Midterm 3
Terms
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copy deck
- What does memory refer to?
- Capasity to retain and retreive information, and the structure that account for this capacity
- Source Amnesia
- Not being able to seperate your orginial experience from what you added after the fact
- Confabulation
- Confusing an event that happened to someone else with one that happened to you, or coming to believe something that never really happened
- What four circumstances increase the chances of confabulation?
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1.) You have thought about the imagined event many times
2) The image of the event contains a lot of details
3.) The event is easy to imagine
4.) You focus on your emotional reactions to the event rather than on what actually happened - Explicit Memory
- Conscious, interntional recollection of an event or an item of information
- Recall
- The ability to retrieve and reproduce information encountered earlier - Essay and fill in the blank quizes
- Recognition
- The ability to identify information you have previously observed, read or head about - True/false and multiple choice
- Implicit Memory
- Information encountered in the past affects our thoughts and actions even though we do not consciously or intentionally remember it
- Priming
- Read or listen to some information and then test you later to see whether the information affects your performance on another type of task -- Hearing the words define and defend, and then LATER asked to complete the stem def
- Relearning method
- Requires you to relearn a task that you have learned earlier
- Encoding
- Convert information into a form that the brain can process
- Storing
- Store information so we can retain it over time
- Retreive
- Recover the information after time
- Sensory Register
- The entry-way of memory. Has a number of seperate subsystems. Information remains for 2 seconds
- Sort-term memory
- Holds a limited amountof infomration for a brief period of time
- Long-Term Memory
- Longer storage of information - fews minutes to a decade
- Parallel Distributed Processing
- Contents of memory are connections among a huge number of interacting processing units, distributed in a vast network and all operating in parallet
- Working Memory
- Short term memory plus the mental processes that control the retrieval of the imformation from long-term memory depending on what task you are doing
- Chunks
- Grouping small bits of information into larger units
- Semantic Categories
- Organizing long-term memory - Chair is put in the categpry of furniture
- Procedural Memories
- Memories of knowing how to do something - comb your hair, use a pencil
- Declarative Memories
- memories of knowing that something is true
- Semantic Memories
- Internal representations of the world, independent of any particular context...facts, rules and concepts
- Episodic Memory
- Internal reprentations of personally experienced events
- Serial Position Effect
- Recall will be best for items at the beginning of the list (primacy effect) and at the end (Receny effect)
- Maintenance Rehearsal
- Involves the tote repetition of the meterial
- Elaborative rehearal
- Involves associating new items of infomration with meterial that has already been stored of with other new facts
- Deep Processing
- Recognizing patterns and assign labels, anaylyzing
- Mnemonics
- Formal Stategies and tricks for encoding, storing and retaining information
- Decay Theory
- Memory traces fade with time when they are not accessed now and then
- Replacement
- New information can wipe out old information
- Retroactive Interference
- Forgetting that occurs when when recently learned material interferes wil the ability to remember similar material stored previously
- Proactive Interference
- Forgetting that occurs when previously stored material interfears with learning new material
- Retreival Cues
- Information that helps us remember
- Cue-dependent forgetting
- Lacking retrieval cues
- State-dependent memory
- Best remember something when you're in teh same mental or physical state as you were when it happened
- Repression
- The involuntary oushing og threatening or upsetting information into the unconscious
- Childhood amnesia
- Can't remember anything before 3 or 4
- Concept
- A mental category that groups objects, relations, activities, abstractions, or qualities having common properties
- Prototype
- A representation or most commonplace example of the concept - goldren retreiver is more prototypical than a chihauhua
- Propositions
- Units of meanings that are made up of concepts and that express a unitary idea - Border Collies are smart
- Cognitive Schemeas
- Mental Models of aspects of the world
- Mental images
- PIctures in the mind's eye
- Subconscious Processes
- Mental processes occuring outside of conscious awareness but accessible to consciousness when necessary
- Nonconscious Processes
- Mental processes occuring outside of an not available to conscious awareness (hunches)
- Implicit Learning
- Learning that occurs when you acquire knowledge about something without being aware of how you did so and without being able to state exactly what it is you have learned
- Reasoning
- Purposeful mental activity that involves operating on information in order to reach conclusions
- Algorithm
- A set of procedures guaranteed to prduce a soultion even if you do not know how it works - recipes
- Deduction Reasoning
- A form of reasoning in which a conclusion follows necessarily from certain premises - if the premises are true, the conclusion must be...All humans are mortal, and I am human...means I am mortal
- Inductive Reasoning
- A conclusion probably follows from certain propositions or premises - if you get good food at one place many times, you probably will again
- Heuristic
- A rule of thumb that suggests a course of action without guaranteeing an optimal solution (In hearts, getting rid of the high cards first)
- Dialectical Reasoning
- The process of comparing and evaliating opposing points of view in order to resolve differences
- Availability Heuristic
- The tendency to judge the probablity of a type of event by how easy it is to think of examples or instances
- Avoiding Loss
- People try to minimize ricks and losses when making decisions
- Mental Set
- A tendency to try to solve new problems by using the same heuristics, strategies, and rules that worked in the past on similar problems
- Hindsight Bias
- The tendency to overestimate one's ability to have predicted an event once the outcome is known; I knew it along bias
- Confirmation Bias
- The tendency to look for or pay attention only to information that confirms one's own belief
- Cognitive Dissonance
- A state of tension that occurs when a person simultaneously holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistant
- Postdecision Dissonance
- Tension that occurs when you believe you may have made a bad decision
- Justification of Effort
- The tendency of individuals to increase their liking for something that they have worked hard for or suffered to attain
- Intelligence
- An inferred characteristic of an individual, usually defined as the ability to profit from experience, acquire knowledge, think abstractly, act purposelly or adapt to changes
- Factor Analysis
- A statistical analyzing the intercorrelations among various measures or test scores
- G factor
- A general ability assumed by many theorists to underlie specific mental abilities and talents
- IQ
- A measure of intelligence now derived from norms provided for standardized intelligence tests
- Psychometrics
- Measurement of mental abilities, traits and processes
- Stereotype Threat
- A burden of doubt a person feels about his or her performance due to negative stereotypes about his or her groups ability (if someone thinks that they are part of a group that will do poorly, they really do do poorly)
- Componential Intelligence
- Informational stategies you use when thinking about a problem - comparing, analyzing and evaluation
- Metacognition
- The knowledge or awareness of one's own cognitive processes
- Experiential Intelligence
- Creativity in transforming skills to new situations
- Contextual Intelligence
- Practical application of intelligence, requires that people take into account the different contexts in which they find themselves -adapt to new situations
- Tacit Knowledge
- Stategies for success that are not formally taught but must be inferred
- Emotional Intelligence
- The ability to identify your own and other people's emotions accurately, express your emotions clearly, and regulate emotions in yourself and others
- Heritability
- A statisitical estimate of the proportion of the total variance in some trait that is attributable to genetic differences among individuals within a group
- Reduced IQ can be attributed to?
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Poor Prenatal Care
Malnutrition
Exposure to toxins like lead
Stressful family circumstances - Cognitive Ethology
- The study of cognitive processes in nonhuman animals - shown evidence that animals can anticipate future events, une numbers to labal quantities, coordinate activities with other animals
- Anthropomorphism
- The tendency to falsely attribute human qualities to non-human beings
- Anthropocentrism
- The tendency to thinking that human beings have nothing in common with other animals
- Consciousness
- The awareness of oneself and the environment
- Biological Rhythm
- A periodic regular fluctualation in a biolgoical system
- Endogenous
- Generated from within rather than by external cues
- Infradian Rhythms
- Period longer than 24 hours - bird migration, or human menstrual cycle
- Circadian Rhythms
- 24 hour long period, like sleep
- Ultradian Rhythms
- Periods shorter than 24 hours - 90 REM Cycle
- Suprachiasmatic Nucleus
- An area of the brain (hypothalamus)containing a bioglogical clock
- Melatonin
- A hormone Secreted by the pineal gland, involved in the regulation of circadian rhythms
- Internal Desynchronization
- A state in which biological rhythms are not in phase with one another - jet lag
- Seasonal Affective Disorder
- A controversial disorder in which aperson experiences depresion during the winter and an improvement of mood in the spring
- Sleep Apnea
- Breathing periodically stops for a few moments
- Narcolepsy
- person subject to irresustible and unpredictable daytime sleepiness or sleep
- REM
- Sleep periods characterized by eye movements, loss of muscle tone, and dreaming
- Sleep Spindles
- Short burts of rapid, high peaking waves in stage 2 sleep
- Delta Waves
- Very slow waves with very high peaks in stage 3 sleep
- Stage 4 sleep
- Deepest sleep, many delta waves
- Lucid Dreams
- People know they are dreaming and feel as though they are conscious
- Manifest Content
- What we experience and remember from dreamas
- Latent content
- hidden, symbolic and unconscious wishes
- Hypnosis
- A procedure in which the practitioner suggests changes in the sensations, perceptions, throughts, feelings of behavior of the subject
- Activation-Synthesis Theory
- The theory that dreaming results from the cortical synthesis and interpreation of neural signals triggered by activity in the lower part of the brain (Pons)
- Rules of hypnosis
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*They cannot be forced to do things against their will
*Feats have to be able to be performed by motivated unhynotized people
*Does not increase the accuracy of memory
*Depends on how hypnotizable the person is
*Does not produce a literal reexperiencing of long-ago events
*Can be used to fix health problems - Dissociation
- A split in consciousness in which one part of the mind operates independently of others (Ernest Hilgard)
- Socio-Cognitive Theories
- Effects of hypnosis result from an interaction between the social influence of the hypnotist, and the abilities, beliefs, and expectations of the subject
- Psychoactive Drugs
- Alter Perception, mood, thinking, memory, or behavior by changing the body's biochemistry
- Stimulants
- Speed up activity in the Central Nervous system - Cocaine, caffeine
- Depressants
- Slows down activity in the Central Nervous System - Alcohol, tranquilzers