Starts off as simple pet- mental representation of it. These mental representations can be abstract.

Cognitive processing: bottom up processing- analysis that emphasizes characteristics of the stimulus,
rather than internal concepts/ knowledge. Perception. What you are seeing and hearing right now.

A lot of cognitive processing is top down. Basically stuff already in your brain, reaching out and
affecting how you process things coming in. No expectation. Memory of experience may help or not
help the factors of perception. Broad set of things count as top down effects. Hand writing is one of the
most difficult thing to manage to read it.

Naïve realism – do we see things as what they really are? [optical illusion] bottom up interact with top
down information.

Constructive realism – enough to show something is going on. Brain is imposing this pattern.
Psychologists are drawn to this. No one is denying that this is happening in the world. Active
construction process in this relatively simple perception of everyday objects. What is this construction?
How does it work? How is it ultimately realized in the brain?

Subtle facial parts are switching from one interpretation to another. Gestalt demonstration of young or
old woman. Active construction plays a part on perception. Difference is not in the stimulus, but
whatever your brain sees in your own mind.

Gestalt Approach-
the whole differs from the sum of its parts. A sense of organization- we don't just see things piece meal,
but perception is rather actively put together in different ways and we build something out of them.

Gestalt: Laws.
1. Proximity
elements tend to be grouped together depending on their closeness [dots closer vertically]
2. similarity
items that are similar in some way tend to be grouped together [dots in same color pairs]
3. good continuation
objects arranged in either a straight line or a smooth curve tend to be seen as a unit.
If something looks like a continuous figure, we see it as a unit. [seen as two lines crossing]
Temporal gap between transformation.

Attention:
question about selective attention: attend to one stimulus and ignore another. When you're trying to
focus on one thing, is the other thing truly ignored?
Question about divided attention: several things at once. Processing limitations and attentional capacity.

Critical evaluation: cell phones and driving:

simulated driving task- ran with conditions of car radio, book on tape is playing, hand held cell phone,
hands free cell phone. Measured- number of times missed red light, reaction time to red light.
Findings: cell phones impaired attention. Deficits in both hand-held and hands-free usage.

Selective attention
– constantly bombarded by stimuli, limited capacity.
– Selective attention refers to the selective processing of task relevant information while
 successfully ignoring irrelevant information
– Facilitatory and inhibitory mechanisms.

Stroop interference effect – automatic/ preattentive processing.

Shadowing task
-ignored inputs: horses galloped across the field.
Auditory. Headphones- two different streams of information on each ear.
What becomes of the ignored input?

Low level of information gets through. Subjects aware of: nonspeech sounds, gender of speak shift, if it
was a human voice.
Subjects are NOT aware of: content ( same word repeated 30 times). Syntax sentences vs. random
words, shift in language of speaker.

Early selection/filter model

input#1- perceptual → pattern → control processes.
Input #2- filter → recognition → memory

cocktail party phenomenon- basically you hear another conversation because you're current
conversation is boring.
Salient or overlearned information gets through early processing without attention. Processing meaning
of the unattended stuff. You can filter it down. Those things that are highly salient may make it through.
If you hear your name, you continue the shadowing pass, you can control it so that it doesn't break
through, but often it does.

Attention and Experiencing a coherent world

-binding process by which features are combined to create perception of coherent objects
-binding problem- features of objects are processed separately in different areas of the brain.

Literally gets processed in different neural channels.

Feature integration theory

What do we need attention to do in order to see whole objects?
Treisman and Gelade
Preattentive stage- form, color, is processed. This does not require attention.
Focused attention stage- features are bound into a coherent perception.
Attention serves as the glue between the neural systems for feature analysis.

Modern study of audomatic and controlled processes.

Pop-out effect studied by Treisman. Task: find target. Visual search.
One feature will give it away.

Treisman's feature-integration theory

-individual feature processing is done in parallel. Simultaneous processing is done on the whole display
and if feature is present- we detect it. Pop OUT
– integrated features- does not POP OUT.

Visual recognition process.

 Visual recognition of the object needs to be specific enough to allow us to detect differences.
Yet general enough so as to allow us to recognize objects under variable conditions- achieve object
constancy. How do we see the same object under different circumstances?

The challenge of object perception:

angles of light. The stimulus on the receptor is ambiguous;
– inverse projection problem; an image on the retina can be caused by an infinite number of
objects.
– Object is coming in through four corners of the rectangle.
– Problem is: the exact same retina image can be displayed by many different ways.
Objects can be hidden or blurred. Occlusions are common in the environment.

Constancy demos: constant percepts. Changing stimuli.

Color constancy-
color as relatively constant in spite of changing light sources. We correct our perception to allow the
overall lighting of the whole color.

10/7/2010

biological predisposition
slide 19
they avoid the thing that they had previously tasted before radiation. Wise to avoid eating what they
ate. This only works with taste. Does not work with sounds or sights. Only specific to taste.
Conditioning does not work the same for all organisms and animals.

Organism does a voluntary action in order to get reward.

Respondent behavior- responding
operant behavior- operate on the environment.

Skinner box- device for rats and pigeons to be trained to do a behavior. Something good will come out
of dispenser if they do something good.

Clive Wearing- very emotional. Left frontal damage- assocaited with lack of emotional control.
Hippocampus disappeared. Cannot learn new information. You lose the frontal cortex- lose emotions.
Convulsions- mean something else is wrong with his brain.
Thinks his diary was written while he was unconscious. Love at first sight.- loves deborah. The patient
makes up stories to make sense of what happened. Episodic memory [still remembers things like
music, sing, conducting, scores]

Capacity- George Miller

Clive was an extreme case. Severe deficit. Always at a complete loss at why he's doing things he's
doing.
2 functions- 1) short-term retention. 2) processing time to long term retention. [as time goes by you get
distracted, you can still potentially remember what happened in the previous episode].

The magical number 7 plus or minus two. This suggest a bottleneck. This is the best you could do.
What counts as a piece though?
A chunk- something we knew as a unit before.
What is a chunk? Information grouped into a meaningful unit. Words are chunks of letters. Multi-digit
numbers are chunks of single digit numbers. Routes are chunks of location.

So you don't have to store it individually in each particular experience.

Lecture 6 Memory
Storage, maintenance, retrieval
Perception is not the same as memory.
Content of memory is not literal [imperfect, some details, not everything]
Forgetting is not all-or-none [somewhere in between]

Evidence for levels of processing

Craik & Tulving (1975)

What you remember from an experience has to do with the level of processing that goes into how you
process it. We encounter information in regular life and turns out we remember it...

Shallow Physical : Is the word written in capital letters?

Acoustic: CAT does it rhyme with mat?

Deep Semantic: Daffodil- is this word a plant?

Processing for meaning is essential.

Generation effect
slamecka and graf (1978)

People learn pairs of words OR produce/generate second item in the pair.

Later: given a cued recall test, people do much better with the generation.

Context and memory

context- everything that's going on while another thing is going on.
Context helps retrieval
-other words on list
-internal state at the time of encoding
-environmental cues such as odors or sounds

The more similar the retrieval situation is to the encoding situation, the better retrieval.

A changed environment hurts recall- it's better if they're tested in the same context if they're in the same
situation as before.

Spacing effects
Spaced practice better than massed practice.
In massed practice, the context at encoding is similar for all repetitions
In spaced practice, context will differ on each repetition
Some of this context is likely to match potential encountered at retrieval time.

Varying study over time and space

Massed practice: studied the material massed in one day
Spaced practice: studied the material spaced out over a period of 4 days
-spaced practice in different locations is best!-

Implicit Memory
Indirect test of memory that reveals past exposure can influence memory
Often shown in amnesic patients, with no conscious awareness that one is relying on memory.
Incidental encoding leads to priming [flashing the same word twice].

Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon-

Knowledge is there, can't retrieve.
Possible explanations: partial retrieval of associated information.
Interference from partially retrieved information
Blockers! (cairo would be a bad cue for nairobi)

Evidence that information might not be accessible but not lost.

Savings: in relearning.
Greek passages to the son. [Burtt did it do his son]

The more similar things happen, the less unique every retrieval cue is.
New retrieval cues and new context for remembering them.

Sources of Memory Errors

The role of schemas
How false memories can be created.
--court of law-- eyewitness testimony
Memory is largely based on schemas or meanings.
-people try to understand what they perceive
-lots of our longterm memory consist of general meaning.
-they get the gist of it, not literal experience
[early work by Barlett]

False memory:

schemas can lead to distortions

People may mixup elements of different memories (binding errors)
misleading questions can lead to distortions
vivid images can be confused with real events. [make this experience seem vivid can lead to error]

Binding error:
see handstand and shotgun. Thought the word handgun exists.