Transcript IB Course Companion Cognitive Studies

Paper One Material
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Aim: investigate if schemas affect both encoding and retrieval.
Procedure: Controlled lab exp. Participants heard a story about
two boys who skipped school and spent the day in an isolated
house -home of one of the boys. Some details of the house were
given. Condition one heard the story from the perspective of a
potential housebuyer. Condition two from the perspective of a
potential burglar. Then the participants performed a distraction
task for 12 minutes. Then all were asked to recall. In a second
trial, half of the participants were given the opposite schema
(either burglar or house buyer) and asked to recall details of the
house. Half were asked to recall with the original schema.
Results: the new schema changed recall as more details of the
new schema were recalled (10%) but 7% of the original was
recalled as well in the group who changed schema. Schema
processing seems to affect both encoding and recall.
Found at: http://www.funnelbrain.com/c-1312868-andersonpichert-1978.html
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John Darley and Paget Gross showed similar effects when they varied
whether a young girl, Hannah, seemed poor or wealthy. College students
watched a video of Hannah playing in her neighborhood, and read a brief
fact sheet that described her background. Some of the students watched
Hannah playing in a low-income housing estate, and her parents were
described as high school graduates with blue collar jobs; the remaining
students watched Hannah behaving similarly, but this time she was filmed
playing in a tree-lined middle-class neighborhood, and her parents were
described as college-educated professionals. The students were asked to
assess Hannah's academic ability after watching her respond to a series of
achievement-test questions. In the video, Hannah responded
inconsistently sometimes answering difficult questions correctly and
sometimes answering simpler questions incorrectly. Hannah's academic
ability remained difficult to discern, but that didn't stop the students
from using her socioeconomic status as a proxy for academic ability.
When Hannah was labeled "middle-class," the students believed she
performed close to a fifth-grade level, but when she was labeled "poor,"
they believed she performed below a fourth-grade level.
Found at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/alternativetruths/201005/why-its-dangerous-label-people
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Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford, and
her colleagues showed white college students a pictures of
a man who was racially ambiguous--he could have plausibly
fallen into the "white" category or the "black" category. For
half the students, the face was described as belonging to a
white man, and for the other half it was described as
belonging to a black man. In one task, the experimenter
asked the students to spend four minutes drawing the face
as it sat on the screen in front of them. Although all the
students were looking at the same face, those who tended
to believe that race is an entrenched human characteristic
drew faces that matched the stereotype associated with
the label (see a sample below). The racial labels formed a
lens through with the students saw the man, and they
were incapable of perceiving him independently of that
label.
Found at:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/alternativetruths/201005/why-its-dangerous-label-people
 In
lab, participants hear a list of items and
then immediately recalled them in any order.
 Participants recalled words from the
beginning and the end of the list best—u
shaped curve. If given a filler/distracter task
after hearing last words, primacy effect
disappeared but recency effect remained.
 Participants
asked to read prose and
understand it while remembering number
sequences. Found in dual-task experiment
that there was a clear and systematic
increase in reasoning time but that task was
impaired, although not entirely catastrophic,
if the participants had to learn sequences of
six rather than three numbers.
 Conclusion: more than one unitary store
 Participants
either asked to learn word list
by either imagery or rehearsal, on own or in
presence of concurrent visual noise (changing
dot pattern) or concurrent verbal noise
(foreign language speech).
 Conclusion: Imagery group not affected by
verbal but disturbed by visual. Rehearsal
group was not disturbed by visual but was by
verbal.
 Working
Memory Test Battery for Children
 Improvement in performance in working
memory capacity from the age of 5 until 15
years
 Varies widely across individuals of same age
 Problems of working memory are associated
with problem in academic performance.
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Word recall task in US and among the Kpelle people of rural Liberia.
Researchers observed everyday cognitive activities to develop relevant and familiar
recall tasks.
Children from different age groups asked to recall as many items as possible from
four categories: utensils, clothes, tools, and vegetables.
The non-schooled children did not improve on free recall task after the age of 10.
After 15 practice trials, they remembered only two more items to the average of 10
recalled. School attending children learned the lists just as rapidly as children in
the US and used same strategy of categorical similarity to recall.
plate cutlass
calabash hoe
pot knife
pan file
cup hammer
potato trousers
onion singlet
banana head tie
orange shirt
coconut hat
 Mayan
children did better in a memory task
if they were given one that was meaningful
to them in local terms. Researchers made a
mini model of Mayan village like the
children’s own. 20 miniature objects a set of
80 were placed in the model. Then the 20
were removed, and the experimenter asked
the children to reconstruct the shown scene.
 Results: the Mayan children did slightly
better than the US children.
 PET
scan of reduced metabolic activity in
hippocampus during early stages of
Alzheimer’s disease.
 Longitudinal study of 53 normal, healthy
participants—some for nine years and others
for up to 24 years.
 Early signs were associated with later
Alzheimer’s development.
 Emotions
are physiological signals in reaction
to external stimuli, and feelings (conscious
interpretation of the emotion) arise when
the brain interprets the stimuli.
 Emotional
reactions are flexible due to
evolution. 1. short route—amygdala reacts
and activates response system 2. long route—
sensory input goes via sensory cortex to
hippocampus, involves evaluation of stimulus
and consideration of an appropriate response
 Certain memories have emotional
significance that might explain why
memories based on emotional events are
remembered better, as well as why PTSD
patients have problems forgetting.
 Appraisal
of threat and appraisal of one’s
resources
 Problem focused coping—aimed to change
the problematic situation that causes stress
 Emotion focused coping—handle the
emotions rather than changing the situation,
ex. Escape, self control, social support,
positive reappraisal
 Lazarus 1975 Appraisal theory—cognitive
factors can modulate stress responses
 Participants
viewed film about aboriginal
initiation ceremonial genital cutting.
 Experimental levels of three different
soundtracks (trauma condition—emphasized
the pain and mutilation, denial condition—
willing and happy, intellectualization
condition—anthropological interpretation)
 Participants reacted more emotionally to the
trauma condition (heart rate and galvanic
skin response).
 Prolonged
stress can damage neurons in the
hippocampus but this can be reversed if
normal levels of cortisol are restored.
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Elderly participants to study for five years the role of
cortisol on memory
Cortisol secretion was too high in 30% of population.
Excessive cortisol secretion participants showed
memory impairment and atrophy of the hippocampus.
2002 follow-up study—two groups (moderate level
and high level/impairment), both given anti-cortisol
secretion drug metyrapone, then memory test, then
hydrocortisone to restore cortisol levels, compared to
placebo group; found that moderate group had no
problem restoring normal memory function; high
level had no memory improvement, hydrocortisone
caused even greater memory loss.
 Data
from EEG and MEG to identify
interactive patterns of neurons in cerebral
cortex during visual tasks.
 Frontal and parietal in coordinating attention
and action; occipital lobe in handling and
maintaining sensory information about visual
stimuli.
 80
participant questionnaires—where they
had learned shocking events
 Reported vivid memories of where, what,
and feelings about shocking public event like
assassination of John F. Kennedy
 Flashbulb memories, too, of personal events.
 FM caused by the physiological arousal
arousal (amygdala).