Summary of the lectures in conjunction with chapters 1, 3 to 10, 12 and 13, so this document contains all the material you need to know before the exam.
Cognition: what you know, what you remember and what you think
Cognitive psychology: the scientific study of knowledge
- a huge range of your actions, thoughts and feelings depend on your cognition
- the scientific study of acquisition, retention and use of knowledge
Patient H.M.
- lost the ability to form new memories
- without a memory, there is no self → our self-concept depends on our knowledge (our memory for
various episodes in our past)
Cognitive revolution
- science of psychology cannot study the mental world directly
- science of psychology must study (investigate) the mental world if we’re going to (in order to)
understand behavior
Why does research in many subfields of psychology (and most of cognitive psychology) rely on
inferential methods? → Since unobservable processes are crucial for understanding observable
capacities and behaviors, psychology often demands hypotheses about processes that cannot be
observed directly
Introspection (Wundt, Titchener): psychology needs to focus largely on the study of conscious
mental events (feelings, thoughts, perceptions, recollections) → the only way to study thoughts is
through introspection (looking within) to observe and record the content of our own mental lives and
the sequence of our own experiences
- BUT some thoughts are unconscious → introspection is limited (cannot examine processes outside
of awareness)
- BUT testability of claims is often unattainable (subjective) → to test hypotheses we need data that
aren’t dependent on a particular point of view or a particular descriptive style
Behaviorism: data concerned with behavior are objective data, stimuli are measurable, recordable,
physical events
- beliefs, wishes goals, preferences, hopes and expectations cannot be directly observed, cannot be
objectively recorded (mentalistic notions that only via introspection can be observed) → scientific
psychology needs to avoid these invisible internal entities
- the ways people act/feel are guided by how they understand or interpret the situation and not by
the objective situation itself
- mental/subjective entities play a pivotal role in guiding behavior and so we must consider them if
we want to understand behavior
Transcendental method (Kant): begin with the observable facts and then work backward from these
observations → visible effect from an invisible cause
- what must be the underlying causes that led to these effects?
- ‘inference to best explanation’
- study mental processes indirectly (processes themselves are invisible, but they have visible
consequences)
- to study mental events, one focuses on observable events but then asks what (invisible) events
must have taken place in order to make these (visible) effects possible
,Tolman: learning is not a change in behavior, but the acquisition of new knowledge
- rats acquire a cognitive map of the maze
Chomsky: argued powerfully that a behaviorist analysis was inadequate as an explanation for
language learning and language uses
Gestalt movement: behaviors, ideas and perceptions are organized in a way that could not be
understood through a part-be-part, element-by-element analysis of the world, but the elements take
on meaning only as a part of the whole
Bartlett: people spontaneously fit their experience into a mental framework or schema
Computer technology/science (artificial intelligence) → human mind followed processes and
procedures similar to those used in computers
Response time: how long someone needs to make a particular response
- mental operations are fast, but do take a measurable amount of time
Cognitive neuroscience: the effort toward understanding humans’ mental functioning through close
study of the brain and nervous system
Clinical neuropsychology: the study of brain function that uses as its main data source cases in which
damage or illness has disrupted the working of some brain structure
Neuroimaging techniques: gives information about healthy brains, enables us to scrutinize the
precise structure of the brain and to track the moment-by-moment pattern of activation within
someone’s brain
Cognitive psychologists: diverse set of methods and collect many types of data → measures of
response speed, methods that allow us to probe the underlying biology
CHAPTER 6
Acquisition: the process of gaining information and placing it into memory (how you learn)
Storage phase: hold information in memory until it is needed (what you already know)
Retrieval: locating the information in the vast warehouse that is memory and bringing it into active
use
Modal model (Atkinson and Shiffrin)
1. Sensory memory: holds on the input in ‘raw’
sensory form
- iconic memory for visual inputs
- echoic memory for auditory inputs
- through an attentional process of selection and
interpretation, the information passes on to STM
2. Short-term/working memory: the place where
you hold information while you’re working on it
- ideas or thoughts are currently activated,
currently being thought about
- is STM a storage place/loading dock through which the information has to pass on the way into
LTM? → working memory is simply the name we gave to a status → information in working memory:
ideas are currently activated and being worked on by a specific set of operations
- does memory retrieval involve movement of information out of storage and back into working
memory?
,- limited in size
- getting information into and out of working memory is easy
3. Long-term memory: the vast repository that contains all of your knowledge and all of your beliefs
(large and permanent storage place)
- has to be enormous, contains all of your knowledge
- contains all of your episodic knowledge: knowledge about events (both
early in life and more recent)
- getting information into LTM involves some work
- finding information in LTM can sometimes be difficult and slow and in
some settings can fail completely
- LTM is not linked to your current thoughts (less fragile than STM)
information remains in storage whether you’re thinking about it right
now or not
Free recall procedure word list
- likely to remember the first few words on the list → primacy effect
- likely to remember the last few words on the list → recency effect
Recency effect
- participants try to keep up with the list presentation → they will be placing the words just heard
into working memory → bump the previous words out of working memory
- last few words on the list don’t get bumped out of the working memory, because no further input
arrives to displace them
- materials in working memory are readily available, easily and quickly retrieved
Primacy effect
- attention in the beginning of the list: participants hear the list and do their best to be good
memorizers → after hearing the first word they repeat it over and over to themselves (memory
rehearsal) → second and third word and so on also rehearsed
- first few items on the list are privileged: first word 100% of attention, second word 50 % of
attention, third word only 33% of attention → words arriving later in the list receive even less
attention → words later in the list are rehearsed fewer times than words early in the list
- primacy effect: the observed memory advantage for the early list items (they didn’t have to share
attention with other words, because the other words hadn’t arrived yet) → more time and more
rehearsal were devoted to them than to any others
- early words have a greater chance of being transferred into LTM (!) → greater chance of being
recalled after a delay
30-second filled delay (counting backward)
- counting backward will itself require working memory → the chore will displace working memory’s
current contents: last few list items will be bumped out of the working memory → these items won’t
benefit from the swift and easy retrieval that working memory allows
- counting backward will eliminate the recency effect
- counting backward should have no impact on recall of the items earlier in the list (because these
items are recalled from LTM)
- counting task will not interfere with LTM (because LTM (unlike working memory) isn’t dependent
on current activity)
, 30-second unfilled delay
- no impact: participants can continue rehearsing the last few
items during the delay and so can maintain them in working
memory
- no new materials coming in → noting pushes the recency
items out of working memory (normal recency effect)
Serial-position effect
- present the to-be-remembered materials at a slower rate
improves retention of all the pre-recency items but has no
effect on recency
- working memory is limited by its size, not by ease of entry or
ease of access → slower list presentation has no influence on
working memory performance
- more time to spend on all of the list items → increasing the
likelihood of transfer into more permanent storage → improve
recall for all items coming from LTM
- more familiar / more common words → improves pre-recency
retention, but no effect on recency
- memory for early items on the list depends on brain areas (in and
around the hippocampus) (fMRI scans) that are associated with
LTM, memory for later items on the list do not show this pattern
(retrieval from working memory specifically activates the perirhinal
cortex)
Fundamental differences between working memory and LTM
1. Size
2. Ease of entry
3. Ease of retrieval
4. Working memory is dependent on current activity (and therefore fragile) while LTM is not (durable
and can last a life time)
Number of items in you can hold in STM → 7 plus or minus 2
Chunking
- small units can be combined into larger meaningful units (words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs,
stories)
- chunk: a collection of elements that are strongly
associated with on another but are weakly associated with
elements in other chunks
- a package of connected info, that can be memorised
together
- chunking can increase our ability to hold information in
STM (unrelated words: 5-8, words that together form
sentences: 20+)
- meaningfulness of chunks is derived from LTM
- condenses information
- essential feature of STM → expends amount of
information that can be retained in STM, but not the
number ‘slots’ (5-8 chunks can be lot more information
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