PSY 410: Cognitive Psychology



PSY410 – Cognitive Psychology. J. P. Toth.

Study Guide for Exam 2

Note: Students are responsible for all lectures and assigned material regardless of what is on this guide. Items marked with an asterisk (*) are primarily covered in the textbook, not in lecture notes.

Memory: Overview

❑ What are the different ways in which memory can be defined?

❑ What are the three main processes that underlie all forms of memory?

❑ What functions does memory serve?

❑ What are the main kinds of memory?

Short-Term & Working Memory

❑ What is working memory? How is it defined? Give examples.

❑ What are the two main characteristics that working & short-term memory share?

❑ How does working memory differ from short-term memory?

❑ What terms did William James use to describe the distinction between short-term and long-term memory?

❑ What is the modal model of memory? What are its the three main components?

❑ *What is sensory memory?

❑ *What is iconic memory (aka. the icon) and what are its main characteristics?

❑ *What is the partial-report technique, and what does research using this technique tell us about sensory memory?

❑ In the context of STM, what are meant by the terms duration, capacity, & code?

❑ What method was used to study the duration of STM? How did it work?

❑ What is thought to be the general duration of STM?

❑ What is memory span?

❑ What is the magic number +/- 2? What is chunking?

❑ According to the modal model, in what code are items in STM stored?

❑ What are the two main forms of forgetting? How do they differ? Which is thought to provide the better explanation of forgetting?

❑ What is the serial position curve?

❑ What are primacy and recency effects? What explains these effects?

❑ What are the two main forms of amnesia and how do they differ?

❑ To what degree does the modal model provide a good explanation of amnesia?

❑ Describe the main problems with the modal model?

❑ *What does Sternberg's research say about how we search for items in STM?

❑ List & define the four main components of Baddeley & Hitch's (B&H) WM model? [note that only 3 components were discussed in class; the 4th is mentioned in the text as a new addition to the B&H model. The following questions refer to the 3 components discussed in class].

❑ What experimental phenomena support the existence of these 3 components?

❑ What brain regions appear to underlie the 3 components of B&H's WM model?

❑ How does the Operation-span task work? What does it measure?

❑ According to Engle (2002), WM is most related to what other cognitive process?

Long-Term Memory: Encoding

❑ Define and describe the difference between declarative & procedural memory.

❑ Define and describe the difference between semantic & episodic memory.

❑ What brain area/s is/are most crucial for declarative memory? Procedural memory?

❑ Describe the Levels of Processing (LoP) paradigm & the LoP effect.

❑ What are the primary implications of the LoP effect?

❑ What is the difference between intentional & incidental learning (or encoding)?

❑ According to the LoP approach, what are the three main encoding strategies for getting information into LTM?

❑ What concept best captures the idea of deep processing?

❑ Describe the various ways in which information can be elaborated at encoding?

❑ Explain the concepts of organization & distinctiveness in the context of encoding?

❑ What are mnemonics? What are the main mnemonic strategies? How do they work?

Long-Term Memory: Retrieval

❑ What is the difference between recognition & recall?

❑ What is the difference between free recall & cued recall?

❑ What are the two primary ways in which recognition memory is tested?

❑ *Who first documented the forgetting curve, and what does it tell us about forgetting?

❑ *What is a flashbulb memory and what does research tell us about this effect?

❑ What is encoding specificity (ES)? What experimental results support this idea?

❑ What is transfer appropriate processing (TAP)?

❑ In terms of explaining how memory works, how do ES & TAP differ from LoP?

❑ What is mean by the term encoding-retrieval interactions?

❑ What is state- or context-dependent memory? Give examples.

❑ What are the two main processes underlying the dual-process model of recognition memory? How are these processes defined?

Long-Term Memory: Implicit Memory

❑ What is implicit memory? How is it usually expressed in performance?

❑ How do amnesics perform on implicit memory tests relative to normals?

❑ How is implicit memory measured? What is priming?

❑ What is the difference between repetition priming & semantic priming?

❑ What are the three main classes of implicit memory tests?

❑ What is a dissociation? What do dissociations between tests tell us?

❑ List some variables that produce dissociations between implicit & explicit tests.

❑ Give an example of a dissociation between an implicit & explicit test.

❑ What are the two main explanations of implicit/explicit dissociations?

❑ What does it mean to say that an implicit (or explicit) test is "contaminated" by explicit (or implicit) memory? Why is this a problem?

❑ What are the 3 main methods for dealing with explicit contamination of implicit tests?

❑ According to Toth (2000), what is the most difficult issue to address when studying implicit (nonconscious) forms of memory?

Long-Term Memory: Distortion

❑ What does it mean to say that memory is reproductive? reconstructive?

❑ What classic memory researchers are most closely associated with ideas of memory as reproduction vs. reconstruction?

❑ Who conducted research on The War of the Ghosts and what does that research tells us about memory?

❑ *What is memory consolidation.

❑ Describe the Deese, Reodiger, McDermott (DRM) paradigm. What is the DRM effect & how is it explained?

❑ What are schema & scripts? How do they help memory? How might they create false memories?

❑ Define imagination inflation.

❑ How does Loftus's misinformation paradigm work? What is a misinformation effect?

❑ Define & give an example of retroactive and proactive interference (RI & PI).

❑ Define source memory & source confusion.

❑ Give an example for how priming & source confusion might lead to false memory.

❑ *Describe the recovered/false memory debate.

❑ What does the Jennifer Thompson case say about the distinction between memory as reproduction vs. reconstruction?

Knowledge (Semantic Memory)

❑ Describe the main questions that define research on semantic memory?

❑ What are the primary tasks used to measure the organization of semantic memory?

❑ Describe the Hierarchical Network model. How does this model exhibit cognitive economy? What data was this model designed to explain?

❑ Give examples of Frequency & Typicality effects in sentence verification.

❑ Describe the Spreading Activation model. How is it different from the Hierarchical model? How is strength of association indicated in the model?

❑ What is Hebb's Law? What is LTP? What is a Hebbian circuit?

❑ *Describe the Connectionist (PDP) approach to semantic memory. What are the main features of connectionist networks?

❑ What does the study of the brain & brain damage say about how semantic memory (general knowledge) is organized?

Knowledge (Concepts & Categories)

❑ What is a category? What is a concept? Give examples.

❑ What are the three major properties people use to categorize things?

❑ What are the three major types of categories? Give examples.

❑ What does it mean to say that a person understands a concept or category?

❑ Why is the process of categorization so important?

❑ What is implicit learning (also called *nonanalytic concept formation)? Describe the two major paradigms (covered in class) used to explore this form of learning.

❑ According to your instructor, what are the three major ways by which people categorize things?

❑ Why are some categories difficult to explain in terms of rules or defining features (called the *classical view in the textbook)?

❑ What two theories assume a resemblance- (or similarity-) based categorization process?

❑ What does it mean to say that some categories have fuzzy boundaries, a graded structure, or a family-resemblance structure?

❑ What is a typicality effect? What are some of the different tasks in which this effect is shown. Give examples.

❑ Describe the idea of a prototype. Be specific.

❑ Describe the idea that prototypes are organized in a hierarchical structure?

❑ What is the basic level of categorization, why is it unique, and what explains its' uniqueness?

❑ Describe the exemplar view of categorization.

❑ Can the exemplar view explain typicality effects? If so, how? Can the exemplar view explain findings that the prototype view cannot?

❑ *Describe the schematic view of categorization.

❑ Describe the explanation-based view of categorization (called the *knowledge-based view in the textbook). What findings support this view?

❑ What is psychological essentialism?

❑ In what way might all four (or five, if you count schemas) theories of categorization be correct?

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