Visual Imagery & Auditory Imagery
Define pitch?
Define timbre?
how high or low a sound stimulus is
the sound quality of a tone; ex. a flute will sound more pure than a trombone
How do demand characteristics affect an experiment?
If participants know the aim of the experiment, they may unconsciously act different in order to support the hypothesis, therefore affecting the results.
Define semantic memory
our knowledge about the world
Define a schema
generalized, well-integrated knowledge about a situation, event, or person; the building blocks for representing our thoughts
Who conducted a meta-analysis on gender comparisons in cognitive processes and what did the results show?
Janet Hyde; males are slightly better at spatial reasoning
Most research on mental imagery focuses on what?
Visual Imagery
What is the landmark effect?
What is border bias?
when traveling to a landmark, we perceive it to be a shorter distance than if we were to travel to a nonlandmark
we estimate 2 locations to be farther apart if they are on different sides of a geographical border
Define a prototype and explain the prototype approach
best, most typical example of a category
when deciding if an item belongs in a category, we compare it with a prototype. If it's similar, we put it in the category
What is a life script?
list of events that a person believes would be most important throughout their life
What did Chambers and Reisberg's ambiguous figure experiment show? (duck/rabbit experiment)
Participants could not mentally reinterpret the image; when they drew the image, they were able to reinterpret it.
Conclusions: a strong propositional code can override an analog code; it is easier to reverse a visual stimulus than a mental image
What is an analog code?
What is a propositional code?
mental representation that resembles the physical object
abstract, language-like representation of the physical object; not visual
What is the rotation heuristic?
What is the alignment heuristic?
a slightly tilted figure will be remembered as more vertical or horizontal than it really is
separate geographic structures will be remembered as more lined up than they really are
superordinate-level: very general categories; "furniture"
basic-level: moderately specific; "chair"
subordinate-level: most specific; "desk chair"
What is verbatim memory?
What is abstraction?
our word-for-word recall of information; generally very poor
memory process that stores the meaning of a message, not the exact words
What did Rosch and Mervis conclude in regards to family resemblance?
the most prototypical items share the most attributes with other items in the same category (more detail on pages 161 and 163)
How do males and females differ in their cognitive skills?
Verbal ability and mathematical ability is the same, with males having slightly better spatial abilities; spatial ability depends on how you grow up, males are not inherently better at it than females
Define the situated cognition approach
what we know depends on the situation we are in; we make use of info in the environment around us
What is the parallel distributed processing approach?
cognitive processes can be represented by a model where activation flows through linked networks; AKA "connectionism" or "neural networks"
What does the constructive model of memory propose?
People integrate info from sentences to construct larger, more complex ideas; they then believe these complex sentences were what they originally saw, because they cannot break them back down
What were the results of Kosslyn's study that conducted PET scans during mental rotation?
Participants who rotated the physical object showed activity in their primary motor cortex when visualizing it later; participants who did NOT physically rotate it, but saw it rotated, showed no activity in the primary motor cortex.
What are the conclusions about the characteristics of visual imagery? (hint: 3 of them)
1. a large mental rotation of an image takes longer, just as it takes longer to rotate a physical object
2. we make distance judgments similarly for visual images and physical stimuli
3. we make decisions about shape similarly for visual images and physical stimuli
List the spatial dimensions from most important to least important. (spatial framework model)
above-below, front-back, right-left
What is ACT-R?
What is declarative knowledge?
Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational; a model depicting all of our cognitive processes
part of ACT-R; knowledge about facts and things
What is the pragmatic view of memory?
we pay attention to the aspect of a message that is most relevant to our current goals; we know what we need to pay attention to and adjust our focus based on that
What was the process of Branson and Franks experiment that displayed false alarms and led to the constructive model of memory?
They gave participants a set of sentences, and then later another set. In this second set some were the same and some were slightly altered. Participants claimed to remember the slightly altered sentences in the first set because they combined the information.