PSYCHOLOGY
Mr. Duez
Unit 3: "Cognition"
Part I: Memory
DO NOW:
What is the best thing
you ever ate?
Ordering from the menu at Torchy’s Tacos takes a great deal of cognition. Especially if
you have never tasted these taco combinations before.
Cognition
The mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge.
the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and
understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.
Literal: “to know.”
Take a yearning for pizza for example:
Cognition encompasses everything from:
★ knowing/remembering pizza itself
★ recalling what style & toppings that you like
★ realizing that you are hungry & organizing
plans to have it delivered or travel
somewhere to eat out.
YouTube: New Yorker Anthony Bourdain Experiences Chicago Deep Dish Pizza
For minds to make sense of the near
infinite details of our surroundings a
large part of cognition involves the
organization of our thoughts
into associations or categories.
★ things one might find in a kitchen”
★ “what toppings I like”
Simple symbols such as the word
“food” are used to group more complex
learned associations
★
★
★
★
New York Style
Chicago Style
Frozen Pizza
Pizza Rolls
Although important, these cognitive
categories are overlapping and not
always clearly distinct
How do we divide the thinking process?
Perception, attention, memory & executive function
Perception - Seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and or
smelling your surroundings, allowing you to respond
appropriately.
You feel hungry and that there is no food in the
fridge, is what gets the whole process moving.
Memory - stores the name of your favorite pizza joint.
Enables you to dial the number & give directions to
your house.
Includes:
★ short term/working memory
★ long-term memory
★ subconscious/implicit knowledge
Executive Function enables the planning of logistics, such as timing the pizza
delivery to coincide with the start of the football game.
Improvising - guessing what toppings everyone will enjoy
Problem Solving figuring how much to tip
Controlling Impulses - not ruining your appetite by eating a whole bag of Doritos
while waiting also come into play here.
Attention Processes kick in by having you shift your
focus from reading your Psychology text to answering the
door upon hearing that long awaited knock.
They also help in multi-tasking a slice of pizza with
figuring out how your football team can come back from an
embarrassing early deficit while ignoring the heckling
antics of your so called “friends.”
Process of Cognition It is the interplay of all of these
systems working simultaneously; allowing us to adapt to
our surroundings & take action towards obtaining our
goals.
The multi-store model of
memory is an explanation of
how memory processes
work. You hear, see, and feel
many things, but only a small
number are remembered.
Since Atkinson & Shiffrin
originally proposed their dualstore model, it has
undergone numerous
adjustments &
improvements.
The most recent version of this model
is called Search of Associative
Memory (SAM) - shown right:
YouTube: The Mystery of Memory (30 minutes) This is essential for understanding memory in a deep and
meaningful way.
How Does Memory Work?
encoding, storage, & retrieval
In short, these are the processes by
which we...
★ get info in (encoding),
★ hang on to it (storage), &
★ get it back out (retrieval).
Name the 7 Dwarfs
Write each name on a
sheet of paper.
Name the 7
Dwarfs
Was this difficult for you?
It all depends on these factors...
★ Do you like Disney movies?
★ How long ago did you watched the
movie?
★ How loud or distracting were the
people around you when you are
trying to remember?
Superior Autobiographical Memory - or
Hyperthymesia
Jill Price was the first. She is one of about 20
subjects positively diagnosed with the condition
hyperthymesia.
She is able to recite details of every day of her life
since age - 14.
Dr. James McGaugh - By stimulating the amygdala
in rats, McGaugh has learned more about how we
can enhance memory.
Through research with rats, McGaugh has shown
that stimulating the amygdala with a drug that
emulates the effects of stress hormones helps
memories become more firmly fixed and
retained.
Without the amygdala, all of our memories would
be remembered equally: the loss of a loved one,
what you ate for Thanksgiving dinner, and where you
parked your car.
Video YouTube: The Woman Who Could Not Forget 15 minutes
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V
wigmktix2Y&feature=youtu.be
3 minutes- man with no short term
memory
YouTube: Endless Memory, Part I - 60 Minutes - Superior Autobiographical Memory
14 minutes
YouTube: 60 Minutes - Endless Memory - Superior Autobiographical Memory, Part II
13 minutes
“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is
built. And in the case of memory its utility is obvious. If
we remembered everything, we should on most
occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing." -William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890
Yet this does NOT seem to be the case for most of
these Superior Autobiographical Memory persons.
Memory - How it works.
Amygdala: a small almond-shaped
region of the brain near the
Hippocampus, is responsible for this
enhanced memory.
Dr. Larry Cahill - conducted
experiments in which subjects were
shown slides of varying emotional
content.
Immediately after watching the slides,
subjects immerse one arm in a tub of
ice water.
The immersion triggers the stress
hormone response, which in turn
enhances the subjects' memory of
the slides.
Subjects who endured the ice water for
a full 3 minutes, recalled the emotional
slides more clearly than did the control
subjects, whose arms were not
immersed in water.
Emotional Wiring Fundamentally Different
"Throughout evolution, women have had to deal with
a number of internal stressors, such as childbirth,
that men haven't had to experience," said study coauthor Larry Cahill of the University of California Irvine.
"What is fascinating about this is the brain seems to
have evolved to be in tune with those different
stressors."
The finding, published in the recent issue of the journal
NeuroImage, could help researchers learn more about
sex-related differences in anxiety, autism, depression,
irritable bowel syndrome, phobias and post-traumatic
stress disorder.
Amygdala: cluster of neurons found on both sides of
the brain & involved for both sexes in hormone &
other involuntary functions, as well as emotions &
perception.
Cahill already knew that the sexes use different sides
of their brains to process and store long-term
memories, based on his earlier work. He also has shown
that a particular drug, Propranolol, can block memory
differently in men and women.
Scans showed that men's & women's amygdalas are
polar opposites in terms of connections with other
parts of the brain.
Encoding
Information from the environment is encoded when it
enters the body through the senses.
visual, acoustic, & semantic encoding.
Visual is most effective, but the most successful
way is to encode in all 3 ways.
This would be like the computer taking input from a
keyboard, mouse or touch screen smartphone or tablet.
The typical brain has about 100 trillion synapses, which are the points where
nerve cells in the human brain connect with other cells.
Storage
★ sensory memory,
★ short-term memory, &
★ long-term memory.
STM (or ‘working memory’) has a limit
not only on the number of items it
can hold but also on duration (20
seconds or so).
Use of rehearsal helps to increase the
likelihood that those memories will be
recalled.
LTM is divided into explicit (knowing facts)
& implicit memories (remembering how to move
your body when walking).
Retrieval
Key to accessing information from Long Term Memory
(LTM) is to have an appropriate retrieval cue.
Mnemonics is a memory aid that relies on reorganization
of information for easy retrieval.
(Song to know information for a test)
Encoding Specificity (or Transfer Appropriate Processing):
Retrieval is better when the context in which we are
trying to retrieve something matches the context in
which it was learned.
The context is part of the overall memory.
By reinstating that context when
retrieval is occurring, we are creating an
optimal recall situation.
YouTube Video: Memento Movie Trailer (2 min)
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Save February, with twenty-eight days clear,
& twenty-nine each leap year.
A clear moment of an emotionally or historically
significant moment or event.
Flashbulb
Memory
Where were you when?
November 4, 2008
Studies have shown that, although people
believe such memories are more complete
and accurate, they are actually just as flawed
as those stored in less emotional situations.
Obama Elected
May 2,
2011
November 22, 1963, Dallas, TX
John F. Kennedy,
Assassinated
January 28, 1986 Space Shuttle
Challenger Disaster
Article & Video: A Pill to Forget
If there were something you
could take after experiencing a
painful or traumatic event that
would permanently weaken
your memory of what had just
happened, would you take it?
As correspondent Lesley
Stahl first reported last fall, it's
an idea that may not be so far
off, and that has some critics
alarmed, and some trauma
victims filled with hope.
This segment was originally broadcast on Nov. 26,
2006. It was updated on June 14, 2007.
Capacity of STM – Short Term Memory
Learning the sounds and meanings of new
words, or seeing pictures while a storyteller tells
a tale.
If we want to remember large
amounts of information, our recall
will be easier if we can use chunking
to group information together.
Learning the sounds and meanings of new
words, or seeing pictures while a storyteller tells
a tale.
The "Magic Number" =
7 digits, plus or minus 2
(5..6..7..8..9)
Chunking storage in STM
If we want to remember large amounts of
information, our recall will be easier if we can
use chunking to group information together.
Remembering a 10-digit phone
number is much easier if we
remember the pattern 3-3-4
rather than trying to recall 10
unconnected numbers.
Psychologist George Miller
published the original study in
1956.
YouTube: Feats of Memory That Anyone Can Do
You only have 150 “Friends”
Choose wisely :)
Dunbar's number is suggested to be
a theoretical cognitive limit to the
number of people with whom one can
maintain stable social relationships
= 150.
Our memories can keep track of
groups about this size. Beyond 150
our interactions become more
anonymous.
Past a group size of 150 we start
needing formal organizational
structures to handle interactions.
Further, the group we consider
"friends and family" clusters around
this size.
Organization
2 biggest (wrong) assumptions of long term
memory:
1. capacity is unlimited, &
2. once the information gets into long-term
memory, it is there forever.
Human brain = 1 billion neurons
Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other
neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections.
Each neurons combine so that each one helps with
many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the
brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to
around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).
For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital
video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be
enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You
would have to leave the TV running continuously for more
than 300 years to use up all that storage.
Organization of Long Term Memory
Nodes/Links: Activation is the process of
"thinking" about a concept.
When we activate a node, that activation
spreads down the links to related nodes.
Psychologists have divided memory into
explicit and implicit memory.
Explicit memory (Declarative) - memory for
information that you are aware of.
"knowing what"
Includes: facts, events
Can be divided into Episodic & Semantic
Implicit memory (Procedural) - memory that influences
your behavior but for which you have no conscious
awareness.
"knowing how"
YouTube: How does memory/though/cognition really work? This is how it looks - for a fish!
Studies have shown that musicians tend to have a better memory than nonmusicians, not just for music, but for words and pictures too.
Interestingly, they also tend to use different strategies for memorization, being
more likely than non-musicians to group words into similar semantic categories, and
less likely to verbalize pictures.
Turn to a blank sheet of paper.
Pick out the names of the 7 dwarfs.
Grouchy Gabby Fearful Sleepy
Smiley Jumpy Hopeful Shy
Droopy Dopey Spiffy Wishful
Puffy Dumpy Sneezy Pop
Grumpy Bashful Cheerful Teach
Sporty Nifty Happy Doc
Wheezy Stubby Poppy
How many did you remember this time?
Did you do better on the 1st or
2nd dwarf memory exercise?
Recall vs. Recognition:
With recall - you must retrieve
the information from your
memory
(fill-in-the blank tests)
With recognition - you must
identify the target from
possible targets
(multiple-choice tests)
Which is easier?
Can you identify the “real” penny?
Why do we have trouble finding the "real" penny?
We don't have any need to know the details, other than the color, size, and
feel.
Then again... do we even NEED the penny anyway?
How did you do?
Its obverse has featured the profile of President
Abraham Lincoln since 1909, the centennial of his birth.
From 1959 (the sesquicentennial of Lincoln's birth) to
2008, the reverse featured the Lincoln Memorial.
Four different reverse designs in 2009 honored Lincoln's
200th birthday and a new, permanent reverse - the
Union Shield - was introduced in 2010. The coin is 0.75
inches (19.05 mm) in diameter and 0.061 inches (1.55
mm) in thickness.
The U.S. Mint's official name for a penny is "cent“ and
the U.S. Treasury's official name is "one cent piece".
The colloquial term "penny" derives from the British coin
of the same name; however, the British plural form
pence is never used.
As of 2010, it cost the U.S. Mint 1.79 cents to make a
cent because of the cost of materials and production.
YouTube: John Green vs. Pennies (and Nickels) 4 min
YouTube: John Green asks Obama - Why all the Pennies? President stumped.
YouTube: Google Glass - Would this work? Work memory & cognition be improved?