psych 102 final

• linguistic relativity: language can shape our thinking but is not absolute in determining our thoughts.
• (Features of learning)

  Phonemes: basic unit of sound in a language

  • bat and pat have one different phoneme (b/p)
• (Features of language)

  Morphemes: smallest unit of meaning in a language

  • created by linking phonemes together
• (Features of language)

  Syntax: set of rules for arranging words to form a sentence
• (Features of language)

  Extralinguistic information: information that is not part of a language itself, but plays an important role in how we understand it
• Representative heuristic: involves judging the probability of an event by its similarity to a prototype

  • ex: Tversky and Kahnemen
• Representative heuristic: involves judging the probability of an event by its similarity to a prototype

  • ex: Tversky and Kahneman: gave description of a person, then asked which profession they would be best suited for.
  • Tendency to ignore base rates: people do not consider the frequency of membership in the categories.
• availability heuristic: estimates of the likelihood of an occurrence are based on the ease with which examples of the occurrence comes to our minds.

  • Ex: safer to travel by car or plane? most people say car, but plane is safer.
  • response owe to salience: the media influences us when they report salient events. Guided by emotions
• hindsight bias: tendency to overestimate how well we could have predicted something after it has already occurred.

  aka: "I knew it all along" effect
• Confirmation bias: tendency to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs, and deny , dismiss, distort or ignore evidence that contradicts them.

  • Important to consider disconfirming evidence.
• amnesia: loss of memory, or memory abilities, due to brain damage or disease

  • often result of serious head injury or stroke
• Retrograde amnesia: loss of memory of events before the injury

  • Ribot's law: temporal gradient in retrograde amnesia
• Anterograde amnesia: loss of memory of events after the injury
• (Problems in memory)

  Overconfidence: certainty in the accuracy of memory. Stems from two things

  1. source memory: memory of the exact source of the information
  2. Processing fluency: the ease which something comes to mind
• source monitoring: the ability to remember the source of a memory, including whether it is something encountered in the real world, or imagined.
• source monitoring failure: remember the content of the information but cannot attribute it to a particular source
• cryptomnesia: a person unconcisouly plagiarizes information that they have heard before. Because they forget the source, they mistakenly think its a new idea that they thought of.
• (implanting false memories)

  Leading questions: suggest which answer to a question is appropriate

  ex: the words used to describe a car crash affected the way people remembered it
• Implanting completely false memories:

  • can not implant just any memory
  • depends on plausibility and how recent the "event" is
  • plausible events include those that support our beliefs -- more likely to become memories
• (The biology of memory)

  • the "engram" is diffused across many brain areas
  • Hebb's rule: neurons that fire together, wire together
• Long-term potentiation (LTP): a long-lasting strengthening of the connections between two neurons after synchronous activation
• Long-term depression (LTD): a long-lasting weakening between two neurons after low patterns of activation
• (Key areas of brain)

  Hippocampus: critical for the formation of many declarative memories, including both episodic and semantic memory.

  1. episodic: remembering an event
  2. semantic: remembering a word
• (key areas of brain)

  amygdala: plays an important role in emotional memories
• (key areas of brain)

  Prefrontal cortex: a "bank" of memories

  • allows ability to deliberately access memories
• (key areas of brain)

  Cerebellum: important for procedural or motor memories

  • necessary for memory consider how we move around
  • doesn't require conscious thinking
• encoding specificity: we will better remember the information if the conditions which we retrieve the information are similar to when we encoded that information
• Distributed practice: learning in small amounts over time (ex: studying routinely)

  Massed practice: learning a lot at once

  (ex: cramming)

  • distributed tends to out perform massed
• reliability: consistency when consistency is expected

  • measures can be reliable (consistent) while being inaccurate
• test-retest: administer the same test to the same participants on multiple occasions, under the same circumstances
• interrater reliability: the extent of which independent raters of observers agrees in their assessment

  • ex: 3 judges
• validity: extent to which a measure assesses what is it supposed to assess
• Three step sequence for memory

  1. encoding: initially putting info into brain
  2. storage: process of keeping info in brain
  3. retrieval: retrieve info from long-term memory

  • retrieval cues help the likelihood of accessing info in LTM
• priming: exposed to certain information influences future processes
• latent learning: learning that is not directly observable
• observational learning: learning by watching others
• Sleep cycle

  Stage 1:

  • light sleep
  • 10 - 15 mins
  • alpha (relaxation) to theta
  • sudden jerky movements may occur

  Stage 2:

  • sleep spindles: short, intense bursts of electrical activity
  • k complexes: sharp rise and falls of amplitude waves

  Stages 3 and 4:

  • deep sleep
  • delta waves prevalent
  • necessary to feel fully rested

  Stage 5: REM

  • rapid eye movements
  • increase in heart rate and breathing
  • sleep paralysis
• smell

  • volatile chemical substances are picked up by olfactory receptor cells (each olfactory cell detects one kind of compound)
  • message is sent to olfactory bulbs and relayed to limbic system and other areas
  • odours can evoke memories
• Taste

  • gutation; chemical sense
  • as we chew, air is forced into nasal cavity

  five major tastes:

  • sweet, salty, sour, bitter, Unami
  • taste maps are a myth
• Taste receptors (taste buds):

  • soluble chemical substances
  • situated in gaps between papillae