week 6

• Dr Philippe Chassy is an expert in the field of memory and cognition.
• External stimulus refers to the sensory memory, short term memory (STM), and long term memory (LTM) stages of memory.
• Memory is the main factor in our understanding of the world.
• Memory is the source of our ability to predict events.
• Memory is the planner and controller of our actions upon the world.
• Memory is the source of our skill.
• Working memory, as per Baddeley’s model, is the conscious experience of reality and understanding of the world and of others, serving these functions by integrating information from the senses and from long-term memory.
• Squire’s taxonomy of LTM categorizes items in memory as templates, prototypes, and concepts.
• Templates in memory are flexible structures that enable multiple instantiation of slots, for example, Turkish March revised.
• Prototypes are the most typical member of a category or a set of such members, for example, labrador or {labrador, alsatian, collie} for dog.
• Concepts are represented as a set of characteristic features, and these features are normally sufficient in identifying members, for example, 'barks' vs 'drinks water'.
• Concepts have a typicality gradient, with prototypes being the most typical.
• Prototypes are 'fuzzy' representations that enable flexibility.
• Brewer and Treyens (1981) conducted an experiment where participants were asked to wait in an office, and after going in another room, they were unexpectedly asked to recall the items of the office.
• Participants recalled all the items that would usually be present in an office, but they also recalled common items that were not in this particular office.
• The knowledge used to interpret the perceptual input has biased perception and memory.
• Scripts are goal-oriented memory structures that predict future events in the world and are used as a framework to understand events.
• Our restaurant script helps us draw a link between forgetting glasses and reading the menu.
• Abelson (1981) suggests that scripts are used to lead to automatic inferences about the environment.
• The psychological status of the script concept is discussed in American Psychologist, 36, 715-729.
• The concept of concepts can be generalised to the idea of models, which are descriptions of something.
• Mental models are used to explain, understand, and predict the world.
• Perception is a competition between all the models that are activated by the visual scene.
• When we search into long-term memory, we activate models.
• The spreading of activation within our network of knowledge is what makes us find the usually good answer.
• Collins and Loftus (1975) proposed a revision of Collins and Quillian’s model, eliminating the hierarchical structure and connecting concepts in a network with no constraint as to how related concepts should be organised.
• The idea of spreading of activation is used in the spreading-activation theory of semantic memory, where mentioning the word “car” activates the node for “car” and activation then spreads to all the connected nodes.
• Through short- and long-range wires, activation spreads automatically in the brain as a living organ.
• The continuous perceptual input creates a huge dynamical system.
• Expertise: Current scientific view includes working space, input, knowledge, executive, and patterns.
• Approaching expertise involves recognition of the pattern, where the information is retrieved from long-term memory and put into working memory.
• Deliberate practice, as proposed by Ericsson, Krampe, Tesch-Römer, involves no need to compute, it is knowledge retrieval.
• Deliberate practice plays a crucial role in the acquisition of expert performance.
• During learning, the speed and force with which you hit the notes can be adjusted.
• The motor programs controlling your fingers will fine tune their activity to improve performance.
• Fine tuning takes the form of adjusting the influence of source neurons on target neurons.
• Visual Motor Weight is a simple motor skill that requires the pairing of a visual stimulus with a motor action.
• The acquisition of this skill requires the establishment of neural connections.
• Sequences and chords are used in the perception of series of chords.
• The learning rate in skill acquisition follows what is known as the power law of practice, also known as the learning curve: RT = b•n -r + a.