Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 13
Language comprehension
How we understand speech and written language.
Understanding requires accessing semantic information and appreciating the meaning of words, the intention of the utterance, and sometimes the non-literal meaning.
The objective is to understand what is being communicate.
At lower levels the processes involved in speech perception (the process by which we convert a stream of speech into individual words and sentences) and visual word differ markedly.
Speech processing is a fast, accurate and automatic process. Once we have acquired language, we readily understand a spoken utterance.
The speed with which the task is achieved does not reflect the complexity of the process.
Word recognition is the starting point for language comprehension and understanding language is the key of much of higher cognition.
Prosody: the rhythm, intonation and stress patterns in speech.
Aspects of an utterance’s sound that are not specific to the words themselves.
While we perceive a sequence of words within the stream of speech, the speech signal itself is not produced as discrete units.
There are few clear boundaries between words in spontaneous speech and sounds blend together as they are produced so that phonemes differ as a function of the other sounds used.
The speech sounds produced by a single speaker vary with context.
There are further differenced when we consider: individual differences, differences in accent, and changes over time.
Factors such as speech rate, the speakers age and sex, as well as the amount and type of background noise affect the acoustic form of a spoken word.
The sounds we produce change with age and they change as societies change.
A speaker may produce as many as 150 words per minute, with each word spoken in, on average 400 milliseconds.
When someone is speaking quickly, this rate can double.
Speech occurs at a rate of 10-15 phonemes per second, and can be understood at rates as fast as 50 phonemes per second for artificially speeded speech.
Syllables are produced every 200-400 milliseconds.
Recognition precedes completion of the heard word.
Speech perception requires rapid segmentation of this continuous signal.
It is initially very difficult to work out where one word ends and the next begins, without knowledge of the structure of the language.
Speech perception: the process of imposing a meaningful perceptual experience on an otherwise meaningless speech input. A process whereby a continuous input is transformed into more or less a meaningful sequence of discrete events.
Speech provides a continuous signal extended in time, where each segment cannot be taken on its own but instead depends on what went before and what follows.
Blended sounds can occur at boundaries between words so that there is no ‘gap’ in the signal that would reliably indicate a word boundary.
The speech signal is continuous without clear boundaries between words.
The invariance problem
The invariance problem: the variation in the production of speech sounds across speech context.
The lack of invariance in speech sounds.
A particular phoneme is not uttered in exactly the same way on each occasion, even by the same speaker. Its form is affected by other phonemes that precede or follow it.
Co-articulation: the tendency for a speech sound to be influenced by sounds preceding or following it.
Sounds blend together so that a continuous, fluent output of speech is produced.
The same word can be produced with slight variations as a function of surrounding words.
The segmentation problem
If we extract words from a sentence in spontaneous speech, and present them in isolation, recognition is greatly reduced.
One important source of information that aids segmentation is provided by the sound patterns within a language.
Stress patterns provide an important cue to a speaker’s accent.
Cues to word boundaries
Infants tend to show a preference for their native language or for familiar over unfamiliar voices.
Around 7,5 months, English learning infants are able to segment words that conform to the predominant stress patterns of English words.
Initially, infants rely heavily on stress patterns, but they subsequently begin to appreciate other cues. By the age of 24 months the perception of word boundaries is at a level similar to that of native speaking adults.
The development of word recognition requires the extraction of the regularities in a language that can be reliably used to distinguish word boundaries.
Phonotactic constraints: describe the language-specific sounds groupings that occur in a language.
Permissible patterns of sounds within a language also serve as effective cues to segmentation.
Onset of a word: the initial phoneme or phonemes. The rime follows the onset.
Cross-linguistic surveys of sound patterns show clear preferences for some onset patterns over others.
Onsets like bl are commonly used.
Through early exposure to our native language, we develop tacit knowledge about how sounds go together in a language. This knowledge then guides speech perception.
Knowledge about sentence structure, provide by syntax, may also play a role in speech segmentation.
Slips of the ear
Slips of the ear: occur when we misperceive a word or phrase in speech.
70 per cent of word slips involved errors in identifying word boundary.
There are: word boundary shifts, word boundary deletions and word boundary additions.
Four categories of slip:
Cues are language-specific. Just as the structure of a native language will affect accent in a second language, segmentation of incoming speech is also biased towards the dominant patterns of the native language.
Categorical perception
While there is much variation in the way sounds are produced, we are rarely aware of this and we generally find speech perception to be unambiguous.
This is because the cognitive system tends to treat speech sounds as falling within discrete categories rather than falling along a continuum.
Categorical perception: the perception of stimuli on a sensory continuum as falling into distinct categories.
It helps counteract the invariance problem.
We are more sensitive to differences in speech sounds across phonetic categories than within, although we are still able to detect differences and discriminate speech sounds within a category.
Categorical perception applies in particular to consonant sounds; vowel sounds are treated as continuous.
Voicing: when speech sounds are produced while the vocal cords are vibrating.
Babies can distinguish between the speech sounds of many languages at a young age.
But this ability disappears as they acquire experience of the sounds of their native language.
Phonemes come to sounds like a prototype as categorical perception develops and distinctions not made in the native language are treated as belonging to the same category.
The right ear advantage for speech sounds
Connections between the ears and auditory cortex are mainly contralateral.
Consistent with this, adults show a right ear advantage for speech sounds over non-speech sounds.
Right ear advantage is not restricted to humans.
Top-down influences: more on context
The effect of context can lead to the perception of absent speech sounds, so that perception is consistent with the sentence context.
Phoneme restoration effect: the tendency to hear a complete word even when a phoneme has been removed from the input.
Perception is guided by top-down processing such that the sentence context dictated the meaning.
Phonemes that are absent can be restored in speech perception.
There are many sources of information operating to allow accurate speech perception.
Visual cues: the McGurk effect
Cues from modalities, vision, play a role in accurate speech comprehension.
Face processing involves analyses conducted specifically to facilitate speech recognition.
We can use facial cues to aid understanding of speech.
McGurk effect: a perceptual illusion that illustrates the interplay of visual and auditory processing in speech perception.
Models of speech perception attempt to explain how information coming in form the continuous stream of speech that we hear makes contact with our stored knowledge about words.
Two categories:
The Cohort model
We do not have to wait until the whole word is uttered before it is processed: some words can be recognized based on particular information.
The Cohort model of speech recognition reflects the sequential nature of speech perception.
It assumes that incoming speech sounds have direct and parallel access to the store of words in the mental lexicon.
We establish expectations regarding likely target words once we have heard the initial phonemes of a spoken word. The set of words that are consistent with the initial sound is the ‘word initial cohort’.
As more phonemes follow as input, and therefore more information about the target word is provided, the set of available candidate words reduced. Such that those which no longer fit the incoming pattern lower in activation and are dropped from the set while those remaining in the cohort become fewer until only the target remains. This is the uniqueness point.
The original cohort model:
The revised model:
The gating paradigm has been used to identify a word’s uniqueness point.
A spoken word is presented as a ‘left to right’ sequence of sounds, in segments of increasing duration.
The participant must guess the word in each case and may also supply a confidence rating as to how sure they are that they have identified the correct target word.
Electrophysiological evidence for the model was provided by an event related potential (ERP).
Lexical decision task: a task where participants are presented with a letter sting and they must decide whether or not it is a word.
ERP component occurred sooner for words that had early recognition points, consistent with a faster response time in the lexical decision task.
It also supports the facilitatory effect of context, and suggest that it plays an early role, consistent with the original cohort model.
Word recognition can occur before the point at which the provided acoustic input is sufficient to able to uniquely identify the word. Such a process is efficient as access to meaning can occur before the word is complete and multiple meanings are briefly activated within the cohort words.
Trace
The TRACE model of speech perception.
Top-down effect play a key role in speech perception.
A connectionist model. The trace is referring to the entire network of units and the particular pattern of activation associated with it. The pattern of activation left by a spoken input is a trace of the analysis of the input at each of the three processing levels.
The concepts of activation and competition are central.
The TRACE considers top-down processes and the processing of sub-optimal (noisy) input.
Trace takes a gradated approach to activation levels.
Words can acquire a level of activation as a function of shared features with other candidate words.
What contributes to the perception of a phoneme?
When conditions degrade (like encountering speech against a noisy background), more top-down processing comes into play and semantic and syntactic cues may become more influential.
Dynamic, self-updating processing system in order to reflect the online and interactive nature of speech processing.
Processing units form three levels.
TRACE does not make a word-by-word sequential assumption.
Activation can be bidirectional with bottom-up connections from feature to phoneme to word. And top-down activation form word to phoneme to feature.
Excitatory and inhibitory links within levels create a set of possible responses such that activation of a unit represents the ‘combined evidence’ for the presence of the particular linguistic unit.
Words do not occur in isolation.
Any realistic theory of sentence comprehension must be able to account for:
Lexical access
Word recognition is a process of lexical access.
Two main types of models of lexical access:
Lexical access has been investigated using a number of methodologies, experimental and neuroscientific.
Word naming task: require participants to name a word, while response time is measured.
Sentence verification tasks: present a sentence frame with a target word, and the participant must decide if the word fits in the frame.
Frequency effects
Although we have a large vocabulary, a large set of these words will be used rarely (low frequency words), while a smaller number of words will be used very often (high frequency words).
The frequency with which a word is used in a language affects cognitive processing. The higher the frequency, the easier the word is to process.
Open-class words: content words such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. New words can be added to this class of words. They do have the frequency effect.
Closed-class words: remain stable over time and are not added to (adjectives for example). They do not have the frequency effect.
Frequency is a particularly important factor in lexical decision.
The magnitude of the effect of frequency differs depending on the task used.
Priming effects
When semantically related words are primed in a lexical decision task, response time decreases.
The closer the words are in meaning, the greater the semantic priming effect.
Repetition priming: the finding that repeated exposure to a word leads to faster responses in a lexical decision task.
The effect of repetition on low frequency words is stronger than that on high frequency words. This is the frequency attenuation effect.
Syntactic context
The syntactic category of the word and sentence context affect lexical decision time.
Participants are significantly faster in recognizing words when they occurred in sentences that provided the appropriate grammatical context than when not.
Lexical ambiguity
Many words have multiple meanings.
Homographs: words with the same spelling, but more than one meaning and pronunciation.
Ambiguous words will have multiple representations in memory and therefore may be treated differently than unambiguous words.
When an ambiguous word is encountered, more than one meaning is initially activated. Context subsequently influences processing, but initially multiple meanings are active.
Context does not affect initial access to multiple meanings, although the nature of the task, the context and the word (meaning) frequently play important roles in activation of meanings.
In bilinguals, both languages are activated, the initial access is language non-selective.
Syntax and semantics
Syntax: the rules that govern language use.
Despite ambiguity, on hearing a sentence, we show a preference for one structure and interpretation. It is only when we realize a mistake may have been made that we go back and look for other alternatives.
Parsing: the process by which we assign a syntactic structure to a sentence.
Psycholinguistics: the branch of study concerned with the mental processes underlying language comprehension and production.
Superficially different sentences can have the same underlying structure and meaning, and sentence components can maintain their role in a sentence even though their position in a sentence changes.
Semantic information interacts with syntactic processing and can reduce processing load in cases where meaning can inform syntactic processing.
Irreversible passives did not require more processing time than and active voice sentence, whereas reversible passives did.
Phrase structure three: a graphic representation of the syntactic structure of a sentence.
Garden path sentences: a grammatically correct but ambiguous sentence that biases reader’s initial parsing.
The goal of parsing is to assign incoming words to the appropriate role in the sentence as simply ad efficiently as possible.
Two key strategies:
Parsing is incremental in that we allocate a word to a syntactic role as the words is perceived.
Parsing is seen as autonomous and modual in such accounts in that the syntactic analysis is independent of semantic and other factors.
The interactive view proposes that semantics can influence syntax, and there is interaction between the levels of language.
Garden path sentences require the person to revise their initial interpretation of the sentence, as new, conflicting, information is presented.
However, this re-analysis does not always produce the ‘ideal’ sentence structure, and revision of the roles initially assigned to the word may not be consistent, suggesting that structures that are ‘good enough’, rather than ideal, suffice.
The process of learning to read contrast with learning to speak.
Children acquire spoken language readily, requiring little by way of explicit instruction.
Writing systems
Scrips vary across languages in the extend and manner of representation of spoken sounds.
All spoken languages have phonemes or basic speech sounds which can be combined in various ways, but written scrips differ markedly in the extend to which, as well as the ways in which, this phonetic information is presented.
Four main types:
Some writing systems combine elements of these types.
Logographic scrips developed from earlier pictograpic forms, but the relation between the symbol and referent became arbitrary.
In syllabic writing, each syllable is represented by a character, so that the precise pronunciation of each symbol is known.
In a language with a relatively small number of syllables, this is effective.
In consonatal scripts: letters represent consonants but not vowels, although in some scrips the vowels might be represented using diacritics.
The alphabetic writing system is the most dominant across word languages. Its basic unit of representation is the phoneme.
Grapheme: the written representation of a phoneme. It can consist of more than one letter.
Transparent or shallow orthography: uses a one-to-one correspondence between the letters and sounds.
Opaque or orthographically deep languages: those where relationship between letters and sounds is more complex.
The same sound may be written in a number of ways. And the same letter string might be associated with multiple pronunciations.
Context effects on visual word recognition
Recognition can occur before the word is fully uttered.
Top-down influences can speed written word recognition.
Word superiority effect:
The finding that a target letter within a letter string is detected more readily when the string forms a word.
Context has considerable influence on visual word recognition.
Eye movements
Analysis of eye movements has provided much insight into the processes underlying reading.
As we read a line of text, our eyes do not move smoothly from one letter to the next or from one word to the next.
Saccades: fast movements of the eye made when reading or scanning an image.
Fixation: occurs when the eye settles briefly on a region of interest in a visual scene.
Two robust findings come form eye movement research:
We do not just move forward reading each word, nor are all words treated equally.
Many saccades are regressions.
There may also be multiple fixations of the same word (re-fixations) or skipping of words.
Content words are fixated more often than are function words.
As the word length increases, the likelihood that it will be fixated increases.
Context adds to the efficiency of the process, as a predictable word is more likely to be skipped than a less predictable word.
Text difficulty affects eye movement: as difficulty increases, the saccade length decreases and the number of regressions increases.
The eyes respond predictably to semantic and syntactic anomalies as well as to parsing errors such as those elicited by garden path sentences. Although studies addressing the sentence level have produced more variable findings than those addressing word identification.
The dual route model of meaning
Three routes for reading:
Pure word deafness: a deficit affecting the ability to recognize speech sounds, while comprehension of non-speech sounds remains intact.
Other aspects of aphasia are absent. And perception of (most) non-speech sounds is intact.
Pure word meaning deafness: the patient can repeat back the word, but cannot understand it.
The patient may be able to recognize the same word when it is written down.
Neuropsychology of reading
Acquired dyslexia: reading difficulties following brain injury.
Surface dyslexia: characterized by a deficit in the reading of irregular words, while the reading of regular words is spared.
Tend to make over-regularization errors when they try to read exception words.
Route 3 broken.
Phonological dyslexia
Affects non-word reading, but real words can be read.
Problems pronouncing non-words or pseudowords but they can read real words, whether regular or irregular.
Route 1 is broken.
Brain imaging and electrophysiological data
N400 component: a negative-going potential that occurs approximately 400 milliseconds after the presentation of a triggering stimulus.
It has been shown to be associated with the time-course of some aspects of word processing and with semantic processing in particular.
The N400 is relatively larger when a semantically anomalous word is presented to participants.
N400 reflects increased processing effort when dealing with semantic information.
P600 wave occurs when syntactically anomalous words are presented and has an onset around 500 milliseconds after presentation of the stimulus.
Introduction - summary of chapter 1 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, M 
Cognitive Psychology
Chapter 1
Introduction
Cognitive psychology is concerned with how the mind represents and uses information about the outside world.
The study how humans (and other animals)
In all these cases we are dealing with mental representations.
Information is taken in through perceiving what is attended to, and is stored initially in short-term or working memory.
Then selected items are retained in long-term memory through learning processes and form knowledge that can be represented in a variety of ways.
Later, stored information may be retrieved if it has been retained, or it may turn out to be forgotten.
Perceived and recalled information shapes skilled actions on the environment and enters into problems solving, reasoning and decision processes.
Information can be shared with others via language and frequently involves an emotional aspect.
History and approaches
Mnemonics: a learning device used to aid memory.
Spatial learning are of particular importance for such techniques.
Mnemonic techniques allow us to create associations between unrelated pieces of information. But they are less likely to help us complete meaningful task specific memory tasks.
Associationism
Empiricist held that all knowledge came from experience and that ideas and memories were linked by associations. Closeness in space as well as in time fosters associations also.
Introspectionism
Wundt tried to analyze normal perceptions into simpler sensations which combined to give the perception.
Behaviourism
This approach abandoned the attempt to look inside the mind and took only observable behavior and stimuli as its data. This approach essentially aimed to be a psychology without reference to internal cognitive processes. The focus was on learning and particularly about how behavioral responses could be predicted form knowing the history of rewards and punishments following behavior in response to particular stimuli.
Mental maps: mental representations of a spatial layout.
Information processing: the cognitive
.....read more Perception - summary of chapter 2 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 2
Perception
Perception is our sensory experience of the world.
The set of processes that organize sensory experience into an understanding of our surrounding world.
Gives insight of who properties of the physical world are transformed into our mental wold and informs our understanding of behaviors like navigation and recognition.
Perception is standing in the continuum between sensation (where physical energy is transformed into brain signals) and cognition (where mental representations of the world and our goals are used to reason and plan behavior.
How physical properties of the world are represented mentally.
Perceptual information is essential to inform us about our surroundings and guide our interactions with the physical and social world.
Visual illusions provide clear evidence that our perceptual systems do not always faithfully represent the physical world.
Somatic perception: perception of the body through touch and sensing the orientation of limbs in space.
From physical world to perceptual representation
The essential problem of perception is that the physical world is ‘out there’ and our mental word is inside our head.
Inverse-problem.
Describes why even for the best sensory organs perception cannot typically guarantee a faithful representation of the physical world.
There are fundamental ways that information is lost in the sensory encoding of the physical world.
So
The fidelity of our mental representations of the physical world cannot wholly depend upon the incoming information. It must depend upon the ability of perceptual processes to use assumptions about the structure of the world to analyze incoming sensory information in a way that we can overcome the inverse problem to build plausible interpretations of what is out there.
Our perceptual systems have evolved effective principles to overcome theoretical limitations to the processing of perceptual information.
Principles and theories of perception
To tackle the inverse problem, we focus on how best to characterize the flow of information in the fully developed perceptual system and what principles might be at work or organize this information.
The flow of information: bottom-up and top-down processing
A fundamental distinction in perceptual processing is whether we achieve and understanding of the world through bottom-up or top-down mechanisms.
Bottom-up: the original sensory input is transformed in an uninterrupted cascade of transformations feeding forward the information, one transformation following the other until the final representation is obtained.
Also known as data-driven processing.
Characterized by perceptual mechanisms that can independently create increasingly complex representations.
Top-down processing.
Involves connections between the higher levels and the
Attention and consciousness - summary of chapter 3 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 3
Attention and consciousness
Attention and consciousness have the idea of selection in common.
We attend to particular aspects of information hitting our senses and seem consciously aware of only a limited view of the world at any one time.
Attention is a limited resource that is deployed to facilitate the processing of critical information.
External attention: selecting and controlling incoming sensory information (like features, objects, spatial locations, sensory modality and time points).
Internal attention: selecting control strategies and maintaining internally generated information. It involves regulating our internal mental life so we can achieve our goals (like task rules, responses, long-term memory and working memory).
The attention system: can be seen as independent from processing systems and it utilizes a network of anatomical areas that carry out functions that are specified in cognitive terms.
Three basic components:
This orienting system is external attention since it has the function of orienting our sensory processing to incoming information.
The frontal eye fields are found in the frontal cortex and are involved with the generation and control of eye movements.
The altering system is a kind of ‘on’ switch that organizes our behavior for when a event might occur.
The orienting and executive systems on the other hand are important for organizing our behavior in response to what is happening in the world and what we should be doing.
Early theories of attention
The cocktail party problem: describes how we successfully focus on one speaker in a background of noise and other conversations.
But, our ability to tune into one speaker can be broken by certain sounds.
Filter theory
A filter is used to block irrelevant information so that only the important message would reach a central channel for further processing.
To goal is to get the important information on a piece of wire (information attention should select to put out the wire) so it can
Sensory, short-term and working memory - summary of chapter 4 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 4
Sensory, short-term and working memory
Memory
Distinction between:
Recollection: the act of recalling something to mind. Used by LTM
STM allows a small amount of information to be held in mind, so that it is immediately accessible and can be used.
Working memory (WM) refers to memory that allows us to manipulate active information. There is considerable overlap between the terms short-term memory and working memory.
Before a piece of information enters short-term memory, its sensory aspects are stored temporarily in a very short-lived store called sensory memory.
Sensory memory: a temporary sensory register that allows input from the sensory modalities to be prolonged.
The sensor memory stores allow input from the sensory modalities (vision, hearing, etc.) to be prolonged briefly in order for us to process relevant aspects of that input.
It is essentially a temporary sensory register, of large capacity, by which fades rapidly.
Models of sensory memory assume a number of modality-specific sub-stores dealing with different types of input.
Sensory memory consists of a number of modality-specific stores.
Iconic memory
Iconic store is the sensory memory store for visual stimuli.
The spatial advantage disappears after a delay of about half a second.
There is a brief memory of a visual image, which is potentially very large in capacity but which rapidly fades away. Thus iconic memory.
Iconic memory allows visual input to be prolonged, which means that our visual experience is not an exact reflection of reality.
This allows us to see a series of still images as moving picture sequences in motion pictures and animation.
Echoic memory
Echoic memory is sensory memory for heard information.
A large initial memory of auditory information which decayed rapidly.
The echoic store provides an acoustic register, allowing auditory presented information to be prolonged so that some aspects of the input can be retained later.
.....read more
Long-term memory - summary of chapter 5 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 5
Long-term memory
Three important aspects of long-term memory processes:
Amnesia revers to the amnesic syndrome. A pattern of memory loss characterized by impaired long-term memory and spared short-term memory.
General characteristics:
Ribot’s law:
Recently formed memories are more susceptible to impairment that are older memories.
Wechsler Memory scale: a widely used neurocognitive assessment that measures visual memory, auditory memory and working memory.
Causes of amnesia include effects of brain surgery., infections, head injuries or stroke, conditions such as Korsakoff’s syndrome, and injury.
Korsakoff’s syndrome: brain dame related to thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency. It generally occurs following prolonged alcohol abuse in per-disposed individuals. It is associated with damage to the thalamic, mamillary body and frontal brain areas.
In patients with amnesia, language and concepts are generally intact. The person can answer a question and can understand what a particular object is, and what it does.
However, most of our knowledge about the world and about language is laid down early in life.
One of the problems with testing patients with amnesia is being sure that the information was stored in memory in the first place.
Long-term potentiation (LTP): a mechanism that is inferred from animal models. LTP is a long-lasting increase in the strength of synapses that occurs with repeated stimulation.
Long-term depression (LTD) or depotentiation: a weakening of synapses.
There are different kinds of LTM.
When we call something in mind, we are using short-term memory, but all of the memories that we have, whether we are currently thinking of them or not, are stored in LTM.
.....read more Learning and forgetting - summary of chapter 6 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 6
Learning and forgetting
Learning is the process of acquiring knowledge which can be retrieved to help us meet our goals.
Encoding, storage and retrieval are the three main stages involved in learning and in remembering.
The first step in learning new information is to encode that information in an internal representation in working memory.
The internal representation then needs to be processed further to develop a memory trace (a mental representation of stored information) or record in long-term memory.
Processes, such as rehearsal in which the basic representation is repeated, are presumed to strengthen the trace.
Which meaningful materials, other processes of encoding can elaborate the traces and link the traces to already stored information.
Levels of processing
Levels of processing: a theory that better learning results form deeper semantic processing which produces stronger, more elaborate memory traces that superficial level processing.
Learning needs to be intentional.
Incidental learning could be strong if the material is processed deeply.
Incidental learning: learning which takes place without any intention to learn. Learning is a by-product of attending to the material
Mnemonics
Various strategies of encoding can enhance memory performance markedly.
Such strategies to boost memory are known as mnemonics.
One key mnemonic principle is categorization. Grouping of items into familiar categories. Items grouped or organized into categories will be better recalled than unorganized lists of items.
If words are drawn from a few categories, participants tend to recall them in groups or clusters by category.
Hierarchically structured categorizations are particular beneficial for retention.
Use of images in encoding is an important aspect of many mnemonics. Us as:
Dual-coding hypothesis:
Concrete words can be coded in two different ways, in a verbal code and in an imagery code.
Abstract words can only easily be coded in one way, verbal. Concrete words have two internal codes an two ways of being remembered.
Encoding specificity
The encoding specificity principle: if the context at recall
.....read more Concepts and knowledge representation - summary of chapter 7 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 7
Concepts and knowledge representation
Concepts: mental representations of classes of items.
When we treat distinct objects as the same as other distinct objects.
To represent all the distinct object that make up the categories concerned.
Dealing in concepts rather than in distinct individual objects is clearly an efficient way to work and emerges as an inevitable result of who the brain responds to stimulation, in that similar stimuli evoke similar activation patterns and by association will arouse similar memories and action tendencies.
Concepts allow us to organize information in long-term semantic memory very efficiently into hierarchical structures.
Overall, our long-term knowledge about the world is based on concepts and relations among concepts. Also, representations of current situations are in terms of concepts.
All higher-level mental concepts involves imagining possible actions in terms of concepts.
Visual images convey information as to what an object looks like and the image associated with a concept would seem likely to be important in using that concept.
Imagery: the mental representations of sensory properties of objects, experienced as like perceiving the object but with less vividness than in reality.
Despite the pervasive role of concepts in cognition, there is no universal agreement on the best way of define concepts in a whole.
Definitional approach
Some concepts are well defined and clear black and white definitions can be given.
Well-defined concepts are the essence of formal subjects such as mathematics and are sought throughout sciences.
Concepts are typically formed from combinations of features that are themselves concepts. Each of these requires its own definition and within a given legal system each would have its own clear criteria.
Many and perhaps most everyday concepts are not so well defined and exhibit a degree of fuzziness. The lack of definitions can have important real life consequences.
Since most concepts that we work with in everyday life are not well defined, a major part of this area of study concerns alternative ways in which ill-defined concepts might be represented and used.
Prototype approaches
Introducing prototypes
Everyday categories have members that vary markedly in how typical they are.
If all concepts were purely definitional and well defined then all examples would be equally representative and decisions about category membership would be clear cut. But over many everyday categories, people reliably judges some examples as more typical of the category than others.
A number of aspects of performance with concepts are affected by typicality (the extend to which an object is representative of
.....read more Motor control and action - summary of chapter 8 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 8
Motor control and action
How our body achieves our goals.
The description of motor control and action in three parts:
How body movements are planned by the brain and performed by the body.
Movement between targets could be described with a two-component process of motor control.
Degrees of freedom: of a joint are the number of ways it can move.
When performing a task, the joints do not need to all move in all possible ways.
This provides us with great versatility in performing actions in changing situations.
The computational problem of how to plan a movement out of the multitude of alternatives.
(Like the inverse problem in vision 3D → 2D)
Given all the possible factors for achieving a goal, we can see that the motor planning system is controlled with a difficult task to plan what body parts will move with what motion.
The effortlessness in with we act to achieve our goal shows that our brain has worked out an efficient strategy for producing movements.
Theories of movement planning
Three approaches:
Problem solving - summary of chapter 9 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 9
Problem solving
Problem: a situation in which you have a goal but do not know how to achieve it.
Thinking: a process of mental exploration of possible actions and states of the world.
Problems can be said to arise when a person or animal has a goal but does not have an immediately available way of reaching the goal.
Problems can be classified in terms of a few broad characteristics:
There are a number of ways we classify problems based on these characteristics which help us to group different types of problems together for understanding and research.
We then determine whether specialized knowledge is required to solve a problem. Making them:
Finally, we consider whether the type of problem involves a rational opponent.
Problems can be classified as:
Some problems are large scale and require months or years of effort.
Some are small scale and can be tackled within minutes.
Gestalt approach
Problem solving as much like perceiving a new pattern in an ambiguous drawing.
The key process was one of changing the way the problem was seen, in other words restructuring the way the problem was perceived.
Changing how one represents a problem.
Insight: a restructuring of a problem that makes the solution obvious and understandable.
No trial and error.
Barriers to insight
Two important barriers to insight
Information processing approach
inspired by
.....read more Decision making - summary of chapter 10 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 10
Decision making
Decision making is the cognitive process of choosing between alternative possible actions.
Normative approaches: attempt to establish ideal ways of deciding that will give the best decision possible.
Descriptive approaches: aim toe describe how decisions are actually taken as against who they should be made.
Decision problems differ in a number of ways:
Expected value: the long-term average value of a repeated decision which is determined by the probability and size of the outcome.
People should act to maximize the expected value of choices.
The expected value of a risky choice is the average result you would get if you repeated the actions many times over.
The expected value approach is an optimal way to deal with risky decisions in which we can put a money value on the possible outcomes and can say exactly what the probabilities of the possible outcomes are.
But the expected value approach does not fit people’s behavior in real life.
Risk aversion: avoiding risky choices even when a higher expected value than riskless alternatives.
Risk seeking: a preference for risky choices even when riskless alternatives of higher value are available.
Utility: the subjective value of an option
Subjective probability: how likely a person believes an outcome to be irrespective of the objective probability.
Prospect theory
Prospect theory: a decision theory stressing relative gains and losses.
Deals with how people choose among gambles and importantly extended the utility plot into the area of losses.
Decisions about monetary gambles are about gains and losses relative to one’s current wealth.
Losses of any kind are weighted disproportionately to gains of the same amount.
Loss aversion: there is a greater dislike of losing utility than liking for gaining the same degree of utility.
Endowment effect: a tendency to over-value a possessed object and to require more money to
Reasoning - summary of chapter 11 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 11
Reasoning
Reasoning: the cognitive process of deriving new information from old information.
People who can correctly derive new information by reasoning do well on tests of general ability or intelligence and in turn do better in education and in the occupational world.
Deductive: drawing logically necessary conclusions from given information.
Inductive: the process of inferring probable conclusions from given information.
In deductive tasks, people are required to determine what conclusions, if any, must follow when they are given statements that are assumed to be true.
Premises: statements assumed to be true from which conclusions are drawn.
Valid arguments: those in which the conclusions must be true if the permisses are true.
Deductive reasoning is of two types:
Propositional reasoning
Propositional logic is a set of rules devised by logicians which enable valid arguments to be developed.
Inference rules: rules for reaching a conclusion given a particular pattern of propositions, e.g. modus pones, which states that given ‘if p then q’ and ‘not q’ we can infer ‘not p’.
Can be used to derive correct conclusions from patterns of propositions, such that different patterns trigger different inference rules.
Three examples:
Two main mistakes or fallacies when arguing from conditionals:
Suppression effects
It has been suggested that what are usually classes as fallacies in conditional reasoning could result from misinterpretations of the premises.
The importance of premise interpretation and how surrounding context can affect interpretations ans so influence reasoning.
Mental logic approaches
People have mental logic rules that they can apply to solving reasoning problems.
People generally have available a set of mental inference rules (or schema’s in their terminology) that permit direct inferences when the schema conditions are met.
The schema typically match some rules of logic but may not include others.
The mental rules/schemas may also include fallacious inferences, such as denying the antecedent. Thus, schemas may or may not match the formal inference rules.
Schemas can take the form of ‘premises→ conclusion’.
Ratings of problem difficulty would depend on the length of the problem in words and on the difficulty of
.....read more Language production - summary of chapter 12 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 12
Language production
Syntax: to rules governing the ways words can be combined to create meaningful sentences.
Content words: words that provide meaning to the sentence; these contrast with function words which do the grammatical work of the sentence.
Language production: a number of processes by which we convert a thought into language output, in the form of speech, sign language or writing.
Social cognition: the ways in which people make sense of themselves and of others in order to function effectively in a social world.
Level | Refers to |
Semantics | The level of meaning in language |
Syntax | The rules by which words are combined to make meaningful sentences |
Morphology | The rules by which words are constructed and modified |
Phonology | The sound units withing a language |
Conceptually driven or top-down processes reflect the influence of higher order cognitive processes such as thought, beliefs and expectations.
Communication: any means by which information is shared.
Language has been particularly important for human evolution because it promotes social bond and social interaction and because it provides an effective means of persuading others.
Two ways in which we can use language to communicate:
People also communicate non-verbally. Non-language vocalizations an convey information, and gestures can supplement or substitute for spoken language.
Gesture is so closely tied to human language that we continue to gesture even when we cannot be seen.
Subtler non-verbal signals such as body language and tone of voice also communicate to others.
Language universals
Mental lexicon: our store of knowledge about words and their uses.
Languages vary in number and type of sounds used, in basic word order, in the size of their vocabularies and in their rules for sentence construction.
However, all languages are capable of expressing complex and new ideas. Non are primitive. The expression of complex ideas is evident in all languages and in all human groups.
Linguistic universals: linguistic features said to be found in all languages.
All languages:
Language comprehension - summary of chapter 13 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 13
Language comprehension
How we understand speech and written language.
Understanding requires accessing semantic information and appreciating the meaning of words, the intention of the utterance, and sometimes the non-literal meaning.
The objective is to understand what is being communicate.
At lower levels the processes involved in speech perception (the process by which we convert a stream of speech into individual words and sentences) and visual word differ markedly.
Speech processing is a fast, accurate and automatic process. Once we have acquired language, we readily understand a spoken utterance.
The speed with which the task is achieved does not reflect the complexity of the process.
Word recognition is the starting point for language comprehension and understanding language is the key of much of higher cognition.
Prosody: the rhythm, intonation and stress patterns in speech.
Aspects of an utterance’s sound that are not specific to the words themselves.
While we perceive a sequence of words within the stream of speech, the speech signal itself is not produced as discrete units.
There are few clear boundaries between words in spontaneous speech and sounds blend together as they are produced so that phonemes differ as a function of the other sounds used.
The speech sounds produced by a single speaker vary with context.
There are further differenced when we consider: individual differences, differences in accent, and changes over time.
Factors such as speech rate, the speakers age and sex, as well as the amount and type of background noise affect the acoustic form of a spoken word.
The sounds we produce change with age and they change as societies change.
A speaker may produce as many as 150 words per minute, with each word spoken in, on average 400 milliseconds.
When someone is speaking quickly, this rate can double.
Speech occurs at a rate of 10-15 phonemes per second, and can be understood at rates as fast as 50 phonemes per second for artificially speeded speech.
Syllables are produced every 200-400 milliseconds.
Recognition
Cognition and emotion - summary of chapter 14 of Cognitive Psychology by Gilhooly, K & Lyddy, F, MCognitive Psychology
Chapter 14
Cognition and emotion
Skin conductance response: (or galvanic skin response GSR) reflects changes in the skin’s ability to conduct electricity in the presence of an emotion-eliciting stimulus.
Emotion: a number of mental states including anger, joy and disgust.
Relatively short-lived and associated with an eliciting event, be it an environmental trigger or a thought.
Four key features that distinguish the emotions form other affective states:
Emotions provide us with essential feedback on the execution of our plans relative to our goals, and allow us to detect, and work to reduce, discrepancies between actual and expected value.
An emotion has a clear onset and a somewhat fuzzy offset.
Emotions tend to be intense, and short-lived, preparing us to act.
Moods can be caused by emotions and can be the after-effects of an emotional reaction.
Particular regions of the brain might be linked with particular emotions.
Amygdala: an almond shaped set of structures located in the medial temporal lobe. Linked to fear.
Limbic system: consist of the thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus and amygdala, and other structures.
Insula: an area hidden within the folds of the cortex, with connections to the cingulate, amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, implicated in aspects of emotion, cognition and action. Linked to disgust.
The anterior cingulated cortex is linked to sadness.
Orbitofrontal cortex is linked with anger.
Default network: a network of brain regions that is active when a person is not focused on the external environment.
Salience network: involved in monitoring the external and internal environments to allow detection of salient stimuli.
The cognitive view of emotions is that they have important immediate and long-term functions that allow us to adapt to a changing environment.
Core emotions
Emotions are associated with distinctive facial expressions and gestures.
Display rules: social conventions governing how, when and with whom emotions may be expressed.
There is evidence for a basic set of emotional expressions that is largely consistent across cultures.
These arguably correspond to a set of basic or core emotions.
.....read more
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