Cognition, 6E Gabriel A. Radvansky Solution Manual

Type:

Solution Manual

Resource:

Cognition

Edition:

6th Edition

Author(s):

Gabriel A. Radvansky Mark H. Ashcraft

INSTRUCTOR’S MANUAL Gabriel A. Radvansky University of Notre Dame

COGNITION 6th EDITION

Gabriel A. Radvansky University of Notre Dame

Mark H. Ashcraft

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

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Instructor’s Manual

Cognition, 6th ed.

Radvansky/Ashcraft

Chapter 1: Cognitive Psychology: An Introduction 1.0 Chapter Overview This is an overview chapter: an introduction to cognitive psychology.

1.1 Chapter Contents Thinking about Thinking Memory and Cognition Defined An Introductory History of Cognitive Psychology • • • •

Anticipations of Psychology Early Psychology Behaviorism and Neobehaviorism Dissatisfaction with Behaviorism: The Winds of Change

Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing •

The New Direction

Measuring Information Processes • • •

Getting Started Guiding Analogies Time and Accuracy Measures

Information Processing and the Cognitive Science Approach • • • •

The Standard Theory A Process Model Revealing Assumptions Cognitive Science

Themes 1.2 Chapter Summary Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human memory and mental processes, including activities such as perceiving, remembering, using language, reasoning, and problem solving. The field is driven forward by research, the results of experiments, and the explanations provided by models and theories.

Intuitive analysis of examples such as “How many hands did Aristotle have?” and “Does a robin have wings?” indicates that many important mental processes can occur very rapidly and below the level of conscious awareness; experimental evidence presented later in the book supports these conclusions. The field of cognition aims to provide an accurate assessment of human thought by a number of methods. The aim is to provide ecologically valid conclusions using a scientific approach to expose the underlying elements and processes of thought.

“Psychology has a long past but only a short history” (Ebbinghaus, 1908): interest in psychological topics has existed for a long time, but the scientific study of human memory and cognition has only developed recently (e.g., Wundt established the first psychological laboratory in 1879). Early “scientific” investigations of psychologically relevant phenomena started in the late 1800s. These included investigations into the structure of thought (Wundt & Titchner via the first psychological approach: structuralism), as well as physiological (Helmholtz) and psychophysical investigations. The largely American behaviorist movement rejected the use of introspections and substituted the study of observable behavior as the true goal of psychology. Real-world problems of vigilance (performance decrements across time) and attention were not easily addressed with the tools afforded by stimulus–response (S–R) behaviorism; neither were problems of language acquisition and decision making. These shortcomings led to the demise of behaviorism. The movement in America from the behaviorist perspective to the cognitive perspective—the shift towards an objective examination of mental processes—is the cognitive revolution.

Modern cognitive psychology retains many behaviorist viewpoints and assumptions, as well as behaviorism’s methodological rigor, but has dropped the antimentalistic stance and has incorporated viewpoints, assumptions, and methods from linguistics and the computer and information sciences. Among the common methods used to study thought are response time and accuracy measures. Among the common guiding analogies are the information-processing perspective and the computer metaphor.

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The standard model of memory is introduced as a guiding theory of cognitive psychology. A process model is provided to give student a feel for how cognitive psychology conducts its business. Also provided are a number of assumptions cognitive psychologists may make when doing their research.

The chapter concludes with a discussion of cognitive science to provide a broader perspective in which cognitive psychology fits. Cognitive science is viewed as the interdisciplinary approach used in the scientific study of thought, language, and the brain—the study of the mind. Seven themes for the entire book are also introduced in this chapter.

1.3 Key Terms Accuracy: how correct a person is in the responses given; often quantified in terms of both number correct and number incorrect. Separately, or paired with response time, it can give an indication of cognitive functioning. (p. 21) Attention: (one of the seven themes of cognition) this is an all-important but poorly understood mental process.

It is limited in quantity, essential to most processing, but only partially under our control. Is it a mechanism? Is it a limited pool of mental resources? (p. 30) Behaviorism: the movement or school of psychology in which the organism’s behavior was the primary topic of interest, and the learning of new stimulus–response associations, whether by classical conditioning or by reinforcement principles, was deemed the most important kind of behavior to study. Experience is the primary factor in determining even the largest aspects of one’s behavior. Antimentalistic; associated with John B. Watson. ( p. 12) Channel Capacity: term borrowed from communications engineering: any channel—any physical device that transmits messages or information—has a limited capacity. (p. 18) Cognition: the collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding, as well as the act of using those processes. (p. 6) Cognitive Psychology: is an objective, empirical discipline that favors an experimental approach. The major assumptions are: 1) Mental processes exist (vs. behaviorist perspective); 2) Mental processes can be studied scientifically (vs. subjectivity of introspective method); 3) People are active information processors (vs. passive recipients of knowledge and experience). (p. 5) Cognitive Revolution: the movement away from behaviorism to re-embrace the study of memory and mental activity: instinctive drift, language, perception, judgment, and decision making. (p. 2) Cognitive Science: is the interdisciplinary (linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, and psychology) study of thought, language, and the brain; the text also defines cognitive science as “the scientific study of thought, language, and the brain—in short, the scientific study of the mind.” (p. 2) Computer Analogy: human information processing may be similar to the sequence of steps and operations in a computer program—similar to the flow of information from input to output when a computer processes information. (p. 19) Conceptually Driven Processing (top-down): when existing context or knowledge has an influence on earlier or simpler forms of mental processing. (p. 27) Context Effects: related concepts or processing can speed later processing; aA problem for process models, because there was not an easy way to accommodate context effects. (p. 27) Control Processes: the cognitive steps involved in manipulating information, such as rehearsal, in short-term memory. (p23) Data-driven (bottom-up) Processing: some processing relies heavily on the information we get from the environment. (p. 30) Ecological Validity: the extent to which experimental results provide insight into how people actually think and act in real-world situations rather than in sterile, very controlled, laboratory conditions. (p. 7) Embodiment: (one of the seven themes of cognition) the way we think about and process information reflects the fact that we need to interact with the world using our bodies. (p. 30) Empiricism: the philosophy that phenomena are to be investigated by careful objective observation. (p. 9) Explicit: direct and explicit awareness of certain types of memories (you remember the experience of buying this textbook, for example). (p. 30) Functionalism: the study of the functions of consciousness (rather than its structure); answered the questions: “What is it for?” “How does it adapt?” (p. 11) Implicit: some memories and memory processes are there, but not necessarily with conscious awareness, which raises the issue of whether (and how much) unconscious influences can affect your behavior. (p. 30)

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Independent and Nonoverlapping Stages: in a strict information-processing approach, the idea that stage processing only starts after the prior stage has finished; processing within a stage occurs independently of processing occurring at other stages. (p. 26) Introspection: Titchner’s method, in which observers are carefully trained to report on inner sensations and experiences. (Note: this is not the self-analysis of self-help books.) It was intended to be a careful, reliable, and scientific method. Reports in which memories, rather than experiences, were reported were excluded: suffered an inherent problem of subjective bias. (p. 9) Lexical Decision Task: a timed task in which people decide whether or not letter strings are words in a participant’s language. (p. 24) Long-Term Memory (LTM): virtually permanent memory store; responsible for holding information for more than a few seconds. (p. 23) Memory: the mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval and the mental storage system that enables these processes. (p. 6) Metacognition: our awareness of our own cognitive systems and knowledge and insight into their workings. (p.

30) Parallel Processing: multiple mental processes can operate simultaneously. (p. 26) Process Model: hypothesis about the specific mental processes that take place when a particular task is performed; a small-scale model that delineated the specific mental steps involved in a task and made testable predictions about the results. (p. 24) Reductionism: attempting to understand a complex event by breaking it down into its components. (p. 7) Response Time (RT): the time it takes to make a particular response to a stimulus; the time between stimulus onset and the time of the response. Key assumption: longer RTs are produced whenever more “mental work” is required. (p. 20) Sensory Memory: (standard theory) when environmental stimuli impinge onto the processing system, each sense modality has its own sensory register or memory. Some of this information is transferred to shortterm memory. (p. 23) Sequential Stages of Processing: an assumption of most stage models in which stages occur in a fixed sequence with no overlap between stages. (p. 25) Short-Term Memory (STM): classic term for the information store that briefly holds information in memory (for up to 20 seconds); the memory component where current and recently attended information is held; sometimes loosely associated with attention and consciousness. (p. 23) Standard Theory: sensory registers → STM → LTM. (Atkinson & Shiffrin) (p. 23) Structuralism: the study of the structure of the conscious mind through the study of sensations, images, and feelings (which were thought to be the very elements of the mind’s structure); structuralism failed because it was too narrow, but did provide excellent (subjective) descriptions of sensory, imaginal, and affective states of consciousness. (Titchner) (p. 10) Tabula Rasa: the experience of the individual is of paramount importance because the mind is a “blank slate” at birth that one’s life experiences write on. (p. 9) Top-Down: conceptually driven processing; it is the opposite of bottom-up (data-driven) processing. (p. 27) Verbal Learning: branch of experimental psychology that dealt with humans as they learn verbal materials, such as items or stimuli composed of letters and/or words; essentially, this was a way to study memory within the context of behaviorism. (p. 14) Verbal Protocol: have participants verbalize their thoughts (aloud, in “real time”) as they solve the problems that they are working on. (p. 28) Word Frequency Effect: faster lexical decisions to high-frequency (more common) words. (p. 25)

1.4 Key People Chomsky, Noam: linguist who wrote a review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior that illustrated the shortcomings of a behaviorist account of language. (p. 15) Ebbinghaus, Hermann: first researcher to study memory using objective methodology (method of savings). (p.

10) James, William: major American philosopher and psychologist. He was interested in a wide array of psychological phenomena. Advocate of Functionalism. (p. 11) Titchner, Edward: English student of Wundt who came to Cornell in 1892. Titchner believed Wundt’s introspective method was the only method of obtaining psychological knowledge. Titchner’s structuralism explicitly rejected the topics of educational applications, social psychology, and mental illness. (p. 10)

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Skinner, B.F.: behaviorist; wrote a behaviorist account of language, Verbal Behavior, that was resoundingly critiqued by Chomsky. (p. 12) Watson, John B.: viewed experience as the primary factor in determining even the largest aspects of one’s behavior. Advocate of behaviorism (1910: behaviorist manifesto). (p. 12) Wundt, Wilhelm (pronounced “voont”): 1832-1920; established the first psychological laboratory (1879), which was devoted to volkerpsychologie (folk psychology; psychology for the people)—largely focused on sensation, perception, and attention (“conscious processes and immediate experience”). (p. 9)

1.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) •

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• •

Discuss the interpretation of response times (you can leverage an example off of a discussion of Stroop effects). In doing so, be aware that some students will not realize that “faster” is associated with less cognitive work (this is an inherent assumption of most response time studies). Additionally, many students may have difficulty reading simple RT graphs (faster is on the BOTTOM of the y-axis).

The first difficulty many people have with cognitive psychology is an inability to understand why anyone would be interested in it. Here are two suggestions to rectify this particular perspective: 1. After going over the syllabus for the first time, have people call out the different “types” of psychology. Afterwards, briefly describe (or ask for suggestions on) how each area or “type” of psychology could benefit or be relevant to cognitive psychology. Be sure to include clinical (types of deficits), learning (studying for exams: massed vs. distributed practice), and human factors (driving a car and talking on the cell phone = dual-task attentional demands).

2. When developing your syllabus, be sure to include an assignment within each component of the course. The purpose of the assignment is to tie the theoretical knowledge that the students are exposed to from your lecture and the textbook to “real life.” This has the advantage of providing a much more resilient memory trace (you can discuss this logic on Day 1—foreshadowing important topics such as depth of processing).

If possible, use student names when responding to questions. For larger classes, make it a requirement that a student needs to answer at least one question from you during class over the course of the semester.

It is easier to go from a “hard” stance regarding make-up exams or late assignments to a softer one than it is to be too soft in the beginning and then tighten your policies.

1.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) • • •

Additional content: The first mention of “psychologie” as a field of research was in the context that there could not be a scientific study of psychologie (science of the mind).

Part of what motivated Wundt to study the laws that regulate the mind was the success of scientific approach in other fields and the regularity of visual illusions (e.g., the horizontal–vertical illusion and the Oppel-Kundt illusion), which suggested to him that laws could govern psychological experience.

Cognition: cognito = “to know” co = “together” gnoscere = “know”

1.6 Research Project Ideas • • • • •

Use PsycInfo to look up one of the authors of one of the major works cited in this chapter (e.g., Stroop, 1935). Judging by the titles of the articles, identify the topic area in which the researcher was interested.

On the basis of your reading in Chapter 1, identify two areas of your own life where a further understanding of cognitive psychology could help you (e.g., “although you are not allowed to use this one, a great example would be ‘to help you identify good study habits’”).

What are some of the relevant psychological issues that an auto manufacturer might have to consider when designing the interior of a car?

Characterize the differing contributions to cognitive psychology of James, Watson, and Ebbinghaus.

Identify the four “best” things that an understanding of the fundamentals of cognitive psychology can offer an undergraduate (other than a good grade in this course). Summarize your argument for your choices in a two-page, double-spaced paper.

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Chapter 2: Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Science 2.0 Chapter Overview The chapter covers basic issues of cognitive neuroscience and how neural processing relates to cognition.

2.1 Chapter Contents Cognitive Neuroscience Neurons: The Basic Building Blocks • • • •

Basic Neurology Neurons Neural Communication Neurons and Learning

Neuroanatomy: Important Parts of the Brain • • • • •

Brain Anatomy Principles of Functioning Split-Brain Research and Lateralization Cortical Specialization Levels of Explanation and Embodied Cognition

Neuroimaging: Looking at the Brain • • • •

Structural Measures Electrical Measures Metabolic Measures Other Measures

Neural Net Models: Connectionism 2.2 Chapter Summary Cognition does not exist in a vacuum, but depends intimately on various neurological brain states. This can be seen clearly in patients, such as K.C., who have brain damage that then disrupts their ability to engage in certain types of cognition, perhaps illustrating dissociation.

The basic building blocks of the nervous system are the neurons, which students should be familiar with, including their component parts. Neural communication involves action potentials, which are changes in the electrical charge within a neuron. These action potentials follow the all or none principle. At the synapse, neurotransmitters are released which can affect the dendrites and cell membrane of the next neuron. There are a number of neurotransmitters that are involved in neural communication, and that can also influence the flow of cognition. During learning, neurons can be altered during long-term potentiation and consolidation.

In addition to the basic functioning of neurons, a thorough understanding of modern cognitive sciences must include an understanding of brain anatomy. Part of this involves understanding the roles of such brain structures as the thalamus, corpus callosum, hippocampus, and amygdala, as well as the cortex itself. The cortex is divided into a number of regions, each of which is critical for different types of mental activities. Two important principles of brain function and architecture: contralaterality and hemispheric specialization.

Hemispheric specialization refers to the fact that specific types of processes(e.g., language) tend to be represented in and controlled by separate, lateralized regions of the brain. Further localization of function is found in the cortex with the sensory and motor cortices, with special types of neurons, such as mirror neurons, and certain pathways through the cortex for processing different kinds of information, such as the dorsal and ventral pathways.

While understanding underlying neurophysiology is important, in some sense, cognitive processes can be thought of as emergent properties from the operation of the neurons themselves. These emergent properties build from the parts that underlay them. Similarly, more abstract cognitive processes may be built and emerge from the embodied sensory and motor processes in which they began.

There are various neuroimaging methods for understanding brain structure and processes. In terms of the structure of the brain itself, two of the most popular methods are CT scans, which use x-rays, and MRI scans, which use the resonant frequencies of molecules. MRI scans are more detailed. To look at mental processes, some techniques use electrical measures, such as single cell recording, EEG(and ERP), and TMS techniques.

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Another approach is to look at metabolic changes, as with PET and fMRI images. Finally, there are also other techniques available to cognitive science, including lesion studies, direct cortical stimulation, and the use of special populations.

The notion that human cognition is analogous to processing in a computer system has been abandoned at the detailed level, especially because of evidence of widespread parallel processing in humans.

Connectionist(neural net, PDP) models can simulate such parallel processes, however, and therefore may be an excellent way of modeling human cognitive processes.

2.3 Key Terms Acetylcholine: a neurotransmitter that may be involved in strengthening neural connections during long-term potentiation. (p. 38) Action Potential: the change in electrical charge that occurs when a neuron fires. Neural firing follows the all or none principle, resulting in all action potentials being the same. (p. 36) All or None Principle: the idea that either a neuron fires or it does not, with all action potentials being the same. (p. 37) Amygdala: an almond-shaped structure adjacent to one end of the hippocampus; often involved in emotion processing. (p. 42) Axon: the long, extended portion of the neuron. (p. 34) Axon Terminals: the branchlike endings of the axon in the neuron; contain neurotransmitters. (p. 34) BOLD Signal: Blood oxygenation level-dependent signal that informs the researcher about the relative level of activity in a region of the brain. (p. 54) Brodmann’s Areas: these are numbered areas of the cortex that were identified by an analysis of physical differences in different parts of the brain. These numbers are useful in locating general areas of the cortex. (p. 43) Cerebral Cortex (Neocortex): the top layer of the brain; responsible for higher-level mental processes (nearly surrounds the “old brain” or brainstem). (p. 42) Cerebral Hemispheres (Left and Right): The two major structures in the neocortex. In most people, the left cerebral hemisphere is especially responsible for language and other symbolic processing, and the right is especially responsible for nonverbal, perceptual processing. (p. 42) Cerebral Lateralization: specialization of function between the left and right hemispheres(e.g., 90 percent of male, right-handed subjects who write with their hand right-side up have most of their language functions served by the left hemisphere). Different functions or actions within the brain tend to rely more heavily on one hemisphere or the other or tend to be performed differently in the two hemispheres. (p. 45) Cognitive Neuroscience:(a.k.a. neurocognition/cognitive neuropsychology) a hybrid term applied to the analysis of those handicaps in human cognitive functioning which result from brain injury and other neurophysiological effects on cognition. (p. 32) Connectionist Models: a computer-based technique for modeling complex systems. Knowledge is represented by the strength of the excitatory or inhibitory connections between massively interconnected nodes. (p. 57) Consolidation: the slow process of making memories permanent; this process can last days, week, month, or years. (p. 40) Contralaterality: receptive and control centers for one side of the body are in the opposite hemisphere of the brain(contra = against). (p. 44) Corpus Callosum: broad band of fibers that constitute the primary bridge between the right and left hemispheres of the neocortex. (p. 42) CT Scan: computed axial tomography; x-rays(of the head) that can be used to provide detailed 3-D information about the physical structure of the brain. (p. 51) Dendrites: the branching input structures of the neuron (p. 34) Direct Stimulation: The direct application of electrical current to the surface of the cortex; used by Penfield and others to map the cortex, such as the sensory and motor homunculi. (p. 56) Dissociation: a disruption in one component of mental functioning but no impairment of another. (p. 32) Dorsal Pathway: the neural pathway across the top of the cortex, stemming from visual-processing areas in the occipital lobe, primarily responsible for processing information about where things are in the world. (p. 49) Emergent Properties: the properties that emerge from collections of elements (e.g., neurons) working together to create a new process of property that the individual elements lack (e.g., reasoning). (p. 50) EEG (Electroencephalogram): electrodes on a person’s scalp pick up brain waves. (p. 52)

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ERP (Event-Related Potentials): the momentary changes in electrical activity of the brain when a particular stimulus is presented to the subject (e.g., changes in N400 for semantic anomalies, changes in P600 for syntactic anomalies). (p. 52) fMRI: functional MRI; uses signature metabolic activity to capture both general structure of the brain and to indicate which areas of the brain are used to perform some particular task. Minimally invasive but shows some time lag, since the increase in metabolic activity can lag anywhere from several hundred milliseconds to several seconds behind the cognitive activity. Such scans are called “functional” because they show the brain as it is functioning. (p. 54) Frontal Lobe: most forward part of cortex, and important for the control of thought and action. (p. 43) GABA: an inhibitory neurotransmitter involved in weakening connections between neurons during learning. (p.

39) Glutamate: an excitatory neurotransmitter involved in strengthening connections between neurons during learning. (p. 38) Hemispheric Specialization: the principle that each cerebral hemisphere has specialized functions and abilities. (p. 45) Hippocampus: “sea horse”; located immediately interior to the temporal lobes, important for (episodic) memory consolidation. (p. 42) Lesion: a change in the structure of a tissue or an organ due to injury or disease, usually resulting in impairment of normal function (e.g., surgery, head injury, etc.). (p. 56) Lobes(of the Brain): frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal. (p. 43) Long-Term Potentiation (LTP): the temporary (days, weeks, or months) strengthening of connections between neurons as a temporary storage of memories prior to consolidation. (p. 39) Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): a medical scanning technology that uses electrical signatures of metabolic change to compute the structure of the brain. (p. 41) Mirror Neurons: neurons in the cortex specialized for planning and executing one’s own movement, as well as simulating the movement of others that are being observed. (p. 49) Motor Cortex: the band of cortex at the back of the frontal lobe responsible for processing information about voluntary muscle movements throughout the body. (p. 48) Myelin Sheath: the fatty coating on a neuron’s axon that can facilitate neural communication. (p. 34) Neocortex: cerebral cortex. (p. 41) Neural Net Models: connectionist models. (p. 57) Neuron: the cell that is specialized for receiving and transmitting a neural impulse (dendrites [input structures], soma [cell body], axon terminals [output structures]). (p. 34) Neurotransmitter: the chemical substance released into the synapse between two neurons; responsible for activating (type I neurons) or inhibiting (type II neurons) the next neuron in sequence. (p. 38) Nodes of Ranvier: gaps along the myelin sheath that allow the action potential to jump from one point to another, thereby speeding neural communication. (p. 36) Norepinephrine: a neurotransmitter that is involved in the creation of new memories. (p. 38) Occipital Lobe: the lobe at the back of the brain that is most heavily involved in vision. (p43) Parallel Distributed Processing: thoroughly parallel (simultaneous) processing distributed across wide areas of the system (e.g., brain). With this kind of parallel processing, the architecture can turn to distributed, rather than localist, representation. In a distributed representation system, the correlations (regularities) between representations get encoded into a network of connections. One feature of distributed representations is that their use can lead to achieving a “solution” for ambiguous inputs as the input is “cleaned up.” (p. 57) Parietal Lobe: portion of the cortex on the top, behind the frontal lobe and in front of the occipital lobe. This part of the cortex is important for sensory processing, spatial processing, and working memory. (p. 43) Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scan: this technique yields images of the functioning of the brain based on cerebral blood flow. (p. 54) Propagation: the movement of an action potential from the dendrites, through the soma, and down the axon. (p.

36) Sensory Cortex: the band of cortex at the front of the parietal lobes responsible for processing sensory information from throughout the body. (p. 48) Single Cell Recording: the measurement of firing rating from an individual neuron using an electrode implanted in vivo. (p.52) Soma: the cell body of a neuron. (p. 34)

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Special Populations: populations of people that have some consistent alteration of brain structure or activity, such as older adults or Korsakoff’s patients. (p. 56) Split Brain: patients with a severed corpus callosum; performance can be examined to reveal various hemispheric specializations. (p. 46) Synapse: connection point between neurons where neural transmission takes place; the transmission itself. (p.

37) Temporal Lobe: the lobe of the cortex on the sides, below the frontal and parietal lobes. This lobe is important for audition and memory. (p. 43) Thalamus: (“inner room”; “inner chamber”); “gateway to the cortex”; major relay station from the sensory systems of the body to the cortex; almost all messages entering the cortex come through the thalamus. (p.

42) Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS): the use of magnetic coils to affect the activity of targeted assemblies of neurons in the cortex to either increase their activation or give a person a temporary lesion. (p. 54) Ventral Pathway: the neural pathway across the side of the cortex, stemming from visual-processing areas in the occipital lobe; primarily responsible for processing information about what things are in the world. (p.

49)

2.4 Key People Brodmann: identified separate areas of the cortex (p. 43) K.C.: a patient (described by Tulving [p. 54]) who sustained a brain injury due to a motorcycle accident yielding a pervasive disruption of LTM: “He cannot remember, in the sense of bringing back to conscious awareness, a single thing he has ever done in the past.” His intelligence, language, and knowledge were otherwise normal. (p32) McClelland and Rumelhart: connectionist modeling (p. 58) Penfield: pioneer of direct stimulation techniques for investigating brain function (p. 56) Sperry: split-brain research (surgical intervention for epilepsy) (p. 46)

2.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • •

This chapter covers a lot of information. Be sure to indicate what your desired level of to-be-retained knowledge is.

Request (and respond to) feedback. In the third hour of class time, hand out a sheet of paper and have each student (anonymously, if they wish) answer each of four preprinted questions: 1) What would you like to learn in this course?

2) Which course requirements are of most concern to you? (e.g., interpreting data, technical writing, etc.)

3) What is most likely to prevent you from performing at a level of excellence?

4) What can be done to enable you to meet these challenges?

2.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) Basic Tools • Illustrate (via example or video) lesion/imaging techniques and their associated behavioral observations.

• To make it clear that the mind depends on the brain, discuss cases in which brain damage has affected thinking in some form or another.

2.6 Research Project Ideas • • •

Given unlimited resources, how might neuroimaging tools be used in the work place or other aspects of real-world life? Be creative.

New ways of assessing neural activity are being developed all the time. Find one of these and design a study of how it may be used to study one aspect of cognition.

What utility, if any, do developments in neurocognition and connectionist modeling have for developments in artificial intelligence? Are there any existing technologies that use principles of cognitive science in one form or another?

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Chapter 3: Sensation and Perception

3.0 Chapter Overview A traditional treatment of visual and auditory sensation and perception.

3.1 Chapter Contents Visual Perception • • • • •

Gathering Visual Information Visual Sensory Memory The Early Parts of a Fixation A Summary for Visual Sensory Memory Trans-Saccadic Memory

Pattern Recognition; Written Language • • • • •

Gestalt Grouping Principles Template Approach Visual Feature Detection Beyond Features: Conceptually Driven Pattern Recognition Connectionist Modeling

Object Recognition (and Agnosia) • • •

Recognition by Components Agnosia Implications for Cognitive Science

Auditory Perception • •

Auditory Sensory Memory Auditory Pattern Recognition

3.2 Chapter Summary Sensation and perception involve the detection of physical energy such as light and sound, converting it into neural impulses and then interpreting those patterns. To gain an idea of how complex this process can be, one can look at the structure of the eye, and the retina. Clearly distinguish between sensation and perception.

The eye sweeps across the visual field in short movements known as saccades, taking in information during brief fixations. The information encoded in these fixations is stored in visual sensory memory for no more than about 250 ms. This iconic image, which may include movement, fades rapidly or can be erased by subsequent visual stimulation. Under normal viewing conditions, one moment’s visual input replaces the previous visual input by means of erasure or “write-over.” This type of replacement occurs throughout the continuous stream of successive glimpses that constitute normal viewing. Under unusual circumstances, even the shortest displays will seem to last longer than the actual physical presentation (e.g., the brief visual exposure offered by lightning strikes). The duration of normal iconic memory is about 250 ms, although the first 50 ms of viewing are all we need to encode visual information.

The entire sequence of encoding visual information—selecting part of it for further processing, planning subsequent eye movements, and so on—is highly active and very rapid. The phenomenological experience of visual continuity—the feeling that we see continuously, without breaks, pauses, or blank intervals—is due to the constant updating of visual sensory memory and our focus on attended information. As we pay attention to a visual stimulus, we seem to be examining the readout from iconic memory. In the meantime, a new visual scene is being registered in sensory memory. Our mental processes then pick up the thread of visual information in the newly registered scene, providing a smooth transition from one attended display to the next, with the new input “erasing” the old input under normal viewing conditions. Neisser’s (1967) term for the mental process of visual attention is “focal attention.”

Trans-saccadic memory allows a person to create a complete and coherent mental representation of the visual world. “Perceptual representation of the environment is built up via the integration of information across eye movements” (Irwin, 1991).

Visual pattern recognition can be easily illustrated by considering the various Gestalt grouping principles, including figure–ground segregation, closure, proximity, similarity, and good continuation. Recognition of

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visual patterns is not a process of matching stored templates to visual stimuli. Feature detection provides a more convincing account of visual recognition, where the features being detected are elementary patterns that can be combined to form letters and other visual stimuli. Feature detection accounts of pattern recognition, such as Selfridge’s Pandemonium model, must be augmented by conceptually driven processes to account for known effects of context in visual recognition. Connectionist approaches provide one method of accommodating context effects.

Biederman’s (1990) recognition by components (RBC) theory claims that we recognize objects by extracting or detecting three-dimensional components (“geons”) from encoded visual stimuli, then access memory to determine what real-world objects contain those components. The most informative parts of objects tend to be parts where the components join together; people have more difficulty recognizing objects when the intersections are degraded visually than when long, connecting segments are degraded.

Studies of patients with visual agnosia demonstrate the complexity of perception and pattern recognition.

Patients with apperceptive agnosia sometimes are unable to detect even elementary features from stimuli and therefore have difficulty in perceiving a whole pattern or Gestalt form. Those with associative agnosia can perceive the whole, but still cannot associate the pattern with the stored knowledge that would allow them to identify the object.

Auditory stimulation is stored briefly in auditory sensory memory, for periods up to about four seconds for language-based information. Although auditory sensory memory lasts longer than visual sensory memory, its capacity may not be as large as that of visual sensory memory. Generally, the last items in a list presented auditorially are better recalled than items presented visually, an outcome known as the modality effect; furthermore, an auditory suffix added to the end of the list degrades performance on the last list items, demonstrating erasure from auditory sensory memory. Theories of auditory pattern recognition resemble those in vision; that is, they involve feature detection plus a substantial role for top-down processing.

3.3 Key Terms Agnosia: a failure or deficit in recognizing objects. (p. 91) Apperceptive Agnosia: a basic disruption in perceiving patterns. Individual features cannot be integrated into a whole percept or pattern. (p. 92) Associative Agnosia: able to make a mental percept, but cannot associate the pattern with a particular meaning.

Cannot link the perceived whole with stored knowledge about its identity. (p. 92) Audition: the sense of hearing. (p. 94) Auditory Sensory (Echoic) Memory: brief memory system that receives auditory stimuli and holds it for further mental processing. (p. 94) Backwards Masking: a later visual stimulus can dramatically affect the perception of an earlier one. (p. 71) Beta Movement: illusory movement that occurs when perception makes inferences when viewing a series of static pictures in rapid succession, as in a movie. (p. 78) Change Blindness: the failure to notice changes in visual stimuli (e.g., photographs) when those changes occur during a saccade. (p. 67) Closure: a Gestalt grouping principle that is used by visual perception to close up gaps in a percept to help identify a whole object. (p. 74) Common Fate: a Gestalt grouping principle that is used by visual perception to group together points that are moving together. (p. 75) Conceptually Driven Processing: context and higher-level knowledge influence lower-level processes; topdown processing. (p. 79) Connectionist Modeling: theoretical and computational approach applied to understanding the ways in which human cognition might perform its mental operations. The connections in a connectionist network are pathways. Network pathways exist both within and between levels of the network. (p. 82) Context: the influence of surrounding information and your own knowledge. (p. 81) Data-Driven Processing System: processing is driven by the stimulus pattern (the incoming data); bottom-up processing. (p. 79) Decay: a passive process like fading away; simple loss of information across time. (p. 70) Echoic Memory: see auditory sensory memory. (p. 94) Feature Detection (Feature Analysis): a theoretical approach, most commonly in pattern recognition. Stimuli (patterns) are identified by breaking them into constituent features. (p. 76) Figure–Ground: a Gestalt grouping principle that is used by visual perception to segregate the part of the percept that corresponds to an object, from the part that corresponds to the background behind it. (p. 73)

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Fixation: in visual perception, the pause during which the eye is almost stationary and is taking in visual information; also, the visual point on which the eyes focus during the fixation pause. (p. 67) Focal Attention: Neisser’s (1976) term for the mental process of focused visual attention, such as a mental redirection of attention; visual attention. Important for transfer to short-term memory. (p. 72) Fovea: the highly sensitive region of the retina responsible for precise, focused vision. Most of the fovea is cones, and most of the cones lie in the small area of the retina at the foveal pit. (p. 62) Geons: geometric ions, from Biederman’s recognition by components model of human object recognition; geometric components into which a visual object might be broken down for the purpose of representation (and thus recognition) within the visual information system. (p. 87) Gestalt: an overall pattern, form, configuration, or percept. (Note: the term carries with it the assumption that decomposing a pattern into its components in some way loses the essential wholeness of the cohesive pattern). (p. 73) Good Continuation: a Gestalt grouping principle that is used by visual perception to structure and organize together elements based on edges and trajectories so that a visually simple solution is obtained. (p. 74) Hidden Units: the level between the input and hidden units in a simple three-level connectionist model. (p. 84) Icon: the visual image that resides in iconic (visual sensory) memory; “snapshot.” (p. 70) Inattention Blindness: as a result of directing attention elsewhere, failing to see an object even if looking directly at it. (p. 67) Input Units: the level analogous to the receptors in a simple three-level connectionist model. (p. 84) Interference: forgetting caused by the effects of intervening stimulation or mental processing. (p. 70) Masking: an effect, often in perception experiments, in which a mask or pattern is presented very shortly after a stimulus and disrupts or even prevents the perception of the earlier stimulus (see also erasure). (p. 71) Modality Effect: in sensory memory research, the advantage in recall of the last few items in a list when those items have been presented orally rather than visually. (p. 98) Output Units: the level at which the input pattern has been categorized in a simple three-level connectionist model. (p. 84) Pandemonium: whimsical feature detection model of pattern recognition (letter detection). (Selfridge) (p. 76) Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP): see connectionist.

Partial Report Condition: only the cued item or items are to be reported (e.g., Sperling used partial report to study iconic memory). (p. 69) Perception: the process of interpreting and understanding sensory information. (p. 65) Phi Phenomenon: illusory movement that occurs when perception makes inferences while viewing a series of adjacent images, as with blinking lights on a theater marquee (p. 78) Phoneme: the smallest unit of language-specific sound; sound or set of sounds judged to be the same by speakers of a language (e.g., “Kuh” of “cup” and “keep”). (p. 99) Problem of Invariance: sounds of speech are not invariant from one time to the next—they change depending on preceding and following sounds—yet humans understand spoken language. (p. 98) Prosopagnosia: a failure or deficit in recognizing faces; a disruption of face recognition. (see Sacks, 1970). (p.

91) Proximity: a Gestalt grouping principle that is used by visual perception to structure and organize together elements of a visual input that are nearer to one another in space. (p. 74) Repetition Blindness: the tendency to not perceive a pattern, whether a word, picture, or other visual stimulus, when it is quickly repeated. (p. 81) Retina: back of the eye; contains the sensory apparatus for vision (rods and cones). (p. 62) Saccades: the eye sweeps from one point to another in fast (jerky) movements; the voluntary sweeping of the eyes from one fixation point to another. (p. 67) Sensation: the reception of stimulation from the environment and the initial encoding of that stimulation into the nervous system. (p. 65) Sensory Memory: the initial mental storage system for sensory stimuli. There are presumably as many modalities of sensory memory as there are kinds of stimulation we can sense. (p. 68) Similarity: a Gestalt grouping principle that is used by visual perception to structure and organize together elements of a visual input that have similar visual features, such as texture, color, brightness, and so forth. (p. 74) Span of Apprehension: the number of individual items that can be heard (or seen) and immediately recalled; a common memory task on intelligence tests. (p. 68)

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Suffix Effect: a decline in sensory memory when a subsequent item is presented after a sound. The suffix displaces and erases the prior information, driving performance down. (p. 98) Template: stored model of a categorizable pattern. In theories of pattern recognition, a template is the pattern stored in memory against which incoming stimuli are compared to recognize the incoming patterns. (p. 76) Three-Eared Man: procedure used to investigate echoic memory. (Darwin, Turvey, & Crowder, 1972) (p. 96) Trans-Saccadic Memory: memory in visual perception that occurs across eye movements (p. 72) Visual Persistence: the apparent persistence of a visual stimulus beyond its physical duration. (p. 68) Visual Sensory (Iconic) Memory: temporary visual buffer that holds visual information for brief periods (250– 500 ms) of time; the visual sensory register. (p. 68) Whole Report Condition: report all items. Compare to partial report (report some items). See Sperling. (p. 69)

3.4 Key People Averbach : masking. (p. 70) Biederman: recognition by components. (p. 87) Crowder (1972): modality effect. (p. 97) Darwin, Turvey, & Crowder (1972): three-eared man procedure (decay in echoic memory). (p. 96) Irwin: trans-saccadic memory. (p. 72) Hubel & Wiesel (1962): implanted electrodes provide support for feature detection. (p. 78) McClelland & Rummelhart: connectionist account of word recognition. (p. 82) Neisser: the effect of context; echoic and iconic memory; focal attention. (p. 72, p. 68) Sacks: agnosia. (p. 91) Selfridge: pandemonium. (p. 76) Sperling: iconic memory; whole vs. partial report. (p. 68) Warren & Warren: phonemic restoration effect (conceptually driven processing). (p. 99)

3.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • •

Pandemonium model can work well as a class example (have half the class shut their eyes then have the other half be the various lowest-level daemons as you point to the levels of the model). The other half of the students have to guess which letter was presented. (Use the letter R.) The McGurk effect can be easily illustrated in the classroom as an addition to the textbook material covering integration of inputs.

3.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) • • • •

Phoneme will make more sense if contrasted with “morpheme” and with a couple of applied examples (have students generate examples).

Discussion of visual reception system should touch on rods vs. cones—maybe also features of the visual system such as dark adaptation (scotopic system, takes 20 minutes to fully adapt, etc.).

A good way to illustrate the combined influence of multiple Gestalt principles is to show a subjective contours figure (these are easily available on the web) and point out how the Gestalt principles are working to produce this illusion.

The phonemic restoration effect can be easily demonstrated using simple sound editing software. Student will claim to hear entire words, and will not notice that phonemes are missing.

3.6 Research Project Ideas • • • •

Use PsycInfo to look up one of the authors of one of the major works cited in this chapter (e.g., Neisser).

Judging by the titles of the articles, identify another topic area in which the researcher was interested.

On the basis of your reading, identify two areas of your own life in which a further understanding of cognitive psychology could help you.

Write a short (two-page maximum, double-spaced, Times 12 point) paper describing a situation in which you experienced something analogous to a “template failure.”

To illustrate the powerful impact of conceptually driven processing, collect examples in which people mistakenly thought song lyrics stated one thing, when in fact they stated another.

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Chapter 4: Attention

4.0 Chapter Overview An overview of attentional phenomena and models of attention.

4.1 Chapter Contents Meanings of Attention Basics of Attention Basic Input Attentional Processes • • • • •

Alertness and Arousal Orienting Response and Attention Capture Spotlight Attention and Visual Search Contrasting Input and Controlled Attention Hemineglect: An Attention Deficit

Controlled, Voluntary Attention • •

Selective Attention and the Cocktail Party Effect Selection Models

Attention as a Mental Resource • • •

Automatic and Conscious Processing Theories A Synthesis for Attention and Automaticity Disadvantages of Automaticity

4.2 Chapter Summary Attention is a pervasive and complex topic, with meanings and connotations ranging from alertness and arousal up through the notions of automatic and conscious processing. A basic dichotomy is between attention as a mental process or mechanism and attention as a limited mental resource. There are four important concepts that relate to attention. They are: 1) that there is more information available to us than we can pay attention to; 2) there is a limitation on the amount of information that we can attend to; 3) some tasks or processes require very little attention; and 4) with practice and increased knowledge, some tasks will draw less on our attentional limitations.

Two metaphors for attention are attention as a mental process and attention as a mental resource. In terms of the process, attention can be thought of as a means of directing thought towards stimuli or thoughts of interest. In terms of the resource, there is only so much attentional capacity available that can be distributed among the various activities in the environment.

Three basic senses of the term attention refer to alertness and arousal, the orienting reflex, and the spotlight of attention. These correspond to input attention—a fast process involved in encoding environmental stimuli into the mental system. Alertness can be strained under vigilance situations when events are rare and unlikely to occur. Attention is the central process in vigilance when people need to keep attention sustained on a task.

However, over time, vigilance declines, leading to declines in performance. Interestingly, this decline seems to be a decline in response bias, rather than a decline in the ability to detect. This may be due in part to habituation that can occur for unchanging aspects of the environment, leading to attention being unlikely to be directed to those locations.

Attention capture can occur in vision when there are abrupt onsets or changes in color, luminance, movement, etc. Interestingly, in vision, the mental spotlight of attention can be shifted without any movement of the eyes, confirming the mental rather than perceptual nature of attention. To keep visual search effective, inhibition of return often operates to keep people from searching a recently searched location too soon.

A specific disorder of attention, hemineglect, shows how attention can be affected by brain damage, thus informing us about normal attention. In hemineglect, the patient is unable to direct attention voluntarily to one side of space, so he or she neglects stimuli presented in that side. The evidence suggests that this arises from an inability to disengage attention from a stimulus on the nonneglected side, hence disrupting the process of shifting attention to the opposite side.

Controlled or conscious attention is a slower, more voluntary form of attention. Selective attention—the ability to focus on one incoming message while ignoring other incoming stimuli—is a complex ability, one

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investigated since the beginning of modern cognitive science. The evidence shows that we can select one message and reject others based on physical characteristics or on more semantic characteristics. The later in processing that selection occurs, the more demanding it is of the limited capacity of attention.

To keep attention on the relevant line of thought, a person may use inhibition. Inhibition keeps strong and wrong thoughts from entering the stream of consciousness. A classic illustration of the operation of the attentional mechanism of inhibition is negative priming. Negative priming occurs when an item that was an irrelevant distractor on the previous trial has been actively inhibited. Then, on the current trial, a person takes longer to respond to that item because of the prior inhibition.

When attention is viewed as a limited mental resource, issues of task complexity become concerned with how automatic or controlled different mental processes are. Automatic processes are rapid, are not dependent on the intent, are unavailable to conscious awareness, and place few if any demands on limited attentional resources. Conscious or controlled processes are the opposite: rather slow, requiring intention, open to conscious awareness, and heavily demanding of attentional resources.

Mental processes become more automatic as a function of practice and overlearning. A disadvantage of automaticity is that it is difficult to reverse the effects of practice in an automated task, and automaticity can lead to errors of inattention. A classic illustration of a disadvantage of automaticity is action slips. These occur when people initially intend to do one thing, but end up doing something else, where this something else is something they typically do. When attention is not fully engaged in a task, it can drift to other, irrelevant thoughts. This is mind wandering. Mind wandering is more likely to occur when the task does not fully engage attention, there is attentional capacity left over, and the person has salient concerns or anxieties that this attention can drift to.

4.3 Key Terms Action Slips: unintended, often automatic actions that are inappropriate for the current situation. (p. 132) Alertness and Arousal: the nervous system must be awake, responsive, and able to interact with the environment. Arousal is a necessary precondition for most cognitive processing. The system must be aroused to pay attention. (p. 103) Attention: attention can be thought of as a mental process that concentrates effort or resources on a stimulus or mental event; attention can be considered the limited mental energy or resource that powers the mental system. Typically, attention is considered to be under the control of some executive mechanism. (p. 103) Attention Capture: the spontaneous redirection of attention to stimuli in the world based on physical characteristics. (p. 107) Attentional Blink: a brief slow-down in mental processing due to having processed another very recent event. (p127) Automatic, Automaticity: occurs without intention, without a conscious decision; the process is not open to conscious awareness or introspection; the process consumes few, if any, conscious resources. Informally, the process is likely to operate very rapidly (usually within one second). (p. 127) Benefits: (see facilitation). (p. 110) Cocktail Party Effect: selecting one message in a crowded, noisy environment. (p. 121) Conscious Processing: process that occurs only with intention, with a deliberate decision. The process is open to awareness and introspection. The process uses conscious resources (drains capacity). Informally, the process is generally slow, taking more than one or two seconds for completion. (p. 105) Controlled Attention: a deliberate, voluntary allocation of mental effort or concentration (selective attention, mental resources and conscious processing, supervisory attentional system). (p. 119) Cost: a lower than baseline response (generally a result of a misleading cue). (p. 110) Dual-Task Procedure: used to manipulate attention or workload. Two tasks are presented such that one task captures the person’s attention as completely as possible. Interest is generally in decrement of primary task performance due to secondary task. (p. 121) Early Selection: selection or filtering based on early phases of perception (e.g., selection based on physical features of the message such as loudness or location; Broadbent’s filter theory). (p. 122) Explicit Processing: processing that involves conscious processing, conscious awareness that a task is being performed, and usually conscious awareness of the outcome of that performance. (p. 106) Facilitation: better than baseline response (generally a result of useful advance information); any positive or advantageous effect on processing, usually because of prior presentation of related information. (p. 110) Filtering: unwanted, unattended messages are filtered or screened out so that only the attended message is encoded into the central processing mechanism (e.g., Broadbent’s filter theory; also see selection). (p. 120)

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Habituation: a gradual reduction of the orienting response back to baseline. (p. 108) Hemineglect: disruption in the ability to look at something in the neglected (often left) field of vision and pay attention to it. The deliberate devotion of controlled attention to one side is deficient. (p. 116) Hemi-Inattention: see hemineglect. (p. 116) Implicit Processing: processing with no necessary involvement of conscious awareness. (p. 106) Inhibition: (costs) a lower than baseline response (generally a result of a misleading cue); any negative or disadvantageous effect on processing, usually because of prior presentation of some specific kind of information. In RT research, a slowing of RT caused by the prior information. (p. 125) Inhibition of Return: a decreased probability of returning to recently checked locations during a search process. (p. 112) Input Attention: fast, automatic process of attention; occurs early in the stream of mental processing (alertness or arousal, orienting reflex or response, spotlight attention and search); the basic processes of getting sensory information into the cognitive system. (p. 105) Late Selection: selection or filtering based on the meaning and importance of information (e.g., selection based on semantic relevance). (p. 123) Mind Wandering: a situation in which a person’s attention and thoughts wander from the current task to some other, inappropriate line of thought. (p. 134) Negative Priming: a situation in which a person is slower to respond to target trials when they are preceded by the same item as a to-be-ignored distractor item. (p. 125) Orienting Reflex: reflexive redirection of attention that orients you toward the unexpected stimulus so that you can devote deliberate attention to it if warranted. (p. 107) Orienting Response: (see orienting reflex). (p. 107) Pop-out Effect: in visual search, when a target item is highly discriminable from the distractor items, the attentional search mechanisms use a basic rapid attentional mechanism that operates in parallel across the visual field in a highly automatic fashion. The resulting visual search function is quite fast overall and shows only a minimal, if any, effect of set size. (p. 112) Priming: mental activation of a concept by some means, or the spread of that activation from one concept to another; also, the activation of some target information by action of a previously presented prime; sometimes loosely synonymous with the notion of accessing information in memory. (p. 128) Psychological Refractory Period: a delay in a second decision or response cycle if it is required immediately after a preceding decision. (p. 127) Selecting: the mental process of eliminating distractions, the elimination of unwanted messages (see filtering). (p. 120) Selective Attention: the ability to attend to one source of information while ignoring or excluding other ongoing messages. (p. 119) Shadowing Task: a task in which participants hear a spoken message and must repeat the message aloud in a very short time; it is often required that one of two simultaneously presented messages must be shadowed (one version of a dual-message procedure). (p. 121) Spotlight of Attention: metaphor for visual attention; a mental attention-focusing mechanism that prepares you to encode stimulus information. (Posner) (p, 111) Stroop Task: name the physical color of a color word (e.g., RED in the color blue → “blue”). (p. 127) Sustained Attention: see vigilance. (p. 105) Vigilance: the maintenance of attention for infrequent events over long periods of time. (p. 105) Visual Attention: input attention—specifically, as it relates to vision; typically associated with the spotlight metaphor. (p. 103) Visual Search: search a spatial display of items (e.g., a set of four, eight, or sixteen letters) for the presence of a target (e.g., the letter K). (p. 109) Word Stem Completion Task: complete word stems (e.g., D__ __ K) to form a complete word, generally the first word that comes to mind (e.g., DUCK). (p. 106)

4.4 Key People Banich: hemineglect. (p. 115) Broadbent: filter theory based on early selection. Also, the shadowing task. (p. 121) Cherry: shadowing task. (p. 121) Cowan: orienting response. (p. 108) Klein: inhibition of return. (p. 112)

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Mackworth: vigilance or sustained attention. (p. 105) Moray: people are unaware of repetitions in the unattended channel, but will pick up on their names being spoken. (p. 122) Norman: action slips (p. 132) Posner: spatial cueing task; valid versus invalid cue presented prior to the presentation of a target (which appears in the cued or uncued location); spotlight attention; theories of automaticity (Posner & Snyder) with limited mental resources. (p. 109) Schacter: explicit versus implicit processes. (p. 105) Schneider & Shiffrin: theory of automaticity with limited mental resources; the role of practice. (p127) Smallwood: studies of mind wandering. (p. 134) Tipper: exploration of the negative priming effect. (p. 125) Treisman: late selection model featuring selective attenuation (messages not containing relevant information become unattended). (p. 111)

4.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • •

Facilitate a class discussion of the involvement of bottom-up vs. top-down processing (expand Dalmatian picture for use with PowerPoint and/or overhead transparency).

Facilitate a class discussion of whether the disengagement of attention from the current task is always a bad thing.

4.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) • • • •

•

When discussing search slopes, accentuate the common terms of serial (one by one, that is, sequential search [e.g., of the visual display]) and parallel (pop-out, simultaneous search of the entire display) search.

Discussion of exogenous attention (externally drawn “input attention”) vs. endogenous attention (internally generated “controlled attention”) can be very useful to illustrate issues in attention.

Discuss how job-related accidents can occur due to problems with vigilance (early in the chapter), mind wandering (midway through the chapter), or action slips (late in the chapter).

Many theories use attention as the magic wand—that is, attention is “where things happen”; one approach views the concept of attention as black magic and contends that further clarity in experimentation and neurophysiological understanding will give attention (much like “consciousness”) a smaller and smaller role in theories of human behavior and processing. This is essentially an appeal for further specificity of meaning and function.

It might be helpful to have worked out an example of baseline activation levels for various stimuli and how inhibition would work to keep one out of the current stream of thought, possibly leading to negative priming.

4.6 Research Project Ideas • • •

•

Use PsycInfo to look up one of the authors of one of the major works cited in this chapter (e.g., Tipper).

Judging by the titles of the articles, identify another topic area that the researcher was interested in.

On the basis of your reading in this chapter, identify two areas of your own day-to-day life where the phenomena discussed in the chapter affect you.

Besner & Stoltz (1999) report a set of experiments; based on their results, they suggest that the Stroop effect can be dramatically reduced through changing the task instructions. Does this mean that the Stroop effect is not automatic? (This is a difficult question; points will be awarded for the clarity of your arguments and grasp of the issues.)

Write a short (two-page maximum, double-spaced, Times 12 point) paper describing a situation in which you experienced something analogous to an action slip.

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Chapter 5: Short-Term Working Memory 5.0 Chapter Overview Brief duration memory effects, the working memory model, and the larger role of working memory cognition.

5.1 Chapter Contents Short-Term Memory: A Limited-Capacity Bottleneck • •

Short-Term Memory Capacity Forgetting from Short-Term Memory

STM Retrieval • •

Serial Position Effects Short-Term Memory Scanning: The Sternberg Task

Working Memory • • • • •

The Components of Working Memory The Central Executive The Phonological Loop The Visuospatial Sketchpad The Episodic Buffer

Assessing Working Memory • •

Dual-Task Method Working Memory Span

The Impact of Working Memory in Cognition • • • • •

Working Memory and Attention Working Memory and Long-Term Memory Working Memory and Reasoning Sometimes Small Working Memory Spans Are Better Overview

5.2 Chapter Summary Short-term or working memory is an intermediate memory system between the sensory memories and longterm memory. Its capacity for holding information is severely limited, on most accounts to only 7 +/– 2 units of information. The process of recoding and chunking—grouping more information into a single unit—is the means of overcoming this limitation or bottleneck in the information-processing system.

Whereas decay as an explanation of forgetting from short-term memory is logically possible, most of the research implicates a process of interference or competition as the reason for short-term forgetting. With an attention-consuming distractor task, such as counting backward by threes, even a very simple stimulus can be lost from short-term memory. The research suggests that this loss is a product of two kinds of interference: retroactive interference from the distractor task and proactive interference from multiple trials on the same kind of material.

Serial position curves reveal the operation of two kinds of memory performance. Early positions in a to-berecalled list are sensitive to deliberate rehearsal that transfers information into long-term memory, whereas later positions tend to be recalled with high accuracy in the free recall task; this latter effect is called the recency effect and is due to the strategy of recalling the most recent items first. Asking people to perform some distractor task before recall usually eliminates the recency effect because the distractor task prevents people from maintaining the most recent items in immediate memory. The rehearsal that is necessary to transfer information into long-term memory is a short-term, working memory activity.

Sternberg’s paradigm, short-term memory scanning, provides a technique for investigating the way in which we search through information held in short-term memory. Sternberg’s results indicated that this search is accomplished in a serial exhaustive fashion at a rate of about 38 ms per item to be scanned or searched. The Sternberg task illustrates ways in which the short-term memory search processes of different kinds of people (children, adults, people under the influence of drugs) might be investigated and how other kinds of memory search processes might be studied (e.g., long-term memory).

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Working memory consists of a central executive system, a phonological loop, a visuospatial sketchpad, and an episodic buffer. These different parts of the working memory system have been attributed to different regions of the brain. The central executive is the main control center for working memory, and regulates the control and flow of information. The most commonly investigated subsystem is the phonological loop, the system responsible for memory span performance. Baddeley’s results suggest that when the memory span task is difficult, the phonological loop can drain off mental resources from the central executive. When this happens, the task being performed by the executive suffers in speed or accuracy. The same arrangement applies to the visuospatial sketchpad. The episodic buffer is primarily used to integrate information from the various modalities, as well as from long-term memory.

There are two main strategies for assessing working memory. One is to use a dual-task method in which people are given two tasks, and the researcher assesses the impact of one on the other. An alternative strategy is to test participants’ working memory span, and to then examine difference in cognitive performance as a function of their span (e.g., high vs. low span).

This approach has revealed a substantial number of tasks that show a strong relationship between span and performance. The implication of these results is that working memory span assesses an individual’s controlled attention processes, which are significant aspects of one’s performance all the way from selective attention tasks up through reading comprehension.

5.3 Key Terms Articulatory Loop: a sub-part of the phonological loop used for actively rehearsing verbal information. (p.

155) Articulatory Suppression Effect: the finding that people find it difficult to maintain verbal information in working memory if they have some source of verbal interference, even if it is just repeating the same simple word over and over again. (p. 155) Boundary Extension: the finding that people tend to misremember there being more to an image than what they actually experienced, as if they are mentally extending the boundaries out. (p. 159) Brown-Peterson Task: a short-term memory task showing forgetting caused by proactive interference. First, people are given a to-be-remembered three-letter stimulus, and then they are shown a number. They are to count backward by threes from the number. At the end of the variable length period of counting, the people are to report the original three-letter stimulus. (p. 141) Central Executive: the control portion of working memory; in charge of planning future actions, initiating retrieval and decision processes as necessary, and integrating information coming into the system. The mechanism responsible for assessing the attention needs of the different subsystems and furnishing attentional resources to them. Any executive or monitoring component of the memory system that is responsible for sequencing activities, keeping track of processes already completed, and diverting attention from one activity to another can be called an executive controller. (p. 154) Chunk: unit or grouping of information held in short-term memory; a rich, complex item that can hold something as impoverished as a single digit or letter, or as complex and elaborate as a word or phrase. (p.

139) Decay: forgetting that is caused by the passage of time before testing. Simple loss of information across time, presumably caused by a fading process, especially in sensory memory; also, an older theory of forgetting from long-term memory. (p. 140) Dual-Task Method: a means of assessing working memory by giving people a secondary task to perform while they are doing some other, primary working memory task. Performance is assessed as a function of the influence of the secondary task on the primary task. (p. 161) Episodic Buffer: the component of working memory responsible for integrating and binding together information from the different modalities, as well as from long-term memory. (p. 160) Free Recall: the memory task in which the list items may be recalled in any order, regardless of their order of presentation (contrast with serial recall). (p. 145) Mental Rotation: mental manipulation of a visual STM code that reorients the imagined object in space. (p.

157) Phonological Loop: the speech- and sound-related component responsible for rehearsal of verbal information and phonological processing; the articulatory loop is the component responsible for recycling verbal material via rehearsal. (p. 155) Phonological Similarity Effect: the finding that people find it more difficult to retain and remember similarsounding words in working memory. (p. 155)

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Phonological Store: a sub-part of the phonological loop used for passively retaining verbal information. (p.

155) Primacy Effect: in a recall task, the elevation of recall at the early positions of the list (compare recency effect). (p. 145) Proactive Interference: when older material interferes forward in time with recollection of the current stimulus; interference or difficulty, especially during recall, because of some previous activity, often the stimuli learned on some earlier list; any interference in which material presented at one time interferes with material presented later. (p. 143) Process Model: a stage model designed to explain the several mental steps involved in performance of some task, usually implying that the stages occur sequentially and that they operate independently of one another. (p. 149) Recency Effect: the elevated recall of the last few items in a list, presumably because the items are stored in and retrieved from short-term memory (compare primacy effect). (p. 145) Recoding: the process of grouping items together, then remembering newly formed groups. (p. 140) Release from PI: when the decline in performance caused by proactive interference is reversed because of a switch in the to-be-remembered stimuli; can be used to illustrate that STM must hold and use semantic information. The sudden reduction in proactive interference when the material to be learned is changed in some fashion, such as improved recall on a list of plant names after several trials involving animal names; the initial decline was caused by proactive interference, and the improvement on the last trial is caused by release from PI. (p. 144) Representational Momentum: the finding that people will misremember moving objects as being further along their path of travel than they actually were when they last saw them. (p. 159) Retroactive Interference: newer material interferes backward in time with your recollection of older items; the interference from a recent event or experience that influences memory for an earlier event, such as trying to recall the items from List 1 but instead recalling the times from List 2. (p. 143) Serial Exhaustive Search: memory set is scanned one item at a time (serial), and the entire set is scanned on every trial, whether or not a match is found (exhaustive). A search process in which all possible elements are searched one by one before the decision is made, even if the target is found early in the search process. (p. 151) Serial Position Curve: the display of accuracy in recall across the original positions in the to-be-learned list, often found to have a bowed shape, indicating lower recall in the middle of the list than in the initial positions (primacy effect) or the final positions (recency effect) of the list. (p. 145) Serial Recall: a recall task in which people must recall the list items in their original order of presentation (contrast with free recall). (p. 145) Short-Term Memory (STM): older term focused on the input and storage of new information; embodies the notion of a limited-capacity system and situates that limitation in short-term memory. (p. 138) Sternberg Task: short-term memory scanning task devised by Saul Sternberg. (p. 147) Visuospatial Sketchpad: the visual and perceptual component of working memory. (p. 156) Working Memory: newer term with the connotation of a mental workspace; the elaborate conscious attentional system where cognitive effort is expended. Working memory includes processing. The limitations of working memory derive from limitations on how much work can be done at one time, how much working memory capacity there is to share among several simultaneous processes. It includes a phonological loop, a visuospatial sketchpad, and an episodic buffer, each of which can deplete central executive resources when necessary. (p152) Working Memory Span: the amount of information a person can actively maintain in working memory at one time. (p. 164)

5.4 Key People Baddeley (& Hitch): working memory. (p138) Brown and the Petersons: Brown-Peterson task, originally taken as evidence for the role of decay in shortterm memory loss. (p138) Cowan: working memory. (p139) Engle: working memory span. (p153) Intraub: boundary extension. (p159) Jonides: neurophysiological investigation of regions involved in visuospatial vs. verbal working memory processing. (p153)

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Keppel & Underwood: proactive interference in the Brown-Peterson task. (p. 142) Miller: selective attention studies; limitations on short-term memory (Miller’s magical number seven plus or minus two); chunking; recoding. (p. 138) Shepard: mental rotation. (p. 157) Sternberg: serial-exhaustive memory search; Sternberg search task. (p. 147) Smith: neurophysiological investigation of regions involved in visuospatial vs. verbal working memory processing. (p. 153) Waugh & Norman: interference vs. decay in short-term memory. The data support an interference account. (p.

141) Wickens: release from PI. (p. 143)

5.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • Stress the importance of understanding the fundamental concepts—in particular, the working memory system and the importance of method of representation. Be sure the students have the basic skills required before jumping in the deep end.

• Take your time with the Sternberg memory search task. Discuss the obtained findings as compared to those from easy and hard visual search tasks.

• Because short-term/working memory is so close to consciousness, and involves consciousness, have the class discuss what implications this research has for consciousness, and why our conscious intuitions about short-term/working memory are so often wrong.

5.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) • •

•

Demonstrate working memory capacity by reading students successively larger lists of letters or words in serial order. When it is clear that most of the class cannot recall all of the words in a list, present a sentence that well exceeds their word span to illustrate the benefit of organization and chunking.

Demonstrate release from PI (use 15 seconds of backwards counting before recall, have the students practice backwards counting before you read the items from the first list).

List 1: Banana, Coconut, Apricot, Pineapple, Lemon, Raspberry.

List 2: Orange, Mango, Pear, Honeydew, Watermelon, Plum.

List 3: Cherry, Lime, Papaya, Tangerine, Grape, Strawberry.

List 4: Apple, Kiwi, Peach, Cantaloupe, Kumquat, Blueberry.

List 5: Carpenter, Doctor, Accountant, Salesman, Plumber, Lawyer.

Demonstrate serial position curves by having students write the names of current or former pets on 3x5 cards (or do “online” in class with instructions to say “skip me” if they didn’t have a pet and/or if their pet name has already been spoken). Stop at about 20 items (and possibly run the demonstration experiment a second time if there are sufficient students). Have people indicate by hand whether or not they got each of the names correct after the free recall test phase. Plot the serial position curve on the board.

5.6 Research Project Ideas • •

•

Identify two aspects of your life in which chunking has helped you to encode more information.

Use PsycInfo to find a recent (no more than two years old) Journal of Experimental Psychology (JEP: HPP, JEP: LMC or JEP: General) article on working memory. Summarize the contribution of that article and discuss how the article expands on the knowledge presented in the text. Include a photocopy of the front page of the article used.

Have students read Miller’s original article (easy to find with an online search) and have them write a brief (no more than two pages) summary of the evidence that he cites.

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Chapter 6: Learning and Remembering 6.0 Chapter Overview Memory for episodic, experienced information.

6.1 Chapter Contents Preliminary Issues • • •

Mnemonic Devices Ebbinghaus Tradition of Memory Research Metamemory

Storing Information in Episodic Memory • • • • • • • • •

Rehearsal Frequency of Rehearsal Two Kinds of Rehearsal Depth of Processing Challenges to Depth of Processing Generation and Enactment Organization in Storage Imagery Context and Encoding Specificity

Retrieving Episodic Information • • • •

Decay Interference Retrieval Failure Retrieval Cues

Amnesia and Implicit Memory • • •

Dissociation: Episodic vs. Semantic Information Anterograde Amnesia Implicit and Explicit Memory

6.2 Chapter Summary Long-term memory is now widely viewed as a mulitcomponent system, with a major division between declarative (explicit) memories and nondeclarative (implicit) memories. Declarative memory consists of two major parts, episodic and semantic memories. Nondeclarative or implicit memory includes priming and procedural memory and motor learning. Explicit memories can be verbalized, but implicit memories cannot.

Conscious awareness of the memory is unnecessary for implicit memories, but always accompanies explicit memories.

The classic method for improving memory performance involves mnemonic devices, specialized rehearsal strategies that ensure adequate storage of the information and provide a systematic method by which information can be retrieved. The classic mnemonic devices, such as the method of loci, use a variety of techniques, especially visual imagery, to improve performance; familiarity with the mnemonic method provides a useful foundation for understanding both storage and retrieval effects in studies of memory.

Ebbinghaus was the first psychologist to conduct extensive investigations into the processes of learning and forgetting. Working by himself, Ebbinghaus invented methods of conducting such investigations. The relearning task he devised was sensitive to the demands of simple recall tasks; such tasks tap consciously retrievable information but may underestimate the amount of information learned and retained in memory. The classic forgetting curve he obtained, along with his results on practice effects, inspired the tradition of verbal learning and, later, cognitive psychology. Several of his empirical and methodological insights would be called metacognitive awareness today.

The successful use of memory requires some awareness of when memory will and will not work well. This awareness is called metamemory. Using metamemory effectively, people can assess whether they have or have not learned something, whether they are likely to later remember something, or even whether something is completely absent from memory.

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Storage—transfer to long-term memory—is a complicated process. The important variables in storage are rehearsal and organization, whether these involve just verbal concepts or also include visual imagery and other nonverbal features. Historically, maintenance and elaborative rehearsal generally were viewed as having two distinctly different functions: the former being for mere recycling of information without increasing its likelihood of retrieval and the latter for more semantically based rehearsal, believed to process the information more deeply into the memory system and make it more memorable. Difficulties in this depth of processing framework involved defining the two types of rehearsal and specification of the notion of depth (the problem of circularity). When memory performance is tested with a recognition task, the results often seem to disconfirm the hypothesis that maintenance rehearsal merely maintains information but does not make it more memorable; the same is true of implicit memory tasks (task effects).

In addition to rehearsal, memory can be aided by such factors as the isolation or von Restorff effect, in which distinctive information becomes easier to retrieve. Distinctiveness is defined in terms of the larger context. Following on the levels of processing framework, memory can also be improved by having people relate information to themselves, or better yet, generate the information (the generation effect). The additional mental work needed to produce the information boosts memory. Similarly, actions that a person actually does are remembered better than those that were only heard or read about (the enactment effect).

Organization, especially by category but also by subjectively defined chunks or clusters, improves memory performance because it stores the information securely and provides a useful structure for successful retrieval.

According to the encoding specificity principle, any related information that was encoded along with the studied information should serve as an effective retrieval cue. This is the case even if that related information is normally a lower-strength associate of the to-be-remembered material.

Decay and interference were once thought to cause true forgetting from long-term memory. Although interference is easily demonstrated in the laboratory using proactive or retroactive interference tasks, the evidence now suggests that interference may disrupt retrieval. In this view, retrieval failure is not an issue of true forgetting because information stored in long-term memory remains available in memory. Instead, retrieval failure often is caused by loss of access to the stored information. Effective retrieval cues provide access to otherwise irretrievable information. This retrieval cue may come in the come in the form of the context associated with the information, or as content information, as with a part of the item to be recalled. An alternative view is that the interfering information disrupts the consolidation process, making retrieval more difficult. That said, providing people with part of the information to be remembered may also induce part-set cuing in which less is remembered than would be if no information had been provided at all.

Studies of individuals with amnesia caused by brain damage have taught us a great deal about the components of long-term memory. Patient K.C. shows a total amnesia for episodic information, although his semantic memory is unimpaired, suggesting a dissociation between episodic and semantic memories. A person with anterograde amnesia, like patient H.M., typically is unable to acquire new explicit memories but can show implicit learning and implicit memory. The medial temporal area and especially the hippocampus are very important for the formation of new explicit memories, but different brain structures underlie implicit learning.

6.3 Key Terms Accessibility: the degree to which information stored in memory is retrievable from memory. A memory is said to be accessible if it is retrievable; memories that are not currently retrievable are said to have become inaccessible. (p. 199) Amnesia: the catastrophic loss of memory or memory abilities caused by brain damage or disease. (p. 203) Anterograde Amnesia: disruption of memory of events occurring after brain injury, especially a disruption in acquiring new long-term memories (e.g., the case of H.M.’s bilateral hippocampal lesions). (p. 203) Available: information is available in memory, regardless of whether or not it is currently accessible. (p. 199) Circularity: a major problem for the depth of processing concerns the problem of defining levels of rehearsal independently of retention scores (better memory was held as indicative of deeper processing; thus the depth of processing model could not fail to be consistent with the data). (p. 185) Clustering: the grouping together of related items during recall (e.g., recalling the words “apple pear banana orange” together in a cluster, regardless of their order of presentation; see also organization). (p. 188) Consolidation: the more permanent establishment of memories in the neural architecture. (p. 196) Decay: forgetting that is caused by the passage of time before testing; loss of information across time, presumably caused by a fading process, especially in sensory memory; also, an older theory of forgetting from long-term memory. (p. 194)

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Declarative Memory (Explicit): long-term memory knowledge that can be retrieved and then reflected on consciously (see also explicit memory). (p.174) Depth of Processing: at a rough, intuitive level, provides a compelling account of encoding information into memory (see also levels of processing). (Craik & Lockhart) (p. 184) Dissociation: patterns of abilities and performance, especially among brain-damaged patients, revealing that one cognitive process can be disrupted while another remains intact (see double dissociation). (p. 203) Distributed Practice: occurs when practice sessions are spaced out in time; this is a more effective way of encoding information. (p. 179) Double Dissociation: in a double dissociation, two patients show opposite patterns of disruption and preserved function; further evidence that the cognitive processes are functionally and anatomically separate. (p. 204) Dual-Coding Hypothesis: words that denote concrete objects, as opposed to abstract words, can be encoded into memory twice—once in terms of their verbal attributes and once in terms of their image-based properties. The dual coding increases the likelihood that they will be recalled or remembered. (Pavio) (p.

191) Elaborative Rehearsal: more complex kind of rehearsal that uses the meaning of the information to help store and remember it. In the levels of processing framework, elaborative rehearsal involves any rehearsal activity that processes a stimulus into the deeper, more meaningful levels of memory; any rehearsal that involves meaning, images, and other complex information from long-term memory (contrast with maintenance rehearsal). (p. 184) Enactment Effect: the finding that memory is better for actions a person actually does rather than simply hears about or watches. (p. 187) Encoding Specificity: each item is encoded into a richer memory representation, one that includes any extra information about the item that was present during encoding. The hypothesis that the specific nature of an item’s encoding, including all related information that was encoded along with it, determines how effectively the item can be retrieved. (Tulving) (p. 192) Episodic Memory: a person’s autobiographical memory, memory of the personally experienced and remembered events of a lifetime; the portion of LTM in which personally experienced information is stored (contrast with semantic memory). (Tulving) (p. 174) Explicit Memory: long-term memory retrieval or performance that entails deliberate recollection or awareness (also see declarative memory). (p. 174) Forgetting: loss from memory; colloquially, losing information previously stored in memory. More technically, the term usually implies that the stored information is no longer in memory—that is, it is no longer available in the memory system. (p. 197) Free Recall: after the initial study condition, recall the items in any order. (p. 188) Generation Effect: the finding that memory is better for information people generate themselves compared to information that was simply read or heard. (p. 187) HERA Model: the hemispheric encoding/retrieval asymmetry model is an attempt by Tulving to explain patterns of neural activity data collected during episodic encoding and retrieval along with semantic retrieval. In general, the left hemisphere is more involved in episodic encoding and semantic retrieval, whereas the right hemisphere is more involved in episodic retrieval. (p. 205) Hippocampus: an internal brain structure, just interior to the temporal lobes, strongly implicated in the storing of new episodic information into long-term memory. (p. 181) Implicit Memory (Nondeclarative): long-term memory knowledge that can influence thought and behavior without any necessary involvement of conscious awareness. (p. 174) Interference: an explanation for “forgetting” of some target information in which related or recent information competes with or causes the loss of the target information. (p. 195) Isolation effect: see von Restorff effect.

Levels of Processing: at a rough, intuitive level, provides a compelling account of encoding information into memory (also known as depth of processing). An alternative to the standard three-component memory mode; information subjected only to maintenance rehearsal is not being processed more deeply into the meaning-based levels of the memory system and therefore tends not to be recalled or recognized as accurately as information subjected to elaborative rehearsal. (Craik & Lockhart) (p. 184) Maintenance Rehearsal: in the levels of processing account, a low-level, repetitive kind of information recycling. Rehearsal that merely repeats, recycles, or refreshes information at a particular level via repetition, without processing it to deeper, more meaningful levels of storage. (Craik & Lockhart) (p. 184)

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Massed Practice: when information is studied as a part of one large session; this is a less effective means of memory encoding. (p. 179) Metacognition: awareness and monitoring of one’s own cognitive state or condition; knowledge about one’s own cognitive processes and memory system. (p. 175) Metamemory: knowledge about (meta) one’s own memory, how it works, and how it fails to work. (p. 175) Method of Loci: classic mnemonic device: uses known locations as the cue for the memory items (e.g., a walk along the garden path through to your home, etc., to remember the sequence for a speech). (p. 175) Mnemonic: to help memory. (p. 175) Mnemonic Device: an active strategic learning device or method; a rehearsal strategy. Follows the principles of practice, integration into memory, and retrieval cues; any mental device or strategy that provides a useful rehearsal strategy for storing and remembering difficult material. (p. 175) Nondeclarative Memory (Implicit): long-term memory knowledge that can influence thought and behavior without any necessary involvement of conscious awareness. (p. 174) Organization: the structure of information as stored in memory; especially in studies of episodic long-term memory, the tendency to recall related words together, or the tendency to impose some form of grouping or clustering of information being stored in or retrieved from memory; related to chunking or grouping in short-term memory. (p. 188) Paired Associate Learning: lists of word pairs are presented to a person. After the first presentation, the first word (the stimulus) should act as a cue for the second to-be-produced word (the paired associate response); a favorite learning task during the verbal learning period. (p. 191) Part-Set Cuing Effect: the finding that recall memory is worse when people are provided with part of a set of information compared performance when they are given no retrieval cues; the partial list cues disrupt the retrieval plan and may even inhibited related memory traces. (p. 201) Peg-Word Mnemonic: classic mnemonic. A pre-memorized set of words serves as a sequence of mental “pegs” on which the to-be-remembered material can be “hung.” (p. 176) Primacy Effect: the elevation of performance in the first part of the serial position curve relative to the middle of the curve. The effect has been shown to be reliant on rehearsal for transfer to LTM. (p. 183) Proactive Interference: when older material interferes forward in time with your recollection of the current stimulus; interference or difficulty, especially during recall, because of some previous activity, often the stimuli learned on some earlier list; any interference in which material presented at one time interferes with material presented later. (p. 197) Recognition Task: make yes/no decisions about whether the item was in the original set; more generally, any task asking for a simple yes/no (true/false, same/different) response, often including a response time measure. (p. 185) Rehearsal: a deliberate recycling or practicing of the contents of the short-term store. (p. 182) Relearning Task: a list is originally learned, set aside for some period of time, and then later relearned to the same criterion of accuracy. (Ebbinghaus) (p. 178) Repetition Priming: a previous encounter with information facilitates later performance on the same information, even unconsciously; often used in implicit memory tests. (p. 208) Retrieval Cue: a useful prompt or reminder for the information to be retrieved (the target information). (p. 193) Retrograde Amnesia: loss of memory of events before brain injury. (p. 203) Ribot’s Law: for retrograde amnesia, memory is more affected the closer it is to the time of the injury, with older memories being more likely to be preserved. (p. 203) Savings Score: the reduction, if any, in the number of trials (or the time, in other studies) necessary for relearning, compared to original learning; how much was saved, on second learning, compared with original learning; e.g., if original learning required 12 repetitions, relearning required 8, then the savings score is 8/12 = .67 or 67 percent. (Ebbinghaus) (p. 178) Self-Reference Effect: the finding that memory is generally better for information that is related to the self in some way. (p. 187) Semantic Memory: general world knowledge; knowledge that relates concepts and ideas to one another, influencing your knowledge of how to express those concepts and ideas in language (and includes language itself); a component of long-term memory. (p. 174) Serial Recall: after the original study condition, recall the items in the original order of presentation. (p. 186) Subjective Organization: organization developed by the subject for structuring and remembering a list of items without experimenter-supplied categories. (p. 191)

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Task Effects: a second major difficulty for depth of processing (along with circularity); different memory tasks reveal differences in memory performance that are incompatible with a unitary processing mechanism. (p.

185) Tip-of-the-Tongue (TOT): momentary inability to recall some shred of information, often a person’s name, which is known to be stored in long-term memory; includes the sense of being on the verge of retrieving the target concept. (p. 198) Visual Imagery: the mental picture of a stimulus that affects later recall or recognition; the mental representation of visual information; the skill or ability to remember visual information. (p. 191) Von Restorff Effect: in a recall task, the elevated accuracy for an item that was noticeably different during list presentation; the improved retention of one piece of information that is made distinct or different from the information around it, such as underlining one word in a to-be-remembered list in red ink. (p. 181)

6.4 Key People Craik & Lockhart: depth of processing account. (p. 184) Ebbinghaus: method of savings. (p. 177) Engelkamp: the enactment effect. (p. 187) Paivio: visual imagery; dual-coding hypothesis. (p. 191) Roediger: the testing effect. (p. 201) Rundus: primacy effects in memory due to repetition. (p. 183) Slamecka (& Graf): the generation effect & part-set cuing. (p. 187, 201) Squire: long-term memory hierarchy. (p. 174, 204) Tulving: encoding specificity; episodic memory, etc. (p. 174, 204) Von Restorff: isolation effect. (p. 181)

6.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • • •

Walk through examples of each of the types of mnemonics. Use lists of items generated in class by the class (independently generated).

During your presentation of depth of processing and organization in memory section, read the first half of the “GOOD ADVICE” box in the middle of Chapter 6. Discuss ways in which you use cognitive principles to help you to use student names (and if you do not . . . you could start!).

Use the cued retrieval example from p. 285 as a classroom exercise.

6.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) •

• •

Demonstrate how a mnemonic device can help you to remember facts about coursework. As an example, use this mnemonic based on visual imagery: Ebbinghaus = “ebbing-house; house on the side of the sea, on pilings, but the pilings are giving way in the surf.” Attach this visual image to the idea that Ebbinghaus studied memory decay, as illustrated by the decay of the ebbing-house.

Ask people how they have used mnemonics in day-to-day life (and note that even experts actually rarely use explicit mnemonics).

Ask students to relate what they have learned in this chapter to their own study practices. How can they change those practices to learn better (with “better” being either more information, less time, or both)?

6.6 Project Ideas • Examine the literature to find one or more articles that investigate amnesia using animal (nonhuman) populations or computer simulations. Discuss how the article extends the presentation of amnesia as presented in the textbook.

• Explore issues of metacognition, particularly judgments of learning (or JOLs), and the fact that people mistakenly think that they have learned something when they have not.

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Chapter 7: Knowing 7.0 Chapter Overview A coverage of semantic memory and various forms of general world knowledge.

7.1 Chapter Contents Semantic Memory • • • •

Semantic Networks Smith’s Feature Comparison Model Tests of Semantic Memory Models Semantic Relatedness

Connectionism and the Brain • •

Connectionism Connectionism and the Brain

Semantic Priming • • • • •

Nuts and Bolts of Priming Tasks Empirical Demonstrations of Priming Priming in Other Tasks Automatic and Controlled Priming Priming Is an Implicit Process

Schemata and Scripts • • • •

Bartlett’s Research Schemata Scripts Evidence of Scripts

Concepts and Categorization • •

Concept Formation Theories of Categorization

7.2 Chapter Summary Semantic memory contains our encyclopedic long-term memory knowledge of the world. Early studies of the structure and processes of semantic memory generated three kinds of models: semantic network, feature list, and connectionist approaches.

In the Collins and Quillian network model, concepts are represented as nodes in a semantic network, with connecting pathways between concepts. Accessing a concept involved the process of spreading activation; activation spreads from the originating node to all the nodes connected to it by pathways. Several early studies using the sentence verification task supported an early version of this model, although the disconfirmation came soon after.

Smith et al. claim that semantic concepts are lists of semantic features. Verification in their model consists of accessing the feature lists and performing a comparison process on the features. While the Smith et al. model initially seemed better able to explain typicality effects, the model did not provide a plausible account of how we verify property statements, nor did it predict or account for semantic priming.

There are a number of different ways to assess semantic memory—one straightforward way is to use sematic verification test in which people are presented with sentences and are asked to verify whether they are true. Response times and error rates can be very informative here. One principle that is illustrated by this procedure is the semantic relatedness effect, in which it is easier to verify statements the “closer” two concepts are in memory. Semantic processing can also be illustrated by ERP components, such as the N400. This approach has also shown that even semantic memory can be influenced by the principles that guide embodied cognition.

In the section on connectionism and the brain, there is an effort to show how more advanced modeling techniques have been applied to issues of semantic memory. This section is intended to tie in many ideas from both the current chapter and many of the earlier chapters. An interesting part of this chapter is the discussion of semantic memory deficits, such as anomia.

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In the priming task, a prime of some degree of relatedness to a target is presented first, and then RT to the target is measured. When the prime is relevant, RT to the target is usually speeded up, even at very short time intervals (i.e., at short SOAs, or stimulus onset asynchronies). This is generally taken as evidence that semantic priming is an automatic process. When the prime is irrelevant to the target, RT is generally slowed down at longer SOAs. This is usually interpreted as evidence that irrelevant primes generate a conscious expectation that slows down processing when the expectation is misleading. Among the tasks used to examine priming in semantic memory are word naming, sentence verification, and lexical decision tasks. Evidence also suggests that priming is implicit (for example, anterograde amnesiacs show normal priming effects).

Bartlett’s (1932) early research demonstrated an important fact about semantic memory. When meaningful material is to be remembered, we tend to reconstruct the memory from two sources: the presented information and our existing knowledge. Bartlett used the term schema to refer to this existing knowledge base and found that schemata led to various omissions, distortions, and alterations of the originally presented material.

Scripts are a concept related to schemata, except that a script is temporally ordered. Scripts help guide people through everyday, commonly experienced aspects of life. People use the basic frame of a script to guide memory. When information is forgotten, it is filled in with the default value of the script. The information that people tend to remember the best is information that is inconsistent with the script in some way.

Categories are another major aspect of semantic memory. Essentially, people use categories to organize and structure their interaction with various entities in the world. The classic view of categorization assumes that people use rules to define and organize their categories. These rules define categories around necessary and sufficient features. While people can use rules to create categories, this does not appear to be the way that much of human categorization occurs. Many human categories have characteristics that deviate from the rule-based approach of the classic view. This includes characteristics such as central tendency and typicality effects, graded category membership, family resemblance among category members, and correlated attributes.

More recent theories of categorization included probabilistic theories. One probabilistic theory is the prototype view; this theory assumes that people use an abstract representation (a prototype) to make category decisions. Another view, the exemplar view, assumes that people use mental representations of a wide range of examples (exemplars) to make category decisions. A final view of categorization is explanation-based theories; these perspectives assume that people derive theories of the world to create their mental categories. This allows people to create categories on the fly, such as they do with ad hoc categories. A central concept of explanationbased theories of categorization is the idea of psychological essentialism—that is, people treat members of a category as if they share a common underlying essence, even if they do not.

7.3 Key Terms Activation: how “active” the node is, how ready to fire; the mental activity of accessing and retrieving information from the network; if activation exceeds some threshold level, the concept “fires” and the activation spreads to related concepts. (p. 213) Ad Hoc Categories: are human categories that are generated on the fly; they are interesting because they show many of the same characteristics of standard categories. (p. 247) Anomia: a disruption of word finding or retrieval, caused by a brain disorder or injury. (p. 228) Association: a general term referring to a connection or link between two elements. In classic behaviorism, an association was formed between a stimulus and a response. In various models of long-term memory, associations are the links or pathways between concept nodes, such as the isa pathway between “robin” and “bird.” (p. 213) Benefits: see facilitation. (p. 230) Category: a mental representation of a class of concepts. (p. 243) Category-Specific Deficit: a disruption in which a person loses access to one semantic category of words or concepts while not losing others. (p. 227) Central Tendency: a characteristic of human categories in which the category has a graded structure, with better members at the center of the category. (p. 245) Characteristic Feature: in the Smith et al. (1974) model of semantic memory, characteristic features are the features and properties of a concept that are common but are not essential to the meaning of the concept: for example, “eats worms,” may be characteristic of “bird,” but the feature is not essential to the central meaning of the concept (contrast with defining feature). (p. 215) Classic View of Categorization: a theory of categorization that assumes that people create their categories based on a system of rules; these rules typically define a category in terms of necessary and sufficient features. (p. 244)

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Connectionism: theoretical and computational approach applied to understanding the ways in which the human cognitive system might perform its mental operations; the connections in connectionist modeling are network pathways. Network pathways exist both within and between levels of the network. Advantages of connectionism are in the similarity in function between: 1) interconnected nodes and the network of neurons in the brain; 2) individual similarity between neurons and nodes; 3) facilitative and inhibitive connections; and 4) parallel processing. (p. 225) Connectionist Models: a computer-based technique for modeling complex systems; knowledge is represented by the strength of the excitatory or inhibitory connections between massively interconnected nodes. The connections in connectionist modeling are the network pathways both within and among the levels of knowledge. (p. 225) Correlated Attributes: the idea that the features found in category members tend to go together in systematic ways. (p. 245) Cost: see inhibition. (p. 231) Defining Feature: in the Smith et al. (1974) model, defining features are the features and properties of a concept that are essential to the meaning of the concept: for example, “bearing live young,” is a defining feature of “mammal” (contrast with characteristic feature). (p. 215) Exemplar Theory: the theory of categorization that assumes that human categories involve all mental records involving interactions with various members of a category. (p. 248) Explanation-Based Theories: are theories of categorization that assume that people create theories of the world, and that these theories serve as the basis for the mental categories that are formed. (p. 247) Facilitation: better than baseline response (generally a result of useful advance information); any positive or advantageous effect on processing, usually because of prior presentation of related information. In RT research, a speeding up of RT due to related information. (p. 230) Family Resemblance: the idea that mental categories are composed of members that may share a common set of features, with no subset of features being necessary or sufficient. (p. 215) Feature List: properties or characteristics stored in the mental representation of some concept, presumed by some theories to be accessed and evaluated in the process of making semantic judgments (also called semantic features). (p. 215) Inhibition: (costs) a lower than baseline response (generally a result of a misleading cue); any negative or disadvantageous effect on processing, usually because of prior presentation of some specific kind of information; in RT research, a slowing of RT caused by the prior information. (p. 231) Lag: in studies of mental processing, the number of intervening trials between a prime and a target. (p. 231) Lexical Decision Task: a timed task in which people decide whether letter strings are English words. (p. 231) Lexical Memory: the mental lexicon or dictionary in which our word knowledge (as distinct from conceptual knowledge) is stored. (p. 228) Lexicon: see mental lexicon.

Mental Lexicon: the mental dictionary of long-term memory; that is, the portion of long-term memory in which words and word meanings are stored. (p. 228) Nodes: a point or location in the semantic space which roughly corresponds to a concept. (p. 213) Parallel Distributed Processing Models: connectionist models. (p. 225) Pathway: in network representations in long-term memory, the connecting link between two concepts or nodes. (p. 213) PDP Model: see connectionist models. (p. 225) Perceptual Symbols: elements of cognition based on perceptual/motor elements derived from experience. (p.

223) Prime: the first stimulus in a prime–target pair; intended to exert some influence on the second stimulus (the target). (p. 229) Priming: mental activation of a concept by some means, or the spread of that activation from one concept to another; also, the activation of some target information by action of a previously presented prime; sometimes loosely synonymous with the notion of accessing information in memory. Neely’s (1977) work suggests both implicit and explicit mechanisms. (p. 229) Probabilistic Theories of Categorization: theories that assume that mental categories are created using statistical information about experience; the prime examples are prototype and exemplar theories. (p. 246) Prototype: the typical or average member of a category; the central or most representative member of a category. Note that a prototype may not exist for some categories, in which case the category’s prototype would be some “average-like” combination of the various members. (p. 246)

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Prototype Theory: the probabilistic view that human categories are created by using a mental prototype. (p.

246) Psychological Essentialism: the idea that people treat members of a category as if they have some underlying, perhaps invisible, property or essence that makes them belong to one category or another. (p. 248) Reconstructive Memory: constructing a memory by combining elements from the original material with existing knowledge. (p. 236) Schema (plural schemata): a semantic representation that serves as a framework or body of knowledge about a topic; these are often available for commonly experienced aspects of life. This concept was developed by Bartlett. (p. 237) Script: a schema that is temporally ordered. (p. 238) Semantic Features: properties or characteristics stored in the mental representation of some concept; presumed by some theories to be accessed and evaluated in the process of making semantic judgments. (p. 215) Semantic Memory: a person’s general world knowledge; permanent memory store of general world knowledge; includes language and conceptual knowledge that relates concepts and ideas to one another; one's mental dictionary and encyclopedia (combined). In contrast to episodic memory, it is assumed that most people’s semantic memories will be fairly similar. The concept of semantic memory was first raised

by Quillian (1966), who was trying to make an artificial intelligence system that could “understand” language. (p. 211) Semantic Network: a structure for information stored in long-term semantic memory; assumed by several popular models of mental processing. In most network models, concepts are represented as nodes that are interconnected by means of links or pathways; activation is presumed to spread from concept to concept along these connecting pathways. (p. 213) Semantic Relatedness Effect: in semantic memory tasks, reaction time is speeded up or judgments are made easier when the concepts are closer together in semantic distance—when they are more closely related.

Note that the effect is reversed when the comparison is false; that is, RT is longer for the comparison “a whale is a fish” than for “a whale is a bird.” (p. 220) Sentence Verification Task: a task in which people must respond true or false to simple sentences. (p. 217) Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA): the temporal offset between the start (onset) of one stimulus and the start (onset) of a second stimulus; in priming studies, SOA is the interval of time separating the prime and the target, usually a few hundred milliseconds. (p. 230) Spreading Activation: an assumed theoretical process by which long-term memory knowledge is accessed and retrieved; some form of mental excitation or activation is believed to be passed or spread along the pathways that connect concepts in a memory network. When a concept has been activated, it has been retrieved or accessed within the memory representation. The process is loosely analogous to the spread of neural excitation in the brain. (p. 213) Target: the second part of a prime–target stimulus (see priming); any concept or material that is designated as being of special interest. (p. 230) Typicality: in semantic categories, the degree to which items are viewed as typical, central members of a category; the central tendency of a category. (p. 245) Typicality Effect: in semantic memory research, the result that typical members of a category tend to be judged as members of the category more rapidly than atypical members. (p. 245)

7.4 Key People Barsalou: perceptual symbols; ad hoc categories. (p. 223, 247) Bartlett: development of the schema concept. (p. 234) Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin: the classic view of categorization. (p. 244) Collins & Quillian: semantic hierarchical network model (and revisions). (p. 213) Graesser: scripts. (p. 242) Hintzman: semantic memory as generic memory. (p. 211) Kounios & Holcomb: ERP investigation of semantic activity. (p. 220) Loftus: semantic activation, semantic priming. (p. 218) McClelland: connectionist modeling. (p. 226) Medin: exemplar theory of categorization. (p. 246) Neely: automatic and controlled priming. (p. 232) Paivio: dual-coding theory. (p. 222) Rips: typicality effects. (p. 245)

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Schank and Abelson: development of script theory. (p. 240) Rumelhart: connectionist modeling. (p. 213) Seidenberg: connectionist modeling. (p. 226) Smith: feature comparison model; feature list. (p. 215) Warrington & Shallice: sensory vs. function category-specific deficit in semantic memory storage system. (p.

227)

7.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • • •

Introduce the concept of semantic activation by asking people to write down what they might find in a grocery store. Have them look at their lists to see how items are grouped.

Have students produce examples of activities that access abilities that might be modular.

Have students give examples of categories can be helpful and how they might be harmful (especially when categorizing other people).

7.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) • •

•

Demonstrate the sentence verification task; discuss importance (i.e., what abilities the task might measure).

See Table 7-1 and Figure 7-4.

Read Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” passage and have students do a written recall test after a short delay.

Have two different volunteers read their versions out loud to the class. Have a class discussion on the differences. Read the textbook version from one week and one month later. Use these recall attempts and the class recall attempts to motivate Bartlett’s reconstructive memory, specifically noting omissions and normalizations.

Try a category retrieval demonstration as an in-class exercise. See Table 7-7.

7.6 Research Project Ideas • •

Find a recent research article discussing natural and artificial categories. Explain how the information presented in the article extends the presentation of the material in the textbook.

Find a recent research article discussing semantic memory deficits. Explain how the information presented in the article extends the presentation of the material in the textbook.

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Chapter 8: Using Knowledge in the Real World 8.0 Chapter Overview Memory applied to real-world situations and circumstances.

8.1 Chapter Contents The Seven Sins of Memory Facts about the World •

The Nature of Propositions

Situation Models and Embodied Cognition • •

Levels of Representation Remembering Facts

Metamemory • • •

Source Monitoring Prospective Memory Knowing What You Know

False Memories, Eyewitness Memory, and “Forgotten” Memories • • • • • • •

False Memory Integration Leading Questions and Memory Distortions The Misinformation Effect Source Misattribution and Misinformation Acceptance Stronger Memory Distortion Effects Repressed and Recovered Memories

Autobiographical Memory • • •

The BahrickWork Phenomena of Autobiographical Memory The Irony of Memory

8.2 Chapter Summary This chapter begins with an overview of the seven sins of memory discussed by Schacter (1999).This can serve as the basis for organizing information about memory in general.

Comprehending and remembering can involve mentally representing basic ideas or propositions in which meaningful elements are represented as simple idea units. As evidence of this, we tend to remember the gist or general meaning of a passage, rather than superficial aspects, and we routinely “recognize” a sentence as having occurred before even if the sentence is a paraphrase. Understanding memory as a structural framework for containing basic ideas, researchers predicted the fan effect even before it was observed in human performance.

The more new pieces of information a person learned about a concept, the more difficult it was to retrieve any one of them. Thus, during learning, multiple propositions in memory can bring about a cost, causing interference (the fan effect).

Moving beyond the idea that people encode and process simple propositions, more recent work has looked at how situation models, or mental simulations of the world, influence memory and cognition. This section of the chapter begins with a description of different levels of processing, such as the surface form, textbase, and situation model levels. Evidence by Kintsch et al. is described to show that the situation model level is the one that is retained over a long period of time. The concept of situation models can also be used to look at phenomena that have been explained using propositional theories, such as the fan effect. Results of a study are presented that go beyond the original, propositional network explanations.

In the section on metamemory, there is some discussion of metacognitive awareness of one’s own memory.

This begins with a discussion of source monitoring, or knowing where memories came from. Cryptomnesia is provided as an example of a situation in which problems can arise when source monitoring fails. After this there is a discussion of prospective memory, which is the ability of people to remember to do things in the future.

Two types of prospective memory are highlighted: namely, time-based and event-based prospective memory.

There is then some discussion of people’s ability to monitor the contents of their own memories. Highlighted

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here are judgments of learning, which are typically relatively poor estimates of whether someone has learned something or not, and feeling of knowing judgments, in which people estimate the likelihood that they actually will be able to remember something that is forgotten at the moment. The TOT effect is mentioned again here in terms of its relation to feeling of knowing.

Several paradigms give clear evidence of false memories, such as the Roediger & McDermott (1995) list presentation studies (critical lures) and eyewitness memory research by Loftus and others. The integration memory findings of Bransford and Franks are presented here as an example of how people lose memory for what they originally learned, but remember an amalgam of information from different sources. “Remembering” is affected by source misattribution, the acceptance of misinformation, and bias. People tend to be overconfident about their memories (poor metamemory), regardless of the distortions that might be involved (repeated exposure to misinformation, the effect of imagination, etc.). Cases of “forgotten” and “recovered” memories are particularly difficult to assess because of the fragile, reconstructive nature of memories. It is a concern, however, that therapeutic techniques used to assist in “recovering” memory of trauma are so similar to variables like repetition and repeated questioning, variables that increase the false memory effect.

Studies of autobiographical memory, or memory for one’s life narrative, show a number of interesting things. Recognition memory for information acquired across an extended period is remarkably accurate across many years, whereas recall begins to decline within months. The text describes the phenomenon of infantile amnesia, and provides some explanations for why people do not have many or any conscious memories from early childhood. At the other end of the spectrum, the text also discusses work on the reminiscence bump, an autobiographical memory effect that shows superior memory for when a person was a young adult. There is also some brief discussion of spontaneous memories of life events that come unbidden. Distinctiveness, importance of the event to oneself, and the level of one’s affective response are all important factors in remembering realworld events, especially those that seem to produce flashbulb memories. The ironies of memory—a powerful, large capacity system that is nonetheless quite prone to error—have not been completely explained.

8.3 Key Terms Absentmindedness: everyday memory failures in remembering information and intended activities; probably caused by insufficient attention or superficial, automatic processing during encoding (one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory). (p. 252) Autobiographical Memory: one’s lifetime collection of personal memories—one’s life narrative; memories of specific, personally experienced events, such as one’s activities upon learning of the Challenger space shuttle disaster; the study of those memories. (p. 279) Bias: the tendency for knowledge, beliefs, and feelings to distort recollection of previous experiences and to affect current and future judgments and memory (one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory). (p. 252) Blocking: the temporary retrieval failure or loss of access, such as the tip-of-the-tongue state, in either episodic or semantic memory (one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory). (p. 252) Critical Lure: a word that is highly related to all the other words in a study list but that never was presented to the participant (but which the participant is likely to later report as part of the list). (Roediger & McDermott) (p. 266) Cryptomnesia: Unconscious plagiarism, typically for information that a person has lost the source knowledge for. (p. 262) Eyewitness Memory: study of memory for personally experienced episodes with an emphasis on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the report as it relates to misinformation encountered since the original event. (p. 272) False Alarm (False Positive): an error in recognition in which a response of “yes” is made to a new item; any “yes” response in recognition when a “no” response is correct. (p. 270) False Memory: memory for something that did not happen. (p. 266) Fan Effect: an increase in response times with an increase in the number of newly learned associations with a concept. (p. 256) Feeling of Knowing: a person’s assessment of the likelihood of remembering something in the future that has currently been forgotten. (p. 264) Imagination Inflation: an increased likelihood of a person creating a false memory if the forming of mental images is encouraged. (p. 277) Implanted Memories: false memories that are placed in a person from some external source. (p. 274) Infantile Amnesia: the inability to recall personal, conscious memories prior to the ages of two or three. (p.

282)

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Integration: to produce a composite memory; the tendency to store related pieces of information into an integrated unified representation. (p. 271) Judgments of Learning: a person’s assessment of how well, or whether, a piece of information has been learned. (p. 264) Memory Impairment: a genuine change or alteration in memory of an experienced event as a function of some later event (i.e., retroactive interference); a specific interpretation of early eyewitness memory results in which a subsequent piece of information replaces a memory formed earlier, thus impairing memory of the original information. (p. 272) Metamemory: one’s awareness of the contents and processes of one’s own memory. (p. 264) Misattribution: see source misattribution (p. 273) Misinformation Acceptance: participants accept additional information as having been part of an earlier experience without actually remembering the information. (p. 274) Misinformation Effect: people claim to remember information that was not in the original experience, but was provided later as a piece of misinformation (Did the car run the stop sign? (in reality, it was a yield sign)). (p. 273) Persistence: the tendency to remember facts or events, including traumatic memories, that one would rather forget; that is, failure to forget because of intrusive recollections and rumination (one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory). (p. 252) Processing Fluency: the ease with which something is processed or comes to mind. (p. 276) Proposition: a basic idea unit of meaning; a representation of meaning that can be stored in and retrieved from memory. The meaning of a single simple sentence, a simple idea: “a proposition is the smallest unit of knowledge that can stand as a separate assertion.” (p. 253) Prospective Memory: remembering to do something in the future. (p. 262) Reconsolidation: when a memory is retrieved, this puts it in a plastic, malleable state where it can be changed before it is stored in memory again. (p. 274) Reminiscence Bump: superior memory for life events between the ages of fifteen to twenty-five. (p. 282) Repression: intentional forgetting of painful or traumatic experiences, especially in psychoanalytic theory. (p.

278) Situation Model: a mental representation that refers to the event being described; a mental situation of an event. (p. 257) Source Memory: memory of the exact source of information. (p. 276) Source Misattribution: remembering a fact correctly from past experience but attributing it to an incorrect source or context; the inability to distinguish whether the original event or some later event was the true source of the information (one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory). (p. 252, 273) Spontaneous Memories: autobiographical memories that come unbidden, often in response to some environmental cue, such as an odor. (p. 284) Suggestibility: the tendency to incorporate information provided by others into your own recollection and memory representation (one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory). (p. 252) Surface Form: one’s verbatim memory. (p. 257) Textbase: one’s memory for propositional content of a text. (p. 257) Tip of the Tongue State: the feeling the retrieval of a forgotten word or name is imminent. (p. 265) Transience: the tendency to lose access to information across time, whether through forgetting, interference, or retrieval failure (one of Schacter’s seven sins of memory). (p. 252)

8.4 Key People Anderson: node plus pathway method of prepositional representation. (p. 255) Arbuckle & Cuddy: judgments of learning. (p. 264) Bahrick: real-world memory (50 years of names and faces). (p. 279) Bransford & Franks: integration. (p. 268) Brown: cryptomnesia. (p. 262) Conway: autobiographical memory. (p. 279) Einstein & McDaniel: prospective memory. (p. 262) Johnson: source monitoring. (p. 261) Kintsch: situation models. (p. 257) Loftus: eyewitness memory. (p. 271) Roediger & McDermott: false memories using critical lures. (p. 276)

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Rubin: the reminiscence bump. (p. 283) Sachs: evidence for the rapid loss of verbatim information. (p. 254) Schacter: “the seven sins of memory.” (p. 251)

8.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • •

Student understanding of the Bransford and Frank’s (1971) result is often somewhat limited (beyond knowing that somehow it implicates semantic integration). Be sure to review the graph and the underlying methodology carefully.

Students can be easily engaged by the work on infantile amnesia. See if there are any students who might be willing to share their first memories.

8.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) •

• • •

An excellent example to use to demonstrate the distinction between content and technical accuracy (in particular the weakness of technical accuracy) is the testimony of John Dean during the publicized Senate hearing on the Watergate break-in. Dean’s testimony captured the gist of the meetings, but despite presentation to the contrary, did not capture the specific veridical details (e.g., the specific information and specific statements actually said by each party).

Use the DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) task as an in-class demonstration. It almost always works.

Use both Prove It sections as in-class demonstrations.

The seven sins of memory exist because of some adaptive functions. Be sure to point these out to the class.

8.6 Research Project Idea •

•

Look through a recent edition of a newspaper or online news source and find an article relevant to false memories or memory bias. Discuss how the material covered in this course might be relevant to the news story. Be sure that your two-page, double-spaced assignment defines the relevant cognitive terms and shows the link between the news story and the cognitive terms. Attach a copy of the news story.

Using the seven sins of memory as a guide, suggest examples of how each of these could lead to distortions in an eyewitness’s testimony.

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Chapter 9: Language 9.0 Chapter Overview Characteristics of language, including approaches to analyzing language.

9.1 Chapter Contents Linguistic Universals and Function • • • •

Defining Language Language Universals Animal Communication Levels of Analysis, a Critical Distinction, and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Phonology: Sounds of Language • • • • •

Sounds in Isolation Combining Phonemes into Morphemes Speech Perception in Context Embodiment in Speech Perception A Final Puzzle

Syntax: The Ordering of Words and Phrases • • •

Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar Limitations of Transformational Grammar Cognitive Role of Syntax

Lexical and Semantic Factors: The Meaning in Language • • • • •

Morphemes The Lexical Representations Case Grammar Interactions between Syntax and Semantics Evidence for Semantic Grammar Approaches

Brain and Language • • •

Language in the Intact Brain Aphasia Generalizing from Aphasia

9.2 Chapter Summary Language is our shared system of symbolic communication, a system unlike natural animal communication.

True language involves a set of characteristics—linguistic universals—which emphasize the arbitrary connection between symbols and referents, the meaningfulness of the symbols, and our reliance on rules for generating language. No known animal communication system contains these critical features. Language is so integrated and important to the rest of cognition, that some, such as Benjamin Whorf, have wondered about the degree to which our language influences how we think.

Three traditional levels of analysis (phonology, syntax, and semantics) are joined by two others in psycholinguistics (level of conceptual knowledge and the level of one’s beliefs). Linguists focus on an idealized language competence as they study language, but psycholinguists are interested in the learning and the use of language—therefore, the final two levels of analysis take on greater importance as we investigate language users and their behavior. To some degree, we can use people’s linguistic intuitions to discover what is known about language; to the extent that language processes are automatic, however, our intuitions provide little insight into the processes behind our performance.

Phonology is the study of the sounds of language. Spoken words consist of phonemes, the smallest units of sound that speakers of a language can distinguish. Surprisingly, a range of physically different sounds are classified as the same phoneme; we tolerate a fair degree of variation in the sounds we categorize as “the same.”

This is particularly important in the study of speech recognition because the phonemes in a word exhibit a characteristic known as coarticulation. There is much overlap among successive phonemes, such that an initial sound is influenced by the sounds that follow and the later sounds are influenced by what came before.

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Therefore, speech recognition relies heavily on conceptually driven processes. Part of this conceptually driven process is based on our implicit embodied knowledge of how we would produce the sounds that we are hearing.

Syntax involves the ordering of words and phrases in sentence structure and features such as active versus passive voice. Chomsky’s theory of language was a heavily syntactic scheme with two sets of syntactic rules.

Phrase structure rules were used to generate a deep structure representation of a sentence, and then transformational rules converted the deep structure into the surface structures, the string of words that makes up the sentence.

There are a variety of syntactic clues to the meaning of a sentence, so an understating of syntax obviously is necessary to psycholinguistics. On the other hand, psycholinguistics had developed its own theories of language, at least in part because of linguists’ relative neglect of semantic and performance characteristics.

Semantic factors in language are so powerful that they can sometimes override syntactic and phonological effects. The semantic aspects of language units—words—are held in the lexicon. Theories of semantics break words down into morphemes, the smallest meaningful units in language; cars contains the free morpheme car and the bound morpheme –s (signifying a “plural”). It should be noted that some words have more than one meaning, and so are called polysemus. When a particular meaning of a word is activated, this will prime other words similar in meaning, but not as much as words that are related to an alternative meaning of that word.

Priming can also be observed across languages, for people who are multilingual.

Extensive evidence from studies with brain-damaged people and more modern work using imaging and ERP methods reveals several functional and anatomical dissociations in language ability. Evidence of brain activity for newly learned words looking like previously known words takes about five weeks. The syntactic and articulatory aspects of language seem centered in Broca’s area, in the left frontal lobe, whereas comprehension aspects are focused more on Wernicke’s area, in the posterior left hemisphere junction of the temporal and parietal lobes. While many language abilities are dominated by left hemisphere activity, there are major contributions of right hemisphere activity, such as that needed to make more distant connections, as with jokes.

The study of these and other deficits, such as anomia, converges with evidence from imaging and ERP studies to illustrate how various aspects of language performance can act as separable, distinct components within the overall broad ability to produce and comprehend language.

9.3 Key Terms Agnosia: deficit in visual object recognition due to brain disorder or injury. (p. 335) Agraphia: a disruption in the ability to write due to brain disorder or injury. (p. 334) Alexia: inability to read or recognize printed letters or words due to brain disorder or injury. (p. 334) Anomia (Anomic Aphasia): disruption in word finding; impairment in the normal ability to retrieve a semantic concept and say its name due to brain disorder or injury. (p. 224) Aphasia: the disruption (a loss of all or some) of previously intact language skills caused by a brain-related disorder or injury. (p. 332) Apraxia: deficit in voluntary action or skilled motor movement due to brain disorder or injury. (p. 332) Arbitrariness: one of Hockett’s (1960) linguistic universals; there is no inherent connection between a symbol and the concept or object to which it refers—there is only an arbitrary connection between sound and meaning. Contrast this with iconic communication systems, such as the bee’s waggle dance. It is arbitrary that we refer to “duck” as a “duck” rather than “grandmother” or “bezel.” (p. 291) Broca’s Aphasia: a form of aphasia characterized by severe difficulties in producing spoken speech; the speech is hesitant, effortful, and distorted phonemically. This aphasia is caused by damage in Broca’s area. Also called expressive or production aphasia. (p. 332) Broca’s Area: site of brain damage associated with Broca’s aphasia; located at the rear of the left frontal lobe, a region of the cortex next to a major motor control center. (p. 332) Case Grammar: an approach in psycholinguistics in which the meaning of a sentence is determined by the semantic analysis of sentence; the analysis involves figuring out what semantic role is being played by each word or concept in a sentence and computing sentence meaning based on those semantic roles (case roles). (p. 323) Case Roles (Semantic Roles): the various semantic roles or functions played by different words in a sentence; the semantic roles include which word names the overall relationship and which names the agent or patient of the action. Other cases include time, location, and manner (case grammar). (p. 323) Categorical Perception: all the sounds falling within a set of boundaries are perceived as the same, despite physical differences among them; the perception of similar language sounds as being the same phoneme, despite the minor physical differences among them: for example, the classification of the initial sounds of

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cool and keep as both being the /k/ (hard c) phoneme, even though these initial sounds differ physically. (p.

300) Coarticulation: the phenomenon in which more than one phoneme at a time is affecting articulation; the simultaneous or overlapping articulation of two or more of the phonemes in a word. (p. 303) Competence: in linguistics, the internalized knowledge of language and its rules that fully fluent speakers of a language possess, uncontaminated by flaws in performance. (p. 295) Conduction Aphasia: a disruption of language in which patients are unable to repeat what they have just heard. (p. 334) Deep Structure: in linguistics and psycholinguistics, the deep structure of a sentence is the meaning of the sentence; a deep structure is presumably the most basic and abstract level of representation of a sentence or idea. A component of transformational grammar, phrase structure rules are used to generate a deep structure representation of a sentence (contrast with surface structure). (p. 312) Displacement: one of Hockett’s (1960) linguistic universals; linguistic messages are not tied in time or space to the topic of the communication; this implicates an elaborate memory system within the speaker or hearer, which allows them to recall the past or anticipate the future; the ability to talk about something other than the present moment. This feature of language allows us to displace ourselves in time, by talking about the past or future. (p. 292) Dysfluency: irregularity, error, or flaw in otherwise fluent speech. (p. 295) Flexibility (of Symbols): the characteristic that enables the meaning of a language symbol to be changed and enables new symbols to be added to the language; we can change the connections between symbols and meaning, and invent new connections, because the connections are arbitrary. (p. 291) Garden Path Sentence: a sentence that initially leads a person to interpret it as having one meaning, but that the person later comes to realize has another, completely different, intended meaning. Such garden path sentences can be useful in understanding the stages of processing during language processing. (p. 327).

Given-New Strategy: a language phrase tends to contain given information that was presented before along with new information that builds on that given knowledge. (p. 315).

Grammar: the complete set of rules that will (ideally) generate or produce all the acceptable utterances and will not generate any unacceptable, ill-formed ones. (p. 323) Language: shared system for symbolic communication. (p. 289) Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis): the language you know shapes the way you think about events in the world around you. (p. 296) Linguistic Universals: features or characteristics of language common to all human languages. (p. 289) Linguistics: the discipline that takes language, per se, as its topic; the study of language as a formal system. (p.

288) Mental Lexicon: mental dictionary of long-term memory that holds words and their meanings. (p. 317) Morpheme: smallest unit of meaning in language (un as in unhappiness). (p. 318) Motor Theory of Speech Perception: the idea, advocated by Liberman, that people understand language that they hear, in part, by mentally simulating how they themselves would produce those sounds. (p. 306) N400: ERP function associated with semantic anomaly. (p. 322) Naming: we assign names to all the objects in our environment, to all the feelings and emotions we experience, to all the ideas and concepts we conceive of; the characteristic that human languages have names or labels for all the objects and concepts encountered by the speakers of the language. (p. 292) Onomatopoeia: when a name is based on its referent sound (buzz, hum, zoom, etc); an exception to arbitrariness. (p. 291) P600: ERP function associated with syntactic anomaly. (p. 330) Parse: separate or divide the sentence into phrases or other logical or meaningful groupings. (p. 312) Performance: any observable behavior; in the context of linguistics, actual language behavior a speaker generates; the string of sounds and words that the speaker utters; any behavior related to language, influence not only by linguistic factors but also by factors related to lapses in attention, memory, and so on (contrast with competence). (p. 295) Phoneme: a category or group of language sounds judged to be the same by speakers of a language (e.g., the initial sound in the words cool and keep for speakers of English). Note that because of categorical perception, we tend to judge some physically different sounds as the same (despite physical differences among the category members) and other different sounds as different (as belonging to a different phoneme category). English uses approximately 46 phonemes. (p. 298)

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Phonemic Competence: the extensive knowledge or rules of permissible sound combinations; one’s basic knowledge of the phonology of the language. (p. 302) Phonology: the sounds of language and the rule system for combining them; the study of the sounds of language, including how they are produced and how they are perceived. (p. 298) Phrase Structure: accounts for the constituents of the sentence, the word groupings and phrases that make up the whole utterance, and the relationship among those constituents; the underlying structure of the sentence in terms of the groupings of words into meaningful phrases such as “[The green duck][swam quickly].” (p.

310) Polysemy: having more than one meaning. (p. 319) Problem of Invariance: speech sounds vary across people, places, and times; yet we categorize sounds as being from the same phonemic category despite this large degree of variability. The sounds of language change depending on what sounds precede and follow in the word. The problem of invariance is that this variance is not a problem (although it would be for machine language processing). (p. 303) Productivity: one of Hockett’s (1960) linguistic universals; language is novel, consisting of utterances that have never been uttered or comprehended before; new messages, including words, can be coined freely by means of rules and agreement among the members of the language culture; language is a productive and inherently novel activity. The essence is that we generate sentences rather than repeat them. (p. 293) Psycholinguistics: the study of the psychology of language; the study of language as it is used and learned by people; the study of language behavior and processes. (p. 288) Pure Word Deafness: disruption of the perceptual or semantic processing in auditory word comprehension. (p.

334) Rewrite Rules: in a phrase structure grammar, the rules that specify the individual components of a phrase; for example, a noun phrase is rewritten as a determiner, an adjective, and a noun, NP → det + (adj) + N. (p.

311) Semantic Case (Case Roles): in a case grammar approach, the particular case played by a word or concept is said to be that word’s semantic case (case grammar). (p. 323) Semanticity: one of Hockett’s (1960) linguistic universals; language conveys meaning. (p. 289) Surface Structure: in linguistics and psycholinguistics, the actual form of the sentence, whether written or spoken (contrast with deep structure); the literal string of words or sounds present in a sentence. A component of transformational grammar; transformational rules are applied to the deep structure to produce the words (or sounds) of the sentence—the surface structure. (p. 312) Syntax: the arrangement of words as elements in a sentence to show their relationship to one another; grammatical structure; the rules governing the order of words in a sentence. (p. 308) Transformational Grammar: Chomsky’s theory of the structure of language; a combination of a phrase structure grammar and a set of transformational rules. (p. 313) Transformational Rules: a component of transformational grammar; transformational rules are applied to transform an idea (the deep structure sentence) in order to produce the words (or sounds) of the sentence (the surface structure). (p. 312) Voicing: refers to whether the vocal cords begin to vibrate immediately with the obstruction of airflow (/b/ in bat) or whether the vibration is delayed until after the release of air (/p/ in pat). (p. 300) Wernicke’s Aphasia: one of two common forms of aphasia in which the language disorder is characterized by a serious disruption of comprehension, as well as repetition, naming, reading, and writing; the syntactic aspects of speech are preserved although the use of invented words, and semantically inappropriate substitutions can lead to “copious unintelligible jargon.” Also called receptive or comprehension aphasia. (p. 333)

9.4 Key People Broca: Broca’s area and aphasia. (p. 333) Chompsky: transformational grammar. (p. 310) Fillenbaum: semantics can overpower syntax; reordered paraphrasing. (p. 325) Fillmore: case grammar. (p. 323) Fromkin: speech errors. (p. 315) Hockett: linguistic universals. (p. 289) Liberman: motor theory of speech perception. (p. 306) Miller & Isard: problem of invariance and conceptually driven processing. (p. 304) Miller: five levels of conversation analysis: phonology, syntax, lexical/semantic, conceptual, and belief. (p. 295)

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Sapir and Whorf: linguistic relativity hypothesis. (p. 295) Simpson: polysemy. (p. 320) Wernicke: Wernicke’s area and aphasia. (p. 333)

9.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • •

Reinforce question-asking behavior (e.g., precede your response with the phrase “good question”).

Ask students for examples of speech involving accents other than their own, and how the ability to understand such people relates to the cognitive psychology of language.

9.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) • • • • •

Demonstrate the differences between a Wernicke’s patient and a Broca’s patient by reading aloud or using audio or video materials to support the class presentation (see Table 9-6).

Encourage students to be aware of speech errors (but warn against shallow processing of your lecture).

When quizzing students to test comprehension in class, do not let them off the hook with an “I don’t know”; push them a little.

Spend some talking about how other languages represent and process information, and discuss how this might aid in increasing the intelligence of bilingual speakers.

To make salient the distinction between surface structure and deep structure, show the class a series of photographs. Then have people give written descriptions of them. Pick out and highlight examples that convey the same idea, but using very different words, or the same words but in a different syntactical form.

9.6 Research Project Ideas • •

Record fifteen minutes of a lecture, an interview talk show, or a radio talk show. Record and categorize the speech errors observed. (p. 398) Identify one piece of evidence for each of Miller’s (1973) five levels of language analysis (see Table 9-2).

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Chapter 10: Comprehension: Written and Spoken Language 10.0 Chapter Overview An overview of language comprehension and reading, as well as more general aspects of comprehension, such as event comprehension, conversation and gesture.

10.1 Chapter Contents Getting Started: An Overview • • • • • •

Conceptual and Rule Knowledge Comprehension Research Online Comprehension Tasks Metacomprehension Comprehension as Mental Structure Building Levels of Comprehension

Reading • • • •

Gaze Duration Basic Online Reading Effects A Model of Reading Summary

Reference, Situation Models, and Events • • •

Reference Situation Models Events

• • • •

The Structure of Conversations Cognitive Conversational Characteristics Empirical Effects in Conversation Gesture

Conversation and Gesture

10.2 Chapter Summary Comprehension involves understanding. This is done using rules, knowledge, and beliefs about the world.

A variety of online tasks have been devised to investigate comprehension of language. These online tasks generally have supported the view that comprehension is an interactive process. Moreover, it is also important to look at metacomprehension—the ability of people to assess whether they understand something. There is evidence that people are relatively poor at monitoring their comprehension and learning, but they do eventually narrow in on an appropriate region of proximal learning.

Language comprehension has been described as a process of structure building in which you map incoming concepts onto the structure under construction until a new concept switches the discourse focus. Language comprehension involves representations and processes at multiple levels. These levels include the verbatim surface form, the propositional textbase of idea units, and the referential situation model.

Perhaps the most studied aspect of comprehension is the processes that go into reading. Sophisticated reading research techniques include eye movement monitoring with eye trackers. Essentially, reading researchers use eye tracking as a window into cognition, using gaze durations as their primary data. The interpretation of this data uses the immediacy and eye–mind assumptions to help interpret the data, although it is not a perfect approach. Just & Carpenter’s (1987) model of reading is built on these kinds of data and makes predictions about gaze durations and comprehension based on a variety of local and global factors; for instance, word frequency and recency in the passage influence local processing, whereas the difficulty of retrieving semantic and scripted knowledge influences global processing factors. The technology that enables this kind of investigation promises to provide a wealth of information about reading and comprehension.

Reference and inference in language involve the notion of linking, by which a speaker intends a certain meaning that the listener must infer. A variety of reference types exist, some requiring fairly complex bridges on the part of the listener for comprehension to succeed. The source of knowledge that permits speakers to

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include reference in their messages and listeners to infer the basis for those bridges is not just our knowledge of syntax and word meanings, but also the entirety of semantic memory and much top-down processing. Evidence also shows the capacity and operation of working memory to be important factors in understanding individual difference in reading comprehension. Concepts enjoy an advantage of first mention in later tests of memory and for a brief time enjoy a recency advantage.

People are creating situation models of the events being described, and these mental representations then influence performance. These situation models serve as the basis for the inferences that are drawn during comprehension—often these situation models are created using perceptual symbols and have an embodied quality. As people read, they update their situation models. This updating is effortful, which can increase reading times, and access to information in the situation model reflects the current structure of the model. This situation model theory has also been extended to look at the comprehension of events, not just language comprehension.

Conversations follow an extensive but largely implicit set of conversational rules. Some of these involve turn taking and social status and conventions, but many more govern the nature of the topic of participants’ contributions. Conversational topic shifts involve selecting some part of a participant’s utterance to form the basis for a new contribution but then adding some new information. Participants in a conversation develop theories of the other speakers, called direct theories, as well as theories of what the other speakers think of them, called second-order theories. When we engage in conversation, we not only tailor our contributions to these theories but also follow a set of conversational rules, the unspoken contract between conventional partners.

When a rule is being violated intentionally, usually to make some other point (e.g., sarcasm), we mark our violation so that its apparent illegality as a conversational move is noticed and understood.

Empirical work on conversational interaction often tests general notions about direct theories, the politeness rule, or indirect requests. Although we sometimes attempt to manipulate another person’s direct theory of us, research also shows that the initially planned utterance usually is from a very egocentric perspective, whereas later adjustments may take the other person’s perspective into account.

More recent work in comprehension has also looked at the role of gesture. Gesture plays a communicative and social role in that it helps other people understand what is being talked about. However, it also seems to play a cognitive role for the speaker, further reflecting the role of embodiment in cognition. People who gesture have fewer problems, and can even be better at solving problems as they speak.

10.3 Key Terms Advantage of Clause Recency: the speed-up or RT to the most recently processed clause (temporary accessibility increase). (p. 356) Advantage of First Mention: the speed-up of RT to characters and ideas that were mentioned in the very first sentence, at the beginning of the entire episode (generalized accessibility increase). (p. 356) Anaphoric Reference: the act of using a pronoun or possessive (or synonym) to refer back to a previously mentioned concept. (p. 354) Antecedent: the concept to which the later word refers; for example, the speaker refers to the antecedent Bill in “Bill said he was tired.” (p. 354) Authorized (vs. Unauthorized) Inference: the intended inference; intended or correct; an implication of a speaker’s statement is authorized if the speaker intended the implication to be drawn; if the listener draws the intended inference, the inference is said to be authorized. (p. 358) Belief: the fifth level of analysis of language, according to Miller, in which the listener’s attitudes and beliefs about the speaker influence what is comprehended and remembered. (p. 338) Bridging Inference: term for the mental processes of reference, implication, and inference during language comprehension; the process of constructing a connection between concepts. Metaphorically, a bridge must be drawn from “he” back to “Bill” to comprehend the sentence “Bill said he was tired.” (p. 358) Conceptual Level/Conceptual Knowledge: the fourth level of analysis of language, according to Miller, roughly equivalent to semantic memory. (p. 338) Conversational Rules/Conversational Maxims: rules or maxims, largely tacit, which govern our participation in—and contributions to—conversations. (p. 368) Cooperative Principle: the ideas that each participant in a conversation implicitly assumes that all speakers are following the rules and that each contribution to the conversation is a sincere, appropriate contribution; the most basic conversational postulate, stating that participants cooperate by sharing information in an honest fashion. (p. 368)

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Direct Theory: theories we develop cpncerning our conversational partners; our theory of what the conversational partner knows and is interested in, what the partner is like. A direct theory is a person’s appraisal of or informal theory about the other participant in the conversation, including information about that person’s knowledge, sophistication, and personal motives (contrast with second-order theory). (p. 370) Enhancement: in Gernsbacher’s theory, the boosting of concepts’ levels of activation during comprehension; related memory nodes are boosted or enhanced in their level of activation (c.f., spreading activation). (p.

344) Eye–Mind Assumption: there is a close link between eye movements and cognitive processes; the eye remains fixated on a word as long as that word is being actively processed during reading. (p. 347) Eye Tracker: a device used in reading experiments to precisely record where a person is looking. (p. 346) Fixation: in visual perception, the pause during which the eye is almost stationary and is taking in visual information; also, the visual point on which the eyes focus during the fixation pause. (p. 347) Gaze Duration: how long the eyes dwell on each word; the principle measure of online comprehension during reading. (p. 347) Gesture: movements a person makes with his or her hands that are tied to the spoken language. (p. 374) Immediacy Assumption: the assumption that readers try to interpret each content word of a text as that word is encountered in the passage; that is, we do not take in a group of words before starting to process them. (p.

347) Implication: an intended reference in a sentence or utterance that is not mentioned explicitly (the implication is supplied by the author of the sentence). (p. 358) Indirect Request: requesting by an indirect, and presumably more polite, statement. A question or statement that is not to be taken literally, but instead is a polite way of expressing the intended meaning; for example, “Do you have the time?” (p. 371) Inference: the process by which the listener or reader draws connections between concepts and determines the references of words and ideas and then draws conclusions based on the statements. (p. 358) Judgments of Learning (JOLs): estimates that people make of how much they have learned of what they have read. (p. 341) Labor in Vain Effect: The finding that people initially try to study and learn information that is too far beyond their current ability. (p. 341) Mapping: in Gernsbacher’s theory, as more elements appear in the sentence, they too are added to the structure; the process of determining the connections between two sets of elements. Mapping means that additional word and concept meaning are now added to the previous structure, elaborating that structure by specifying (new) activities. Mapping is the process by which recurring terms and inferred ideas are related to each other and to the meaning of the whole passage and stored as part of the structure under construction. (p. 343) Metacomprehension: one’s own insight into one’s own comprehension abilities. (p. 341) Online Comprehension Tasks: a dynamic time- or action-based task that yields measurements of the underlying mental processes as they occur; measurements of performance are obtained as comprehension takes place. (p. 340) Pragmatics: the aspects of language that are “above and beyond” the words; so-called extralinguistic factors; a means of knowing that the meaning is something different than what a literal reading would suggest. For instance, part of our pragmatic knowledge of language rules includes the knowledge that the sentence “Do you happen to know what time it is?” is actually an indirect request rather than a sentence to be taken literally. (p. 339) Propositional Textbase: the basic idea units conveyed by a text. (p. 345) Reference: the linguistic process of alluding to a concept by using another name (e.g., pronouns or synonym); use of reference will require the reader/listener to find the connections to the other concepts in the sentence. (p. 354) Region of Proximal Learning: information that is just beyond a person’s current knowledge state; learning is most effective in this region. (p. 342) Repeated Name Penalty: a slowdown in reading when a name is inappropriately used as an anaphor when a pronoun, or similar reference, would suffice. (p. 354) Second-Order Theory: in conversation, the informal theory we develop that expresses our knowledge of what the other person knows about us, summarized by the phrase “what he or she thinks I know” (contrast with direct theory). A person’s evaluation of the direct theory of another person. (p. 370)

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Situation Model: a memory representation that serves as a simulation of the situation referred to in a text. (p.

345) Speech Act: the intended consequence of an utterance. (p. 360) Structure Building: the process of comprehension in Gernsbacher’s theory; building a mental representation of the meaning of sentences. (p. 342) Suppression: in Gernsbacher’s theory, the active process of reducing the activation level of concepts no longer relevant to the meaning of a sentence. (p. 344) Surface Form: the verbatim words and syntax used in an utterance. (p. 345) Theory of Mind: a person’s theory of what another person knows or understands. (p. 370) Topic Maintenance: conversational rule; making our contributions relevant and to the topic and sticking to the topic; consists of both comprehension of the speaker’s remark and then expansion, contributing something new to the topic. (p. 369) Unauthorized (vs. Authorized): not intended; especially said of inferences drawn during a conversation. (p.

358) Updating: altering a situation model as a consequence of new information that is received during the language comprehension process. (p. 362)

10.4 Key People Gernsbacher: structure-building framework of language comprehension; advantage of first mention, advantage of clause recency. (p. 342) Grice: conversational maxims: relevance, quantity, quality, manner and tone (+ infer & respond to partner’s knowledge + signal rule violations). (p. 368) Holtgraves: indirect replies in conversation (“face saving vs. not”). (p. 367) Just & Carpenter: model of online reading; idea and proposition comprehension. (p. 347) Keysar: egocentric processes in conversation. (p. 368) McNeill: gesture. (p. 374) Metcalfe: region of proximal learning. (p. 342) Miller: five levels of analysis of conversation: phonology, syntax, lexical/semantic, conceptual knowledge, and beliefs. (p. 338) Reichle: E-Z reader model of online reading: word level. (p. 350) Van Dijk & Kintsch: surface form, textbase, and situation model. (p. 357) Zwaan: the event indexing model. (p. 360)

10.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) •

•

Assign five student volunteers to be a “straight man” and four “comedians,” with each of the four comedians being responsible for frequently violating one of Grice’s four conversational rules (neither the straight man nor the class should know the comedian rule correspondences). Provide each “comedian” with information that the straight man requires. The goal is to illustrate the four conversational maxims and why they are important.

Comprehension applies to more than just language. Ask students apply the principles that are discussed with regard to language to their understanding of television, movies, or even everyday life.

10.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) •

Show a video clip from some conversation-based sitcom/soap opera to illustrate conversational maxims (and violations of same).

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10.6 Research Project Ideas • • •

Identify two recent advances using eye movement research.

Identify recent research on language comprehension that show that comprehension involves embodied processes.

At the end of the eye movement section, there is a list of some recent work attesting to the importance of the factors in determining gaze durations. Obtain and summarize one or more of these articles or other work on the same topic by one of the authors cited in this chapter.

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Chapter 11: Decisions, Judgments, and Reasoning 11.0 Chapter Overview Formal Logic, Reasoning, and Heuristics and Biases in Decision Making.

11.1 Chapter Contents Formal Logic and Reasoning • • •

Syllogisms Conditional Reasoning: If P then Q Hypothesis Testing

Decisions • • •

Decisions about Physical Differences Decisions about Symbolic Differences Decisions about Geographic Distances

Decisions and Reasoning under Uncertainty • • • • • • • •

Algorithms and Heuristics Heuristics, Biases, and Fallacies The Representativeness Heuristic The Availability Heuristic The Simulation Heuristic The Undoing Heuristics: Counterfactual Reasoning Adaptive Thinking and “Fast, Frugal” Heuristics The Ongoing Debate

Limitations in Reasoning • •

Limited Domain Knowledge Limitations in Processing Resources

11.2 Chapter Summary Human reasoning is not especially logical, as shown in formal syllogistic and conditional reasoning problems. In reasoning tasks using syllogisms, conditional reasoning, if–then problems, and hypothesis testing, people often fail to search for negative evidence. Instead, they often look for positive evidence for a conclusion, called the confirmation bias, and are often influenced, both positively and negatively, by semantic knowledge.

When a more skeptical attitude is adopted, and when the reasoning involves more concrete concepts, reasoning accuracy tends to improve.

Deciding which of two physical stimuli is louder, brighter, and so on is a psychophysical judgment. These decisions are speeded up when the two stimuli differ by a great amount. When symbolic stimuli are compared, the same effect is obtained; this is called the symbolic distance effect. Additionally, judgments are speeded up when the evaluated dimension (e.g., choose the larger) matches the stimuli being compared (e.g., two “large” digits); this is called the semantic congruity effect. Both of these results are obtained in simple comparisons of numbers and in comparisons of qualities such as “hot/cold.” In all symbolic and reasoning situations, including those about geographical location, our mental representation and knowledge influence our judgments.

Algorithms are systematic rules and procedures that generate correct answers to problems, whereas heuristics are quick, informal rules that are often useful but are not guaranteed to yield the correct solution.

Three important heuristics have been investigated in circumstances where people reason about uncertain events.

The representativeness heuristic guides people to judge outcomes as likely if they seem representative of the type of event being evaluated; for instance, a random-looking sequence of coin tosses is judged more representative of coin toss outcomes almost regardless of the true probabilities involved—included among the reasoning effects predicted by this heuristic are various stereotyping results.

In the availability heuristic, people judge the likelihood of events by how easily they can remember examples or instances. These judgments therefore can be biased by any other factor, such as salience or vividness, which affects the storing of example in memory.

In the simulation heuristic, people forecast or predict how some outcome could have been different. These forecasts are influenced by how easily the alterative outcomes can be imagined. Interestingly, when people

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complete “if only” statements, the changes they induce tend to normalize the original situation by removing an unusual event and substituting a more common one. Such normalizations can be affected by the focus of the situation.

More recent developments, such as Gigerenzer’s fast and frugal heuristics and explanations based on causal reasoning, continue to develop work in decision making beyond the classic work by Kahneman and Tversky.

In everyday reasoning, we rely on mental models of the device or event to make our judgments. These mental models sometimes are quite inaccurate. In the best-known research, people’s mental models of physical motion lead them to incorrect predictions (e.g., the trajectory of a ball dropped from an airplane). Ongoing research is focused on the kinds of limitations that lead to incorrect reasoning and decision making, including limited domain knowledge and limitations in working memory processes.

11.3 Key Terms Affirm the Antecedent (a Valid Inference): modus ponens; evidence p for “if p then q” allows you to conclude q. (p. 382) Affirm the Consequent (an Invalid Inference): evidence q for “if p then q” does not allow you to conclude p. (p. 385) Algorithm: a specific rule or solution procedure, often detailed and complex, that is certain to yield the correct answer if followed correctly (contrast with heuristic). (p. 397) Antecedent: the if–clause in standard conditional reasoning (if–then) tasks. In the statement “If it is foggy, San Francisco Airport will be backed up,” the antecedent is “If it is foggy.” (p. 381) Availability Heuristic: a decision-making heuristic in which we judge the frequency or probability of some event on the basis of how easily examples or instances can be recalled or remembered; thus, the basis of this heuristic is ease of retrieval. (p. 405) Belief Bias: the tendency to accept conclusions when reasoning based on one’s beliefs, rather than logical form. (p. 379) Conditional Reasoning: the form of reasoning in which the logical consequences of an if–then statement and some evidence are determined; for example, given “If it rains, then the picnic will be cancelled,” the phrase “it is raining” determines that the picnic is cancelled. (p. 381) Confirmation Bias: in reasoning, the tendency to search for evidence that confirms a conclusion. This is a major difficulty in syllogistic reasoning and in undergraduate understanding of scientific hypothesis testing. (p. 384) Conjunction Fallacy: in reasoning, when a person fails to take into account the joint probability of two different factors; exemplified by the Linda problem (p. 415) Consequent: in conditional reasoning, the consequent is the then statement; in “If it rains, then the picnic will be cancelled,” the consequent is “then the picnic will be cancelled.” (p. 381) Counterfactual Reasoning: a line of reasoning that deliberately contradicts the facts in a “what if” kind of way; in the simulation heuristic, the changing of details or events in a story to alter the (unfortunate or undesirable) outcome (undoing). (p. 407) Deny the Antecedent (an Invalid Inference): modus tollens; evidence not-p for “if p then q” does not allow you to conclude not-q. (p. 385) Deny the Consequent (a Valid Inference): evidence not-q for “if p then q” allows you to conclude not-p. (p.

382) Distance Effect: an effect, seen particularly in reaction time, in which two distant or highly discriminable stimuli are more easily judged than two nearby or less discriminable stimuli. For instance, judgments are faster to “poor versus excellent” than to “good versus excellent.” (p. 389) Downhill Change: in the simulation heuristic, a downhill change is an unusual or unexpected aspect of a story or situation that is changed to be more normal or customary; if a story character left work early and then was involved in a car accident, a likely downhill change would be to normalize the unusual characteristic and substitute a more customary aspect, such as leaving work on time. (p. 409) Familiarity Bias: in reasoning, the bias in the availability heuristic in which personal familiarity influences estimates of frequency, probability, and so on. (p. 406) Heuristic: from the Greek heureka, “I have found it”; and heuriskein, “to find”; an informal “rule of thumb” method for solving problems, not necessarily guaranteed to solve the problem correctly but usually much faster or more tractable than the correct algorithm. (p. 398) Hindsight Bias: in reasoning, the bias or attitude that some completed event was very likely to have had just that outcome. (p. 410)

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Insensitivity to Sample Size: the particular bias in the representativeness heuristic seen when people reason about events and fail to take into account the size of the sample or group on which the event is based. They seem to believe that both small and large samples should be equally similar to the population they are drawn from; the error is also referred to as the law of small numbers. (p. 402) JND (Just Noticeable Difference): in psychophysics, the amount by which two stimuli must differ so that the difference can be perceived. (p. 389) Law of Small Numbers: mistaken belief that small samples will be representative of the population from which they are selected; this is a mistake that people make—it is not a real law. (p. 402) Mental Models: the mental representation of a situation or physical device; for example, a person’s mental model of the physical motion of bodies or a person’s mental model of a thermostat. Also refers to the mental representations of meanings of the terms in a reasoning problem. (p. 387) Naïve Physics: the study of people’s misconceptions about the motion of physical objects, such as a ball rolling off a cliff. (p. 419) Plausible Reasoning Hypothesis: knowledge from a variety of sources is factored into a decision; e.g., Chicago judged north of Rome based on Northern North America and Southern Europe. (p. 395) Psychophysics: the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and the perceived characteristics of those stimuli; the study of how perceptual experience differs from the physical stimulation being perceived. (p.

388) Recognition Heuristic: a reasoning heuristic in which we select an option that seems familiar and is recognized. (p. 413) Representativeness Heuristic: a reasoning heuristic in which we judge the likelihood of some event by deciding how representative that event seems to be of the larger group or population from which it was drawn. (p. 400) Salience (Vividness): sources of bias in the availability heuristic in which a particularly notable or vivid memory influences judgments about the frequency or likelihood of such events. (p. 406) Satisficing: a reasoning heuristic in which a person selects the first option that is ‘good enough”. (p413) Semantic Congruity Effect: in the mental comparison task, reaction time is speeded or judgments are made easier when the basis for a judgment is congruent or similar to the stimuli being compared; for instance, a congruent condition would be “choose the smaller of second or minute” and an incongruent condition would be “choose the smaller of decade or century.” In semantic memory tasks, response time is speeded up or judgments are made easier when the concepts are closer together in semantic distance—when they are more closely related. Note that the effect is reversed when the comparison is false; that is, RT is longer for the comparison “a whale is a fish” than for “a whale is a bird.” (p. 391) Simulation Heuristic: a reasoning heuristic in which we predict a future event or imagine a different outcome to completed events; a forecasting of how some event will turn out or how it might have turned out under another set of circumstances. (p. 406) SNARC Effect: in the mental comparison, response time is generally faster with the left hand for small numbers, and faster with the right for larger numbers, parallel to the idea of a mental number line going from left to right. (p393) Stereotypes: in reasoning, bias in judgments related to the typical characteristics of a profession, type of person, and so on; stereotypes can lead to base rate neglect. (p. 403) Syllogism (Categorical Syllogism): a classical reasoning form composed of two premises and one conclusion in which the logical truth of the conclusion must be derived from the premises; the goal of the syllogistic reasoning process is to understand how different premises can be combined to yield logically true conclusions and to understand what combinations of premises lead to invalid or incorrect conclusions.

Errors can be divided into form errors, search errors, and memory errors. (p. 378) Symbolic Comparisons: mental comparisons of symbols, such as digits, usually in a “choose smaller/larger” task. (p. 389) Symbolic Distance Effect: the result, in a symbolic comparison task, in which two relatively different stimuli (e.g., 1 v. 8) are judged more rapidly that two relatively similar stimuli (e.g., 1 v. 2) because of the greater symbolic distance between 1 and 8. (p. 389) Take the Best Heuristic: a reasoning heuristic in which a person selects an option because it is the first to be discriminated from the alternatives based on some salient criteria. (p. 414)

11.4 Key People Banks: symbolic comparisons: semantic congruity effect, symbolic distance effect. (p. 391)

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Gigerenzer: adaptive thinking. (p. 411) Johnson-Laird: mental models and reasoning. (p. 387) Kahneman & Tversky: human reasoning and decision making; algorithms and heuristics (representativeness, availability, etc). (p. 399) McCloskey: naïve physics. (p. 419) Moyer: imagery effects in symbolic comparisons. (p. 390) Wason: Wason card problem (conditional reasoning). (p. 383)

11.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) •

Provide a handout of questions that will allow you to illustrate each of the biases/heuristics. You can include content from both the Kahneman & Tversky examples (p. 496) and from the naïve physics examples (p. 510).

11.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) •

•

•

Introduce the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. In many judgment domains, people usually begin by guessing a first approximation—an anchor—and then make adjustments to that number on the basis of additional information. Often this leads to a reasonable answer, but it can lead to errors in some cases.

Consider: o Is the average price of an undergraduate textbook more than, or less than, $15.00? o What is the average price of an undergraduate textbook?

Typical finding: those with the $15 anchor produce lower estimated prices than those students given a $150.00 anchor. Part of this is due to the availability heuristic. It also works to bias estimates of frequency or number (e.g., the number of countries in Africa: anchor at 5 versus anchor at 80). o As an additional question (which may be even more biased given the lack of exposure most people will have that could help guide them to the correct answer), you can use the knowledge that there are 55 (57 given dispute over ownership) independent countries in Africa (as of August 2005).

Wason Card Problem: Which card or cards do you need to turn over to test “if VOWEL on one side then EVEN on other side”?

EK47 (Typically people will show a confirmation bias, which can be removed by making the information more meaningful with the analogous “if DRINKING then at least 21”) Martini Coke 31 17 Francis Bacon proposed logical induction as the logic of scientific discovery and deduction as the logic of argumentation. In fact, both processes are used synergistically in the behavioral science: by observation of particular events (induction) and from already known principles (deduction). o Induction: the process of reasoning from the particular to the general. o Deduction: the process of drawing, by reasoning, particular conclusion from more general principles assumed to be true.

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11.6 Research Project Ideas • Have students find the historical definition of “rule of thumb” (informal assignment).

• Also, consider using the following (formal) assignment: GOAL: To have you demonstrate your grasp of three different http://www.psych.sjsu.edu/~mvselst/courses/psyc135/assignments/biases.htmcognitive heuristics or biases in decision making. One of these must be the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; the remaining two could be any two cognitive biases in decision making that we have discussed in class or which are mentioned in the text (e.g., risky shift, risk seeking or aversion, etc.).

REQUIREMENT: Write a report discussing the heuristics that have influenced three decisions you have made.

Provide a brief description of each of three scenarios in which you had to make a decision (or were involved in the decision making) and the cognitive biases that may have been involved (possibly in retrospect). It is possible (but not required) that multiple heuristics may have influenced each decision. Clearly define each heuristic and indicate why it applies to the situation as you have described it. One example must use the anchoring and adjustment heuristic. The other heuristics are up to you.

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Chapter 12: Problem Solving 12.0 Chapter Overview Methods of investigation, history, characteristics, and computational models of how people go about solving problems.

12.1 Chapter Contents The Status of the Problem Solving Area Gestalt Psychology and Problem Solving • •

Early Gestalt Research Difficulties in Problem Solving

Insight and Analogy • • •

Insight Analogy Neurocognition in Analogy and Insight

Basics of Problem Solving • •

Characteristics of Problem Solving A Vocabulary of Problem Solving

Means–End Analysis • • •

The Basics of Means–End Analysis The Tower of Hanoi General Problem Solver

Improving Your Problem Solving •

Suggestions for Improving Problem Solving

12.2 Chapter Summary Newell & Simon’s insights on the role of computer simulations in an understanding of human information processing were central to the development of cognitive psychology in the late 1950s. Their research methods were different from those developed in much of cognitive psychology, such as the stronger emphasis on verbal protocols, so the area of problem solving has only recently become a mainstream topic within cognitive psychology.

The early Gestalt psychologists studied problem solving and discovered two major barriers to successful performance: functional fixedness and negative set. The first is a difficulty solving a problem because some aspect of thinking is fixed on an element of the problem as being used in its typical way, such as thinking about pliers as being used for grabbing rather than as being used as a weight. The second is a difficulty seeing simple solutions to problems when a more complex approach has been pursued in the past.

Insight is a deep understanding of a situation or problem, often thought to occur suddenly and without warning. Although there is some debate on the nature of insight, recent work suggests that insights may be discovered and used unconsciously and only later be available to consciousness (and thus for verbal report) through a process of incubation. This has been supported by recent work using neuroimaging.

Reasoning by analogy is a complex kind of problem solving in which relationships in one situation are mapped onto another to solve a problem. People are better at developing analogies if given a useful source problem and an explicit hint that the problem might be used in solving a target problem. Holyoak and Thargard’s multiconstraint theory of analogical problem solving claims that we work under three constraints as we develop analogies: constraints related to the similarity of the source and target domains, the structure of the problems, and our purposes or goals in developing the analogies. Some new evidence suggests a particularly important role for the left frontal and parietal lobes in solving problems by analogy and a right hemisphere role in insight problems involving semantic priming.

We are problem solving when our behavior is goal-directed and involves a sequence of cognitive steps or stages. The sequence involves separate cognitive operations, where each goal or subgoal can be decomposed into separate, smaller subgoals. The overall problem, including our knowledge, is called the problem space, within which we apply operators, draw inferences, and conduct a constructive search for moves that bring us closer to the goal.

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The best-known heuristic for problem solving is means–end analysis, in which the problem solver cycles between determining the difference between the current and goal states and applying legal operators to reduce that difference. The importance of subgoals is revealed most clearly in problems such as the Tower of Hanoi.

Newell & Simon’s general problem solver (GPS) was the earlier cognitive theory of problem solving, implemented as a computer simulation. Studying GPS and comparing its performance with human problem solving showed the importance of means–end analysis to human problem solving.

Here are several recommendations for improving problem solving. Note the inclusion of the mundane yet important advice about practice.

1.

Increase domain knowledge.

2.

Automate some components.

3.

Follow a systematic plan.

4.

Draw inferences.

5.

Develop subgoals.

6.

Work backwards.

7.

Search for contradictions.

8.

Search for relations among problems.

9.

Find a different problem representation.

10.

Stay calm.

11.

Practice!

12.3 Key Terms Analogy: a relationship between two similar problems, systems, or concepts; bringing the two concepts into some kind of alignment or relationship that highlights their similarities and differences; a heuristic in which a problem is solved by finding an analogy to a similar problem. (p. 439) Domain Knowledge: a general term referring to one’s knowledge of a specific domain or topic, especially in problem solving. (p. 460) Einstellung: another term for negative set. (p. 433) Functional Fixedness: in problem solving, an inability to think of or consider anything but the customary uses for objects and tools. (Duncker; Maier) (p. 431) Gestalt: a German term, adopted into psychological terminology, referring to an entire pattern, form, or configuration; the term always carries the connotation that decomposing a pattern into its components in some way loses the essential wholeness of the cohesive pattern. (Köhler) (p. 430) Goal: in problem solving, the endpoint or solution to the problem; the ending state toward which the problem solving attempt is directed. (p. 447) GPS (General Problem Solver): the first serious computer-based model of problem solving. (Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958). (p. 458) Ill-Defined Problem: a problem in which the initial, intermediate, or final goal states are poorly or vaguely defined, or a problem in which the legal operators (moves) are not well specified. (p. 450) Incubation: the time when a person stops actively and consciously thinking about a problem, allowing a solution to present itself. (p. 438) Insight: a deep, useful understanding of the nature of something, especially a difficult problem; said to be an essential step in creativity and problem solving. An argument can be made that “insight” problems can be thought of in simpler terms, such as overcoming negative set. (p. 436) Means–End Analysis: a major heuristic in problem solving; assessing the distance between the current and the goal states and then applying some operator that reduces that distance. (p. 454) Multiconstraint Theory: Holyoak and Thargard’s multiconstraint theory of analogical problem solving claims that we work under three constraints as we develop analogies: constraints related to the similarity of the source and target domains (superficial similarities can be misleading), the structure of the problems (must be parallel mappings), and our purposes or goals in developing the analogies. (p. 442) Negative Set: in problem solving, a tendency to become accustomed to a single approach or way of thinking about a problem, making it difficult to recognize or generate alternative approaches. (p. 433) Operator: in problem solving, a legal move or operation that can occur during solution of a problem; the set of legal moves within some problem space (e.g., in algebra, one operator is “multiply both sides by the same number”). (p. 449) Problem Solving: goal directed sequence of steps; cognitive operations; subgoal decomposition. (p. 449)

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Problem Space: the initial, intermediate, and goal states in a problem and the problem solver’s knowledge and any external resources that can be used to solve the problem. (p 449) Production: a production is a simple if–then rule in models of memory processing, stating the condition (if) necessary for some action (then) to be taken, whether that action is a physical response or a mental step or operation. (p. 458) Satisficing: finding an acceptable or satisfactory solution to a problem, even though the solution may not be optimal. (p. 462) Subgoal: in problem solving, an intermediate goal that must be achieved to reach a final goal. (p. 447) Verbal Protocol: in studies of problem solving, a word-for-word transcription of what the subject said aloud during the problem-solving attempt. (p. 430) Well-Defined Problem: a problem in which the initial and final states and the legal operators are clearly specified. (p. 450)

12.4 Key People Duncker: functional fixedness. (p. 431) Gick & Holyoak: analogical reasoning. (p. 440) Köhler: Gestalt psychologist; examined insight in chimpanzees. (p. 430) Holyoak & Thagard: multiconstraint theory. (p. 440) Jung-Beeman: neuropsychology of insight. (p. 445) Luchins: negative set; water jug experiment. (p. 431) Maier: functional fixedness. (p. 431) Metcalfe: examination of people’s “feeling of warmth” when solving routine vs. insight problems. (p. 436) Newell & Simon: computer simulation of problem solving (GPS) and, more broadly, the informationprocessing approach. (p. 447) Wharton: neuropsychology of analogical reasoning and insight. (p. 444)

12.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • •

The difficulty for this section will be to facilitate the students in receiving a focused or principled treatment of problem solving rather than providing a catch-as-catch-can overview.

Obviously, the demonstrations (though time consuming) can be very effective teaching aides. Consider assigning some of the problems as homework prior to the lecture.

12.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) •

This section begs for in-class demonstrations of the various problems; such demonstrations can add much to the interest and can add depth to the coverage. In particular, consider having students engage in a thinkaloud procedure and then leverage this into a discussion of possible limitations of the procedure—note the text discussion on the possible analogies to difficulties with introspection.

12.6 Research Project Ideas • • •

Identify three content areas (e.g., chess, math problem solving) in which a production model has been used to investigate or evaluate human decision making. Cite your references.

Document the problem space of a game of tic-tac-toe (or the three-disk version of the Tower of Hanoi).

Have students flesh out the problem space for a specified (or at least clearly defined) problem.

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Chapter 13: Cognition and Emotion 13.0 Chapter Overview Examination of how cognition, of various types, is influenced by the human experience of emotion.

13.1 Chapter Contents What Is Emotion?

• •

Types of Emotion Neurological Underpinnings

Emotion, Perception, and Attention • • • • •

Perception Emotional Guidance of Attention Visual Search Emotional Stroop Emotion and Self Control

Emotion and Memory • •

Making Memory Better Making Memory Worse

Emotion and Language • •

Prosody Words and Situations

Emotion and Decision Making • • • •

Stress Impairs Performance Choking Under Pressure Stereotype Threat Stress Improves Performance

13.2 Chapter Summary Emotion is a visceral experience, but it is deeply intertwined with our thoughts and cognitions. Basic characteristics of emotion can be captured by considering the valence of the emotion (how positive or negative it is) and the intensity of the emotion (how strong it is). Important neurological structures for processing emotion include the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Emotion can influence cognition, even at the levels of perception and attention. In general, emotioninvoking stimuli are more likely to draw attention and also result in more cognitive processing being done at the perceptual level, e.g., influencing one’s judgments of how high a balcony is depending on the emotional reaction to it. The influence of emotion on perception and attention has been exploited in the development of the emotional Stroop task, a widely used variant of the normal Stroop task that has been modified to assess whether certain people are particularly emotionally sensitive to certain things. Not only does emotion influence perception and attention, but people also use attention to regulate emotion, as in when a person tries to suppress unwanted emotional responses.

Emotion can have dramatic effects on memory. Emotion can both help and hinder later memory; it helps memory in that emotional materials and events are often remembered better than more neutral information. This may reflect greater activity in the amygdala and the brain structures it is connected to, such as the hippocampus.

Part of the benefit of emotion for memory is the distinctiveness of the information, and the attention it gets during processing. Positive influences of emotion on memory are also seen in the mood-congruent and mooddependent memory effects, as well as with autobiographical flashbulb memories. While emotion can aid memory in some ways, there are also ways that it can impair memory. For example, at high levels of emotional intensity, there is a tunneling of attentional focus, resulting in poorer memory for peripheral aspects of an event.

Language is used not only to communicate content information, but emotions as well. One way to communicate emotion is through prosody, the up and down pitches in an utterance. Another way to do this is through actual words that convey emotional information. During language comprehension, people actively track emotional information to understand the goals and motivations of other people. This helps explain why people act as they do and give a causal coherence to the described events.

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Emotional states can also influence reasoning and decision making, impairing it in some cases and improving it in others. On the impairment side, people have been known to choke under pressure. This can be a result of either outcome-based pressure, in which a person is focused on how well they are doing, or monitoringbased pressure, in which a person is focused on how they are doing something. Outcome-based pressure results in the intrusion of off-topic thoughts, and monitoring-based pressure results in disruption of automatized routines. Emotional stress can also be subtle, as with stereotype threat and its impact on performance and decision making. Stress can actually improve performance when people view the task as a challenge rather than negatively.

13.3 Key Terms Amygdala: an almond-shaped neurological structure, near the hippocampus, important for regulating emotional responses based on sensory input. (p. 472) Choking Under Pressure: performance below typical performance levels as a result of emotional stress or pressure at the time of the action. (p. 489) Easterbrook Hypothesis: Easterbrook’s idea that at high levels of emotional arousal, there is a narrowing of attention, which lead to better memory for details at the focus of an event but poorer memory for details at the periphery of an event. (p. 483) Emotion: both the state of mind a person is in at a particular moment as well as the physiological response a person is experiencing at that time. (p. 471) Emotional Stroop Task: a variant of the normal Stroop task in which potentially emotionally arousing words are used (in which people must name the colors they are printed in) to assess the degree to which processing is disrupted by this emotionally arousing content. (p. 475) Flashbulb Memory: memories of specific, emotionally salient events, reported subjectively to be as detailed and as accurate as a photograph but now considered possibly to be no different from any other highly accurate memory. (p. 481) Intensity: the relative strength of an emotional experience. (p. 471) Mood-Congruent Memories: the finding that it is easier to think of concepts, topics, ideas, or memories that are consistent with one’s current mood. (p. 480) Mood-Dependent Memories: similar to the idea of encoding specificity, this is the finding that it is easier to remember something when the mood at retrieval and encoding are the same or similar than if they are different. (p. 480) Monitoring Pressure: performance pressure occurring because of an emphasis on how a task is being done. (p.

490) Outcome Pressure: performance pressure occurring because of an emphasis on the final outcome of performance. (p. 489) Prosody: the up and down pith of an utterance that can convey emotional information. (p. 485) Stereotype Threat: unconscious activation of negative stereotypes leads a person to perform worse on a task than they would otherwise. (p. 490) Tunnel Memories: at high levels of emotional arousal, better memories for the central details of an event, but poorer memories for peripheral details—as if a person is developing a kind of tunnel vision. (p. 484) Valence: whether an emotion is positive (e.g., happy) or negative (e.g., angry). (p. 471) Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex: part of the cortex involved in the identification and interpretation of emotional responses. (p. 472) Weapon Focus Effect: the finding that memory for peripheral details of an event is poorer when there is a salient, emotionally charged object present, such as a weapon, that is drawing attention and processing. (p.

484) Yerkes-Dodson Law: the inverted u-shaped function which shows that memory is best at moderate levels of emotional arousal, but poorer at low and high levels of arousal. (p. 483)

13.4 Key People Beilock: choking under pressure. (p. 489) Bower: mood-dependent memory. (p. 480) Brown & Kulik: flashbulb memories. (p. 481) Easterbrook: emotion and memory. (p. 483) Gage: brain-damaged individual. (p. 472) Kensinger: emotion and memory. (p. 478)

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LeDoux: amygdala processing and emotion. (p. 472) Steele: stereotype threat. (p. 491) Zeelenberg: emotion and perception. (p. 473)

13.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) • •

Students should be open to discussing issues involving emotion. This topic would be a good opportunity to elicit examples from the students of things related to their own lives (if they elect to share).

Ask students to give examples of situations in which a person has choked under pressure (to show the different kinds of tasks and pressures), as well as situations in which pressure is viewed as a challenge and performance improves.

13.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) •

To illustrate the impact of prosody on the communication of emotion, show how individual sentences, spoken in different ways, can convey a wide range of emotions.

13.6 Research Project Ideas •

•

Have students ask their parents or other people older than themselves about traumatic public events, such as the assassination of President Kennedy, as well as other public events of a similar era, and have them compare the amount of detail recalled in the two cases to illustrate the nature of flashbulb memories. (p.

398) Explore the influence of pressure on performance using an outcome-based task, such as taking a math quiz, as well as a performance-based task, such as putting or throwing a ball (see Table 9-2).

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Chapter 14: Cognitive Development 14.0 Chapter Overview Examination of how cognition changes as a function of the progress through life and development, with focus on infancy and childhood, as well as aging.

14.1 Chapter Contents A Lifespan Perspective Infants and Children • • • • •

Neurological Differences Perception and Attention Memory Language Decision Making and Problem Solving

Older Adults • • • • • •

Neurological Differences Perception and Attention Memory Language Decision Making and Problem Solving Aging and Emotion

14.2 Chapter Summary A lifespan perspective is taken on development in which there is no such thing as a non-developing person.

The chapter focuses on infancy and childhood as well as age-related changes in cognition. Lifespan perspectives favor longitudinal over cross-sectional studies; however, the former can often be more difficult to conduct, so there are still quite a few of the latter.

Humans are born relatively neurologically immature. While some neurological structures are welldeveloped, others take years to develop to adult levels. In addition, there is a process of the pruning of neurological connections from those that are present around birth. This results in developmental differences in cognitive abilities.

In terms of perceptual abilities, while there is some training of the perceptual systems that is needed, these systems are relatively far along. Very early on, infants prefer the sound of their mother’s voices, and can distinguish biological from nonbiological motion. In terms of basic number sense, research has shown that infants exhibit evidence for two types of number systems: a precise one for small numbers that precedes learning how to count and an approximate system for larger quantities that is sensitive to basic ratios. In terms of attention, children show similar patterns of using their attention as adults, such as with visual search. Although children do not initially show the Stroop effect, as they become literate, it emerges—this could be used as an index of literacy.

In terms of memory, while there is infantile amnesia for the earliest part of our lives—suggesting that some types of memory are underdeveloped—there are other types of memory that are relatively more developed. For example, nondeclarative, procedural memories are well developed at birth. This can be seen in the skills that infants are rapidly acquiring. The more declarative forms of memory, such as episodic and semantic memories, develop as the child grows older; short-term memory processes continue to mature as well. That said, there are some rudimentary forms of these types of memory early on, as illustrated by such procedures as the conjugate reinforcement paradigm. The operation of memory can also be seen in tasks that explore the idea of object permanence. Finally, there is evidence that part of the reason memory becomes better a child matures is because of increases in metacognitive and metamemory awareness.

While people are born knowing no language, they quickly acquire one at a high level of proficiency. This is done by going through a series of stages or levels of skill, from simpler language forms to more complex language forms. Throughout this time, there is often a difference between a child’s linguistic competence and his or her performance, with competence generally being ahead of performance. The acquisition of language is guided, in part, by the way that adults interact and speak with children.

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Children also developmentally progress through a series of stages of reasoning. These can be captured by Piaget’s stages of development or Vygotsky’s developmental progression. Regardless of the approach, it is clear that there are developmental changes that children go through, from simpler forms of thinking and reasoning to more complex types of thinking.

With older adults, there are systematic neurological changes, such as slowdown in neural processing speed and cortical changes, particularly in the frontal lobes. Physiological changes can also influence perception: e.g., the stiffening of the lens and age-related declines in hearing due to hair cell loss. Neurological changes, particular in the frontal lobe, also lead to declines in the ability to control attention, the orienting reflex, and attentional capacity overall. Some of this may be due to declines in inhibitory processes. Attention capture and pop-out effects are unaffected by aging, and mind wandering actually seems to decline with aging.

The most well-known age-related cognitive changes have to do with memory. There are clear declines in short-term/working memory, as well as episodic memory, particular as it has to do with memory for contextual information. That said, what is remembered is qualitatively similar to what is remembered by younger adults, and there are no clear age-related declines in semantic memory, as observed with priming and with schemas. In terms of metamemory, older adults show declines in source monitoring and prospective memory, which is likely related to declines in frontal lobe functioning, although the latter is less true in real-world settings.

In terms of language, older adults have larger vocabularies, and do not show profound deficits in language processing. However, when language processing depends on some aspects of working memory, such as accessing the referent for an anaphor or processing grammatically complex sentences, deficits can be revealed.

However, language comprehension at the situation model level is relatively well preserved, although older adults may have difficulty selecting important ideas in a text.

For reasoning, decision making, and problem solving, older adults seem to be on par with younger adults, except when reasoning requires large amounts of information to be held in working memory. Older adults appear to be able to draw on their larger experiences and take into account the bigger picture when making decisions. Older adults also seem to be more prone to the hindsight bias and are more likely to be influenced by recent thinking.

Lastly, there are age-related changes in the role of emotions in cognition. While some things stay the same, such as the creation of flashbulb memories, there are some things that change; for example, there is a greater emphasis on positive information with aging, namely the positivity effect. This leads older adults to process emotionally positive information more effectively than emotionally negative information.

14.3 Key Terms Babbling Stage: stage of language acquisition, up to eighteen months, in which there is a lot of vocal play, but no real words. (p. W-12) Basic Number Sense: knowing how many items are visible in a display. (p. W-4) Child-Directed Speech: speech used when talking to children that is often higher in pitch, slower, and exaggerated. (p. W-15) Concrete Operations Stage: the third Piagetian stage of development, from ages seven to eleven, in which children’s thinking becomes more reasoned and logical, although there is still an emphasis on concrete objects. (p. W-18) Conjugate Reinforcement: a methodology for testing memory in infants; the infant’s leg is attached, via a ribbon, to a mobile—when the infant kicks, the mobile moves. Various aspects of the environment can be manipulated to assess whether memory is retained for aspects of the testing environment by measuring the amount of kicking later. (p. W-9) Conservation: a Piagetian milestone in cognitive development in which children learn that things can change their appearance while retaining underlying qualities, such as quantity. (p. W-18) Cross-Sectional Study: a study that compares different groups of people from different age groups; these studies are more prone to cohort effects due to different experiences of different age groups, rather than to developmental changes per se. (p. W-2) Enactive Representation: according to Bruner, an early, embodied, action-based stage of childhood thinking. (p. W-19) Formal Operations Stage: the fourth Piagetian stage of development, beginning around age eleven, in which children’s thinking becomes able to handle and process abstract and hypothetical ideas. (p. W-19) Iconic Representation: according to Bruner, a middle, perceptual, image-based stage of childhood thinking. (p.

W-19) Infantile Amnesia: the inability to remember life events from before the ages of two to four. (p. W-8)

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Lifespan Perspective: taking the view that there is no such thing as a person who is not in some state of development; the entire lifespan is considered. (p. W-2) Linguistic Competence: the level of language processing that a child can understand and identify. (p. W-14) Linguistic Performance: the level of language processing that a child can demonstrate and use. (p. W-14) Longitudinal Study: a study that looks at changes in cognition over time within a single group of people instead of comparing people from different age groups as in a cross-sectional study; this type of study is more sensitive and more accurate assessment of cognitive changes. (p. W-2) Motherese: an older term for child-directed speech. (p. W-15) Multiword Stage: stage of language development, from eighteen to twenty-four months of age, in which multiple words are used but syntax is still somewhat simplified. (p. W-14) Object Permanence: the ability to remember the presence of an object when it is removed from view. (p. W10) Overextension: overextending a category to include more members than would be found in an adult version of the category, such as calling all men “daddy.” (p. W-8) Overregularizing: the use of regular word forms, such as “goed,” for words that grammatically should have irregular forms, such as “went.” (p. W-16) Positivity Effect: the finding that older adults place a greater emphasis on emotionally positive information. (p.

W-33) Preoperational Stage: the second Piagetian stage of development, from ages two to seven, in which children’s thinking is largely focused on physical objects. (p. W-18) Presbycusis: the loss of hair cells in the cochlea that accompanies aging and results in difficulty hearing highpitched sounds; may be resolved with a hearing aid. (p. W-22) Presbyopia: the hardening of the lens of the eye that accompanies aging and results in difficulty seeing close up; often resolved with reading glasses. (p. W-21) Sensorimotor Stage: the first Piagetian stage of development, from birth to age two, in which thinking is guided by what children can see and do themselves. (p. W-17) Single Word Stage: stage of language development, from twelve to eighteen months of age, dominated by the use of single words, even to convey complex ideas. (p. W-13) Symbolic Representation: according to Bruner, a late, abstract, linguistic-based stage of childhood thinking. (p.

W-19) Two-Word Stage: stage of language development, typically peaking around eighteen months of age, dominated by two-word utterances. (p. W-14) Word Explosion: the period of language development, from eightten months to five years of age, in which there is an explosion in the number of words a child knows and can use. (p. W-14) Zone of Proximal Development: the idea that children acquire information that is just beyond their current level of thinking. (p. W-19)

14.4 Key People Baillargeon: object permanence. (p. W-10) Bruner: An information processing approach to development. (p. W-19) Carstensen: positivity effect in aging. (p. W-33) Craik: aging and memory. (p. W-23) Marcus: childhood syntax acquisition. (p. W-16) Piaget: stages of development. (p. W-16) Rovee-Collier: episodic memory in infants. (p. W-5) Smith: childhood vocabulary acquisition. (p. W-15) Spelke: children’s number sense. (p. W-4) Vygotsky: social development. (p. W-19) Zacks: aging and attention. (p. W-22)

14.5.1 Lecture Suggestions (Effectiveness/Student Reactions) •

When discussing cognitive differences at different ages, encourage students to think or talk about other people they may know at those ages, and to imagine themselves at those ages. (You might even refer to different ages as “When YOU were young,” or “When YOU get old . . .” rather than referring to children and older adults as if they are somehow completely different from the students.)

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Instructor’s Manual

Cognition, 6th ed.

Radvansky/Ashcraft

14.5.2 Lecture Suggestions (Content) •

While it would be difficult to get children or older adults to come to class, this is a prime opportunity to show videos in class to see how people in different stages of life do various cognitive tasks.

14.6 Research Project Ideas •

Have students pick any topic from earlier in the semester and find out how it has been investigated developmentally. This can involve either children or older adults. .

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TOTAL ASSESSMENT GUIDE

Chapter 1 Cognitive Psychology: An Introduction

Topic Chapter Introduction

Memory and Cognition Defined

Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing Measuring Information Processes

Information Processing and Cognitive Science

Themes

Conceptual

2

1, 3

Applied

68 82 4–9, 11

10, 12

True/False Fill-Ins

History of Cognitive Psychology

Factual

Essay Multiple Choice

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

83–86 13, 16–17, 20–21, 23– 24, 27–29, 31–32, 38– 39, 41–42 69–70 89 98

14–15, 18–19, 25–26, 30, 33–37, 40, 43 71–73 87–88 96–97 44–45 74

90-91 48

49–50 75–76

92 51–56, 58, 63 79, 81 93–95 102 67

57, 59–62,64 77–78, 80 99–101 65–66

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Chapter 2 Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Science

Topic Cognitive Neuroscience: The Brain and Cognition Together

Neurons: The Basic Building Blocks

Neuroanatomy: Important Parts of the Brain

Neuroimaging: Looking at the Brain

Neural Net Models: Connectionism

Factual

Conceptual

Multiple Choice

1

2–3

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

85 101 4–5, 7–14, 17–24, 30

102 114 6, 15–16, 25–29

True/False

86–89

90

Fill-Ins

103–107

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

31–44, 46, 48–52, 54– 58

115 45, 47, 53, 59 91–95

108 60–63, 65–83

64

97 111–113

96 109–110 116–118 84 98–100

Applied

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Chapter 3 Sensation and Perception

Topic Visual Sensation and Perception

Pattern Recognition

Object Recognition and Agnosia

Auditory Perception

Factual

Conceptual

Applied

2, 20–21, 26–28, 34, 36 115–116 125 143–144, 147 41, 43–47, 54, 60–63, 66–67, 70, 72–73 119

19, 22, 35

True/False

1, 3–18, 23–25, 29– 33, 37–39 110–114, 117–118 126–130 145–146 40, 42, 48–53, 55–59, 64, 69, 71 120–121

Fill-Ins

131–136

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

148 78–79, 82, 84–92 122 137–138, 140–141

True/False Fill-Ins Essay

123–124 142 149

Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

93–101, 104–109

74–77, 80–81, 83 139 102–103

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Chapter 4 Attention

Topic Multiple Meanings of Attention

Basic Input Attentional Processes

Controlled, Voluntary Attention

Attention as a Mental Resource

Factual Multiple Choice

1–3

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

96

True/False

4–5, 11–13, 21–22, 26, 29–32, 34–35, 43– 45, 47 97–99

Fill-Ins

108–112

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

50–51, 53, 55–56, 58– 65, 69–72 100–102 113–114 117 73–75, 77, 80, 86, 88– 89, 95 104–107 115 120

Conceptual

Applied

6–10, 15–17, 19–20, 23–25, 27–28, 33, 36– 39, 41–42, 46

14, 18, 40

116 48–49, 54, 57, 58, 66– 68

118 76, 78–79, 81–85, 87, 90–91, 93–94 103 119

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Chapter 5 Short-Term Working Memory

Topic Short-Term Memory: A Limited Capacity Bottleneck

Short-Term Memory Retrieval

Working Memory

Assessing Working Memory

Working Memory and Cognition

Factual

Conceptual

Applied

1–3, 5, 7–8, 11, 14– 18, 20–24 81–82 91–92

4, 6, 9–10, 12, 19, 25

13

32–33, 39–40, 42, 44

36

True/False

26–31, 34–35, 37–38, 41, 43 83

Fill-Ins

95–98

93–94

Essay Multiple Choice

105 45–46, 48–51, 53–54, 57, 61, 64–66 85–87 99–103

107 47, 52, 55–56, 58–60, 62–63

Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

84

108 67–73 88 109 76, 78, 80–81 89–90 104 110

74–75, 77, 79

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Chapter 6 Learning and Remembering

Topic

Factual

Conceptual

Introductory Material

Multiple Choice

1–2

3–5

95–97 114

Preliminary Issues

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False

98–104

Fill-Ins

115–117

Storing Information in Episodic Memory

Retrieving Episodic Information

Amnesia and Implicit Memory

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

6, 8–11, 13–19

21–26, 28–29, 38–41, 44–45 105–106 118–122 129 50, 52–53, 55–57, 61, 63–66, 69–72, 75–79 108, 110 123–124

Applied

7, 12

127–128 27, 30, 32–37, 42–43

20, 31

107

46, 48–49, 51, 54, 58– 60, 62, 67–68, 73–74 109

47

130 80–94 111–113 125–126 131–133

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Chapter 7 Knowing

Topic Introductory Material

Multiple Choice

Semantic Memory

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

Connectionism and the Brain

Semantic Priming

Schemata and Scripts

Concepts and Categorization

Factual

Conceptual

2-4

1, 5

83–84

True/False

9–11, 14–15, 18–20, 23, 25 62–63, 65,

Fill-Ins

85–86

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

Applied

26, 28, 31–32 69–70 97–98 33, 36–39, 41–42

6–8, 12–13, 16–17, 21-22, 24 61, 64, 66

95–96 27, 29–30

34–35, 43–44

40

99 45–47 78

100

71–75 87–89 48 76–77 90–91 53, 55, 58, 60 79–82 92–94 102

101 49–52, 54, 56–57, 59

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Chapter 8 Using Knowledge In the Real World

Topic

Factual

Conceptual

Seven Sins of Memory

Multiple Choice

1–3

4–7

75–76 94

Facts about the World

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False

77–81

Fill-Ins

95–96

Situation Models and Embodied Cognition

Metamemory

False Memories, Eyewitness Memory, and “Forgotten Memories”

Autobiographical Memory

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

8–11, 13–16

104 17

Applied

12

18 82–84 97

19–21

22–24, 26–27, 29–31, 37–38 85–86 98–99

25, 28, 32–36

39–40, 42, 54–57, 59– 60 87–89 100–102

41,43–44, 47–50, 52– 53, 58 90

45–46, 51

106–107 67–68, 71–72, 74

108

105

61–66, 69–70, 73 91–93 109

103 110

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Chapter 9 Language

Topic Introductory Material

Linguistic Universals and Functions

Phonology: The Sounds of Language

Syntax: The Ordering of Words and Phrases

Lexical and Semantic Factors: The Meaning in Language Brain and Language

Factual

Conceptual

Applied

Multiple Choice

1

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

63–64 93 2–7, 10–11, 13–18

8–9, 12

True/False

65–67

68

Fill-Ins

94–95

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

108 19–21, 23, 25–26 69–71 96 29–30, 36, 38–39

109 33–35, 37, 41

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

75–76, 78–83 98–99

73–74 97

77

42–44, 46–47, 49 84–88 100–104

48

45, 50

51–56, 58, 60 89–92 105–106 110

57, 59, 61–62

107 22, 24, 27–28 72

111–112

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Chapter 10 Comprehension: Written and Spoken Language

Topic Getting Started: An Overview

Reading

Reference, Situation Models, and Events

Conversation and Gesture

Factual

Conceptual

Applied

1–2, 7–8, 24, 26, 30

16

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

3–6, 9–15, 17–23, 25, 27–29 82–85 106–107 117 31–32, 34–37

True/False

86–90

Fill-Ins

108–110

Multiple Choice

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

41, 46–47, 51–55, 57, 60, 62–68 91, 93–102 111–113

115-116 33

118 39–40, 44–45, 48-–50, 56, 59, 61 92

71–73, 75–76, 81

120–121, 123 69–70, 77–78

103–105 114 125

124

38, 42–43, 58

119, 122 74, 79–80

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Chapter 11 Decisions, Judgments, and Reasoning

Topic Formal Logic and Reasoning

Decisions

Decisions and Reasoning Under Uncertainty

Limitations in Reasoning

Factual

Conceptual

Applied

Multiple Choice

1–3, 5, 12, 14–19

7-9, 13–15

4, 6, 10–11

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

64–70, 74, 76

70–73, 75 88–89

20–21

22–24, 28, 30

95 25–27, 29

True/False

77, 79, 81

78

80

Fill-Ins

89–90

Essay Multiple Choice

96 31–32, 35–36, 38–39, 44–46, 48, 50, 53, 5760 83–87 91–93

33–34, 40–43, 47, 51– 52, 54–55

37, 49, 56

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

61

82 97, 99 62–63

100

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Chapter 12 Problem Solving

Topic Studying Problem Solving

Gestalt Psychology and Problem Solving

Insight and Analogy

Basics of Problem Solving

Means–End Analysis: A Fundamental Heuristic

Improving Your Problem Solving

Factual Multiple Choice

1–2

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

74–75 91

True/False

76–77

Fill-Ins

92–93

Essay Multiple Choice

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

3–4, 7, 9–10

11–12, 14–16, 18, 20– 23, 25, 29–30, 32–34, 36 79–86 94 38–39, 41, 43, 45, 47

Conceptual

Applied

5–6

8

13, 17, 19, 24, 26–28, 31, 35 78 101 37, 40, 42, 44, 46

87 95–96 48, 50–53, 55–56 88–90 97–99 102 61–65, 67–68

49, 54

57–60, 66, 69–72

100 103–106

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Chapter 13 Cognition and Emotion

Topic What is Emotion?

Emotion, Perception, and Attention

Factual

Conceptual

Multiple Choice

1–3, 5, 7–8

4, 6

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

68–69 88–89

67

True/False

9–11, 13, 17–18, 20– 22 70–72

Fill-Ins

91

Emotion and Memory

Essay Multiple Choice

Emotion and Language

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice

Emotion and Decision Making

True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

23–25, 27, 30–33, 37– 38, 40–42 73–82 92–96 43–45, 47–48, 52–53

100 14–16, 19

Applied

12

90 101-102 26, 28–29, 34–36, 39

104 46, 49–51

83–85 97 105–106 54-66 86–87 98–99 107

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Chapter 14 Cognitive Development

Topic A Lifespan Perspective

Infancy and Childhood (Neurological, Perception, and Attention) Infancy and Childhood (Memory)

Infancy and Childhood (Language)

Infancy and Childhood (Decision Making and Problem Solving) Aging (Neurological, Perception, and Attention) Aging (Memory)

Aging (Language)

Aging (Decision Making and Problem Solving)

Aging (Emotion)

Factual

Conceptual

Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False

1, 3–4

2, 5–6

Fill-Ins

128–130

Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay Multiple Choice True/False Fill-Ins Essay

Applied

127 7–8, 10–11, 15–21 108–111

23–26, 29–33, 38–40 112–113 131–132 43, 45–51, 55–57 114 133-135 62–74 115 136 139–140 75–82, 85–87 116–118 137–138 88–95, 97 119–120 139

142 9, 12–14, 22

143 27, 34, 36–37

28, 35

41–42, 44, 52–54

144 83

84

145 96

146 98–101 121–122 140 147 102–105 123–124 148 106–107 125–126 141 149