• –Significant events in a person’s life
• –Highly emotional events
• –Transition points

• Enhanced memory of adolescence and young adulthood found in people over 40 years old
• 

Memory is enhanced for events that occur as a person’s self-image or life identity is being formed

• Encoding is better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability
• What does the cognitive hypothesis predict if change happened later in life? How could you test this?

People have an internalized culturally-aware script of the events that make up an expected, skeletal life course; this script acts as a template for the recall of life events in association with each life phase.

• Memories for circumstances surrounding how a person heard about a highly emotional event
• –Positive or Negative
• –Very detailed and vivid, as if a picture was taken of the event

Evidence shows people believe they recall it perfectly, but in reality there are many flaws. Innacurate or lack detail

• –Repeated viewing/hearing of event
• •TV, talking with others
• •Could introduce errors in own memory

• A type of memory error where a specific recollected experience is incorrectly determined to be the source of a memory.
• An example of this would be determining which one of the individual's friends said something rude

• "Pounding the nail" 57% said they'd read "Hammering the nail"
• "Looking for the nail" 20% said they'd read "Hammering the nail"

• You think someone did something based on schemas and scripts
• Schema Saw a picture of a classroom with no books, but 30% said they recalled books
• Script At the dentist, many remembered bill checking in with the receptionist

False memory occurs because of associations

• Allows us to “fill in the blanks”
• Cognition is creative
• Understand language
• Solve problems
• Make decisions

• Sometimes we make errors
• Sometimes we misattribute the source of information
• Was it actually presented, or did we infer it?

Participants were asked to either carry out, imagine, or watch a series of short events, and later asked whether specific events were familiar, and how they happened. The study revealed that elderly subjects are more likely than younger subjects to claim that they recognise events that never happened

refers to the finding that exposure to misleading information presented between the encoding of an event and its subsequent recall causes impairment in memory. This effect occurs when participants' recall of an event they witnessed is altered by introducing misleading postevent information

Memory-trace replacement hypothesis explains how MPI replaces or impairs memories that were formed during the experience of an event.

• Retroactive interference (RI) is a phenomenon that occurs when newly learned information interferes with and impedes the recall of previously learned information
• Ax-Bx -> replaced with Ax-Cx-> memory of Bx words decreased as Cx increased->after 24 hours Bx recovered and surpassed Cx

Weapon focus signifies a witness to a crime diverting his or her attention to the weapon the perpetrator is holding, thus leaving less attention for other details in the scene and leading to memory impairments later for those other details.

Two teachers shown teaching classes (male and female). The female gets robbed later. Participants are asked who robbed her. With perpetrater not in linueup, many said male teacher. With perp absent, some still said male teacher.

When questioned immediately after watching a tape, participants incorrectly answered "yes" to 20% more items

• Inform witness perpetrator might not be in lineup
• Use sequential presentation (not simultaneous)
• Improve interviewing techniques

mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions

Help to understand individual cases not previously encountered

• Determine category membership based on whether the object meets the definition of the category
• “Square vs. Bird”
• Chairs come in so many shapes and sizes. What definition could fit ONLY chairs

Things in a category resemble one another in a number of ways

• High-prototypicality: category member closely resembles category prototype“Typical” member
• For category “bird” = robin
• Low-prototypicality: category member does not closely resemble category prototype
• For category “bird” = penguin

• Typicality effect: we make faster sentence verification decisions when an item is a typical member of a category, rather than an unusual member
• prototypical objects are processed preferentially
• Hearing "green" before given a test to determine if two colors are the same or not. MS on "green" colors was lower

• True or false:
• A robin is a bird.
• A bulldozer is a bird.
• A bat is a bird.
• A chicken is a bird

• Concept is represented by multiple examples (rather than a single prototype)
• Examples are actual category members (not abstract averages)
• To categorize, compare the new item to stored examples

• People almost exclusively use basic-level names in free-naming tasks
• Quicker to identify basic-level category member as a member of a category
• This changes as one obtains mastery, and they begin to almost exclusively use Specific

• The longer the distance between concepts, the longer time for cognition
• It is not efficient to store “can fly” at each bird’s node, rather store “can’t fly” for the exceptions and store "can fly" higher at "bird"

On my way to think about canary, I also encountered (thus priming) "ostrich" and "animal"

• Does not explain the typicality effect (we make faster sentence verification decisions when an item is a typical member of a category, rather than an unusual member)
• Sometimes links that were theoretically more distant were faster

• Closer topics have shorter links and are organized based on experience
• No explicit rules for determining strength of association
• Model can explain any data
• It is too general
• Unfalsifiable

• Proposition representation: relationships represented by symbols, language
• vs.
• "Epiphenomenon" spacial representation

• Kosslyn’s results can be explained by using real-word knowledge unconsciously
• BUT, Finke and Pinker (1982) Participants judge whether arrow points to dots previously seen. No memorization, no tacit knowledge. Still took longer for further dots

If behavior is disrupted, the deactivated part of the brain is causing that behavior, so we know that in terms of imagery vs. perception, the imagery produces the same brain stimulation directly, not as a biproduct

• C.K. Couldn't draw what he saw, but could draw flawlessly from memory (imagery)
• R.M. Could draw what he saw, but could draw nothing from memory (perception)

• Method of loci: Visualizing items to be remembered in different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout
• Pegword technique: Create list of pegwordsone-buntwo-shoe

Neurons that selectively alter their firing rates depending on the stimulus the subject is imagining