Psych 240 Exam 2

Front 1

What are Raven's Progressive Matrices?

Back 1

1. Standard measure of IQ
2. This is the task where you have to fill in the final space of a matrix with an answer, based on identifying patterns in the previous rows and columns.

Front 2

How does Raven's Progressive Matrix test Working Memory?

Back 2

This task does not require only reasoning... You have to hold patterns in working memory while identifying subsequent patterns as well.

Front 3

How does mental arithmetic test your working memory?

Back 3

You have to hold all sorts of numbers in working memory.

Front 4

What does the flow chart of working memory look like?

Back 4

There are storage buffers and executive processes, both of which feed into each other. You have to pull information from storage to use and transform in executive processes, then store transformed information back into the storage buffer.

The executive processes section feeds into long term memory by consulting LTM for answers to certain questions (i.e. addition).

Front 5

Why do we prefer working memory over short-term memory?

Back 5

Because working memory implies that the processes requires effort and work, rather than just a "place to store info"

Front 6

What are executive processes?

Back 6

The mechanisms that make the decisions about what to do next for memory

Front 7

What is the Storage Buffer?

Back 7

It's where we temporarily hold the information that the executive processes need to do their work

Front 8

What is the "Reading Span" task and what does it measure?

Back 8

You read a series of sentences, judge whether they are grammatical, and then you are asked to remember the final word of each sentence.

This really tests WORKING memory (as opposed to STM) because it's testing how much WORK you can do while still retaining information.

Front 9

What are 3 individual differences in WM that we discussed?

Back 9

1. Raven's scores get progressively worse for older people.
2. Raven's scores are linearly (and positively) correlated with WM (reading span)
3. WM span scores are worse for older people

Front 10

Why can we say that Raven's scores get worse because WM gets worse?

Back 10

Because if you control old and young people with the SAME WM score, they also have the same Raven scores

Front 11

What is even implied by "individual differences?"

Back 11

It implies that people with high working memory spans have better comprehension of text.

Front 12

What are some interference effects in reasoning?

Back 12

If you hinder the working memory by imposing a load on it, you notice that it takes people longer to do reasoning tasks.

E.g. Forcing people to come up with random numbers hinders their ability to do syllogism tasks

Front 13

What are some pieces of evidence that WM and LTM are different processes?

Back 13

Dissociations: Anterograde amnesia (LTM disorder) vs. working memory disorder. Serial position curve: primacy effect vs. recency effect (which is WM, which is LTM).

Front 14

What is Anterograde Amnesia?

Back 14

The inability to remember events occurring after brain injury (Patient HM, damage to hippocampus).

Front 15

What is the double dissociation neurobiological evidence for distinct LTM and WM?

Back 15

Patient HM (anterograde amnesia) had impaired LTM and Normal Working Memory.

Patient KF (damage to parietal lobe) had normal LTM but Impaired Working Memory.

Front 16

What is the primacy effect?

Back 16

Tendency to remember words at the beginning of a list.

This could be due to long term memory. We might repeat words the first couple words a lot, so that might let them get into LTM.

Front 17

What is the recency effect?

Back 17

Tendency to remember words at the end of a list.

We think this might just be from storing **** in STM. You JUST heard it, so you remember it.

Front 18

How does the interference (30 second delay) affect the serial position task?

Back 18

It eliminates the recency effect.

Front 19

How can we mess with the primacy effect?

Back 19

We can allow more time in between presentation of words. More time = more words at the beginning of the list remembered. Does not affect recency effect.

This supports rehearsal idea (LTM?)

Front 20

What is Baddeley's Working Memory Model?

Back 20

3 components: Phonological loop (feedback loop is 2 second subvocal rehearsal process), visuospatial sketchpad, and central executive

Front 21

What's the evidence for a phonological loop?

Back 21

Acoustic similarity -- when asked to recall a list, we confuse words/letters sound that sound the same, suggesting that we store the sounds themselves (as opposed to semantic storage or visual storage for auditory input).

Articulatory Suppression -- by repeating a single word (the) while viewing a list, this prevents the formation of a phonological code, which means that you don't see the acoustic confusion effect anymore!

Front 22

What is the articulatory duration effect?

Back 22

Also known as the word length effect.

Subjects can generally remember about as many words as they can say in 2 seconds

Effect also disappears with articulatory suppression

Front 23

Speed of Speech effects on Phonological Memory span

Back 23

Memory span is better
1) for words that are pronounced quickly
2) for people who speak quickly
3) In languages where words are pronounced quickly

Front 24

What is the capacity of the phonological short-term store?

Back 24

7 +- 2 Meaningful units.

Can be affected by chunking (grouping together letters, words, etc into larger, more cohesive, meaningful units).

Front 25

Where is the phonological loop in the brain?

Back 25

Rehearsal processes activate the left hemisphere (Broca's area, Parietal Area).

This was shown in PET scans.

PET activation in 2-back task - PET activation in Search task = Brain areas related to Rehearsal

Front 26

What is the behavioral evidence for the presence of a visuospatial sketchpad?

Back 26

Brooks (1968) Experiment:
2 different tasks, visuospatial and phonological
2 forms of response, vocal or visuospatial
Dependent Variable: time it took to finish responding

Vocal responses interfere with the vocal task.

Front 27

What is the biological evidence for the presence of a visuospatial sketchpad

Back 27

In the Spatial Working Memory Experiment, we see more activity in the prefrontal cortex and occipital cortex in the right hemisphere in the visuospatial working memory condition.

Front 28

What are 3 parts of the central executive?

Back 28

Supervise attention

Planning/Coordination

Monitoring

Front 29

What are three components to frontal lobe syndrome?

Back 29

Distractibility, difficulty concentrating

Problems with organization, planning

Perseveration: fail to stop inappropriate behavior.

Front 30

What is explicit memory?

Back 30

Declarative knowledge. Tested using Recall and Recognition.

Front 31

What is psychogenic amnesia?

Back 31

The "soap opera" amnesia.

Caused by psychological trauma, memory repression.

Front 32

What is organic amnesia?

Back 32

Biologically caused amnesia.

Front 33

What is anterograde amnesia?

Back 33

The inability to learn new explicit information after the trauma

Front 34

What is retrograde amnesia?

Back 34

The inability to retrieve information prior to the trauma. Temporally graded.

Front 35

What are remote memories?

Back 35

Childhood memories, things that are very remote, these tend to be intact.

Front 36

What is the mirror reading task and what does it measure?

Back 36

You read a list of mirror image words. Some of the words are repeated, and you LEARN them.

Amnesiacs suck at the old/repeated words just as much as new words, but normal people don't. Rate of improvement overall is same

Front 37

What is the tower of hanoi and what does it measure?

Back 37

You have to move all circles from left peg to right peg and you can't put larger circles on smaller pegs.

Amnesiacs and controls improve at the SAME rate, even though you have to explain the rules every time an amnesiac does it.

Implicit skills!

Front 38

What is the word fragment experiment, what does it measure, and what were the findings?

Back 38

You have to fill in incomplete words. Some of the words were shown to you before, but some aren't.

We see a priming effect in both normals and controls, even though amnesiacs don't recall having seen the memory.

Front 39

What are PET results from the study of explicit and implicit memory, using the word stem completion?

Back 39

Priming == less activity in the posterior visual area activity

Explicit results --hippocampus and frontal lobe activity

Front 40

What is the independent variable that affects explicit memory, not implicit memory?

Back 40

Depth of processing ----- deeper encoding = easier to remember.

Front 41

What is echoic memory?

Back 41

Auditory sensory memory

Front 42

What is Spurling's Partial Report Measure?

Back 42

a

Front 43

What is semantic memory?

Back 43

General knowledge, knowledge of facts.

"I know THAT ...."

Not tied to a specific time or place

Front 44

Unlike semantic memory, Implicit knowledge is ___________

Back 44

Unconscious. There is no script to it.

Front 45

How is categorization used for recall?

Back 45

We can group together synonyms, related concepts, which allows us to retrieve it on demand, quickly, and accurately.

Front 46

Why is it that we classify things?

Back 46

The world is "clumpy"

We treat similar things the same

It allows us to generalize our behavior to a group of things... allows inferences about members of a class

Front 47

Pigeon experiment demonstrating categorization.

Back 47

Wasserman, Bhatt, Knauss, and Reynolds (1987) taught pigeons to peck one of four keys depending on whether a picture of a cat, flower, car, or chair was shown. Got reinforcement for pressing the correct key for each type. After training (40 per day for 30 days), they were 64% accurate at pecking with new exemplars (81% accurate with old exemplars). Chance was 25%. Worse than humans, but well above chance.
This suggests that they had abstracted some categories - the animal was able to go beyond the old instances.

Front 48

How was the idea that categories are not always similarity-based displayed?

Back 48

Hawks, bats, and flamingos

Front 49

What are some problems with the classical view of defining properties?

Back 49

Some things do not have necessary and sufficient conditions... what makes something a game?

Is a monk a bachelor?
Is a game-show "reality TV?"

You can have the definitive properties of a category, but still not belong for more abstract reasons.

Front 50

So what's the modern view of categorization?

Back 50

Probabilistic Categories:

We have characteristic features. We judge wether an item belongs to a category by similarity to other members. Properties are characteristic, not defining. The category boundaries are fuzzy and probabilistic

Front 51

What's some evidence for fuzzy categories?

Back 51

Ratings measure: Exemplars with more characteristic properties are rated as being more typical of a category

Fruit example

Also sentence verification (True or False)

Front 52

What are linguistic hedges?

Back 52

A way of indicating with language that you have a fuzzy category.

A whale is TECHNICALLY a mammal vs. a cow is TECHNICALLY a mammal.

Front 53

What's the prototype theory?

Back 53

Prototype = a best, ideal, or average example.

Only a prototype is stored in memory, and we categorize based on similarity to prototype

Front 54

Geometric representation

Back 54

Similarities may lie in a geometric space based on subjective ratings. Multidimensional.

Front 55

What's a problem with geometric theory?

Back 55

Geometric has to satisfy three axioms of space:

Minimality - a to b > a to a
Symmetry - a to b = b to a
Triangle Inequality - a to b + b to c > or = a to c

Front 56

What do humans do that violates symmetry?

Back 56

An unfamiliar category is judged more similar to a familiar category than vice versa.

Front 57

What do humans do that violates the triangle inequality? Example:

Back 57

People will say that Jamaica is similar to Cuba and Cuba is similar to Russia, but Jamaica is not similar to Russia.

Front 58

What is tversky's featural approach?

Back 58

People give similarity ratings inconsistent with geometric space

Feature-based similarity approaches do not require metric axioms

Front 59

What are Tversky's explanations for the axiom violations?

Back 59

Minimality - things you know well will have more features, so the a(shared) part will be higher for familiar things than for unfamiliar)
Symmetry - b and c weights can be different so the order of the comparison makes a difference
Triangle inequality - two concepts can be similar to a third for different reasons, but have little in common themselves

Front 60

What is proactive interference?

Back 60

You try to recall new information and old information interferes.

The opposite information interferes.

Front 61

What is syntactic information?

Back 61

Grammar/word order, etc.

Front 62

What is semantic information?

Back 62

The MEANing of words/sentences

Front 63

What do we remember better, semantics or syntax?

Back 63

We remember semantic information better.

Front 64

How did Sachs provide evidence that all we store in LTM are semantics?

Back 64

He varied the number of syllables presented and then asked people to identify whether a sentence was the original or not (varied by semantic and/or syntactical difference) and saw that more syllables lead to less accuracy

Front 65

What's weird in children in central ideas?

Back 65

They can't explicitly identify central/important ideas, but they implicitly remember those important/central ideas.

Adults can do this explicitly.

Idea here is that we remember the things that are important, and we don't have to be explicitly aware of that.

Front 66

How does prior information affect our comprehension and retrieval?

Back 66

(laundry example) Adding a title before the reading makes storing/remembering important details so much easier.

(balloon example) An appropriate drawing before the story helps to remember stuff. Getting the drawing afterwards doesn't help because it's not letting us encode things any easier.

(war of the ghosts) People neglected information that didn't fit; distorted facts to fit; evidence for top-down control of encoding

Front 67

What is constructive memory?

Back 67

We try to rationalize details that we don't remember. This is implicit/subconscious. This means that memory can be an Imaginative Construction!

Front 68

What is a flashbulb memory?

Back 68

A flashbulb memory is a highly detailed, exceptionally vivid 'snapshot' of the moment and circumstances in which a piece of surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) news was heard.

Front 69

What is a schema?

Back 69

Generalized conceptual knowledge
Meaningfully organizes concepts
Tells us what to expect and also what unstated information we can infer

Front 70

What's a script?

Back 70

An event/ordered/sequenced schema

Front 71

What is the evidence for scripts?

Back 71

People agree on what is in script
Recall things in script order
Faster reading
Recall script items that were not in story

Front 72

What is meant by story schema?

Back 72

We have a schema for how the story should go. Are we really concerned if the main character is in trouble?

Front 73

When do we make inferences?

Back 73

When we have sparse information presented to us and we want to help ourselves process it more effectively.

When we make those logical inferences, we encode them as if we actually saw that. (e.g. the logical inference test with the box and the chair and the tree)

Front 74

What is a pragmatic inference?

Back 74

An inference that does not necessarily follow the information we're given (i.e. pounding a nail-- using a nail)

Even though logical and pragmatic inferences are distinct concepts, we encode both of them into memory, occasionally even more strongly than with actual stimuli

Front 75

What is the relevance of assertion/implication commercials?

Back 75

Implication commercials play on our tendencies to make inferences. If the commercial sets us up for an inference, we will make them, even when we are warned.

Front 76

What are some inference tricks in advertising?

Back 76

Hedges (lavium pills MAY help relieve tension)
Unclear comparison (the inside of this car is 700% quieter)

Front 77

So when do we make inferences?

Back 77

We make inferences at ALL stages of memory.

Encoding: context affects what is encoded
Storage: memory is changed during storage to fit into schema happens (also we forget stuff)
Retrieval: Affecting context during retrieval can mess with recall (like the helen keller and carol harris exp)

Front 78

How are some ways/explanations for how eyewitness memory for complex events can be distorted?

Back 78

You might forget things.
You might remember things that didn't happen (inferences!)
Your memory can be influenced by interim misinformation/how you were questioned! (context!)

Front 79

What is the loftus misinformation experiment?

Back 79

You watch an event, you are given some misinformation/manipulation, then you take a memory test.

So like you watch two cars hit each other, and then you are asked "how fast were they going when they hit each other?" or "how fast were they going when they smashed into each other?"

If you are misled, you might "remember" seeing broken glass.

Stop vs. yield.

Front 80

Is the overwriting hypothesis wrong?

Back 80

Yes. It's wrong!

Front 81

Okay, so how do we get this effect of screwey memories?

Back 81

We accept new information as if it were true of the original event

Source information: not clear which memory is the real one
Strength: new information is stronger

Front 82

How does a cognitive interview work?

Back 82

You reinstate the conditions, you tell the story without interruption, and you use reverse chronological order

Front 83

What's wrong with hypnosis?

Back 83

Anxious to cooperate so generate lots of info even if it’s not accurate
Don’t weed things out that are wrong
Loftus’ misinformation effects increase