Why do I keep forgetting
the key area in the brain for memory is.... - we know this from HM (the most famous neuropsychological patient in the history of psychology).
hippocampus!
The hippocampus is a convergence zone for all this information, so when it gets damaged, your ability to tie together memories gets disrupted and you can’t store your memories
you will remember better if you are physically located in the same place you learned something
context dependence
scuba divers were taught things either underwater or above water, then were tested either underwater or above water - they remember better if they are tested in the same location where they learned
procedural memory is also implicit memory - knowing how to do things
What is the implication of prosody/tone of voice according to Paul Rice?
you can make different implications about the same sentence by putting the emphasis on different words
when you hear the sentence “this is a lovely cat,” you can decompose it into 5 separate words - you can do that even though people speak quickly and there are no pauses in the speech stream of any fluently speaking adult (there are actually more pauses in the middle of words than between words)
HM had (a) ______ amnesia - he couldn't form new memories but the soap operas, where you can’t remember your past is an example pf (b) _______
b) Retrograde
you remember better if the way you first encoded the information is consistent with the way you’ll eventually try to remember it
encoding specificity
False
when you see something, your brain cells fire in a certain pattern - some of those patterns overlap - so when you see prof rhodes teaching class, the pattern overlaps somewhat with the pattern when you see another prof teaching, as well as the pattern when you see prof rhodes outside class - like how the numbers on a calculator overlap in the areas they light up
What was so special about nim chimpsky
nim chimpsky was a famous chimp who could express certain ideas through sign language - she was able to put together word combinations that had never been taught to her
once you have parsed a word, you still need to figure out what it means - if you point at a dog and say “gavagai,” most people assume that gavagai means dog - instead of assuming it means animal, nose, brown fur, etc. - the meaning of words is ambiguous because you don’t know what words allude to
HM did remember things from before the surgery - this means that memories aren’t directly stored in the hippocampus - now, we think that the hippocampus stores the memory initially, but it is eventually transferred to other brain areas in a process called
the psychological state you were in when you learned also matters - if you learn something drunk, you might remember it better when you are drunk
state dependent memory
semantics - how you produce and process sounds
phonology - how you put different words together to communicate ideas
syntax - word meaning
semantics - word meaning
phonology - how you produce and process sounds
syntax - how you put different words together to communicate ideas
how do children learn syntax?
a) direct instruction
b) imitation
c) reinforcement
d) universal grammar
it is not through direct instruction - children still learn syntax even when they get no instruction, and children often resist direct instruction
it is also not imitation - children say a lot of things that they have never heard (ex: they apply past tense rules in cases where adults would never do that)
it is also not about reinforcement - parents tend to praise children based on their semantics, even if the things they say are completely grammatically wrong - parents pay attention to meaning, not grammar
the prominent idea today is that syntax learning is pretty easy because of universal grammar - the mind is on the lookout for relevant rules, so it only takes a little bit of exposure to set the parameters of a specific language
paul grice developed the idea of implicature and the principle of charity, explain.
we imply more than we say with words, and listeners can pick up on those implications - this works because listeners assume that speakers are being maximally informative
if you ask your roommate what they bought at the store and they say “apples and cereal,” they probably didn’t also buy cookies
the principle of charity - speakers and listeners are charitable to one another - assume that the other is being communicative and informative
you have to say if something is a word or a non-word - you are more likely to say scalpel is a word if it comes after doctor than if it comes after professor - this is because doctor and scalpel are related semantically - they have partially overlapping meanings in a way that professor and scalpel don’t (the patterns for scalpel and professor don’t overlap)
this means when you hear doctor, scalpel is already partially activated in your brain - not enough that you will think of the word scalpel, but enough that the word scalpel will be a little easier to activate when you see it on the screen
What task is this?
lexical decision task
a) factual knowledge of things like word meanings, knowing paris is the capital of france, etc. - you learned the information at some point, and now you can retrieve it
b) memory of experiences from your past
c) memory of learned skills that does not require conscious recollection.
b) episodic memory
c) procedural memory
if you memorized a list of words based on rhyme, it’s easier to remember them using rhymes
True
in general semantic encoding is better than surface encoding, but if the question is eventually asked using rhymes, surface encoding might be better
(a) problems with syntax, but no problem with meaning - the person can address questions with single word answers, but can’t put words together into sentences
(b) problems with meaning, but not syntax - the person can say complex sentences, but the words don’t make any sense
(a) Broca’s aphasia
(b) Wernicke’s aphasia
there are four strategies to solve referencing problem, 2 of them are:
(1) children think people produce words in an intentional way, especially for verb learning - if you make a doll slide intentionally, they learn that slide means moving down the slide, but if you accidentally drop a doll down the slide, they don’t learn that meaning
(1) children have a bias to assume that nouns refer to basic-level categories (dog, ball, hammer, doll, etc.) - so when they hear a noun associated with a ball, their first guess is that the noun refers to balls, not all round things, and not that specific ball
intentionality
category assumption - taxonomic assumption
experiment: if I teach you to do something difficult, like drawing something you only see in a mirror, you would initially do pretty bad, but on the second and third days you would get better and better at it - HM would show the same pattern on the third day, even though he would tell you he’s never done the task before
This is an example of (a) _________ memory which is also a type of (b)________ memory
b) implicit
a) the processing of information into the memory system
b) the retention of encoded information over time
c) the process of getting information out of memory storage
b) storage
c) retrieval
grammar and semantics are completely separable
True
the sentence “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” makes no semantic sense, but we can see that it is grammatically good - we know this from neuroscientific studies: grammar and meaning are stored in separate parts of the brain
What does the following statement mean? Explain with an example.
Young babies are “citizens of the world”
detecting the differences between different sounds is really hard - every time you hear the p at the beginning of the word potato, it sounds a little bit different because of the person’s voice, background noise, whatever was said before, etc. (similar to how different fonts look different, but we know which letters mean the same thing)
the sounds /p/ and /b/ differ only in the voice onset time - when you make the shape with your lips relative to when you vocal chords make the sound
we have categorical perception - there is a boundary where you perceive different sounds differently - you don’t hear the variability among “pa”s, you just hear the category “pa” - this allows you to hear pa and ba as different even though they are actually very similar
some languages don’t make the same distinctions as others - la and ra are very similar, but we use them differently in English - Japanese doesn’t use these sounds separately (they just have an intermediate sound) - so in Japanese, it is not relevant to make a categorical distinction between la and ra
young babies are “citizens of the world” - they can hear the distinctions between every sound in the world - but once they reach 10-12 months, they can only hear the distinctions between sounds in their native language
there are four strategies to solve referencing problem, 2 of them are:
(3) babies pay attention to what other people are paying attention to - they assume that what you are looking at is likely the meaning of what you just said (as opposed to what they themselves are looking at)
(4) children expect that things just have one name, so they assume that new words must apply to new things - this is easier and easier the more words you have accumulated because you can rule out things you already know the names of
social referencing
novelty matching - mutual exclusivity