Cognition Definitions

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Mystic writing pad

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a model of memory based on children's to writing tablet that allows new messages to be written on one level while fragments of old messages accumulae on another level

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flashbuld memories

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vivid, detailed memories of signitificant events
flashbulb memories are not necessarily more accurane than normal memories.
both everyday memories and flashbulb memories show a decline in consistency over time
participants believe that flashbulb memories are more accurate than "ordinary" memeories. the cofidenced comes from the realixation that they have witnessed a historically importan event.

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now print theory

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the theory that specific process, similar to xerography, lays down in memory copies of especually significant experiences.
1) An event is tested for ‘surprisingness’
2) Test the even for consequentiality (importantness)
3) Formation of flashbulb memory
4) Rehearsal
5) flashbulb accout of our memories we tell to other people

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consolidation theory

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the theory that memory traces of an event are not fully formed immediately after that event but take sometime to become complete

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retroactive interference

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-Something that you have learned after that interferes with consolidation of STM or rehearsal.
a decline in the recall of one thing experienced as a result of later experiencing something else. e.g when u try to remember a phone number and a friend says random numbers.

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proactive interference

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the material that you have learned previously interferes with the acquisition of new material.

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hippocampus

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A site in the brain cruicial for consolidation memory traces.
converting immediate memories into LTM

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reconsolidation

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- Process whereby a memory traces is revised and undergoes consolidation again.

recall of flash bulb experience may be quite difference from the original context in which you experience it. this procides and opportunity for the memory trace to be recised, the recised trace would then undergo reconsolidation in the hippocampus

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method of repeated reproduction

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one participant if given multiple oppotunities to recall something over time. (e.g 15 mins later and then in subsequesnt intervals)

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method of serial reproduction

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one participant,A, is given something to rememeber, A writes down what he canrecall. A's version is fgiven to the next participant,B, who reads it and tries to recall it. B's version is in turn given to C, and so on.
--- Each participant is trying to recall the precious participants version of the orifinal to be remembered material.

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Schema (Bartlett)
&
Schema

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an active mass of organized past reactions that proves a setting that guides our behavior.
&
A mental structure that represents some aspect of the world;
A structured cluster of pre-conceived ideas.;
An organized pattern of thought or behavior;
A specific knowledge structure or cognitive representation of the self;
Mental frameworks centering around a specific theme that helps us to organize social information;
Structures which organize our knowledge and assumptions about something and are used for interpreting and processing information.
--
A schema is an organized setting that guides our behaviour, a standard that can be adjusted to fit changing circumstances.

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Memory traces

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replicas of previous experiences

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Memory Schema

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does not use exact copies, but replies on fragments, used to support a new construction.

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Phantom limb

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After sudden loss of a body part, the feeling that it is still there.

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Body schema or body image

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one's schematic representation of one's body.
--- Plasticity: The body schema is not fixed but shoes considerable plasticity.

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penfield homuculus

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a part of the brain that maps the parts of the sensory cortex that represent the various oarts of the body

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Pitch

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-pitch is related to the frequency or rate of vibration of a string, column of air, or other physical sources. Measured in Hertz (Hz)
-purely psychological construct, related both to the actual frequency of a particular tone and to its relative position in the musical scale.
-The word pitch refers to the mental representation an organism has of the fundamental frequency of a sound.

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Rhythm

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refers to the duration of a series of notes, and to the way that they group together into units

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Tempo

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refers to the overall speed or pace of the piece

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Contour

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describes the overall shape of a melody, taking into account only the pattern of “up” and “down” (whether a note goes up or down, not the amount by which it goes up or down).

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Timbre

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distinguishes one instrument from another –say, trumpet from piano– when both are playing the same written note.
-everything about a sound that is not loudness or pitch

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Loudness

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is a purely psychological construct that relates (nonlinearly) to how much energy an instrument creates –how much are it displaces– and what an acoustician would call the amplitude of a tone

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Reverberation

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refers to the perception of how distant the source is from us in combination with how large a room or hall the music is in

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Meter

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is the pattern of strong and weak accents.

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Rhythm

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is your pattern of inter-onset interval durations. The duration from one note to the next.

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Melody

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the main theme of a musical piece the part you sing along with, the succession of tones that are most salient in your mind. The notion of melody is different across genres.

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Harmony

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-The study of the structure, progression, and relation of chords.
-Simultaneous combination of notes in a chord.
-The structure of a work or passage as considered from the point of view of its chordal characteristics and relationships.
-A combination of sounds considered pleasing to the ear.

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Timbre

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is everything about sound that is not loudness or pitch

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Melodies

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are defined by the pattern or relation of successive pitches across time

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Major? Minor? scales

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For cultural reasons, we tend to associate major scales with happy or triumphant emotions, and minor scales with sad or defeated emotions.

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Schema Theory

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Selection, Abstraction, Interpretation and Integration

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Selection

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The hypothesis that we select information both as we receive it and as we recall it

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Abstraction

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The hypothesis that we tend to remember only the gist, rather than the particulars of what we experience

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Interpretation

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The hypothesis that we interpret information by making inferences and then remember the inferences as part of the original information

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Integration

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the hypothesis that we abstract the meaning of an event, then we put that meaning together with the rest of our knowledge to form a coherent, consistent whole

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Ecological Research

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emphasizes real-world investigations in search for practical applications

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Jost's law of forgetting

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of two memory traces of eual strength, the younger trace will decal faster than the older trace

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Ribot's law of retrograde amnesia

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older memories are less likely to be lost as a result of brain damage than are newer memories.

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law of progression and pathologies

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a "last in, first out" principe referring to the possibility that the last system to emerge is the first to show the effects of degradation

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permastore

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the hypothesis that there can be a permanent state of memory over very long periods of time

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Korsakoff's syndrome

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A form of amnesia occurs in some chronic alcoholics, there is atrophy of brain tissue due to malnutrition, particularly thiamine deficiency

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Alzeheimer's disease

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1- deterioration of episodic memory (failure to retain recently acquired information)
2- deterioration of semantic memory
Az disease does not involve the inability to retrieve existing knowledge so much as the deterioration of knowledge that once existed.

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Episodic memory

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the memory system concerned with personally experience events.
-personally experienced events
consciousness: Autonoetic
Autonoetic awareness is dependent on healthy frontal lobe functioning
Autonoetic consciousness is not only uniquely human, but has played a crucial role in the evolution of human culture and civilization
-The most recent system to evolve.

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semantic memory

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the memory system concerned with knowledge of words, concepts, and their relationships
-constitutes general knowledge as opposed to personally experienced events
Consciousness: Noetic

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Retrograde amnesia

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the inability to recall events prior to the injury.

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procedural memory

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the memory system concerned with knowing how to do things
-knowledge to ride a bicycle.
A form of tacit knowledge: knowing how to do something w/o being able to day exactly what it is that you know.
Consciousness: Anoetic
-The oldest system

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Prefrontal leucotomy

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a surgical procedure whereby the connections bet/ the frontal lobes and other parts of the brain are severed
result: deterioration of episodic memory

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Chronoesthesia

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our subjective sense of time

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Implicit memory

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-memory w/o episodic awareness-the expression of previous experience without conscious recollection of the prior episode.
- Information that was encoded during a particular episode is subsequently expressed without conscious or deliberate recollection

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Working Memory

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The temporary storage and manipulation of information that is necessary for various cognitive activities.
-working memory pulls all other memory systems together
-Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) acting as a monitor to control alternative courses of action.

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Minimalism

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The belief that linguistic competence has only those characteristics that are absolutely necessary
-linguistic competence has only those characteristics that are absolutely necessary. Minimalism operates according to a principle of parsimony in that it aims for the simplest possible theory of linguistic competence.

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mirror neurons

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neurons that fire when the animal makes grasping movements but also when the animal observes other animals making those movements.

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Is the stimulus for language really improvised?

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- Two final conclusions:
-1. Children do both receive and make use of corrective feedback on their ungrammatical constructions
-2. The complexity of the speech to which the child is exposed is significantly related to the complexity of the speech that the child then produces

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The impact of teacher's speech

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-The more complex the teacher’s speech, the greater the syntactic growth
-Teacher speech was NOT significantly related to children’s skill levels at the start of the school year, but it was at the end of the school year.

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Inferential Model

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There are 4 kinds of rules or conversational maxims that follow this principle
1.Maxim of quantity: speakers attempt to say no more than is necessary
2.Maxim of quality: try to be truthful
3.Maxim of relation: Try to be relevant
4.Maxim of manner: try to avoid ambiguity and be clear

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Polysemy

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existence of multiple meanings for one word. English speakers require more time to disambiguate sentences than italians, who have a less ambiguous language

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Language and Spatial Frames of Reference

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- Intrinsic frame of Reference: relations between objects being described
The man is at the chair’s back
- Relative frame of Reference: man is only to the right of the chair relative to an observer’s position
The man is to the right of the chair
- Absolute Frae of Reference: relations between the objects are described in terms of an invariant set of co-ordinates
The man is to the north of the chair

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Anterograde amnesia

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is a loss of the ability to create memories after the event that caused the amnesia occurs, leading to a partial or complete inability to recall the past. Anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia, where memories created prior to the event are lost, can occur together in the same patient

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Metacogniton

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is defined as "cognition about cognition", or "knowing about knowing."

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Memory processes: three stages

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1. Encoding: processing of sensory information: -Acquisition (process of registration of sensory input), -Consolidation (sensory input consolidated into memory. creation of memory trace), -Reconsolidation (old memories , when they are brought up their traces can actually be changed, reconsolidate, this is a modification of the existing trace.)

2. Storage: the record of memory of the deposit of our memories

3. Retrieval: recollection or production of behavioral output based on our memory trace.

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The Five Memory systems

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Semantic, Episodic, procedural, Perceptual representation system and working memory.

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Sensory memory

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also called sensory register or buffer. Lasts in the order of milliseconds to seconds. It is very short lived
For example,
-Echoic memory (auditory info): not as short lived as Iconic memory (10sec): reiterate last sentence to father who is talking to you and says "you are not listening to me"
-Iconic memory (visual memory): stored in terms of icons. short lived (500ms)
-A lot of held in sensory memory, but we can't report all of it.

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Short Term memory

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also short lived, in order of seconds to minutes
-Most of the content are available to consciousness. what we have in out STM is what we report.
-STM has chunking property: we remember 7+/- 2 items at a time.
- How forgetting happens from STM:
Decay: how infor decays over time.
Interference Theory:
1. Proactive Interference (inhibition): Material that you have learned previously interferes with the acquisition of new material.
2. Retroactive Interference: Something that you have learned AFTER that interferes with consolidation of STM or rehearsal (If we are not allowed to rehearse in STM, i.e: by introduction of a secondary task, that information will be lost!)
-Serial Position Effect: Primacy and Recency effect.--> rmbr beginning and end of a list. The items at the beginning of the list are encoded into LTM and items at the very end of the list that we remember so well are encoded into STM.
Models of STM:
1. Modal model: sensory register-->STM-->LTM
NOT true. we can form new LTMs w/o STM. to deal with this problem the Working memory model was created: It uses
- STM for events
- Important for manipulating information from LTM
-Wrking memory can pull out things from LTM, manipulate then and return them back.
- 3 componenets to a working memory system:
1. Central executive: command center (DLPFC).
2. Phonological loop (echoic mem/acoustic info) in presylvian fissure.
3. Visio-spatial sketch pad (visual or spacial coding of info) in occipital lobe
4. Episodic buffer: the contents of LTM that we have recalled and that we are manipulating.
ACC (anterocingulate) involved in detecting errors and conlicting responses.

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Long term memory

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minutes to years. some content is available to consciousness, other content is not.
Major divisions of LTM:
1. Explicit/Declarative: Available to our conscious recall.
-Semantic: our knowledge of facts; general things.
-Episodic: specific events in your life
2. Implicit/ non-declarative: memories like motor actions e.g:
Procedural memory: walking, riding bike
Perceptual representation system: Structure and form of stimuli prime your responses (exposure to word for example primes it in your memory)
- advanced priming or stem completion. Banana example
-Classical conditioning: Associative between stimulus and a response.
-non-associative learning: This is habituation. This is a procedure whereby if we are presented with a stimulus we will tend to habituate it or not notice it anymore. It's not associative like classical conditioning between a stimulus and a response

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Morphemes

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are the smallest language units that can carry meaning

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Phonemes

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are the smallest units of sound. English has about 46 phonemes. African languages have 141 phonemes.

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Levels/Organization of language:

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Sentence
Phrase
Morpheme
Phoneme

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Auditory Cheesecake hypothesis or Non adaptive pleasure seeking (NAPS)

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The idea that cheesecake didn't confer some evolutionary advantage. There wasn't a cheesecake way back and people that ate it were more likely to survive.

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define language

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a shared symbolic system of communication
1. Symbolic
2.The symbols are shared
3. It is a system of communication

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the universals of language

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1- Semanticity: language conveys meaning
2-Arbitrariness: no inherent connection between a symbol and the concept or object it refers. - Flexibility of symbols
- Naming
3- Displacement: the ability to talk about something outside the present moment
4- Productivity: we generate sentences rather than repeat them.
5- the organization of language

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evolutionary theories of music: Adaptionist Accounts

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These are accounts that hypothesize that music evolve because it benefited survival or reproduction in some way. People who had musical abilities passed of their genes rather than people who didn't.

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fundamental Frequency

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no matter what components you add to it. It doesn't change the overall frequency
-the fundamental component is important because it is what determines the pitch of the sound that you will hear.

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Partials/overtones

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frequency components that can be integer multiples of the fundamental frequency.

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Perceptual Representation system (PRS)

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The memory system containing very specific representations of events that is hypothesized for priming effects.

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Innateness hypothesis in language

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Children innately posses a language acquisition device that comes equipped with principles of universal grammar.