Transcript Jul29
Cognitive Processes
PSY 334
Chapter 5 (Cont.)
Chapter 6 – Human Memory:
Encoding and Storage
July 29, 2003
Psychological Reality of
Schemas
Brewer & Treyens – subjects left in a
room for 35 sec, then asked to list what
they saw there:
Good recall for items in schema
False recall for items typically in schema
but missing from this room.
29/30 recalled chair, desk; 8 recalled skull
9 recalled books when there were none
Degrees of Category
Membership
Members of categories can vary
depending on whether their features
satisfy schema constraints:
Gradation from least typical to most typical.
Rosch – rated typicality of birds from 1-7:
Robin = 1.1
Chicken = 3.8.
Faster judgments of pictures of typical
items, higher sentence-frame ratings.
Disagreements at Category
Boundaries
McCloskey & Glucksberg – subjects
disagree about whether atypical items
belong in a category:
30/30 apple is a fruit, chicken is not a fruit
16/30 pumpkin is a fruit
Subjects change their minds when tested
later.
Labov – boundaries for cups and bowls
change with context.
Event Concepts (Scripts)
Schank & Abelson – stereotypic
sequences of actions called scripts.
Bower, Black & Turner – script for going
to a restaurant.
Scripts affect memory for stories:
Story elements included in script well
remembered, atypical elements not
recalled, false recognition of script items.
Items out of order put back in typical order.
Two Theories
What happens mentally when we
categorize?
Two theories are being debated.
Abstraction theory -- we abstract and
store the general properties of instances.
Prototype theory.
Instance theory -- we store the multiple
instances themselves and then compare
average distances among them.
Neural Nets for Learning
Schemas
Gluck & Bower – designed a neural net
that abstracts central tendencies without
storing instances.
Patients with four symptoms classified into
two hypothetical diseases.
One disease 3 times more frequent than
the other.
Error correction changes the strength of
associations in the network (delta rule).
Model predicted subject decisions well.
Evidence From Neuroscience
People with temporal lobe deficits
selectively impaired in recognizing
natural categories but not artifacts (tools)
People with frontoparietal lesions
unaffected for biological categories but
cannot recognize artifacts (tools).
Artifacts may be organized by what we
do with them whereas biological
categories are identified by shape.
Bartlett’s War of the Ghosts
Demo
Cognitive Processes
PSY 334
Chapter 6 – Human Memory:
Encoding and Storage
July 29, 2003
Ebbinghaus
First rigorous investigation of human
memory – 1885.
Taught himself nonsense syllables
DAX, BUP, LOC
Savings – the amount of time needed to
relearn a list after it has already been
learned and forgotten.
Forgetting function – most forgetting
takes place right away.
Memory Models
Atkinson & Shiffrin – proposed a three-
stage model including:
Sensory store – if attended goes to STM
Short-term memory (STM) – if rehearsed
goes to LTM
Long-term memory (LTM)
No longer the current view of memory.
Still presented in some books.
Criticisms of STM
Rate of forgetting seemed to be quicker
than Ebbinghaus’s data, but is not really.
Amount of rehearsal appeared to be
related to transfer to long-term memory.
Later it was found that the kind of
rehearsal matters, not the amount.
Passive rehearsal does little to achieve
long-term memory.
Information may go directly to LTM.
Depth of Processing
Craik & Lockhart – proposed that it is not
how long material is rehearsed but the
depth of processing that matters.
Levels of processing demo.
Working Memory
Baddeley – in working memory speed of
rehearsal determines memory span.
Articulatory loop – stores whatever can
be processed in a given amount of time.
Word length effect: 4.5 one-syllable words
remembered compared to 2.6 long ones.
1.5 to 2 seconds material can be kept.
Visuospatial sketchpad – rehearses
images.
Central executive – controls other systems.
Delayed Matching Task
Delayed Matching to Sample – monkey
must recall where food was placed.
Monkeys with lesion to frontal cortex
cannot remember food location.
Human infants can’t do it until 1 year old.
Regions of frontal cortex fire only during
the delay – keeping location in mind.
Different prefrontal regions are used to
remember different kinds of information.