AP PSYCH REVIEW
COGNITION
2013-2014
(8 – 10%)
 Key Names
George Sperling
George Miller
Alexandra Luria
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Noam Chomsky
Benjamin Whorf
Wolfgang Kohler
 Models of Memory
o Three-Box/Information Processing Model (Aktinson and Shiffring)
 Posits there are 3 stages that information passes through
 Sensory memory
 The split-second holding tank for incoming sensory
information
 George Sperling demonstrated the short duration of
sensory memory in his experiments
o Flashed a grid with 9 letters for 1/20th of a second
o Participants recalled the row they were cued to do
so with ease
o He termed this iconic memory what you see
 Echoic memory the same as iconic, but for hearing
 Selective attention in sensory memory is what allows for
the transfer to short term memory
o Remember the cocktail party effect?
 That too is a form of selective attention
 Short-Term/Working Memory
 Termed as such because it is the information we are
currently “working” with
 Information in short-term fades within 10-30 seconds,
unless we decide to so something with it
 George Miller’s Magical Seven
o The average number of items (7 +/- 2) that we can
store in our short term memory
o This limit can be expanded by chunking  breaking
down information into smaller units
 Ex: 3055979950 or 305-597-9950
 Still the same ten numbers, but the
dashes indicate three distinct chunks
o Mnemonic devices
 Like chunking allow us to remember
information
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Ex: My Very Excellent Mother Just
Served Us Nine Pizzas
o Useful when remembering the
planets
Rehearsal
o To repeat or rehearse information
o Ensures information will remain longer in short
term memory
 Ex: your parents tell you to remember 305221-1221 and you repeat it to yourself over,
and over, and over, etc.
o Rehearsal is only so effective as it is limited
Long-Term Memory
 Our permanent storage of information
 Relatively unlimited
 Once information reaches LT it’s unlikely forgotten
o Episodic memory
 Specific events, stored in sequential order
 Ex: remembering your last movie
night
o Semantic memory
 General knowledge of the world, stored as
facts
 Ex: differentiating between afferent
and efferent
o Procedural
 Memories of skills and how we perform these
 Are sequential, but very hard to explain
 Ex: how to throw a perfect spiral
 Explicit Memories (Declarative)
o Conscious events we try to remember
 Ex: When you completed your take home
exam might be an explicit memory
 Implicit Memories (Non-Declarative)
o Unintentional memories we are unaware we have
 Correlates to the idea of latent learning
 Ex: You are asked to help mop the
floor and you find yourself able to do
it. You most likely saw your parents
doing this.
 Photographic or Eidetic (in children) memory
o The work of Alexandra Luria
 Studied a patient with eidetic memory who
could repeat a list of 70 letters or digits
 Did so forward and backwards
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 Recalled the list 15 years later
o Not to be confused with good memory
o These memories require 100% accuracy
 Much like the human camera (Stephen
Wiltshire)
o Levels of Processing Model
 We remember what we do by examining how deeply the memory
was processed or thought about
 Elaborative (deep) rehearsal spending more time
cognitively on the information, often making connections to
the information
o On some level you have learned the information in
context
 Shallow (maintenance) rehearsal repeating information
to oneself several times without making deep connections
o Ex: cramming for an exam; hopefully not this one!
o Retrieval
 Getting the stuff out of your brain
 Recognition  the process of matching a current event
with one already in memory
o Ex: selecting the Seven Dwarfs from a list
 Recall  remembering information without being cued
o Ex: being asked to simply list the Seven Dwarfs
 Hermann Ebbinghaus
 Established that the order of items on a list will determine
which items are remember and which items are forgotten
o The primacy effect  items at the beginning of a list
are easily remembered
o The recency effect  items at the end of a list are
remembered
 Together you have the serial position effect
 Where on the list the items are will
affect your ability to remember them
 Tip of the tongue phenomenon
 The temporary inability to remember some information
already stored in memory
o Explained by the semantic network theory
 States our brain might form new memories
by connecting their meaning and the context
with meaning already memory
 Flashbulb memories
 Powerful due to the importance of the event that caused us
to remember it
o Ex: The JFK assassination or 9/11
 Mood congruent memory
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Increases the likelihood we will remember an item when
our mood matches the mood we were in when the
information was encoded
o Ex: We remember happy events when we are happy
and sad events when we are sad
State dependent memory
o Similar to mood congruence
o Refers to the recall of information when we are in
certain states of consciousness
 Ex: If you remember you have an
appointment when tomorrow when you are
drowsy and about to fall asleep you better
write it down, otherwise you will forget
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 Constructive Memory
o Recovered memory the phenomenon where individuals claim suddenly
to remember events they’ve repressed for years often as a result of
therapy
o Elizabeth Loftus
 Research shows many of these memories may be constructed or
false recollections of an event that never occurred
 Loftus’ work proved how leading questions may influence us to
recall false details
o The only way to determine the validity of repressed/reconstructed
memories is to use outside evidence
o Commonly used in rape/abuse cases
 Forgetting
o Decay theory  the neural connections in the brain decay over time
 The relearning effect states decay theory is temporary
 Ex: you complete your high school math requirements in
the 10th grade and don’t take another math class until
college
o Sitting in your freshman MAC1101 class you assure
yourself you don’t know this information
o After some review and dusting off the old neurons it
all comes back to you
o Interference
 When information in your memory competes with what you are
trying to recall
 Retroactive interference  new information affects old
information
o You remember your new home address but forget
your old home address
 Proactive interference old information (learned before)
affect news information (learned recently)
o Remembering your old phone number but not your
new one
 How Memories are Stored in the Brain
o Anterograde amnesia as a result of damage to the hippocampus
 Results in the inability to store new information
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o Retrograde amnesia results in the inability to remember old
information
o Long-term potentiation
 Through repeated firings certain neural connections are
strengthened
 This neural strengthening increases sensitivity to that information
 Language
o Elements of Language
 Phonemes  the smallest unit of sound in a language
 English has 44 phonemes
 Morphemes  the smallest unit of meaningful sound
 can be words such as a and but
 can be prefixes or suffixes
 syntax the order of the language
 Ex: where adjectives are placed
o Acquisition
 Babbling  occurs around 4 months
 Marks the baby’s experimentation with phonemes
 Holophrastic stage  occurs around 1 year of age
 One word stage
 Telegraphic speech (two-word stage)  around 18 months
 Toddlers combine the words they can say into simple
commands
 Simple rules of grammar and syntax are learned in this
stage
o Ex: overregularization or overgeneralization
 Using ed to make verbs past tense
 I wented to the park.
 Behaviorists
 Theorized children learned language through operant
conditioning and shaping
 Thought reinforcement/punishment of language utilization
caused children to learn language
 The Cognitive School
 Language acquisition occurs too rapidly to be through
conditioning
 Noam Chomsky
o Theorized we have an inborn universal language
acquisition device
 We are born with the ability to innately
produce language
 Studied cases of children whose language
development was retarded due to a deprived
environment
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o We have a critical period for language development
 Benjamin Whorf
o The linguistic relativity hypothesis
 The language we use may impact the way we
think
 Thought and Creativity
o Concepts
 Similar to schemata in that they allow us to categorize, and think
about the objects, people and ideas we encounter
o Prototype
 The most typical example of some concept
o Images
 The mental pictures we create in our minds of the outside world
 Problem Solving
o Algorithms
 A fixed set of rules that if followed will lead to the right solution
 Ex: using a formula to solve a math problem
 Lead to the right answer, but take too long thus making it
impractical
o Heuristics
 Mental shortcuts we use to solve problems
 Availability heuristic  judging a situation based on
examples of similar situations that come to mind initially
 Prone to errors as it refers to information only in your
mind
o Ex: Judging a certain car to be safer than others
because it’s the only one you have experience with
 Representative heuristic  judging a situation based on
how similar the aspects are to the prototype in our minds
o Ex: Tony is a successful business executive, and
upon meeting her you are shocked because she is a
female
o Problems with heuristics
 Overconfidence  we are too confident over the reliability of our
knowledge
 How confident we are about something isn’t a good
indicator of how correct we are
 Belief bias  making illogical conclusions to confirm our existing
beliefs
 Belief perseverance  our tendency to maintain a belief in the
face of contradictory information
 Issues with Problem Solving
o Rigidity (mental set)  the tendency to fall into established thought
patterns
 Ex: if it worked in the past, it will work again
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o Functional fixedness  a type of rigidity
 The inability to see a new use for an object
 Ex: not seeing a chair could be a suitable replacement for a
ladder to change a light bulb
o Failure to break a problem into its component parts
 Also an issue
 Good problem solvers break the problem into its component parts
and create subgoals
o Confirmation bias
 When we look for evidence to confirm our preexisting beliefs
o Framing
 The way a problem is presented
 Ex: I tell you half the class did not pass the AP Psychology
exam last year. You may think it’s impossible, so why try.
o It still means 50% passed
 Creativity
o Wolfgang Kohler
 Chimpanzees and the “aha” experience
 The same information on insight learning applies here
o Convergent thinking
 Leads to one solution
 Ex: painting by numbers
o Divergent thinking
 Generating multiple solutions to a problem
 Ex: painting outside the lines or getting creative with colors
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