CONSCIOUSNESS & ATTENTION
One's moment-to-moment subjective experience of the world.
What is consciousness?
Biological patterns that occur at regular intervals as a function of time of day; the term roughly translates to "about a day."
What are circadian rhythms?
A relatively enduring change in behavior resulting from experience.
What is learning?
The principle that any behavior leading to a satisfying state of affairs becomes more likely, while behaviors leading to annoying states become less likely.
What is the Law of Effect?
The ability to store and retrieve information.
What is memory?
Cognitive frameworks that organize and interpret information; thinking "restaurant" automatically activates menus, waiters, and ordering.
What are schemas?
The fading of memory over time when not used.
What is decay?
The individual, subjective qualities of experience; what makes the redness of red feel a particular way to you.
What are qualia?
Light hits the eyes, signals the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, which signals the pineal gland to secrete this sleep-promoting hormone.
What is melatonin?
A decrease in response to a harmless, repeated stimulus is this; an increase in response to a threatening or painful stimulus is this.
What are habituation and sensitization?
Adding a pleasant stimulus to increase a behavior is this; removing an unpleasant stimulus to increase a behavior is this.
What are positive and negative reinforcement?
Consciously retrieved memory is this kind; memory expressed through actions, responses, or reactions is this kind.
What are explicit and implicit memory?
Simply repeating something over and over to keep it active produces shallow processing; linking new information to what you already know produces deep processing and stronger long-term memory.
What are maintenance and elaborative rehearsal?
The temporary inability to retrieve something, often due to interference from similar words; the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
What is blocking?
A failure to notice large changes in one's environment, illustrating how selective attention can be.
What is change blindness?
Common misconception is that the brain shuts down here; in fact many regions are more active than during wakefulness.
What is sleep?
In the dog-salivation experiment, food naturally triggers salivation. Identify both halves of this innate pairing.
What are the unconditioned stimulus (food) and unconditioned response (salivation)?
Reinforcing successive approximations of a target behavior; how trainers build complex animal acts and how new skills are constructed piece by piece.
What is shaping?
Memory for past experiences tied to a specific time and place is this; memory for facts independent of personal experience is this.
What are episodic and semantic memory?
The model proposing that what determines whether you remember something is how deeply you process it at the moment of learning.
What is the levels of processing model?
Loss of past memories is this; inability to form new memories is this.
What are retrograde and anterograde amnesia?
Voluntary, goal-directed attention is this kind; attention captured involuntarily by danger signals or sudden noise is this kind. Give one example of each.
What are endogenous (e.g., searching for your gate) and exogenous (e.g., flinching at a fire alarm) attention?
The paradoxical sleep stage with rapid eye movements, motor paralysis, and most dreaming. People cycle through it about five times per night, and report dreaming about 80 percent of the time when awakened from it.
What is REM sleep?
The gradual formation of an association between CS and US; the critical element is timing, also called by this term.
What are acquisition and contiguity?
Name all four partial reinforcement schedules covered in lecture.
What are Fixed Ratio, Variable Ratio, Fixed Interval, and Variable Interval?
Two implicit memory types: skills and habits like riding a bike is one; facilitation from prior exposure (completing "_U_SE" as "NURSE" after seeing "DOCTOR") is the other.
What are procedural memory and priming?
Memory aids that impose structure on material to be learned, including the method of loci and the peg method.
What are mnemonics?
Prior information disrupts memory for new information in this; new information disrupts memory for old in this.
What are proactive and retroactive interference?
Slower, effortful, serial processing for complex tasks like driving in a rainstorm; vs. fast, parallel, low-effort processing illustrated by the famous task where naming the ink color of a conflicting color word is hard.
What are controlled and automatic processing (and the Stroop test)?
Dreams in this stage are bizarre, emotional, and visually vivid, with brain regions for motivation, emotion, and vision active while the prefrontal cortex is not; dreams in the other stage are relatively dull, like wondering what sweater to wear, with general deactivation across many brain regions.
What are REM and non-REM dreams?
The CR weakens when the CS is repeatedly presented without the US; this inhibits the bond but does not eliminate it. Then, after a delay, presenting the CS alone produces the response again.
What are extinction and spontaneous recovery?
The acquisition or modification of a behavior after watching another individual perform it; includes imitation of observed behavior and learning consequences by watching others be rewarded or punished.
What are social learning, modeling, and vicarious learning?
Brief traces lasting about a third of a second is this system; a storage system that briefly holds limited information in awareness for about 20–30 seconds is this; an active processing system that manipulates information for current use is this.
What are sensory memory, short-term memory, and working memory?
The gradual biological process through which long-term memories become stable, enhanced by repetition, importance, emotional arousal, and sleep.
What is consolidation?
The continual recurrence of unwanted memories, very common in PTSD; the amygdala underlies why emotional events stick.
What is persistence?
The attended ear hears "they threw stones at the bank yesterday" while the unattended ear hears either "river" or "money." The listener's interpretation of "bank" shifts depending on the unattended content. Name the paradigm and what it demonstrates.
What is dichotic listening, demonstrating unconscious processing?
Name the three functions of sleep covered in lecture, and any two consequences of sleep deprivation.
What are restoration, following circadian rhythms, and facilitation of learning; consequences include cognitive impairment, mood problems, immune compromise (any two)?
A child bitten by a German shepherd cries at all large dogs but not small ones. Name the two processes at work.
What are stimulus generalization and stimulus discrimination?
A worker paid every two weeks. A salesperson on commission for every fifth sale. A fisherman casting until a catch. A diner checking email for an important reply. Name each schedule, and which type produces the most resistance to extinction.
What are FI (worker), FR (salesperson), VR (fisherman), VI (email); variable schedules (especially VR) are most resistant to extinction?
A patient with hippocampal damage cannot remember meeting his therapist yesterday but has gradually gotten faster at a mirror-tracing task across sessions. Which memory system is intact and which is impaired?
What is intact procedural (implicit) memory and impaired episodic (explicit) memory?
After your friend's birthday party, you remember a red balloon at the entrance. Weeks later, in conversation, someone mentions a "huge blue balloon," and from then on you remember it as blue. Name the process.
What is reconsolidation?
Highly vivid, confident memories of surprising or emotionally intense events. The amygdala enhances consolidation in the hippocampus, but details still get forgotten over time despite the felt vividness. Name the phenomenon, and the related phenomenon by which leading questions can distort or implant memories entirely.
What are flashbulb memories and suggestibility?
Once thought to be the same thing, the guide distinguishes the broader subjective awareness of the world from the narrower process of selecting and processing limited information from senses, memory, and other cognitive processes. The classic model of this narrower process proposes it works like a mechanism that lets important information pass and retains the irrelevant.
What are consciousness vs. attention, and filter theory?
Hobson and McCarley's theory that the brain tries to make sense of random neural activity during sleep by synthesizing it with stored memories.
What is activation-synthesis theory?
The 1919 case study demonstrating that emotional responses can be learned through conditioning rather than arising from unconscious conflicts. An 11-month-old was presented with a white rat (CS) paired with a loud clanging sound (US), and came to fear the rat and similar furry objects.
What is the Little Albert study?
Adding an unpleasant consequence to decrease a behavior is this; removing a pleasant one to decrease a behavior is this.
What are positive and negative punishment?
The strategy that turns "PBSFOXCNNABCCBSMTVNBC" into seven memorable units, and the classic estimate of working memory capacity it helps overcome.
What are chunking and 7 plus or minus 2?
The gradual biological process by which long-term memories become stable; lecture identifies four factors that enhance it (repetition, importance, emotional arousal, and one nightly state) and notes that this state strengthens memory by replaying information.
What are consolidation and the role of sleep in memory consolidation?
Name any three of the major causes of forgetting covered in lecture, and identify which one specifically involves emotional events sticking due to amygdala activity
What are decay, blocking, proactive interference, retroactive interference, and persistence (any three); persistence is the amygdala-linked one?