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Memory: Processes, Types, and Theories, Lecture notes of Cognitive Psychology

This document delves into the intricate workings of human memory, exploring various types of memory, including sensory, short-term, episodic, semantic, and procedural memory. It examines the modal model of memory, working memory, and the role of the prefrontal cortex in memory processes. The document also discusses the interaction between different types of memory, the influence of knowledge on experience, and the concept of personal semantic memories. It explores the remember/know procedure, the semanticization of remote memories, and the role of the hippocampus in memory consolidation. Additionally, it examines the impact of misleading postevent information on memory and the formation of false memories. The document concludes with a discussion of autobiographical memory, its multidimensional nature, and the influence of emotion and music on memory retrieval.

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Book Title: eTextbook: Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research,
and Everyday Experience
Chapter 1. Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Chapter Summary
Chapter Summary
1. Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the
scientific study of the mind.
2. The mind creates and controls mental capacities such as perception,
attention, and memory, and creates representations of the world that
enable us to function.
3. The work of Donders (simple versus choice reaction time) and
Ebbinghaus (the forgetting curve for nonsense syllables) are examples of
early experimental research on the mind.
4. Because the operation of the mind cannot be observed directly, its
operation must be inferred from what we can measure, such as behavior
or physiological responding. This is one of the basic principles of
cognitive psychology.
5. The first laboratory of scientific psychology, founded by Wundt in 1879,
was concerned largely with studying the mind. Structuralism was the
dominant theoretical approach of this laboratory, and analytic
introspection was one of the major methods used to collect data.
6. William James, in the United States, used observations of his own mind
as the basis of his textbook, Principles of Psychology.
7. In the first decades of the 20th century, John Watson founded
behaviorism, partly in reaction to structuralism and the method of
analytic introspection. His procedures were based on classical
conditioning. Behaviorism’s central tenet was that psychology was
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Book Title: eTextbook: Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience Chapter 1. Introduction to Cognitive Psychology Chapter Summary

Chapter Summary

  1. Cognitive psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind.
  2. The mind creates and controls mental capacities such as perception, attention, and memory, and creates representations of the world that enable us to function.
  3. The work of Donders (simple versus choice reaction time) and Ebbinghaus (the forgetting curve for nonsense syllables) are examples of early experimental research on the mind.
  4. Because the operation of the mind cannot be observed directly, its operation must be inferred from what we can measure, such as behavior or physiological responding. This is one of the basic principles of cognitive psychology.
  5. The first laboratory of scientific psychology, founded by Wundt in 1879, was concerned largely with studying the mind. Structuralism was the dominant theoretical approach of this laboratory, and analytic introspection was one of the major methods used to collect data.
  6. William James, in the United States, used observations of his own mind as the basis of his textbook, Principles of Psychology.
  7. In the first decades of the 20th century, John Watson founded behaviorism, partly in reaction to structuralism and the method of analytic introspection. His procedures were based on classical conditioning. Behaviorism’s central tenet was that psychology was

properly studied by measuring observable behavior, and that invisible mental processes were not valid topics for the study of psychology.

  1. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, B. F. Skinner’s work on operant conditioning ensured that behaviorism would be the dominant force in psychology through the 1950s.
  2. Edward Tolman called himself a behaviorist but studied cognitive processes that were out of the mainstream of behaviorism.
  3. The cognitive revolution involved a paradigm shift in how scientists thought about psychology, and specifically the mind.
  4. In the 1950s, a number of events occurred that led to what has been called the cognitive revolution: a decline in the influence of behaviorism and a reemergence of the study of the mind. These events included the following: (a) Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior; (b) the introduction of the digital computer and the idea that the mind processes information in stages, like a computer; (c) Cherry’s attention experiments and Broadbent’s introduction of flow diagrams to depict the processes involved in attention; and (d) interdisciplinary conferences at Dartmouth and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  5. Event after the shift in psychology that made studying the mind acceptable, our understanding of the mind was limited, as indicated by the contents of Neisser’s (1967) book. Notable developments in cognitive psychology in the decades following Neisser’s book were (1) development of more-sophisticated models; (2) research focusing on the physiological basis of cognition; (3) concern with cognition in the real world, and (4) the role of knowledge in cognition.
  6. Two things that may help in learning the material in this book are to read the study hints in Chapter 7, which are based on some of the things we know about memory research, and to realize that the book is

Key Terms

Analytic introspection

Artificial intelligence

Behaviorism

Brain imaging

Choice reaction time

Classical conditioning

Cognition

Cognitive map

Cognitive psychology

Cognitive revolution

Electrophysiology

Information-processing approach

Mind

Neuropsychology

Operant conditioning

Paradigm

Paradigm shift

Reaction time

Savings

Savings curve

Scientific revolution

Simple reaction time

CogLab Experiments

Numbers in parentheses refer to the experiment number in CogLab.

Structuralism

Simple Detection ( 2 )

determine brain activation during cognitive functioning. Brain-imaging experiments have measured the response to still pictures to identify areas in the human brain that respond best to faces, places, and bodies, and the response to movies to create a brain map indicating the kinds of stimuli that activate different areas of the brain.

  1. The idea of distributed processing is that specific functions are processed by many different areas in the brain. One reason for the activation of many areas is the multidimensional nature of experience. This principle is illustrated by the multidimensional nature of seeing a face, remembering, and producing and understanding language.
  2. Neural networks are groups of neurons or structures that are connected structurally and also that are functionally related.
  3. Structural connectivity defines the neural highway system of the brain. It has been measured using track weighted imaging.
  4. Functional connectivity occurs when different areas have temporally correlated responses. Measuring resting-level fMRI has emerged as one of the ways to measure functional connectivity, but functional connectivity can also be measured by task-related fMRI.
  5. A number of different functional networks, such as visual, auditory, salience, executive function, and motor networks, have been determined using resting-level fMRI.
  6. A full description of networks needs to include the dynamic aspects of network activity.
  7. The default mode network is different than other networks because its activity decreases when a person is engaged in a task, but then increases when the brain is at rest. The function of the DMN is still being researched, but it has been suggested that it may play important roles in a number of cognitive processes, which we will discuss later in the book.
  1. Progress in understanding the physiology of cognition has depended on advances in technology. This is demonstrated by considering the connection between technology and answering three basic questions: The Representation Question, The Organization Question, and The Communication Question.

Think About It

  1. Some cognitive psychologists have called the brain the mind’s computer. What are computers good at that the brain is not? How do you think the brain and computers compare in terms of complexity? What advantage does the brain have over a computer?
  2. People generally feel that they are experiencing their environment directly, especially when it comes to sensory experiences such as seeing, hearing, or feeling the texture of a surface. However, our knowledge of how the nervous system operates indicates that this is not the case. Why would a physiologist say that all of our experiences are indirect?
  3. When brain activity is being measured in an fMRI scanner, the person’s head is surrounded by an array of magnets and must be kept perfectly still. In addition, the operation of the machine is very noisy. How do these characteristics of brain scanners limit the types of behaviors that can be studied using brain scanning?
  4. It has been argued that we will never be able to fully understand how the brain operates because doing this involves using the brain to study itself. What do you think of this argument?

Key Terms

57

Localization of function

Microelectrodes

Multidimensional

Nerve fibers

Nerve impulse

Nerve net

Neural circuits

Neural networks

Neuron doctrine

Neurons

Neuropsychology

Neurotransmitter

Occipital lobe

Parahippocampal place area (PPA)

Parietal lobe

Population coding

Principle of neural representation

Prosopagnosia

Receptors

Recording electrode

Reference electrode

Resting-state fMRI

Resting-state functional connectivity

CogLab Experiments

Numbers in parentheses refer to the experiment number in CogLab.

Resting potential

Seed location

Sensory code

Sparse coding

Specificity coding

Structural connectivity

Synapse

Task-related fMRI

Temporal lobe

Test location

Time-series response

Track-weighted imaging (TWI)

Visual cortex

Voxels

Wernicke’s aphasia

Wernicke’s area

Brain Asymmetry ( 15 )

  1. Examples of top-down processing are the multiple personalities of a blob and how knowledge of a language makes it possible to perceive individual words. Saffran’s experiment has shown that 8-month-old infants are sensitive to transitional probabilities in language.
  2. The idea that perception depends on knowledge was proposed by Helmholtz’s theory of unconscious inference.
  3. The Gestalt approach to perception proposed a number of laws of perceptual organization, which were based on how stimuli usually occur in the environment.
  4. Regularities of the environment are characteristics of the environment that occur frequently. We take both physical regularities and semantic regularities into account when perceiving.
  5. Bayesian inference is a mathematical procedure for determining what is likely to be “out there”; it takes into account a person’s prior beliefs about a perceptual outcome and the likelihood of that outcome based on additional evidence.
  6. Of the four approaches to object perception—unconscious inference, Gestalt, regularities, and Bayesian—the Gestalt approach relies more on bottom-up processing than the others. Modern psychologists have suggested a connection between the Gestalt principles and past experience.
  7. One of the basic operating principles of the brain is that it contains some neurons that respond best to things that occur regularly in the environment.
  8. Experience-dependent plasticity is one of the mechanisms responsible for creating neurons that are tuned to respond to specific things in the environment. The experiments in which people’s brain activity was measured as they learned about Greebles supports this idea. This was

also illustrated in the experiment described in Chapter 2 in which kittens were reared in vertical or horizontal environments.

  1. Perceiving and taking action are linked. Movement of an observer relative to an object provides information about the object. Also, there is a constant coordination between perceiving an object (such as a cup) and taking action toward the object (such as picking up the cup).
  2. Research involving brain ablation in monkeys and neuropsychological studies of the behavior of people with brain damage have revealed two processing pathways in the cortex—a pathway from the occipital lobe to the temporal lobe responsible for perceiving objects, and a pathway from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe responsible for controlling actions toward objects. These pathways work together to coordinate perception and action.
  3. Mirror neurons are neurons that fire both when a monkey or person takes an action, like picking up a piece of food, and when they observe the same action being carried out by someone else. It has been proposed that one function of mirror neurons is to provide information about the goals or intentions behind other people’s actions.
  4. Prediction, which is closely related to knowledge and inference, is a mechanism that is involved in perception, attention, understanding language, making predictions about future events, and thinking.

Think About It

  1. Describe a situation in which you initially thought you saw or heard something but then realized that your initial perception was in error. (Two examples: misperceiving an object under low-visibility conditions; mishearing song lyrics.) What were the roles of bottom-up
  1. Try observing the world as though there were no such thing as top- down processing. For example, without the aid of top-down processing, seeing a restaurant’s restroom sign that says “Employees must wash hands” could be taken to mean that we should wait for an employee to wash our hands! If you try this exercise, be warned that it is extremely difficult because top-down processing is so pervasive in our environment that we usually take it for granted.

Key Terms

90

Action pathway

Apparent movement

Bayesian inference

Bottom-up processing

Brain ablation

Direct pathway model

Dorsal pathway

Gestalt psychologists

Inverse projection problem

Law of pragnanz

Landmark discrimination problem

Light-from-above assumption

Likelihood

Likelihood principle

Mirror neurons

Mirror neuron system

Object discrimination problem

Oblique effect

Perception

Perception pathway

Physical regularities

Placebo

Placebo effect

Principle of good continuation

Principle of good figure

Principle of similarity

Principle of simplicity

Principles of perceptual organization

Prior

Prior probability

Regularities in the environment

Scene schema

Semantic regularities

Size-weight illusion

Speech segmentation

Statistical learning

Theory of natural selection

Top-down processing

Transitional probabilities

Figure 3. Cengage Learning, Inc., AnetaPics/Shutterstock.com; Scratchgravel Publishing Services The Dalmatian in Figure 3.17. Details

Book Title: eTextbook: Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience Chapter 4. Attention Chapter Summary

Chapter Summary

  1. Selective attention, the ability to focus on one message while ignoring all others, has been demonstrated using the dichotic listening procedure.
  2. A number of models have been proposed to explain the process of selective attention. Broadbent’s filter model proposes that the attended message is separated from the incoming signal early in the analysis of the signal. Treisman’s model proposes later separation and adds a dictionary unit to explain how the unattended message can sometimes get through. Late selection models propose that selection doesn’t occur until messages are processed enough to determine their meaning.
  3. Lavie proposes that our ability to ignore distracting stimuli can be explained by considering processing capacity and perceptual load. Her load theory of attention states that distraction is less likely for high-load tasks because no capacity remains to process potential distracting stimuli.
  4. The Stroop effect demonstrates how a powerful task-irrelevant stimulus, such as meaningful words that result in a response that competes with the observer’s task, can capture attention.
  5. Overt attention is shifting attention by making eye movements. Overt attention is determined by bottom-up processes such as stimulus salience and by top-down processes such as scene schemas and task demands, which influence how eye movements are directed to parts of a scene.
  6. Covert attention is shifting attention without making eye movements. Visual attention can be directed to different places in a scene even 125