Midterm 1 average: 79

Midterm 2 Chapters: Ch. 6-10

Lectures 9-17

PowerPoint #9: Learning

Cognitive Psychology
 Learning
 Thought
 Rationality
 Decision-Making
 Attention
 Memory
 Creativity
 Intelligence
 Language
 Perception
- All of these make up the field of cognitive psychology

What is Learning?
- In school: the accumulation of knowledge
o Information transfer through communication
- Since you can’t talk to your dog, they must learn a different way.
- Main point of the pictures: There is
 The relatively permanent change in knowledge or behavior that comes through experience
 Is Knowledge a priori (innate)?
o (Can you have some knowledge without needing to learn)
o Yes: Rationalism (Plato) – to know is to remember the experiences that the soul had
before it entered the body (more modern version of this: knowledge from genetics)
 (Plato though that you keep knowledge from your past life)
o No: Empiricism (John Locke) – tabula rasa (blank slate), knowledge derived only from
experience

Innate “Knowledge”
 Reflexes: spontaneous physiological reaction to specific stimulus
o E.g., grasp reflex (baby)
 Instinct: innate behavioral response to stimulus
o E.g., prey drive (if an animal sees something fleeing, they will try to catch it)
- Textbook:
o Reflex: unlearned, automatic response by an organism to a stimulus in the environment
 o Instinct: unlearned knowledge, involving complex patterns of behavior; instincts are
thought to be more prevalent in lower animals than in humans

Learning: Association
 Ideas connected over time
o You learn by either connecting ideas that you already know, or when you learn
something new, you connect that to something else you know
 4 systematic ways that you experience things (so you organize your thoughts that way)
1. Contiguity
2. Similarity
3. Contrast
4. Frequency

 Law of Contiguity – the experience or recall of one object will elicit the recall of things that were
originally experienced along with that object/event.
o Example: thunder and lightning
 Law of Similarity - similar experiences get connected.
o Example: Lemon and lime
 Law of Contrast – opposite experiences get connected.
o Example: hot & cold and light & dark
 Law of Frequency – the more frequently two things are experienced together, the more likely it
will be that the experience or recall of one will stimulate the recall of the second.
o Example: Coffee and donuts

- These are constraints on how we learn stuff

Contemporary Scientific Enterprises

 Behaviorism
o Radical empiricism: Focus on behavior, assume mental processes cannot be
observed/measured
- Very much against innate knowledge
 Cognitive Approach
o (Middle of the road between rationalism and empiricism)
o rationalism / idealism + empiricism
o mental processes can be measured indirectly
o experience alone doesn’t dictate learning

Types of Learning

 Behaviorism
o Association: temporally related events become connected
 Classical Conditioning
  Operant Conditioning
 Cognitive Approach
o Language
 Latent Language
 Social Learning

Classical Conditioning
 Focus on behavior, mental phenomena cannot be observed
 Ivan Pavlov
o Russian physiologist
o Nobel Prize (medicine) 1904
o Trails:
 Salivation and digestions
 (He would feed the dogs)
 Dogs were salivating before presentation of food
 Initially though it was “psychic secretions” initially an annoyance
 (That the dogs psychically knew the food was coming)
 (Every time he would walk into the lab, there was a bell on the door that would
ring, and the dogs associated that with the food.)
o Law of Contiguity & Frequency
 associations formed among experiences that repeatedly co-occur

Unconditioned Response
Before Conditioning
 Natural relationship
o Presentation of food (stimulus)  salivation (response)
o Ringing bell  no response

o Food = unconditioned stimulus (UCS)

 (The dog didn’t have to be trained to have a response)
o Salivation = unconditioned response (UCR)
o Ringing bell = neutral stimulus (NS)

Unconditioned Response (UCR)

 (Repeatedly, you ring a bell and then give the dog a steak)
 Responding to UCS (food) at same time as NS (bell)

Conditioned Response (CR)

 (Now if you ring the bell, the dog salivates)
 Neutral stimulus (NS) becomes conditioned stimulus (CS)
 Conditioned stimulus (CS)  conditioned response (CR)
o Bell (CS)  Salivation (CR)
Classical Conditioning (Table)
Stimulus Response
Neutral Bell before conditioning ---
Conditioned Bell after conditioning Salivation in response to bell
Unconditioned Meat powder Salivation in response to meat
powder
 Repeatedly pair stimuli together, organism develops associations between stimuli

Learning Curve
 [Graphical representation of the] Acquisition of a classically conditioned response
 Each pairing of CS and UCS know as a conditioned trial or acquisition trial
 Repeat conditioning trails, response (CR, salivation) to CS (bell) increases over time
- The graph shows the test after the conditioning trail where you will ring the bell without the
food

Basic Principles of Classical Conditioning

 Acquisition
o CR rarely occurs after single pairing
o Response increases with successive CS – UCS pairings
o Timing is critical – forward conditioning (CS then UCS) is the quickest

 Generalization
 o Other similar neutral stimuli may evoke response
o E.g., clock bell, microwave timer

 Discrimination
o Taught to differentiate between previously over-generalized CS
 CS+UCS: response becomes stronger
 CS-UCS: response becomes inhibited

 Extinction
o Brought about by repeated presentation of CS without UCS
o Extinction does not erase what is learned, only suppresses
 If you try to relearn the condition, it will happen much quicker
o Spontaneous recovery
 The dog might randomly start salivating to the bell

Conditioned Aversions
 From an evolutionary perspective, conditioned aversions may be extremely crucial for survival
o (Ex: eating something, then throwing up (a painful experience) will cause you not want
to eat that thing again)
 Some of the most powerful aversions may arise from associations with taste and smell. These
help us to avoid poisoning.
 Example: Associate nausea with foods
o Evolutionarily ancient: present in invertebrates.
o Does not require cortical involvement (i.e., “higher-order” cognition)
 When extreme and impact daily function, may lead to phobias— Uncontrollable fear of a
specific object or situation
 However, conditioning does not explain all phobias

Conditioned Emotional Response

John Watson
 Transferred Pavlov’s classical conditioning to emotion
 Emotional conditioned response – previously neutral stimulus is made to evoke emotional
response
 (Empiricist: he believed we learn everything from experience (he made behaviorism
(empiricism)))
 (Video: Watson presents baby with a rat and a loud bang. The loud bang would make the baby
cry. The rat alone did not have any response to the baby. So, after presenting the baby with the
 rat and then the loud bang repeatedly. Eventually, without needing the bang, the baby would cry
when there was the rat.)
 “Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in
and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I
might select— doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief and, yes, even beggar-man and thief,
regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”

Limitations of Classical Conditioning

 Order Effects
o CS before UCS > CS after UCS
o Bell before food > food before
 Individual History
o (Past experience before being conditioned might affect the conditioning process)
o Previous S ➔ R associations easier to relearn; occasional spontaneous recovery
o Blocking: previous learning hinders new
o Latent inhibition: exposure to neutral stimulus without
 (If you rang the bell before the conditioning process without the steak, then it
would make it harder to pair the two)
 CS Specificity
o Some responses may be more readily conditioned to certain stimuli than others
o Ex: rats associate taste stimuli with nausea but not visual; associate light and sound
with shock, but not taste. Birds are the reverse

Not all stimuli can be conditioned

Operant Conditioning
 B. F. Skinner
o Coined the term operant conditioning
o Behavior is operant because it is designed to operate on the environment
o Compared to classical conditioning, it is more active learning.
o Learning the association between a behavior and its consequences
 o Skinner box: when the rat does a behavior, he will make a consequence (if the rat
presses the button, the consequence is food being put into the container)

Change of Behavior
 To change a learned behavior, change the animal’s reinforcement contingencies (i.e.,
consequences)
 Animal behaviors in the box result in different outcomes/consequences

- If the mouse presses the button, have a different consequence for the action

PowerPoint #10: Learning II

Reinforcement and Punishment

 Behavior is affected by
o Reinforcement
o Punishment
 Reinforcement
o any stimulus that increases likelihood of a prior operant.
o Positive: strengthen with presentation of positive stimuli (press button get food)
o Negative: strengthen with removal of adverse stimuli (press button remove shock)
 Punishment
o any stimulus that decreases likelihood of prior operant
o Positive: reduce with presentation of adverse stimuli (press button get shock)
o Negative: reduce with removal of positive stimuli (press button food goes away)

Operant Conditioning: An Example

  Operant: button-pressing when light is on
 Consequence: get some cheese
o Positive Reinforcement (added something, behavior becomes more likely)
 Consequence: get electric shock
o Positive Punishment (added something, behavior becomes less likely)

Reinforcement Punishment
Positive Something is added to increase Something is added to decrease
likelihood of behavior (e.g., gold likelihood of behavior (e.g.,
star) electric collar)
Negative Something is removed to Something is removed to
increase likelihood of behavior decrease likelihood of behavior
(e.g., seat belt) (e.g., grounding)

Problems with punishment

 Confusing
 Focus on punisher and not behavior
 Effects of punishment often only last so long as the contingency is in place

Operant Conditioning: Shaping

 Shaping: Reinforcement of increasingly good approximations of the to-be learned behavior
 (How shaping is better than operant condition)
o B. F. Skinner proposed that operant conditioning could explain very complex behavior
o The problem is that the organism needs to demonstrate the behavior to get the
reinforcement.
 If the behavior is complex, the probability of doing it by chance is nearly zero.
o Skinner proposed that “shaping” was the solution to this problem

 How about complex human behaviors? Early language learning?

  Babbling: infant generates a wide variety of speech sounds, some from his or her own language,
but also sounds not from own language
 Shaping: Sounds that are in language get reinforced, others do not. Increasingly good
approximations of words get increasingly reinforced.
 Evidence for some of this in parent-child interactions, but not the whole story

Extinction
 Un-reinforced behavior will be extinguished
 In Classical conditioning:
o Brought about by repeated presentation of CS without UCS
o Ex: hear bell and no food
 In Operant conditioning:
o Brought about by when enough trials pass that the operant is not followed by the
consequence previously associated with it.
o Ex: press lever and no food
 Extinction does not erase what is learned, only suppresses: spontaneous recovery

Habituation
 Loss of response to unconditioned stimulus
 Extinction:
o Loss of response to conditioned stimulus
o e.g., bell + no food  conditioned response lost
 Habituation:
o Loss of response to unconditioned stimulus (e.g., a scary sound)
o e.g., sound + no danger  unconditioned response lost

 Habituation vs Dishabituation
o Habituation
 Repeated exposure to UCS with no consequence leads to decreased response
o Dishabituation
  Novel unfamiliar sound can disrupt habituated response
 Google: the reappearance or enhancement of a habituated response due to the
presentation of a new stimulus.

Schedules of Reinforcement
 Operant Conditioning depends on administering consequences after behavior
 Changing when consequences are imposed (i.e., their schedule) changes learning
 Ratio:
o Consequence administered after set number of operants
 Interval:
o Consequence administered after a set time-interval post-operant

 Example Schedules

o Ratio - number of events (button press)

 Fixed ratio: every 5 presses
 Response rate: high
 Resistance to extinction: moderate
 Variable ratio: 5 presses average
 Response rate: high
 Resistance to extinction: high
o Interval - time between events (5 min)
 Fixed interval: every 5 min
 Response rate: uneven - low
 Resistance to extinction: moderate
 Variable interval: 5 minutes average
 Response rate: high
 Resistance to extinction: very high
Learning: The Behaviorist Approach
(overview)
 Classical Conditioning
o Learned association between stimuli causes a response
o Bell (CS) causes salivation (CR)
 Operant Conditioning
o Learned association between behavior and consequence (reinforcement or punishment)
o Operant (e.g., button-pressing) is reinforced or punished (e.g., cheese) which leads to
higher or lower likelihood of operant behavior

Cognitive Theory
 E. Tolman
 “Cognitive maps in Rats and Men”
o Questioned whether conditioning could explain everything that people do
 The way that an animal construes or “thinks about” the environment is just as important to
learning as environmental contingencies
 Humans and other animals are always developing mental representations of, and expectations
about, the environment.
 These cognitions influence behavior
 LEARNING EXISTS OUTSIDE OF OVERT BEHAVIOR

Latent Learning
 10 trials / day for 10 days Count
 # of errors (wrong turns)
 Textbook: After 10 sessions in the maze without reinforcement, food was placed in a goal box at
the end of the maze. As soon as the rats became aware of the food, they were able to find their
way through the maze quickly, just as quickly as the comparison group, which had been
 rewarded with food all along. This is known as latent learning: learning that occurs but is not
observable in behavior until there is a reason to demonstrate it.

Language Revisited
 B.F. Skinner
o Shaping: Sounds that are in language get reinforced, others do not. Increasingly good
approximations of words get increasingly reinforced.
 Noam Chomsky
o Universal Grammar: Humans produce more kinds of sentences than they’re ever
exposed to. Language develops through experience and innate processes

Cognitive Factors: Expectancies

 An individual’s expectations about an outcome may render behavior more or less likely to occur.
 If one expects a behavior to produce a reinforcing consequence, they will perform it if able
 Not necessarily based on direct experience
 Expects reinforcement: More likely to help me move
 Does not expect reinforcement: Less likely to help me move
 Self-fulfilling prophecy:
o Ned knows that he will fail the exam
o Ned doesn’t study
o Ned fails

Expectancies
 Locus of Control: generalized expectations on whether our behavior will bring about a desired
outcome
o Internal: (control own fate) more likely to take action
o External: (little / no control) more likely to be passive
 In adverse events more likely to be depressed and frustrated
Social Learning Theory
 Learning does not occur in an interpersonal vacuum
 People learn many things from observing others (modeling)
 “Good model”
o Authority
o Attractiveness
o Likeability
o Prestige
 Example of modeling: Bobo Doll Bandura
o interested in aggression
o Result counter to accepted viewpoints
o Bobo doll experiment demonstrated that children are able to learn social behavior such
as aggression through the process of observation learning, through watching the
behavior of another person

Steps for Social Learning

1. Attention: In order to learn one must pay attention to the features of the modeled behavior
2. Retention: Remember the details of behavior
3. Reproduction: Reproduce behavior according to model
4. Motivation: Incentive or motive to produce overt behavior (driving force)

Social Learning Theory

(3 factors)
 Environmental factors
o Models
o Instruction
o Feedback
o Context
  Personal/cognitive factors
o Goals and Desires
o Memory
o Emotions/evaluation
 Behavior
o Progression
 Increases feelings of efficacy
 (efficacy: the ability to produce a desired or intended result.)
o Motivation
 Self-evaluation “almost there” or “never going to happen

Learning (Overview)
 Behaviorism
o Focus on overt behavior
o Classical: association of stimuli
o Operant: association of behavior and consequences
o Direct S-R relationship
 Cognitive
o All learning is not overt
o Learning may occur “offline” (Latent)
o Cognitive components: internal knowledge, expectancies, motivation
 Social Learning
o Influence of others
o Socialization that occurs by reciprocity of behavior, cognition, and interactions with
others

PowerPoint #11: Learning & Memory

Cognitive Theory
 LEARNING EXISTS OUTSIDE OF OVERT BEHAVIOR
 E. Tolman
 “Cognitive maps in Rats and Men”
 Empirical study demonstrated that reinforcement alone doesn’t explain learning.
 Rats’ experience in the maze caused latent learning – learning that did not appear in overt
behavior.
 Conclusions:
o 1. mentalisms affect behavior
o 2. Mentalisms can be indirectly studied

Memory
Theoretical Issues
 How is memory organized?
o Conceptually as well as biologically
 How reliable is memory?
o Are there ways to improve reliability?
 Are there separate representational systems for different kinds of memories?
o external world is re-presented in the mind
o sensory - “movie in the mind”
o verbal - conceptual ex: liberty
o motor - motor programs
 How much control do we have over what we remember?
o Are there ways to improve control?

Memory Defined
 The acquisition, storage, and retrieval of information, knowledge, and procedures for later
use.
 Modern conceptualization borrows heavily from the computer metaphor.
 Information processing approach
o

Standard Model
 Standard model of memory assumes that memory consists of 3 main systems
 Sensory registers
o Immediate perceptual awareness
 Short-term memory
o holds a small amount of information in consciousness
o 20 – 30 seconds
o Limited capacity: 5 to 9 items (phone #’s, SSN)
 Long-term memory
o facts, images, thoughts, feelings, skills, and experiences that may persist for as long as a
lifetime
Sensory Registers
 Hold sensory information in memory for brief moment after the stimulus


o Typically people able to report about 4 or 5 letters

 Manipulate delay between display & recall

o Duration Effect:
 Longer the delay, fewer letters recalled
 Rapid decay after 1s

 Partial Report Technique

o Recall only 1 row, which row not known until after displayed
o Performance is equal to free recall:
o All are “registered”
o Trace (sensory register) is remarkably accurate and contains considerably more
information than reported.

Short Term Memory

 Memory store that holds a small amount of information in consciousness
 Extremely limited capacity
 7 ± 2 bits (i.e, 5 – 9 units of information)

 Extremely limited capacity & decays in time

 7 ± 2 bits (unit of information)
  20 – 30 seconds before decay
 Rehearsal slows fading
o Maintenance rehearsal (shallow) Mental repetition in order to maintain information in
short-term memory
o Elaborative rehearsal (deep) Actively thinking about the information while rehearsing
 Working Memory: the use of short-term memory to manipulate/process information (e.g., in
rehearsal, thinking about an exam Q)
Long-term memory
 Representation of facts, images, thoughts, feelings, skills, and experiences that may persist for
as long as a lifetime
 Capacity: Practically unlimited
 1 quadrillion bits of info (Landauer, 1986)
 Duration: Limited by lifetime of person
 The longer information remains in STM, the more likely it will be passed on for storage in LTM

 Memory Trace
o Representation of new memory
o Possible mechanisms:
 Presynaptic neurons become more effective in sending signals (amount of
neurotransmitter)
 Postsynaptic neurons more effective in receiving signals (sensitivity to
neurotransmitter)
 New synapse creation (dendritic spines)
o There is no singular memory store
o retrieval activates several areas of brain simultaneously
o Memories encoded in areas that are related to info

PowerPoint #12: Memory II

Long term Memory

Explicit and Implicit Memory
 Explicit memory:
o Memory of factual knowledge & personal experiences.
o Requires conscious effort to access.
o Used primarily to make statements about the past or general knowledge
 Implicit memory:
o Memory that influences behavior without conscious awareness or effortful recall.
o Prior exposure to a stimulus facilitates or inhibits the processing of new information
o Exposure does not have to be consciously perceivable to influence memory (i.e., priming
effects)

Long Term Memory: Explicit Memories

 Episodic memory:
o Memories of particular events (e.g., wedding, graduation, birthday)
o What did you have for breakfast this morning?
o (Often ordered chronologically)
 Semantic memory:
o General world knowledge or facts names, places, dates
o What are typical breakfast foods?
o (Ex: What is George Washington’s Birthday)

Long Term Memory: Implicit Memories

 Motor Programs:
o Motor routines that have become mostly automatic and require little thought
o Examples: Walking, riding a bike, driving a car
 Cognitive Prior
 o conscious knowledge and strategies that have become automatic and highly efficient
o Examples: Language comprehension, rules of chess, implicit bias

Other Types of Long Term Memory

 Prospective Memory:
o Memory for things we need to do in the future
o Remembering to remember (stop at the store after work) and what (milk, bread, cheese)
 Flashbulb Memories
o Vivid memories of exciting or highly consequential events
o People can recall precisely when and where they were when they heard about or
experienced a substantial event (JFK’s death, Challenger Explosion, 9/11)
o These memories are so clear and vivid that people think they are 100% accurate. Are
they really totally accurate? Not always!

Encoding into Long Term Memory

 How does information get into LTM (long term memory) and how is it organized so it can be
retrieved?
 Information is stored into a representational form, or “code” that can be readily accessed
 Encoding Processes
o Automatic: No attention required, not strategic or controlled, often subconscious (e.g.,
sequence of events in your day)
o Effortful: Intentional, controlled movement of information into LTM (e.g., information
learned in class)

Encoding Types
 Sensory Encoding
o Visual Encoding:
 Images associated with events get stored
 (Ex: making a diagram of something for class, and remembering the picture with
the information)
o Acoustic Encoding:
 Sounds associated with events get stored
 Can aid in recall, e.g., the ABCs song
 Semantic Encoding: Meaning of events/things.
o How concepts are related
o Encoded a bit more “deeply” (longer lasting, easier recall)
o Self-reference effect: relating material to yourself can strengthen encoding
 Similar concepts/experiences seem to be encoded together

Organization of LTM
 LTM is organized in clusters of information that are related in meaning
 composed of interconnected nodes
  A node may contain any kind of information (e.g., thoughts, images, smells, emotions, etc.)

o (Words that come one relate to the word “tide”)

 Spreading activation theory: Activating one node in a network triggers activation in closely
related nodes
o Contiguity
o Similarity
o Contrast

Node Organization
 Hierarchies of associations
o Argues that info in LTM is organized into broad categories, which are further composed
of subcategories, etc.

 Cognitive economy
o properties of concepts are stored at the highest possible level in the hierarchy and not
re-represented at lower levels

Biological Bases of Memory

 Prefrontal Cortex: semantic memory, working memory
o (Short term memory)
  Amygdala: regulates emotions (especially fear and aggression), fear memories and related
emotional memories
o (Active during the encoding and recalling of emotional memories)
 Hippocampus: involved in recognition, meaning, and transfer of new information to declarative
LTM
o (Hard drive of the brain (long term memory))
 Cerebellum: procedural memory, motor programs
o (breathing, heartrate, digestion)

Hebbian Learning: Association in the Brain

 Slogan: “Cells that fire together, wire together” (Hebbian Learning)

o Repeated co-activation of cells (action potentials at same time)

o Dendrites can grow out to new cells
o Connection-strength between cells increases – more likely to fire together in the future
o Strong evidence that this happens, far from the whole picture.
Retrieval from Memory
 How is information stored in memory re-visited and used in our experience?
 Recall: accessing information without cues.
o e.g., recalling what you did last weekend
 Recognition: identifying information previously learned upon encountering it again
o e.g., naming people in your family with a photobook
o (Ex: what you use on a multiple choice exam)
 Relearning: learning information that was previously learned
o e.g., re-learning a piece of music or picking a sport back up. Often easier to learn than
initially

Memory Deficits & Limitations

2 Ways:
 Disease or Damage:
o Amnesia: loss of long-term memory – disease or trauma induced
o Alzheimer’s Disease: progressive loss of LTM functions including recall and formation of
new memories – associated with buildup of proteins in the brain

 Natural Flaws/Limitations: The Seven Sins (explanations later)

o Transience
o Absentmindedness
o Blocking
o Misattribution
o Suggestibility
o Bias
o Persistence

Memory Deficits & Limitations: Amnesia

 Often brought on by traumatic brain injury

 Retrograde amnesia:
o Problems are related to memories from before an accident.
o New memories form normally
o (Can’t remember stuff before an event)
 Anterograde amnesia
o Problems are related to memories from after an accident.
o New memories cannot be formed
o (Can’t remember stuff before an event)
Henry Molaison (Patient HM)
 Hippocampus removed
o Normal STM, language, perception
o Above average IQ
o Normal memory of his own past
o But unable to store new explicit memories in LTM

 H. M. could learn implicit memory skills:

o Mirror-tracing task: H.M. improved over sessions. But each session required new
instructions and felt new to him.
 (he didn’t remember doing the thing before, but he got better at it. His motor
knowledge was getting better, but he wasn’t actively memorizing it)
o Priming task: Word fragment completion. H.M. showed classic priming effects.
 Prime: Animal
 Word Fragment: C_M_L
 (from the prime of animal, it is easier to know that the word is CAMAL)

Memory Deficits & Limitations: Forgetting

- H. Ebbinghaus


 (Ebbinghaus would show people a list of random, made-up words, and then ask people what the
words were after a certain amount of time.)
 Transience: accessibility of memory decreases with time, typically through disuse

Memory Deficits & Limitations: Forgetting

 - (The line goes down slower after reviewing the information again.)
 Memory is more resilient with practice/review of learned material

Memory Deficits & Limitations:

 Seven Sins Seven different ways that memory can be lost, changed, or otherwise problematic

1. Transience: disuse leads to loss of memory

2. Absentmindedness: inattention leads to memories not being encoded
3. Blocking: retrieval from LTM suppressed or fails
4. Misattribution: Source of memory is incorrect
5. Suggestibility: False memories shaped by later experience
a. (Ex: you see a car accident, and you see the colors of the cars are blue and green, but
then a police officer later says the colors where green and white, and you agree.)
6. Bias: Memories of events distorted by present beliefs
7. Persistence: inability to forget undesirable memories.
a. (Ex: not being able to not think of a traumatic event)

Enhancing Memory
 Review
o Maintenance Rehearsal
o Elaborative Rehearsal
 Chunking:
o split information into smaller units
o Ex: 2128675309  212 – 867 – 5309
  Mnemonic Devices: tools for organizing related pieces of information

Mnemonic Devices
 Help memory due to elaborative rehearsal and increasing semantic encoding
- (Put something in your mind that is deeper than just repeating it over and over again. You attach
more meaning to it. This could be because you attach it to something you know before.)
 Acronyms
o ROY G BIV – colors
o SOHCAHTOA – trigonometry
 Pegwords
o (Attach a complicated sentence to a smaller, more simpler sentence to memorize)
o mineral wolframite is hardness number 4 and black in color
o black wolf opening the door
 Method of Loci
o The content of a physical location that you are familiar with is linked to the items you
want to recall

PowerPoint #13: Intelligence

Intelligence: What is It?

 Academic Success?
 Problem Solving/Thinking?
 Ability to Learn?
 Creativity?
 Practicality?

Intelligence: Cognition
  Processes of the mind including:
o Thinking
o Learning
o Memory
o Decision-making
o Problem-solving
o Language
 We tend to think of intelligence as exceptional skill in one or more of these domains

Historical Approaches: Testing

 A. Binet
 Selected tests that correspond with teacher evaluations.
 Scores are normed by averaging across many individuals.
 Mental Age: cognitive skill level ~ higher values = more developed

 D. Weschler
 “the global capacity of a person to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively
with his environment”
 Advocated for non-intellective factors (e.g., temperament, personality) of intelligence
 Multi-faceted test; Verbal comprehension, visual spatial reasoning, fluid reasoning, working
memory, processing speed

 Modern IQ tests test verbal/pattern recognition skills

 Cognitive-oriented view of intelligence

Crystallized & Fluid Intelligence

 R. Cattell
 Crystallized Intelligence
o Accumulated/acquired knowledge; memory & retrieval
o Used In: taking a test, recalling someone’s name, solving a math problem
 Fluid Intelligence
o Flexible pattern recognition and inferential thinking.
o Used In: navigation, abstract thinking, solving new problems

Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

  R. Sternberg
 Analytical Intelligence:
o problem solving & computation. Analyze, judge, compare/contrast
o Used In: academics broadly, developing a cognitive skill
 Creative Intelligence:
o imaginative/innovative problem-solving
o Used In: inventive thinking, creating art
 Practical Intelligence:
o street smarts/common sense. Application of knowledge
o Used In: navigation, social situations

Multiple Intelligences Theory (Howard Gardner)

 Linguistic: Speaking, reading, writing, learning languages
 Logical-Mathematical: Numerical patterns, logical deduction, math
 Musical: Musical memory, ability to learn/play instruments
 Bodily/Kinesthetic: Controlling body, sport, tool use
 Spatial: Navigation, architecture, Interpersonal Emotional empathy, social interactions
 Intrapersonal: Understanding personal emotions, behavioral management
 Naturalist: Interacting with nature, animal handling

Human Intelligence: Language

 Noam Chomsky
 Language seems to underwrite the rest of cognition – try to think without words!
 Speakers “know” the rules implicitly, and can use them in novel ways
 Grammar: underlying rules of sentence construction
 Universal Grammar: grammatical rules shared among all human languages; innate
 Some evidence, some debate

Structure of Language
 Syntax - the allowable ways we can combine words
 Semantics - the underlying meaning of the words
 What is Yoda getting right? Semantics. Wrong? Syntax

Bits of Language
 Morphemes: smallest units of meaningful language
o joyfulness = joy + full + ness
 Phonemes: smallest sound units of speech
 Phonological rules describe how phonemes are combined
 Can you think of a word that is both a morpheme and a phoneme?

Language Development
 Critical Period: a time during development in which certain behaviors/properties emerge.
  Language Acquisition ~ 5 – puberty
 Evidence: learning a second language after a certain age is a different process.
 When young, babies distinguish all types of phonemes
 After ~ 6 months of exposure, only distinguish between phonemes to exposed language

Relating Language & Thought

 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: language influences the thoughts/perceptions
o

 Russian contains different category names for dark blue and light blue
 For Russians, they were able to match the colors more quickly if one was dark
blue and the other light blue
 English speakers showed no difference

o
 In English, time back and forward (move ahead in time, move back in time)
 In Mandarin, time up and down
 Providing participants with a horizontal or vertical prime (top 2 pictures)
affected their responses to questions about time (lower picture: the lower the
bar, the quicker the response time)(an example of a question is the true or false
question).

PowerPoint #14: Intelligence II

Intelligence: Cognition
 Processes of the mind including:
o Thinking
o Learning
o Memory
o Decision-making
o Problem-solving
o Language

Intelligence as Problem Solving

 What is a problem?
o Impediment between you and some goal state
 Ralph’s barriers to his goal state
o Find the cheese
o Navigate to the cheese
 How does Ralph reach his goal state?
o Problem Solving!!!

 Problem solving - very general

o Maze
o Foraging for food
o Taking a test
o Traveling to California
o Developing scientific experiments

Problem Solving Techniques

 Tools to get from initial state  goal state
 Trial and Error
o continual changing attempts until problem is solved
o Con: May not be time-efficient
 Algorithm:
 o specific sequence of steps to incrementally approach solution

o
 Heuristic:
o loose set of rules or framework for solving a problem
o Working backwards:


o Heuristic as a mental shortcut:


 “Where’s the last place I remember using them?”

Functional Fixedness
 Once something is categorized into a role, hard to change its function
 (Example:) Duncker’s Candle Problem
o Goal state: Mount the lighted candle on the wall at eye height
o Given materials
 Tacks in box vs. Tacks not in box
 When the tacks are in box, the box is seen as a container
o Not part of the solution
Reasoning Pitfalls: Biases & Heuristics
 Functional Fixedness: fixation on singular purpose/function of a tool/concept
 Anchoring: bias from the first piece of information

o (If a car dealer shows you a more expensive car

first, and then show you a less expensive car, you will compare the second car to the first
car, and then see everything wrong with the second car)

 Confirmation: focus on information/experience that confirms beliefs

o Belief: eggs are bad for your health

 (Ignore an article that talks about eggs being good for your
health)

 (Focus on the article that talks about how eggs are bad for
your health)
  Hindsight Bias: mistakenly assuming you knew something about an event/thing before it
happened.
o Checking the answer to a problem and then telling yourself you would have gotten it
right.
 Availability Heuristic: base decision on recent or easily accessible information
o Plane crashes are highly covered in the media, so you might think they’re common
 Representative Bias: judging information based on what seems correct, not appropriate logic.
o Consider Laura Smith. She is 31, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in
economics at university and, as a student, she was passionate about the issues of
equality and discrimination.
o Is it more likely that Laura works at a bank? Or, is it more likely that she works at a bank
AND is active in the feminist movement? (statistically, it is more that one of the two is
correct, and not both)

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth (IOED)

 Overestimate knowledge + Unaware of it  IOED
 Common
o Household devices
o Natural phenomena
o Politics
o Mental Health
 Who cares? YOU SHOULD
o Affects your decision-making
o Receiving medical treatment
o Which politician to vote for
o Decline expert knowledge or advice
 Breaking the IOED = Write out Explanation
o Rating 1  Explain  Rating 2
o Rating 1 ˃ Rating 2
o

Intelligent Machines?
  “What would be impossible mechanically, so Descartes thought, was to make a robot that ‘would
reply appropriately to whatever was said in its presence’. … to have abstract capacities for
discriminating an infinity of possible inputs and appropriately generating an infinity of
responses…”
– Leiber “An Invitation to Cognitive Science”, original emphasis

 “Thus, I am shooketh”

Neural (“Connectionist”) Networks

 Idealization (i.e., simplified model) of neurons.

“Connections”

o
o Stimulation In  Stimulation Out “Node”
 Nodes are typically digital – there’s no physical nodes.
 If stimulation is above a critical threshold, the cell/node “turns on”
 - Output is the network state – the set of nodes that are on/off
o (the one node will have an output of excitatory connections (turn other nodes on), or
inhibitory connections (turn other nodes off) )

 Stimulus (e.g., images, words, sounds, datasets) [Output]

 Response (usually, words corresponding to things in the dataset, e.g., “stop-light”) [Input]
 Hidden Units: any intermediate nodes in a network that transmit stimulation between input and
output nodes – allows network to have more input-output mappings

Training a Network (the “Learning” in “Machine Learning”)

 Training Data (Stimulus)
 Response “Green Light” (what the network says)
 Feedback – “Red Light” (the right answer)
o If response is correct – do nothing
 o If response is incorrect – update network (tell the network that the right answer to that
input is actually “Red Light”

Learning in Neural Networks

 Learning happens through adjusting connections and pattern of activation/inhibition

 Modern AI is very good at detecting regularities in a data-set (e.g., red traffic lights).
 But it can be hard to know what properties of the data it is picking up on!

Is ChatGPT Intelligent?
PowerPoint #14: Development
 How did you get from this to this?
 Core Issues


Early life experience  Later life behavior


What changes happen throughout development?

Three Developmental Domains:

1. Physiological
2. Cognitive
3. Psycho-Social

 Are these trajectories universal?

 What are the sources of individual differences?
Core Issues: Nature and Nurture
 Are traits (physiological or psychological) innate, or derived from experience?
 Nature
o Innate
o Intrinsic
o Unchangeable
o Omnipresent
o Source:
 Genes
 Mental Systems (e.g., Universal Grammar)
 Nurture
o Experience
o Environment
o Learning
o Changeable
o Source:
 Just about everything else…

 Epigenetics: the bidirectional interactions between genes (nature) and experiential factors
(nurture)
 Genes provide some potential traits; environment & behavior realize (or don’t) those traits

Developmental Time-Periods
  Prenatal
o Before-Birth
o ~ 9 Months
 Infancy
o 0-2 Years
 Childhood
o Early: 2-5 Years
o Middle: 5-7 Years
o Late: 8-11 Years

Physiological Development: Prenatal

 Sperm enters egg, egg closes itself off to other sperm: Fertilization
 1st stage: germinal (called zygote) up to 2 weeks
 Monozygotic Twins (Identical) – one fertilization that splits into two embryos Dizygotic Twins
(Fraternal) – two eggs, two sperm
 The fertilized cell is dividing, but not yet implanted in uterine wall – is traveling down the
fallopian tube into place
 Ectopic Pregnancy – zygote implants in fallopian tube

 2nd stage: embryonic (embryo) 3 to 8 weeks:

o
o Zygote implants into uterine wall cells divide into stuff that will be baby and stuff that
will be baby’s house
o House: umbilical cord, amniotic sac, placenta

o Placenta: provides resources (nutrition, oxygen), filters blood

 Not all can be filtered
 Teratogens
 Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders: range of developmental disorders due to
alcohol consumption during pregnancy


o Heart starts as a tube, and starts beating
 The beating is what causes it to loop around and become heart shaped –
participating in its own development

  Stage 3: Fetal stage (Weeks 9 – 40)
o Most physiological structures are formed, baby mostly grows in size

o
 First Trimester
 Second Trimester
 Third Trimester

Physiological Development: Infancy – Childhood

 Growth (Mass)
o 5- 10 lbs at birth
o Doubles in 6 months: 10 -20 lbs
o Triples in 1 year: 15 – 30 lbs
 Length
o 19.5 inches at birth
o ~ 35 inches at 2 years
  Neural Development
o Effectively all neurons are present at birth
o Neural connections will continue to emerge and change
 blooming
o 2 years: 55% of adult size
o 6 years: 90 % of adult size

Physiological/Behavioral Development: Learning to Walk

 Often thought of as a sequence of stages
o


  Milestones: sequential emergence of behaviors/capabilities during growth
 Milestones are typically reached within some window of time. Sometimes associated with
critical periods (e.g., language)

 Stepping Reflex

o Reflex typically occurs when upright.

o Some babies initially only show it when lying on back
o Stepping depends on body composition (e.g., mass), orientation
o If body is set-up correctly, and in correct context, walking can occur – blurring discrete
stages

Physiological Development: Adolescence – Adulthood

 Puberty – Onset of adolescence
o Emergence of secondary sexual characteristics: physiological traits associated with
sexual maturity, but not directly linked to primary sexual organs.
o Development of prefrontal cortex is particularly important: decision making, planning,
impulse control.
o Brain fully developed mid-late 20s.
  Early Adulthood: 20 – 40 years
o Most physical maturation is complete
 Middle Adulthood: 40 - 60 years
o Physical/perceptual decline starts. Gradual.
 Late adulthood: 60 - ?
o Physical/perceptual decline increases significantly.

Cognitive Development
 J. Piaget
 How does language, thought, attention, memory, learning, decision-making, etc. change with
aging?
 Different stages show different limitations to cognition – when those limitations disappear,
individual has moved on to the next stage

Piaget: Stages of Development

 Sensorimotor (birth until 2)
o Learning the regularities of the world, learning how their actions affect the world

o
o A-not-B error: (limitation)
 

 (Google: A typical A-not-B task goes like this: An experimenter hides an

attractive toy under box "A" within the baby's reach. The baby searches for the
toy, looks under box "A", and finds the toy. This activity is usually repeated
several times (always with the researcher hiding the toy under box "A"), which
means baby has the ability to pass the object permanence test. Then, in the
critical trial, the experimenter moves the toy under box "B", also within easy
reach of the baby. Babies of 10 months or younger typically make the
perseveration error, meaning they look under box "A" even though they saw the
researcher move the toy under box "B", and box "B" is just as easy to reach.)
o Object Permanence: understanding that objects continue to exist when not seen, or
directly perceived
o Sensorimotor Stage ends when child stops making A-not-B error

 Preoperational (2 to 7)

o
o Ability to use symbolic thought, imagination
o Children lack concept of Irreversibility: can’t mentally reverse a sequence (so can’t undo
something you did)
o Egocentrism: (limitation) can’t visualize the world from another’s point of view
 Where do you think a toy might be? Where will Barbie look for the toy?
 

o Other limitations:
 Conservation: ability to understand that some things may change in appearance,
without changing in quantity
 Centration: focus on one thing at a time to the exclusion of all else

 Concrete Operational (7 to adolescence)

o
o Have conservation, ability to see from another’s perspective, ability to think/see more
than one thing at a time. (Covers the other limitations)
o Ability to use logic to solve problems, so long as they are concrete.
o Difficulty understanding the non-tangible (limitation)

 Fomal Operational (adolescence on)

o
o Logical thinking achieved even in abstract
o Inferential Reasoning: using cognitive skills to think about things outside of experience
o However, most adults are limited to those areas where we have experience. (limitation)
o Which is why every time we learn something new it’s best to be as concrete as possible.

PowerPoint #15: Development II

Review
  Sensorimotor (birth until 2)
o Lack object permanence, making the A-not-B error
 Preoperational (2 to 7)
o Characterized by egocentrism & centration, misunderstanding conservation &
reversibility
 Concrete Operational (7 to adolescence)
o Difficulty understanding the non-tangible

o
 Formal Operational (adolescence on)
o Lack Experience

Cognitive Development Beyond Piaget

 Evidence that object permanence is understood earlier than preoperational stage.
 May be interpreted as evidence for gradual, continuous, development.

Cognitive Development: Adolescence & Adults

 Adolescence
o Improvement of existing formal operational skills
 o Cognitive Empathy: Ability to recognize and understand the feelings and perspectives of
others – similar to Theory of Mind.
 Google: In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other
people by ascribing mental states to them.
 Adulthood
o Cognitive capabilities are likely to improve as long as they are used regularly. Mental and
physical activity help
o Postformal Thought: synthesis of formal operational thought with past experiences and
emotion to solve problems

Psycho-Social Development: Attachment

 Attachment: the social bond between parent and child, established early in life.
 Harry Harlow
o Monkeys preferred security/comfort, not just nourishment (wool mom or wire mother
with milk)
 J. Bowlby
o Interested in effects of WWII changing family structure
o Secure Attachment: parent provides needs, child is able to explore
 A secure base is a parental presence that gives the child a sense of safety as he
explores his surroundings.
 M. Ainsworth
o Refined Bowlby’s theory
o Different Attachment Styles
o Novel empirical methods for assessing attachment.

Ainsworth: Strange Situation

 Tests for different types of attachment styles
 Some evidence that attachment styles predict later-life social bonds
 4 Attachment Sytles:
o Secure Attachment:
 child explores while parent is in the room, upset when they leave, and consoled
when they return
 Parent might provide consistent resources, is attentive
o Avoidant Attachment:
 child is indifferent to parent, doesn’t care when they leave, slow to warm up
upon returning
 Parent might be insensitive, inattentive
o Anxious (Resistant) Attachment:
 child doesn’t explore as much, distressed when parent leaves, difficult to
console upon return
 Parent might be inconsistent
o Disorganized Attachment:
 child doesn’t explore, behaves erratically, avoids parent upon return
  Evidence that this is more likely in abused children
o Child’s affect/personality are also likely to matter. Not a one-way street!

 Attachment style predicts a number of things:

o Later social adjustment
o Later romantic relationships.
o Adult temperament/anxiety level
 Basically, anything where security and attachment are involved
 Can be overcome (nurture) but is the “default state” (nature).

Psycho-Social Development
 Freud’s Psychosexual Theory
o Put emphasis on early life experience in shaping personality
 Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory
o Highlights social interactions, treats development as lifelong process
 Kohlberg’s Moral Development Theory
o Expanded on Piaget’s cognitive theory, focused on stages of moral reasoning

PowerPoint #17: Emotions & Motivation

Psycho-Social Development: Erikson

 Believed there were distinct psychological tasks defining different life stages
 Tasks depend on social interactions, extend throughout lifespan (unlike Freud)
Stage Age Psychological Task Example
1 0-1 Trust vs. Mistrust Trusting caregivers to
provide basic needs
5 12-18 Identity vs. Confusion Experimenting with
identity and social roles
7 30-64 Generativity vs. Sense of purpose,
Stagnation contribution to society

 Succeed at task: stable personality

 Fail at task: unstable personality (e.g., anxiety, mistrust, fear, low self-esteem, lack of autonomy,
sense of isolation)

Psycho-Social Development: Kohlberg

 Interested in the development of moral reasoning, decision-making about ethical situations
 Tested moral reasoning with stories about ethically ambiguous events.
 Was Jean Valjean wrong to steal a loaf of bread?
Psycho-Social Development: Gilligan & Kohlberg

 Kohlberg’s experiments demonstrated gender-differences

o Women:
 “Valjean should not steal the bread because it leads to the separation from his
family”
 Decision-making oriented towards network of relations
o Men:
 “Valjean should steal the bread because it is just/fair.”
 Decision-making oriented towards justice
 Gilligan hypothesized that differences were not in “moral intellect” or a matter of skill, but a
different form of reasoning/values

Emotions & Motivation

 What makes us do stuff?
 We know we do stuff, try to explain it, call it “motivation”
o Motivation: the biological, emotional, cognitive, or social forces that activate and direct
behavior
 How do we measure motivation?
 o Motivation  Behavior
 Measuring motivation is hard-to-impossible
 Self-report is unreliable
 We measure behavior and infer motivation.
 So if our behavior comes from motivation, where does motivation come from?
o [It’s an] Origins Problem
o One solution: William James 1890: Instinct

Instinct
 Fixed Action Patterns


 Instinct: in-born motivation
 BUT really doesn’t explain anything!
o Instinct  Motivation
o ?  Instinct
o (Instinct might cause motivation, what causes instinct?)
 What about all that learned behavior?

Drive
 Drive: We have biological needs which we meet through our behavior
o Food
o Sleep
o Temperature regulation
o Water
o Sex
 All based on the idea of “set point” which we try to maintain
o ‘Motivated’ to return to homeostasis
  But we ignore drives pretty often!

Extrinsic Factors
 Incentive: Engage in behavior to achieve a reinforcement
 Based pretty heavily on Operant Conditioning
 Reinforcers usually broken into two categories: primary and secondary
o Primary come from drive theory: food, water, sleep, sex
o Secondary are those that will GET you primary or have been ASSOCIATED with primary:
money, affection, achievement
 BUT we engage in behaviors that do not seem to have primary or secondary reinforcement
o Video games
o Painting
o Rubik’s Cube
o Why? Because it’s fun… (because of arousal)

Arousal
 Arousal: General stimulation (not necessarily of the sexy kind) (gets rid of boredom)

 Too low and we get bored – seek stimulation

 Too high and we get overwhelmed – seek quiet
 Everyone’s “optimal” is different – some have high (sensation seekers, the people that sky-dive)
some have low.
 Accounts for behaviors that don’t produce/lead to reinforcements (video games, painting)
Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs:

 Have to meet basic needs (food, security) before can meet higher needs (love, fulfillment)
 “Self-actualized”: achieving one’s full potential

o
o “self-actualization” is a vague concept (Maslow agreed)
 little research support as a universal need

Emotion

 Only emotion will ever make the decision for him!

  Damage the emotional centers of the brain orbitofrontal cortex – become unable to make
decisions (even what socks to wear)

 Perception of emotion seems to be relatively universal:

Showing your emotions

 6 distinctive expressions… universality hypothesis

 But culture can regulate how we express emotion- display rules

What causes emotions?

 What emotion would you feel?

 What would your body feel like?
 How are the two related?

 James-Lange theory proposes our subjective emotional experience is the consequence of a

specific physiological arousal pattern
o
Emotions & Body States

 Strack et al. asked participants to hold a pencil in their mouth

o Teeth condition (forced a smile)
o Lips condition (forced a frown)
o Hand (control) condition (control group)
 Rated a series of cartoons

What causes emotions?

 Cannon-Bard theory proposes a stimulus independently triggers both our subjective emotional
experience and a specific physiological arousal pattern

o
 o Deafferented individuals can feel emotion without physiological arousal

 Schachter-Singer theory proposes our subjective emotional experience is the consequence of a

specific physiological arousal pattern and our interpretation of that pattern
o

o Excitement or fear?


Schacter-Singer: Empirical Support

 Physiological Arousal ↔ Interpretation

What causes emotions? (cont.)

 Lazarus’s Cognitive Appraisal Theory proposes emotion and physiological arousal follow from a
“cognitive appraisal” of the stimulus

o
 o

Emotions & the Brain

- Arrow pointing to the Orbitofrontal cortex

 The Limbic System
o Hypothalamus: Activates sympathetic nervous system (arousal)
o Thalamus: Distributes sensory information (incoming from PNS) to other regions
o Orbitofrontal Cortex: social and emotional behavior
o Amygdala: Processes emotional information – often before sensory integration.
o Hippocampus: Emotional experience + cognition