Psych GRE - Cognitive Psych

he used meaningless strings of letters to study the capacity of our memory system

• belonged to the system of thought referred to as structuralism
• goal = break consciousness down into its elements
• used method of introspection - asked subjects to report on their current conscious experience
• spawned three other systems of thought - functionalism, behaviorism, and Gestalt psychology
• Wundt-trained psychologist

• a linguist
• paved the way for modern cognitive psychology with an eleoquent critique of B.F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior
• opposed the behaviorist's position that speech is best explained by operant conditioning
• assserted that speech could not be due to reinforcement
• believed that language study is the most viable route to understanding the mind

• reaction time
• eye movements
• brain imaging

• time elapsed between a stimulus presentation and the subject's response
• AKA - mental chronometry

• used to study reading and language comprehension
• useful because eye movements are an 'on-line' measure; they can be measured as the subject is actually performing tasks

used to associate various cognitive processes with various cognitive processes with various parts of the brain

• how Ebbinghaus measured subjects' ability to remember nonsense syllables
• after memorizing the inital list, he compared the number of times he had to read the list in order to rememorize; if he memorized the list faster than he originally memorized it, he concluded that he had remembered something from the first time
• to quantify the amount of savings, Ebbinghaus subtracted the number of traisl it took to rememorize the list from the number of trials it originally took to memorize the list (if it took 20 trials to memorize the list, then 8 trials to rememorize - 20-8 =12/20 = 60% in savings)

• savings originally decrease rapidly, but then reaches a plateau after which decrease in percentage savings is minimal
• without practice, we forget rapidly, then at a certain point, forgetting occurs at a much lesser rate

• encoding
• storage
• retrieval

putting new information into memory storage

retaining information over time

recovery of the stored memory/material at a later time

• where you feel like you're on the verge of remembering something but continue to be unsuccessful
• problem with retrieval

• recall
• recognition

• independently reproducing the information that you have been previously exposed to
• short answer and fill in the blank questions

• involves realizing that a certain stimulus event is one you have seen or heard before
• tested by multiple choice questions

• explains why you can usually recognize more than you recall
• a recall task taps the same basic process of accessing information in memory as does a recognition task
• a recall task requires an additional processing step (you have to generate information rather than simply recognize information presented)

when asked to memorize a list of words, those words at the end of the list are remembered best

items presented first are remembered fairly well, though not as well as things presented last

when asked to recall a list of words, people tend to recall words belonging to the same category

• there are several different memory systems; each system has a different function
• memories enter the various systems in a specific order
• 3 systems: sensory memory, short-term(workding) memory, long-term memory

contains fleeting impressions of sensory stimuli

visual memory

auditory memory

• method used to find out how much information could be retained in sensory memory
• subjects look for a fraction of a second at a visual display of nine items, and then asked to recall as many of the items as they could
• on average subjects couldonly remember 4 of the items
• researchers thought the capacity was 4 items, but George Sperling didn't believe this...

• didn't believe that the capacity of memory was 4/9
• devised a method called the partial-report procedure
• he used a 3x3 matrix of letters (9), but he asked the subjects just to remember one row (but they didn't know beforehand which they'd have to remember)
• regardless of which row, their recall was nearly perfect, suggesting that capacity of sensory memory was nine items
• the reason subjects could only remember 4 items is because by they time they reported these, the memory had decayed

• information that you attend to goes from sensory memory to here
• link between our rapidly changing sensory memory and the more lasting long-term memory
• how long a memory remains depends on what is done with it...if nothing is done with the information, it will remain for only about 20 seconds
• if information is rehearsed, it can stay for a relatively long time, as long as you keep rehearsing (maintenance rehearsal)

repeating information to keep it in short term memory

organizing the information and associating it with information already in long-term memory - to get the info into long-term memory

found that 7 (+ or - 2)pieces, or chunks, of infomation

• permanent storehouse of your experiences, knowledge, and skills
• items can be brief or last a lifetime
• we can get memories here by using elaborative rehearsal

• procedural memory
• declarative memory

• semantic memory
• episodic memory

remembering how things are done

• where explicit information is stored (semantic and episodic)
• AKA fact memory

remembering personal knowledge, especially the meanings of words or concepts

memories for particular events that you have personally experienced

• short term memory = phonological/acoustic
• long term memory = semantics (meaning)

time it takes a subject to respond (to a semantic verification task)

spreading activation model

• proposed by Collins and Loftus in 1975
• the shorter the distance between two words, the closer the words are related in the semantic memory

• proposed by Smith, Shoben, and Rips in the early 1970s
• concepts are represented by sets of features, some of qhich are required for the concept, some of which are typical of that concept
• ex: the concept of college is represented by faculty (required), degrees (required), and fraternities (typical)

• challenged the stage theory of memory
• AKA depth-of-processing theory
• proposed by Craig and Lockart
• suggests that what determines how long you will remember material is not what memory system it gets into (they suggest there is only 1 system - not sensory, short-term, and long-term), but the way in which you process the material
• the 3 ways you process information: physical, acoustical, and semantic
• physical (visual) is not very deep; acoustical (sound) is a little more deep; semantic (meaning) is very deep
• the deeper the processing, and the greater the effort, the better your memory will be of the material
• deeper/later stages include connecting the info with other info in memory

dual-code hypothesis

levels/depth-of-processing theory

• Paivio
• information can be stored (or encoded) in two ways: visually and verbally
• abstract information tends to be encoded verbally
• concrete information tends to be encoded visually and verbally

• conceptual framework used to organize our knowledge
• we interpret our experiences, and therefore remember them in terms of our existing schemata
• trying to make our experiences fit into existing schemata can lead to distortions in our memories
• if we have a tough time matching up our experiences with a schema, we will have difficulty remembering it

• early explanation for why we forget
• if the information in long-term memory is not used or rehearsed, it will, eventually be forgotten

• a theory of forgetting
• forgetting is due to the activities that have taken place between original learning and the later attempted recall
• 2 two types of inhibition: retroactive and proactive

what you learned before interferes with what you learn later

occurs when you forget what you learned earlier as you learn something new

assumption that recall will be best if the context at recall approximates the context during the original encoding

recall will be better if your psychological or physical state at the time of recall is the same as your state when you memorized the material

techniques that we use to improve the likelihood that we will remember something

associating information with some sequence of places with which you are familiar (form a path of the info from your house to your school)

• studied memory with the "War of the Ghosts" (a Native American folktale)
• subjects reconstructed the story in line with their own expectations and schema for a ghost story
• prior knowledge and expectations influence recall

studied eyewitness memories and the tendency for eyewitnesses to be influenced by misleading information

tendency to remember incomplete tasks better than completed tasks

• used to look at impediments to effective problem solving
• subjects are presented with three empty jars and a list of the capacities of each jar, and they are asked to obtain a particular amount of water in one of the jars
• problem solving is impeded by mental sets (typical ways to solve the problem)
• after getting used to complicated methods, it's difficult to consider simpler method

• tendency to keep repeating solutions that worked in other situations
• past experiences affect the strategies we use to solve problems
• innappropriate sets can be impediments to effective problem solving

• impediment to effective problem solving
• inability to use a familiar object in an unfamiliar way

• cognitive ability that results in new ways of viewing problems or situations
• often evolves when you're thinking of something else, or suddently, as a "eureka" moment
• Guilford's test of divergent thinking was the most famous attempt to measure this

test of divergent thinking

• involves producing as many creative answers to a question as possible
• tests creativity (the more solutions a person has, the more creative he/she is)

found that humans use heuristics (shortcuts or rules of thumb) to make decisions

shortcuts or rules of thumb, used to make decisions

• when we try to decide how likely something is
• we make our decisions based upon how easily similar instances can be imagined
• we use the information most redily available in memory to make decisions
• example: when asked if there are more words that start with "K" or have "k" as the third letter, most people guess (wrongly) that more words start with K (because they are used to categorizing words by their first letter)

involves categorizing things on the basis of whether they fit the prototypical, stereotypical, or representative image of the category

using prototypical or stereotypical factors rather than actual numerical information about which category is more numerous

• phonemes
• morphemes
• semantics

• the smallest sound units of language
• "field" has 4 phonemes: f, ie, l, and d

• smallest units of meaning in a language (words and roots)
• "walked" has 2 morphemes: walk + ed

meaning of words and sentences

deals with the grammatical arrangement of words in sentences

learning theory and cognitive developmental theory

• learning theorists (beh)- language is aquired through classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and modeling
• cognitive developmental theorists - language has to do with the child's capacity for symbolic thought, which develops toward the end of the sensorimotor period...language continues to develop according to the cihld's cognitive level

• critiqued the behaviorist perspective on language
• nativist theory of language acquisition
• believed there is an innate, biologically based mechanism - language acquisition device (LAD),which is built-in advanced knowledge of rule structures in language
• theory of grammar - deep/surface grammatical structure and transformational rules

actual word order

underlying form that specifies the meaning of the sentence

• tell us how we can change one structure into another
• the sentences "The house is green" and "Is the house green?" are related by a transformational rule including the set of rules that tell us how to change a statement into a question

proposed Whorfian hypothesis (AKA linguistic relativity)

• our perception of reality, the way we think about the world, is determined by the content of language
• ex: eskimos are better at discriminating between different types of snow than others, because they have more words for snow

found evidence of better verbal abilities in girls

suggested that individual differences in intelligence are largely due to variations in the amount of a general, unitary factor, which he called g

• identified 7 abilities which he called primary mental abilities
• abilities include: verbal comprehension, number ability, perceptual speed, general reasoning
• used factor analysis with factorsw more specific than g but more general than s

triarchic theory

• 3 aspects of intelligence:
• componential - performance on tests
• experiential - creativity
• contextual- street smarts

theory of multiple intellgences (7)

• linguistic
• logical/mathematic
• spatial
• musical
• bodily-kinesthetic
• interpersonal
• intrapersonal
• most IQ tests only assess top 2 (linguistic and logical/mathematical)

• 2 major types of mental abilities:
• fluid intelligence
• crystallized intelligence

the ability to quickly grasp relationships in novel situations and make correct deductions from them (ex: solving analogies)

• ability to understand relationships or solve problems that depend on knowledge acquired as a result of schooling or other life experiences
• increases throughout lifetime

• prominent educational psychologist who studied intelligence
• claimed that intelligence as measured by IQ tests was almost entirely genetic in nature and that you could not teach someone to score higher on IQ tests...
• He also focused on IQ across racial lines and provoked a great deal of controversy with this line of inquiry

• parallel distributed processes
• information processing is distributed across the brain and is done in a parallel fashion

ability to reflect upon something

person's ability to think about and monitor cognition and memory