Introduction to

Cognitive
Psychology

Greg Francis

Spring 2019

MWF 11:30 am - 12:20 pm

Matthews Hall, Room 210

http://www.psych.purdue.edu/~gfrancis/Classes/PSY200/indexF19.html
Prof. Greg Francis

Four great mysteries

Introduction
●  Humans face four great mysteries about the
universe
PSY 200 ●  1) Why is there something instead of nothing?
w  This is the domain of physics
Greg Francis w  Most of us are not going to understand the ideas

Lecture 01

Four great mysteries.

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Four great mysteries Four great mysteries

●  Humans face four great mysteries about the ●  Humans face four great
mysteries about the
universe
universe
●  2) How did life form? ●  3) Why is there so much
w  This question is addressed at the boundary between diversity of life?
chemistry and biology w  This is the domain of
biology
w  Evolution and natural
selection answer this
question

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Four great mysteries

Topics
●  Humans face four great mysteries about the universe
●  4) What is the basis of human intelligence and
consciousness? ●  Discuss a sample of issues in cognitive
w  Cognitive psychology and neuroscience psychology / cognitive neuroscience
w  Far from a complete answer
w  Lots of issues to discuss ●  Try to relate cognitive psychology to
stories you may have heard in the popular
press
●  Identify how the topics can help you to be
a better person

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology

1
Prof. Greg Francis

Topics Textbook
●  There is no textbook
●  For example
●  Lecture notes are used instead
w What s the deal with left and right brains?
w Why does everyone love Prozac? ●  If you want a book, borrow from a past
class
w Why telephone operators seem rude.
w Why there is a gate at the first floor stairway ●  There are optional readings in the
in the Psychology building. syllabus
w What to do if you are drunk while studying for w Not for every subject
an exam.
w What is the plural of walkman?

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Lecture notes Lecture vodcast

●  Vodcast of the lectures will be provided
Downloadable from the
Prof. Greg Francis

● 
Four great mysteries
●  To me, these are a poor substitute for attending
class web page
Introduction

lecture
●  Humans face four great mysteries about the
universe
PSY 200 ●  1) Why is there something instead of nothing?
!  This is the domain of physics
Greg Francis !  Most of us are not going to understand the ideas

Lecture 01

w Adobe Acrobat (pdf) Four great mysteries.

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●  Vodcasts will be posted on Blackboard as they
format Four great mysteries Four great mysteries
become available
●  Humans face four great mysteries about the ●  Humans face four great

w  Sometimes takes a few days

mysteries about the
universe
universe

w Reduced form (6 to a
●  2) How did life form? ●  3) Why is there so much
!  This question is addressed at the boundary between diversity of life?
chemistry and biology !  This is the domain of
biology
!  Evolution and natural
selection answer this

w  Sound may not be very good

question

page) Purdue University Purdue University

Four great mysteries

Topics
●  Humans face four great mysteries about the universe
●  4) What is the basis of human intelligence and
consciousness? ●  Discuss a sample of issues in cognitive
!  Cognitive psychology and neuroscience psychology / cognitive neuroscience
!  Far from a complete answer
!  Lots of issues to discuss ●  Try to relate cognitive psychology to
stories you may have heard in the popular
press
●  Identify how the topics can help you to be
a better person

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology

1

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Attendance Course web page

●  When you enter the room each day, be sure to get a
scantron ●  Syllabus on the web
w  fill it out with your Purdue information ●  http://www.psych.purdue.edu/~gfrancis/Classes/PSY200/indexF19.html

w  Sign it w updates to the syllabus

w  No need to answer any questions w Links to labs
●  Hand in the scantron at the end of class w Links to writing assignments
w  It will function as a check on your attendance
w Study guides for the exams
●  You can miss up to 6 lectures without any penalty
w (old) practice exams
w  Beyond that you lose a proportion of points
w Links to optional readings
w  5% of your class grade
w Grades will be posted after the first exam
●  Scantrons are only available for the first 15 minutes of
class ●  The course sparingly uses Blackboard
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology

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Prof. Greg Francis

Course outline Exams

●  Neuroscience -- EXAM 1 (10%) ●  Multiple choice (scantron)
●  Perception, Attention & Memory – EXAM 2 (10%)
●  Detailed study guides are already on the
Memory & Mental representation -- Exam 3 (15%)
class web site
● 

●  Language -- Exam 4 (15%)

●  Beware the scheduling of the final exam!
●  Reasoning
w The exam is during the final exam week
●  Cumulative Final (15%)
w There are few excuses for changing the date

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CogLab CogLab
●  Labs are listed on the syllabus
●  Homework
●  They must be completed by 10:00 am at the date
●  You participate in classic experiments indicated in the syllabus
●  Total lab grade contributes to 15% of your class w  else you get no credit
grade. w  Better to do it the night before
●  Grade is based solely on completing the ●  Since I wrote CogLab, you get access to the
experiment, not on the quality of the data experiments for free
w  (a $50 value!)

●  See handout for instructions on getting started

●  Registration code is on a label on the instructions
●  First lab is due at 10:00 am on Wednesday!
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Writing assignments ●  Straight scale Grading

●  You need practice writing! w  98% -100% A+
w  93% - 97% A
●  Four assignments, 3-5 pages of single spaced
w  90% - 92% A-
text.
w  88% - 89% B+
w  If you struggle to fill 3 pages of text, you probably do w  83% - 87% B
not understand the assignment w  80% - 82% B-
●  Assignments are due in Blackboard w  78% - 79% C+
w  73% - 77% C
●  First assignment is January 23
w  70% - 72% C-
w  By the start of class (not one second later!) No extra credit
w  68% - 69% D+
●  15% of your class grade w  63% - 67% D
w  60% - 62% D-
w  0% - 59% F
●  No rounding up: 82.99 is a B-
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology

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Prof. Greg Francis

Grading Grading
●  Last semester’s grades (Fall 2017) ●  Last semester’s grades (Fall 2017)
w The class met at 7:30 am, so I am sure you can do Frequency
better! A 14
B 48
100
C 20

Final class grade

90

E1 E2 E3 E4 Final CogLab Writing Attendance 80 D 15

Average 67 69 77 87 77 81 78 83
70
F 16
60
Max 96 98 96 100 99 50
40
30
20
10
0
0 20 40 60 80 100

CogLab score
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Grading Instructor office hours

●  Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 2:00 – 3:00 pm
●  Last semester’s grades (Fall 2017)
w Or by appointment
Frequency
A 14 w Psych 3186
B 48 w Email: [email protected]
100
C 20
Final class grade

90
80 D 15
70
F 16
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
0.0 20.0 40.0 60.0 80.0 100.0

Attendance score
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Attitude/Advice
Teaching assistants ●  During lectures: turn off cell phones, don t read newspapers, don t play
games
●  Questions are always welcome. I can adjust my lecturing pace accordingly
●  Maria Kon and Michelle Coverdale ●  Print out the lectures and bring them to class. Take notes during class. Not
everything is on the slides.
●  Grade writing assignments ●  Everything we talk about in class is important
Work on the study guide every week, so the ideas/answers are fresh in your
●  Keep track of grades and attendance ● 

mind.

●  Have office hours ●  This class is an introductory class, but that does not mean it is easy
w  It’s like Introduction to Physics or Introduction to Chemistry

●  May provide out-of-class study sessions w  Almost every other subtopic in psychology depends on the ideas in cognitive
psychology
for exams w  Everything is at least 10,000 times more complicated than what we discuss
●  If you don t find a topic interesting, just wait a week

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology

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Prof. Greg Francis

Next time

●  Cognitive neuroscience
●  The brain
●  The modularity hypothesis

●  CogLab on Brain asymmetry due!

●  What s the deal with left and right brains?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology

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Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Brain parts The brain

PSY 200 ●  The source of cognition

(consider transplant!)

Greg Francis ●  Weighs about 3 pounds

●  Damage to some parts result
in immediate death or
Lecture 02 disability
●  Damage to other parts
seems to have no effect!
●  What brain parts are
What s the deal with left and important to cognition?
How do we discover the role
right brains?
● 

of each brain part?

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The brain The brain

Hypothalamus
●  Fore-brain (appetite, thirst,
●  Hind-brain temperature,
w cortex hormones)
w (brain
●  Hind-brain stem)
w brain stem)
Thalamus
Limbic Lobe (sensory
(sexual behavior, gateway,
emotional behavior, except
memory) smell)

Cerebellum
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Fore-brain Fore-brain
●  Cortex ●  Cortex
●  Similar to a thick, ●  Similar to a thick,
crumpled crumpled
newspaper page newspaper page
●  Grooves (fissures ●  Grooves (fissures
or sulci) separate or sulci) separate
regions regions

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Fore-brain Fore-brain
●  Cortex ●  Cortex
●  Similar to a thick, ●  Similar to a thick,
crumpled newspaper crumpled
page
newspaper page
Grooves (fissures or
Grooves (fissures
● 
● 
sulci) separate regions
or sulci) separate
regions

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Contralateral processing Contralateral processing

●  Processing in the brain is done on the
●  Neural fibers
opposite side of your organs from the eye
●  Control of your right arm is from the left cross on way
to cortex
side of your brain
●  Information from your left field of view
goes to the right side of your brain

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Contralateral processing Cut corpus callosum

●  Brain
hemispheres
●  Behavior
are
changes very
connected by
a mass of little
neural fibers ●  Subtle effects
called the
corpus
callosum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Brain sides Brain sides

●  If nut flashes on left ●  Results led to further study and common belief that
screen w  Left side: language, analytical, classification, Western rationalization

w  subject cannot name it w  Right side: art, music, recognition of faces and shapes, Eastern
mysticism
w  subject can pick up nut
with left hand ●  Vast oversimplification
w  in a normal brain, both
●  If nut flashes on right
sides are involved in
side many tasks
w  subject can name it ●  Results do support the idea
w  subject cannot pick up that different parts of the
nut with left hand until brain are involved in
he says nut out loud different cognitive tasks
(modularity hypothesis)
1981 Nobel Prize for Roger Sperry!
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CogLab CogLab
●  In the CogLab + ●  Your task was to +
experiment Brain judge whether the
asymmetry presented word was
●  You stared at a “old” (seen on an
central fixation point + wood earlier trial) or + wood
“new” (not previously
●  A word was
seen in this
presented to either
experiment)
the left or right side
of fixation + Time + Time

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CogLab CogLab
●  Federmeier & Benjamin (2005) found better memory ●  Other explanations than hemispheric
performance for words presented in the right visual field
specialization
●  Words in the right visual field go to the left hemisphere
w  Which is known to be specialized for language w Reading goes from left to right, from fixation to
right visual field
w Perceptual advantage to right visual field?
w Attentional advantage to right visual field?

●  It is difficult to come up with an experiment

that isolates hemispheric specialization

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

CogLab Data CogLab Data

●  Class (103 right-handed participants; 11 left-handed ●  Global (20,233 right-handed participants; 2106 left-handed
participants) participants)
w  Very tiny effect for right handers (probably just noise) ●  Very tiny effect (but bigger for left-handers than right
handers – weird; probably noise)

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Anatomy Occipital lobe

●  The cortex contains large fissures that
separate five major areas ●  Receives
w Limbic (already discussed) information from
w Occipital the eye
w Parietal w Most investigated
w Temporal area of the brain
w Frontal

●  Each has distinct properties

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Parietal lobe Parietal lobe

●  Sensations of ●  Primary sensory

pain, area
temperature, w sensitivity
touch, pressure involves
disproportionate
areas of the brain,
Primary relative to size of
sensory body part
area

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Temporal lobe Frontal lobe

●  Hearing
●  Largest part of
w speech (left)
cortex
w music (right)
w planning
●  Memory and w prediction
attention w motor area
w visual recognition w speech area

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Broadman areas Area function

●  Divide lobes into areas ●  Can partly identify
●  e.g. Broadman function by looking at
w  Area 1, Area 12, … Area 200 nerves coming in and
w  Some special names: V1, V2, V3,…
out of area
●  Pathways through Color

areas seem to be
involved in different
kinds of cognitive tasks

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Brain layers
Conclusions
●  There is order and
function even within ●  Lots of research in this area
an area ●  New brain regions are being mapped out
●  The cortex is a daily with ever increasing resolution
sheet of neurons
●  Cognitive neuroscience relies strongly on
●  In its thickness are
6 layers of neurons
the modularity hypothesis
w  numbered 1-6 ●  Putting everything together is very difficult
w  sometimes include
subdivisions (4a, 4b,
4cα, 4cβ, …)

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Next time
●  Brain scans
●  EEG recordings
●  MRI scans
●  Functional MRI

●  How to study the brain without killing someone.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

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Brain scans Scanning

●  Technology provides insight into brain processes
PSY 200 w  EEG recordings
w  MRI

Greg Francis w  Functional MRI

●  Non-invasive
Lecture 03 ●  Maps of brain activity
●  The goal is to relate brain events to cognitive
events
How to study the brain without
killing someone.
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Resolution Electroencephalogram
●  For almost every technique we have to worry about its
ability to discriminate differences in
w  Space: which ●  EEG
place is active?
w  Time: when ●  The brain
does something
happen? produces
●  Finer resolution electrical activity
is usually better
w  But can be ●  Put electrodes
difficult to deal
with so much on the head
data

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Brain maps
EEG ●  You can analyze the EEG signals in many different ways
●  Watch the electrical current change through time while ●  Compare the signal strength for different situations
reading sentences (averaged across many trials) ●  Ayahuasca is a Brazilian psychoactive tea
w  Good temporal resolution Semantic
w  Kutas & Hillyard (1980) anomaly

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Spatial resolution ●  Magnetic field
forces protons in
●  Poor spatial your body to line
up
resolution
w  pulses of radio
●  You never really into field
bounces
know which part of protons around
the brain is making w  as they return
to normal
the current
position, they
w  Lots of work to emit a signal
improve that can be
decoded into a
map

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Magnetic Resonance Imaging Magnetic Resonance Imaging

●  MRI Scans: Like an x-ray machine, but ●  MRI Scans: Like an x-ray machine, but can look at soft
tissue (like ankles, my brain,..)
can look at soft tissue (like lungs, heart,..) w  Very good spatial resolution
w Very good spatial resolution w  millimeters

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MRI Scans MRI Scans

●  MRI provides ●  Can identify
a slice at a anatomical
time differences between
●  Take multiple brains
slices to build ●  Alcoholic has larger
up full image ventricles and thinner
corpus callosum
●  Note, comparing
across brains is a bit
Nobel prize tricky!
winning work!
w  Everyone s brain is a
bit different
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

MRI Scans MRI Scans

●  Non-invasive, no side effects
●  3-D maps ●  Allows early detection of brain disease,
tumors,…

●  Normal ●  Fantastic spatial resolution

●  But…
w it only shows structure
●  Ataxia:
w no way to know what a brain area does
w loss of motor
control

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Functional MRI Functional MRI

●  Just like MRI, but with a new analysis
●  Color maps show
w  MRI differentiates between different types of tissue (cell
strongest
types)
responses
w  Functional MRI differentiates between active and
inactive neurons: concentration of oxygen ●  E.g., fMRI scan of a
w  The measurement is called the blood oxygen level woman after a stroke
dependent (BOLD)
w Blue/green:
»  It roughly tracks the flow of blood in the brain
normal blood flow
»  More active neurons recruit more blood
w Red/black:
abnormal blood
flow

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Functional MRI Scanning

●  Consider this fMRI scan

●  Very good spatial ●  It shows regional cerebral

blood volume (rCBV)
resolution
●  You cannot tell how/if
w  millimeters
different regions are involved
●  Pretty good in different activities
temporal resolution w  Breathing

w  Seconds w  Digestion
w  Thinking about exams
w  (Silva, 2002)
w  …..

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Differences A simple experiment

●  We have to look for differences in activity ●  Suppose you run an fMRI experiment where a person alternates
between seeing a blank screen and a face
●  Alzheimer s patients have reduced brain activity
●  You take multiple fMRI scans with half recording brain activity during
the blank and half recording brain activity during the face
●  Add them up pixel by pixel for each condition

Viewing blank Viewing face

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Subtraction method Reporting

●  What is usually
Subtract the fMRI signals produced by one condition from the fMRI
reported is just the
● 

signals produced by another condition

difference map
●  The difference map indicates those brain regions that are involved in
the different cognitive tasks ●  Colors mark places
in the brain that are
●  It requires a sophisticated statistical analysis to avoid false positives!
statistically different
between conditions
Viewing blank Viewing face Difference map
●  Czisch et al. (2009)
for rare tones vs.
frequent tones
●  The map would be
different if it
compared rare tones
versus speech
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Functional MRI
Functional MRI

●  Color maps show ●  When moving a

strongest
pointer to a target
responses
box compared to no
●  e.g., during a task
that requires covert movement
spatial attention w  activity in areas
compared to one that involved in vision,
does not require planning, and motor
attention control

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Connectome Connectome
●  You can use similar technology (diffusion ●  Gives an
spectral imaging) to focus on particular types of anatomical
cellular material map of how
w E.g., identify axons (discussed later) that connect information
brain cells can travel
●  Gives an
anatomical
map of how
information
can travel
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Limitations Common misconception

●  Brain scans do not really tell us how the brain ●  Brain scans demonstrate a physiological basis to
works things that were thought to be emotionally or
w  the scans just tell us approximately where in the brain
cognitively based
something occurs w  e.g., MRI scans
of stutters
w  sometimes it can tell approximately when
w  in fact, all
●  Even trying to find the place may be problematic behavioral traits
w  Lots of cognitive abilities involve many different areas are physiologically
of the brain based
●  Most theories of cognition are derived from
experimental psychology
w  Brain studies explore how to implement the theories

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Conclusions Next time

●  Lots of research in this area ●  How do we use brain scans to study
●  Technology is improving in many ways cognition?
●  There are many other types of scanning ●  How good are the scans?
technologies
w  Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) ●  What is really being measured?
w  Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)
w  Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography
(SPECT) ●  How to read someone s mind.
w  Near Infrared Spectroscopic Imaging (NIRSI)
w  Magnetoencephalography (MEG)
w  Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Brain scans Scanning

●  Brain scanning techniques like fMRI
PSY 200 provide spatial and temporal patterns of
activity across the brain
Greg Francis
●  We want to analyze those patterns to
Lecture 04 discover how the brain works

How to read someone s mind.

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fMRI fMRI
●  Passive listening vs. active listening Passive
●  The colors show the
w Vannest et al. (2009) listening
difference maps
●  Twenty children (ages 11-13) complete three relative to listening to
the tones
tasks
●  Common activity
w Passive listening: hear a female speaker tell a 30-
(breathing, digestion,
second story
hearing machine
w Active response: hear the same speaker tell a story in
noise,…) is
5 second segments of two sentences. Scanning Active
subtracted out
occurred after the sentences (silence). Answer response
questions ●  The colors are not
brain activity!
w Random tones: no task, just listen
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fMRI fMRI
●  More signals and Passive ●  Does more signal for the Passive
listening listening
different patterns for active response mean active
active listening response listening is better
compared to passive than passive listening?
listening ●  Tested children on
●  (Could it be comprehension of stories
otherwise?) w  PL: 75.1% correct, SD=12.7
w  AR: 79.1% correct, SD=9.1
Active Active
response ●  No real difference in response
comprehension

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Sensory substitution Sensory substitution

●  Some scientists look for replacements to lost perception ●  People can use a TDU to discriminate shapes
●  For example, there is a tongue display unit that attempts to present spatial w  Kaczmarek, Bach-y-Rita & Tyler (1998)
information for blind people w  Link to video on class web page

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Sensory substitution Sensory substitution

●  So what happens in the brain? ●  fMRI differences
●  Are there responses from areas typically involved in shape suggest that using the
perception? Or in areas related to touch on the tongue? (or both or TDU involves areas of
neither?) motor cortex
●  Not areas that are
traditionally for visual
perception

●  This is the kind of

question that can best
be answered with brain
scan technology

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Walking Walking
●  There is no portable
MRI machine
●  But scientists are
creative about how to
use it to study a wide
variety of activities
●  Volta et al. (2015)
studied walking by ●  Can compare walking “indoors” versus “outdoors”
having participants
●  Execution (actually “walk”) versus observation (not “walk”)
“walk” on a cylinder
outside the MRI ●  Complicated controls
machine w  Press feet against cylinder
w  Still (non-moving) image
w  Gray image (no picture)

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Walking Reading minds

●  Long-term, the goal of fMRI research is to be able to analyze a brain scan
and identify what a person is thinking
●  There are several attempts to do this (Haynes et al., 2006)
w  Adding or subtracting numbers

●  Top: Executing or observing walking versus gray image

w  Interesting that they involve some similar brain regions

●  Bottom: Hallway walking versus open field walking

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Reading minds Mind reading

●  Based on the choice at the end, we can deduce whether the subject chose ●  It is possible to build a recognition system that distinguishes (with
addition or subtraction for that trial 71% accuracy) the brain patterns for addition and subtraction
●  Make an fMRI scan during the selection process w  Depends on the place in the brain
w  Whether to add or subtract numbers w  Different places for intention and execution
●  You can read the mind of these subjects!

Scan
now

Or scan
now
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Thought reconstruction Thought reconstruction

●  Another research group analyzed fMRI responses to ●  Performance depends on where the signals come from
reproduce a shown image ●  Fewer errors for lower brain areas
w  Where do you stop?, the retina?, the lens of the eye?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Thought reconstruction Mind reading limits

●  fMRI: If subjects decide to multiply numbers, a system trained to
●  These kinds of studies are mostly a demonstration of distinguish between subtraction and addition is clueless
technology ●  Thought reconstruction: As the number of possible images to be
w  we already know the brain represents visual information! shown increases, it becomes harder to reconstruct the shown
●  Before the study was run, we knew that there were image

differences in the brain when we see different images ●  In general, brain scans provide a very limited form of mind reading
w  People do better than this every day by watching people behave
w  The percept is the brain’s behavior, so there must be
(posture, eyes, skin tone)
differences!

●  These kinds of studies tell us that the

neurophysiological differences between cognitive
events can be measured by these brain scanning
technologies
w  Failure would only indicate limits of the technology
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Problems / limitations with

Statistics
scanning
●  So much data that it is difficult to know what to do with everything ●  It is easy to do the statistics incorrectly (it has taken a while for the
w  Statistical analysis is complicated field to sort this out)
w  In a small brain scan, you may have 64 x 64 voxels x 10 slices ●  Bennett et al. (2010) ran a study where the subject was shown a
»  =40,960 voxels overall series of photographs depicting people in social situations with a
w  Some of those voxels will give different responses just by chance specified emotional valence, either socially inclusive or socially
exclusive. The subject was asked to determine which emotion the
●  Difficult to compare across subjects
individual in the photo must have been experiencing.
w  Slightly different anatomy
●  fMRI contrasts were computed between the scans for the two
●  Blurring of images is difficult to deal with (subjects move in the types of emotional valence
scanner)
w  Sometimes blur together brain areas, across a fissure, that are
actually far apart on surface of cortex
●  Some cognitive events are faster than the technology can track
●  Can only measure the brain, cannot manipulate it
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Statistics Statistics
●  There is a significant difference in fMRI activity for some regions of ●  The subject in this study was a mature Atlantic
the brain
salmon (sex unknown)
w  Medial brain cavity and upper spinal column
●  The active regions identified by the fMRI are due to
chance
●  Even with purely random noise, there will be some
statistically significant findings
w  The brain has lots of random noise

●  These problems can be reduced but never entirely

eliminated
w  They are common to many areas of psychology, not just brain
scans

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Neurons A neuron
Dendrite Axon
●  The brain cells that are responsible for cognition ●  ● 

w  input w  output
are neurons ●  Soma
●  Myelin sheath
w  integrate
w  insulate

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Myelin A neuron
●  Diffusion Spectral Imaging detects properties of ●  There are many different types of neurons
the myelin sheath (“white matter”) ●  We will describe only the most common characteristics

●  Allows imaging of human brain connectome

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How many neurons? Conclusions

●  Estimates of 10^11 neurons in the human brain ●  Brain scans usually look at differences in brain
activity
w 100,000,000,000; one hundred billion
●  Lots of technical (and ethical) issues
w estimates of 100,000 per cubic millimeter
●  The goal is to be able to look at a map (or movie)
w (about the resolution of functional MRI)
and be able to read someone s mind
●  Millions are active at any given time
●  That is many years off
w  questionable if it can even be done with these methods
No. 2 1 mm alone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qTuZlMvFgY
(time 2:55) Purdue University Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Next time
●  What is the neural activity that produces
brain scans?
●  How do neurons transmit information to
other neurons?

●  Why does (nearly) everyone like Prozac?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Neurons and neurotransmitters Neurons

●  The brain cells that are responsible for cognition
PSY 200 are neurons

Greg Francis
Lecture 05

Why does (nearly) everyone

love Prozac?
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Input / output Input at dendrites

Changes the cell membrane
-70 millivolts ● 

●  Electrical signal potential

resting level
w  Established by the electrode w  which causes further
relative amount of changes in the cell s
charged ions inside NA+ chemistry
versus outside the cell w  which causes further
membrane changes in the membrane
●  Inputs change the NA+ potential

resting potential of the Strong enough input crosses

K+
● 

cell a threshold and the cell fires

Output identifies when w  action potential

●  K+
the cell potential has
increased a lot
http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/neurons_intro/action_potential_1.0.swf
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A neuron A neuron
●  An action potential ●  The action potential then affects the membranes of
generated at the other cells dendrites
soma travels
down the axon to
the terminals

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Output Output
●  Myelin is like insulation for the ●  The output of a neuron is either excitatory or inhibitory on the
cell s axon
other neuron it reaches
w  it insures that the signal
generated by the action ●  Excitatory: when our neuron sends an output, the receiving
potential is strong neuron is more likely to produce an action potential
w  Jumps electrically rather than ●  Inhibitory: when our neuron sends an output, the receiving
the normal chemical exchanges
neuron is less likely to produce an action potential
●  In multiple sclerosis the body s
immune system attacks myelin
w  physical problems (paralysis)
w  cognitive problems (memory,
reasoning, judgement)
w  cause unknown (300,000
people)

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Networks Epilepsy
●  Cognitive behavior is related to ●  Disease of central nervous system
groups of neurons working w  causes mostly unknown
together
●  Seizures
●  Include excitation and inhibition
w  bursts of electrical activity travelling through networks in
w  more later
the brain
w  brain activity is out of control
w  epileptic fits

●  Isolated seizures also occur due to high fever,

lack of oxygen, or head injury

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Epilepsy Epilepsy
●  One theory (but not yet proven) is that epilepsy
●  EEG recordings patients inhibitory cells are not working properly
are often used to ●  Excitatory cells activate everything until they
diagnose epilepsy exhaust themselves
●  Many different
types of epilepsy,
with different EEG
patterns

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Epilepsy A balanced brain

●  The brain is a dynamic system
●  Treatment generally involves w  at multiple levels
w  drugs, diet, avoiding stress, ●  Neurons
keeping regular schedule
w  balance between forces inside and outside of cell membrane
●  In extreme cases surgery allows for action potentials
prevents seizures from
●  Networks
spreading throughout the
w  balance between excitation and inhibition
brain
●  Without these balances you do not think
●  Contrast with ideas about using “more” of your brain

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Neural connections
Molecular structure

●  Axon --> dendrites ●  Molecules have a particular three-

dimensional shape
water benzene

http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/neurons_intro/neurotransmission_classic_3.0.swf
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Molecular structure Molecular structure

●  Neurotransmitters are just molecules
●  Different molecules have different
●  At least 50 different neurotransmitters
shapes
aspirin w dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin,
acetylcholine, glutamate, gamma-
TNT aminobutyric acid (GABA)

●  All with different shapes!

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Receptor Receptor
●  Very large
molecules called ●  When it accepts a neurotransmitter, it
proteins
starts a chain reaction of events
●  Similar to a filter
w  accepts some
w physical, chemical, electrical
neuro- w locally changes the cell membrane
transmitters
» depolarization (excitation)
w  rejects others
» hyperpolarization (inhibition)

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Neurotransmitters Tourette s syndrome

●  Inherited (~200,000 in US)

●  Different neurotransmitters are associated ●  Behavior

w  Swearing
with different properties
w  Tics
w actually neurotransmitter and receptor pairs »  Simple: eye blinking, facial grimacing, sniffing
»  Complex: coordinated patterns, sniffing objects,
●  neural jumping, twisting
Too much dopamine
cognitive
● 
● 
●  Treated with Haldol (among others)
●  behavioral w  blocks dopamine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlFpkruxrCI
(6:15 in)
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Parkinson s Drugs
●  Lack of dopamine ●  Interact with neurotransmitters in lots of ways, for
example
w Many different causes
w  Replace: accepted by receptor and with similar effect
w In extreme cases, patients are frozen
w  Production: increase or decrease
●  Give patients large doses of L-DOPA w  Reuptake: knock out enzymes that remove
neurotransmitter from receptor, neurotransmitter has a
w a precursor of dopamine bigger effect
w sometimes solves the problem w  Blocking: enter receptor but does not trigger reaction,
w lots of side effects partly closes receptor protein so neurotransmitter
cannot enter
●  Awakenings, by Oliver Sacks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koL0PWCJ4lo
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/2/19

Prozac Other drugs

●  Some forms of depression ●  Amphetamines: release of norepinephrin or dopamine
seem to be related to limits in ●  LSD: resembles serotonin
the use of the
neurotransmitter serotonin ●  Phenothiazine drugs: block dopamine
●  Prozac is a selective ●  Curare: blocks acetylcholine
serotonin reuptake inhibitor
●  Cocaine: prolongs effects of dopamine
(SSRI)
w  it keeps serotonin bound to a ●  Morphine: resembles a small set of neurotransmitters called
receptor for longer than endorphin peptides (modulate pain perception)
usual, thereby increasing its
effect ●  Tetrahydrocannabinol (active ingredient in marijuana): binds to
●  Prozac is one of the most some neuroreceptors, but it s not clear what it does
widely prescribed drugs in the
world!

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Conclusions Next time

●  Neural action potentials
●  Shape of proteins
●  Neural sensitivity
●  Specific use of neurotransmitters for certain behaviors
●  Current work on identification of role of neurotransmitters ●  Neural codes
●  Lots of money to be made
●  Receptive fields
●  Lots more complicated than what we ve seen here
●  CogLab on Blind spot due!

●  How do you recognize your grandmother?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Receptive fields Action potential

With enough excitatory input, a cell produces an
PSY 200 ● 

action potential that sends a signal down its axon

to other cells
Greg Francis w  But a single action potential has little effect

Lecture 06 ●  If the input stays present, the cell produces

another, and another,…
w  A rapid series of action potentials can influence other
cells
How do you recognize your ●  The number of action potentials in a certain
grandmother? length of time determines the firing rate of the
cell
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Firing rate Specificity

●  Two key questions in cognitive neuroscience are
●  8 spikes (action potentials) during 300 ms
w  What stimulus (or stimuli) makes a given cell fire at a strong
w  Firing rate of 27 Hz (27 spikes per second)
rate?
»  something red?
»  a pen?
»  your grandmother?
w  What does it mean when a given cell fires strongly?
»  You are thinking of something?
»  Seeing something?
»  Remembering something?

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Receptive field Receptive field

●  Receptive fields are very useful for studies of spatial perception
●  The set of stimuli that reliably changes a
●  Touch involves sensitivity to pressure on skin
cell s firing rate. ●  The loops indicate the
regions where a single
●  A stimulus could excite the cell
neuron responds to
w above normal firing rate pressure

●  Or inhibit the cell

w below normal firing rate

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Receptive field Receptors

●  Receptive fields are very useful for studies of visual perception
●  The back of the eye
●  Vision involves spatial patterns of light
contains tightly Light
packed sensors
called rods and
cones that detect
light at a particular
location

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Receptors Receptors
A receptor has a simple receptive field
●  Light sensors (rods and cones) respond to light ● 

w  it responds to light of the right wavelength (color) and the right

at a particular location in the back of the eye position
w produces a neural response

Light

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Blind spot
Blind spot ●  In CogLab you mapped your blind spot
●  my
●  Where nerves leave data
looks
the back of the eye,
like
there are no light this

receptors
w light that hits this spot is
not visible

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Blind spot Network

●  Here s the average data for the whole class
●  108 participants ●  Light receptors do not just pass information
to the brain
●  Neurons are hooked together in an inhibitory
way

Light

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Evidence of inhibition Evidence of inhibition

●  Stimulation of a center region alone ●  Adding light to a surrounding region

gives a strong response can reduce the response

40 40
Light 35 Light 35
Firing rate

Firing rate
30 30
25 25
20 20
15 15
10 10
5 5
0 0
Time Time
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Receptive field Spatial responses

●  The spatial
●  The receptive field of this cell pattern of
includes any place on the retina excitation
(center) and
where light excites the cell and any
inhibition
place where light inhibits the cell

-+
(surround)
●  On-center, off-surround means the cell
is sensitive to
the location of
a small spot of
light
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Spatial responses Simple cells

●  You have many ●  On-center, off-surround cells send action potentials to
different such simple cells in parts of visual cortex, which have oriented
cells with receptive fields
receptive fields
that are
centered at
different
locations
●  They respond
differently to an
edge
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Simple cells Simple cells

●  On-center, off-surround cells send action potentials to ●  Simple cells come in a variety of types,
simple cells in parts of visual cortex, which have oriented but all are sensitive to bars or edges of a
receptive fields
preferred orientation at a particular
location

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Information processing
Information processing
●  For simple cells, an image like this
●  For simple cells, an image like this
w is coded something like this

Strong
responses
at edges!

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Complex cells Complex cells

●  Many simple cells feed ●  Many simple cells feed into a

complex cell, which is
into a complex cell,
insensitive to direction of
which is insensitive to
contrast and responds to an
direction of contrast and oriented bar in many different
responds to an oriented places
bar in many different w  Often these cells are also
sensitive to directions of
places
motion

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Receptive field hierarchy Higher order cells

●  Receptive fields inherit some properties from ●  Complex cells feed into hypercomplex cells, which
lower-level cells are sensitive to some types of curves and visual
●  But they also gain new selectivity by interacting forms
with each other (and across levels) ●  Receptive fields seem to get ever more complex
●  What does this mean?
●  Is there a grandmother cell?

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Receptive field Receptive field

●  In the inferior temporal cortex of monkeys ●  In the inferior temporal cortex of monkeys
w  Desmione et al. (1984) w  Desmione et al. (1984)

●  some cells ●  Other cells

appear to have appear to have
receptive fields receptive fields
that respond to that respond to
monkey faces, in hands
profile

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Grandmother cells? Conclusions

●  It could be that a single cell has a receptive field ●  Receptive fields
selectively tuned to respond to the image of your
w any stimulus that affects a cell s firing rate
grandmother
w excitatory
w  but it is unlikely
w  not enough cells w inhibitory
w  cell death ●  Very useful for studies of the visual
●  Receptive fields become less useful as we search nervous system
for neural representations of non-sensory concepts
●  Lots of issues left unresolved
w  What is the receptive field of a neuron that codes love
or trust ?

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Next time
●  Networks of neurons
●  Connections between cells
●  Feedback – resonance

●  Seeing things that are not there.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Neural networks Receptive field

●  As we saw last time, a
PSY 200 cell s receptive field
depends to a large extent
Greg Francis on the receptive fields of
other cells
Lecture 07 w  (e.g., complex cells depend
on simple cells)

●  Today we look at some

Seeing something that is not issues involved in
networks of neurons
there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qTuZlMvFgY
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Feedback Resonance hypothesis

●  Initially cell firing rates may vary a lot
●  Cell 1 can affect cell 2, which ●  In some networks cell firing rates stop
can affect cell 3, which can 2 changing much (unless outside input changes)
affect cell 1 again, which… ●  The remaining active cells are those that
3 1 support each others activities through
●  What happens to cell firing
rates? excitation: resonance
w  high firing rate==> active ●  Inactive cells are inhibited by the active cells
w  low firing rate ==> inactive ●  Mental awareness ==> resonance

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A simple model A simple model

●  A cell s activation is on or off (one or zero) ●  Neural connections
(synapses) are described as
●  Cell connections (synapses or weights) are
weights on the links between w21
reciprocal 2
cells
●  Cells update activations one at a time 1
●  Input to a cell is the summed 3
●  Cell activations are calculated with the rule w41
multiplication of sending
w15
"$1 if ∑ wij a j > 0 activation and weight w34

ai = # ●  Reciprocal weights have 4 5

$%0 if ∑ wij a j ≤ 0 wij = wij

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Demonstration Feedback
●  Feedback in networks can act to clean up
●  Cell activities do settle down eventually noisy sensory information to make it
●  Final pattern of activities satisfies consistent with what our systems expect
constraints of the network connections ●  In a very real way, what we see, hear, taste,
smell, touch, and think, is biased by our
●  Error correction capabilities network s expectation
●  Can tolerate the loss of some cells ●  A network s expectation is established by its
connection weights
●  Emergent properties of the network
w  excitation -- inhibition
w no single cell has these properties

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Seeing things that are not Seeing things that are not
there there

●  Do you see a square in front of the ●  Neurons in area V2 of your brain

pac men? create the illusory contours

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Feedback Conclusions
●  Similar situation with the illusory ●  Networks of neurons have properties
circle seen here different from single cells
w emergent properties
w stable activities
w multiple constraints
w tolerance to errors and cell loss

●  Structure of connections (synapses)

determines the final pattern of responses

Purdue University Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Next time
●  How networks learn
●  Changing connections
●  Learning rules
●  Self-organization
●  CogLab due for Implicit Learning

●  A problem with virtual reality.

Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Neural learning Networks

PSY 200 ●  As we saw last time, a

network of neurons can
2
Greg Francis have very complicated
behavior 1
3
Lecture 08 ●  The behavior depends on
the connections between
cells
4 5
A problem with virtual reality. ●  How do those connections
w45
get established?

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Hebb s rule A simple model

●  A cell s activation is on or off (one or zero)
●  If two neurons are active
●  Cell connections (weights) are reciprocal
simultaneously, then they
●  Cells update activations one at a time
strengthen the connection
between them ●  Cell activations are calculated with the rule

●  Signals from the

environment change the
properties of the network
"$1 if ∑ wij a j > 0
ai = #
$%0 if ∑ wij a j ≤ 0
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Simplified learning Self-organization

●  A network of this type does not need an intelligence to set
●  Initially, all connections are zero the connection weights
w wij = 0 ●  The network self-organizes in response to stimulation
●  Hebb s rule ●  It can remember things it has previously experienced
w cells that are simultaneously active develop ●  It can interpret new information on the basis of things it has
positive weights (excitation) previously learned
w an active cell develops negative weights with
inactive cells (inhibition)

●  Demonstration

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Deep learning
Learning
●  Google used one version of a neural network to analyze
10 million YouTube stills ●  This may not be the same type of learning you do when you
study for school
w  1000 computers (16,000 cpu’s) over 3 days
w  but it is important just the same
●  The network self-organized to identify common patterns ●  Consider implicit learning
w  Cats, faces, “tool-like objects oriented at 30 degrees” w  A long sequence of trials,
where you press a key to
indicate the appearance
of a dot at a corresponding
location

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Implicit Learning Learning

Global data
(~13,000 in each
●  We are interested in how fast you respond to the dot group) ●  Lots of learning happens that you do not
Two groups of subjects:
● 

w  Random: each sequence is random

notice
w  Pattern: each sequence is the
same (but so long that people
●  Consider the length of your arm
typically do not notice)
w to catch and throw objects your brain must know
●  Subjects in the pattern
condition are faster
exactly your arm s length
(they have partly learned w but the length of your arm changes as you age!
the sequence, and generate
faster responses to
» And depends on unknown environmental
expected locations)
factors
●  More generally, networks in your brain can learn information about your
environment without you being aware that something is being learned

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Hand-eye coordination Coordination and learning

●  We do not know the exact nature of the

vision arm network involved in this coordination
info info w  but we know it continually modifies part of itself to
match up with the current situation

●  This is actually a good design feature,

because the brain cannot know in advance
every detail of the eye-hand system
vision arm
info info

Purdue University Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Virtual reality Cameras

●  Using computer graphics to convince the ●  Enhance visual perception

body it is someplace other than it really is ●  Night vision for helicopter
●  Useful for pilots
w architects, designers
w  surgeons, pilots
w entertainment

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Cameras Problem
●  Enhance visual perception
●  The network coordinating
w MRI overlaid on actual image
of brain for surgeon eye-hand systems, adjusts
» highlight tumor itself
w Avoid other brain regions ●  Extended use of the
» faster computer cameras makes
the user adapt so his eyes
are where the cameras are!

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Problem Other adaptations

●  After taking the cameras off, ●  Inverted prisms

it takes some time to adapt
●  Fortunately, the adaptations return to
back
normal pretty quickly
●  Eye-hand coordination is off
●  Kind of like the feeling you get after
●  Could be a problem for
surgeons and pilots! roller-skating

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Conclusions Next time

●  Learning in neural networks ●  Review for Exam 1
w changing connections
w relatively simple rules
●  Then
●  Much of our perceptual and motor
●  Neural networks for visual perception
behavior is based upon this type of
w brightness
continuous learning
w color
●  It s not clear if more cognitive learning is
w form
similar
●  Why we see color afterimages.
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Visual perception Visual perception

●  Light enters eye
PSY 200 ●  Signals sent to area V1 in cortex

Greg Francis ●  Neural networks tuned to

w  brightness
Lecture 09 w  color
w  form
w  motion
w  texture
Why you see color
w  depth...
afterimages.

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Seeing Measuring perception

●  It’s kind of like a camera, but what we see is not just an image ●  CogLab uses the method of constant stimuli
In particular, we do not see the world the way it “really” is
Judge which of a pair of lines is longer
● 
● 

●  When we notice this discrepancies, we call them illusions

●  Vary the length
●  Muller-Lyer illusion is one example
of the line
●  How big is the illusion? How can you measure a subjective
experience?
without wings
●  Repeat many
times

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Psychometric function Neurophysiology

●  Plot proportion of times line without wings is judged “longer” than the
line with wings ●  How we see things is largely
●  50% is point of subjective equality (around 114 pixels) determined by the properties of
●  They property is that the perceptual experience is described in terms receptive fields
of physical units!
w on-center, off-surround
w simple cells
Global data 
 w complex cells
(~31,000 observers)

●  And by network interactions among

cells

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

On-center, off-surround On-center, off-surround

●  Characteristics of cell receptive ●  Characteristics of cell receptive

fields force additional properties fields force additional properties
of the visual system of the visual system
w  center-surround cells tend to not w  center-surround cells tend to not
respond well to homogeneous respond well to homogeneous
light that covers both excitatory light that covers both excitatory
and inhibitory parts and inhibitory parts
w  => percepts of the middle of an w  => percepts of the middle of an
object is derived from the edges object is derived from the edges

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Brightness contrast
Brightness contrast
●  Two receptive fields inside the middle square
receive the same excitatory and inhibitory signals
●  Edge responses are influenced by the surrounding
w  Little response
light
w  both center squares have the same light intensity

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Brightness contrast Brightness contrast

●  Receptive fields on the corner ●  Thus, the visual system computes brightness as
something like local contrast
w Receive the same excitation at the center
w  It s a property of the center-surround cells
w differ in the amount of inhibition in the surround w  Our percept of brightness is determined by the responses
of cells at contrast edges
w  As a result, things that have equal physical intensities can
less
inhibition look dramatically different (next slide)
more
inhibition

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Brightness contrast Brightness contrast

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Brightness contrast Brightness contrast

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Hermann grid Hermann grid

●  Seems related to on-center,

off-surround cells
●  Cells at intersections receive
more inhibition than cells at
single roads

●  How do we explain the other

version?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Filling-in Filling-in
●  We see color and brightness inside objects ●  Brightness
w  so edge information must fill-in to the interior information
●  It sometimes gets things messed up spreads across
●  Water color effect surfaces
w Craik-O Brien-
Cornsweet
effect

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Filling-in Color system

●  competition between
●  Carefully fixate opposite colors
w  red-green
the pink center
w  blue-yellow
●  If you keep your w  black-white

eyes very still, it ●  habituating gate

offset of one color leads to
will disappear ● 

rebound in other
●  The yellow fills-in! ●  Gated dipole circuit

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Color system Color system

●  competition between ●  competition between
opposite colors opposite colors
w red-green w red-green
w blue-yellow w blue-yellow
w black-white w black-white

●  Initial balance ●  Extra input to green

w Neither color wins w Green wins competition
competition

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Color system Color system

●  competition between ●  competition between
opposite colors opposite colors
w red-green w red-green
w blue-yellow w blue-yellow
w black-white w black-white

●  Extra input to green ●  Offset of green

w Fading of green signal w Rebound of red signal

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Color system Color afterimage

●  competition between
opposite colors
w red-green
w blue-yellow
w black-white

●  Recovery of green pathway

w Disappearance of rebound
w Return to initial state

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Orientation competition Orientation competition

●  competition between ●  With additional input to
orthogonally tuned cells
horizontal pathway,
●  habituating gate
horizontal channel wins
●  offset of horizontal leads to
rebound in vertical competition
●  Same kind of gated dipole
circuit
w  Principles of neural
computation!
●  Baseline response
w  Due to tonic input

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Orientation competition Orientation competition

●  With additional input to ●  At offset of horizontal
horizontal pathway, input, the gated horizontal
horizontal channel wins signal is weaker than the
competition vertical signal
●  But as horizontal gate ●  A vertical rebound
habituates, horizontal appears
signal weakens
●  It still wins the
competition, though

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Orientation competition Oriented afterimages

●  As the horizontal gate ●  Oriented
recovers, the system reset signals
returns to baseline and are also
the vertical after response implicated in
disappears an unusual
type of
afterimage

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Conclusions Next time

●  Visual perception ●  Visual dynamics
w brightness w  Flicker
w  Persistence
w color
w  Motion perception
w form
●  CogLab on Apparent motion due!
●  Largely determined by the receptive fields
and network structure of visual circuits ●  Why computer monitors work.
●  Neurophysiology strongly determines
what we see!

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Visual dynamics Flicker

●  A flashing light looks constant if it is
PSY 200
presented rapidly enough
Greg Francis ●  The frequency of flashing at which
subjects do not detect flicker is called the
Lecture 10
Critical Flicker Frequency (CFF)
w about 50 Hertz (50 on-off cycles in a second)

Why computer monitors work. w 20 millisecond durations

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CFF Phosphor
●  Establishes minimum characteristics of ●  The phosphor on a computer screen
electronic devices typically glows less than 10
milliseconds
●  Lights flicker at 120 Hz
w  ten thousandths of a second
w  we spend a lot of time in darkness
●  The gun reactivates the phosphor
●  Computer (Cathode Ray Tube, CRT)
every 17 milliseconds
monitors and TV s flicker at around 60
●  Thus, at any given time 1/3 of the
Hz
screen is dark
w  better monitors go faster
w  the percept persists in your head!
w  Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) monitors work
differently
»  Although some still flicker
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Persistence Experiment

●  What is the source of the persisting percept? ●  Bowen, Pola & Matin (1973)
w Receptors in the eye? w subjects adjust duration of a blank
w Receptive fields? stimulus so onset of probe matched
perceived offset of the target
w Network interactions?
w Cognitive (memory)?

●  Studies support network interactions +

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Strange property Networks

●  As the target s
●  Feedback is
duration or
important
luminance
increases ●  Produces a persisting
w its persistence response
decreases ●  Demonstration

Input from eyes

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Explanation Explanation
●  Francis, Grossberg & Mingolla (1994) ●  Offset of input from
the eyes produces an
●  Something has to reset the network
after response
w else it would keep persisting forever
w e.g., due to
●  Two mechanisms competition from
w (1) new inputs inhibit old responses orthogonally tuned
cells
w (2) afterimages act as new inputs
●  Offset response
●  Note: afterimages get stronger as duration
inhibits persisting
and luminance increase!
response Input from eyes
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●  As the target s
Explanation Wait a minute
duration or
luminance ●  If visual percepts persist for over 100
increases milliseconds, why doesn t the world seem
w  the afterimage blurry?
produced at target
offset increases in w There should be smears of objects as they
strength move or as we move
w  so there is stronger
inhibition to break
●  There must be something else preventing
the feedback such blurring
w  so the persistence w masking
of the original
percept decreases

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

No mask No mask

●  Write down all the letters you see ●  Write down all the letters you see

W R
E D
T Q
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No mask Masking demonstration

●  Write down all the letters you see ●  Write down all the letters you see

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Masking demonstration Masking demonstration

●  Write down all the letters you see ●  Write down all the letters you see

K L X X X X
S J X X X X
A P X X X X
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Metacontrast
Significance
●  Masks do not have to “write over” the target to have an
●  The mask appeared after the target turned off
effect
●  The target was presented all by itself for a brief
●  In metacontrast masking the mask and target do not
period of time
overlap in space and (often) in time (CogLab)
●  However, our visual system is unable to
develop a complete percept of a scene in a Target Mask
such a period of time
w  Thus, the XXX mask interferes with processing of
the letters by shortening their persisting responses
w  And prevents perceived blurring of changing scenes

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Metacontrast Motion
●  Correct identification of the narrow target is affected by ●  In simple animals (like flies and frogs), we know how
the Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) of the target and motion is detected
mask w  Demo on web page

w  Worse between 60-90 milliseconds ●  Reichardt detector

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Detecting Motion Apparent Motion

●  Humans have something like Reichardt motion detectors ●  When objects move, there is a continuous path of
w  at lots of different positions in the visual field motion
w  sensitive to lots of different motion directions
●  Reichardt motion detectors do not require
w  sensitive to lots of different motion speeds
continuous motion
●  Think of them as receptive fields that vary in both space and time
w  and, continuous paths are not necessary for motion to be
●  Many aspects of how we perceive motion follow from the properties seen
of Reichardt motion detectors

Time1

Time2

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Apparent Motion Apparent Motion

●  For just two stimuli, it does not depend on ●  The percept of motion does depends on
w  color
w  stimulus duration
w  shape
w  interstimulus interval (50-200 msec)
w  attention
w  cognitive priming w  distance

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Timing Korte s laws

●  For a Reichardt detector to ●  Apparent motion was highly studied at the beginning of the 20th
indicate motion, the signal from century
the second area must follow the
w  Korte (1915) noted that to get good motion, you needed to increase
signal from the first by just the ISI too short
the ISI between the stimuli as the distance between them increased
right length of time
●  CogLab data
●  Vary the Interstimulus Interval
w  (75 participants- from class, 8383 from global)
(ISI) between the stimuli
ISI about right The image cannot be displayed. Your
w  The time between offset of the The image cannot be displayed.
Your computer may not have computer may not have enough
first stimulus and onset of the enough memory to open the image, memory to open the image, or the
second stimulus or the image may have been image may have been corrupted.
corrupted. Restart your computer, Restart your computer, and then
and then open the file again. If the open the file again. If the red x still
red x still appears, you may have to appears, you may have to delete the
ISI too long delete the image and then insert it image and then insert it again.
again.

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Motion representation Motion aftereffect

●  Just like for color and
●  One conclusion of studies of apparent motion orientation, we might
is that motion is a fundamental percept expect an aftereffect of
w  It has an explicit representation in the visual system motion
●  You could imagine otherwise, we can be aware of ●  competition between
something moving without opposite directions of
actually seeing the movement motion
●  Apparent motion is the source w  Left-right
of motion for all movies and w  Up-down
animation ●  habituating gate
●  offset of one direction leads to
rebound in other
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

After effect Conclusions

●  Motion can be adopted by non-moving stimuli ●  Dynamic vision
w  http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/mot_adapt/index.html
w  flicker
w  persistence
w  network dynamics
w  Masking
w  Reichardt detectors
w  Apparent motion
w  Motion aftereffect

●  Also used to investigate other areas of cognition

and types of mental problems

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Next time

●  Attention
●  What is attention?
●  What does it do?

●  How could you not see it?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Attention Attention

PSY 200 ●  The world contains more information than

we can fully interpret or process all at once
Greg Francis
●  The ability to deal with some stimuli and
Lecture 11 not others is attention
w not clear if there is an attentive system
w or if attention derives from other systems
How could you not see it?

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Attention
Information processing ●  Part of attention seems to be due to mental effort on
your part
●  Modern theories see cognition as information processing
w  much like a computer w  attending a lecture

●  Different systems have different capabilities, capacities, and speeds w  ignoring whispering around you

●  Necessarily, some information is ignored because it is not ●  Part of attention seems a natural side effect of mental
processed effort
w  ignoring the uhs and ums from a speaker
w  ignoring the feel of clothes on your body

●  Part of attention seems effortless

w  a loud noise

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Magic trick Magic trick

●  Pick any card ●  Now the computer will shuffle the cards and present
them again
●  Memorize it
w  really study the card carefully to be certain you have it
memorized

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Magic trick Drawing attention

●  Hey, the card you selected is missing ●  Attention can be focused by meaningful stimuli
●  How did I know which card you would select? ●  Attention can be focused by environmental
w  Try it on the web at http://members.tripod.com/
characteristics
~andybauch/magic.html

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Automatic attention Automatic attention

●  Simon effect (Simon & Wolf, 1963) ●  Location of the square is irrelevant, but it sometimes is
congruent with the response location (left-green; right-red)
●  An irrelevant cue can affect response time to a while sometimes it is incongruent (left-red; right-green)
stimulus
●  Task: respond as quickly as possible to identify
the color of the square
●  The square is sometimes on the left and
sometimes on the right side of the screen
(irrelevant)
●  You respond with a keypress on the left (green)
or on the right (red)

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Automatic attention Automatic attention

●  People are faster identifying color for congruent compared ●  The Simon effect is, in some sense, a failure of attention
to incongruent conditions ●  You want to ignore the location of target square and only
w  53 millisecond difference attend the color
w  You cannot ignore the target location

CogLab global data ●  CogLab has several labs that play on similar ideas
(~13,250 observers) w  Stroop effect (more next time)
w  Spatial cueing
w  Several labs related to memory and decision making have
similar properties

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Automatic attention Human Factors

●  The kinds of effects are ●  Applied cognitive psychology
small (~50 ms), but they ●  Among other things, design interfaces so that stimuli and responses
matter a lot are compatible
●  Consider the remote control ●  Products “feel” better, are used as intended, and users make fewer
and on-screen channel guide errors
provided by my cable
●  Really important in high stress situations
provider
w  Aircraft cockpits, nuclear power plant control stations
●  To move the “cursor” up on
●  Really important in everyday (low stress) situations that are used a
the screen, I press the “+”
lot
button the right side
w  Your phone
●  The effect on the screen is to w  Doors
go “up” one line, but that is to
a channel with a lower
number!
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Drawing attention Drawing attention

●  Raise your hand when you spot what
●  In some situations, attention can be focused by changes in the two images
certain stimulus characteristics, especially
changes
w  Flashes of light
w  Movement
w  Color
w  Think of advertising signs

●  We depend on these characteristics a lot

w  Removing these cues can make simple tasks rather
difficult

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Drawing attention Drawing attention

●  Raise your hand when you spot what ●  Raise your hand when you spot what
changes in the two images changes in the two images

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

Drawing attention Drawing attention

●  Raise your hand when you spot what
changes in the two images
●  Suppose these cues were masked by other
changing stimuli
●  You might not notice the change at all

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Drawing attention Drawing attention

●  Raise your hand when you spot what ●  Raise your hand when you spot what
changes in the two images changes in the two images

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Attention
Drawing attention
●  Masking the changes makes it difficult to identify
●  Raise your hand when you spot what
the changed parts of the image
changes in the two images
w Suggests that you do not actually “see” the entire
image with each presentation

●  Attention seems to be necessary to detect

stimulus changes
●  Explains how people can look but not see
w  walking into doors
w  driving into trains
w  detecting changes on a radar screen
w  why magicians use flashes of light!
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/3/19

What does attention do? Attention illusion

●  It is not clear, and it is probably different things for different situations
●  To many people, attended information feels “stronger”, so they think ●  Sometimes attention
neural representations must be stronger in the brain. can change perceptual
properties
●  But if attention strengthens perceptual representations, we should lose
perceptual veridicality ●  But then we have an
incorrect perception of
w  We might expect what is schematized below
the properties of the
w  But we normally do not experience this
visual scene
●  Attention generally seems to strengthen information about a stimulus
●  So it is difficult to
that is not perceptual
understand how
Attend green attention is helping
Stimulus Attend red
here

Tse, 2005
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More demos Conclusions

●  If time permits, here s some more demos
w  http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html ●  Attention can have very powerful effects
●  Field w help processing of focused on things
●  Living room w can cause unawareness of unattended things
●  Phone call ●  Not precisely defined
●  Lunch conversation (9 changes)
w characteristic of processing?
●  Paris scene
w An extra system?

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Next time
●  Methods of studying attention
●  What things influence attention
w Timing, features
●  CogLabs on Attentional blink and Visual
search due!
●  Should you pay $59.95 for Mega-speed
reading?

Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Attention Attention
We saw last time that attention can have
PSY 200 ● 

very powerful effects

Greg Francis w when it is focused on one thing, you ignore
other things
Lecture 12
●  Today we want to consider some more
specific properties of attention
w and look at experimental methods that are
Should you pay $59.95 for
used to study attention
Mega-speed reading?

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Characteristics of attention Attentional blink

●  By identifying the properties and ●  Suppose you have to identify rapidly presented (100
characteristics of attention we can deduce ms) letters
w  e.g., detect J and/or K in a stream of letters
properties of the underlying systems that
are involved in cognition
M
w whether attention is thought of as a system P
K
w or as a by-product of other systems R
W
●  Look at S

w temporal
w featural
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Attentional blink
Attentional blink
●  Measure frequency of detection
●  Turns out that detection of first letter tends to make w  class data (103 observers)
detection of the second letter very difficult
w  if it immediately follows the first
w  Attentional blink
Implies that
detecting the
M
first letter
P
causes
K
you to miss the
R
J second letter!
S

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Attentional blink Speed reading

●  Suggests that processing the first target
●  Ever seen the ads for speed reading?
letter, J
w  uses up resources that would otherwise be used ●  One is for a program called Mega Speed Reading
to process second target letter, K w  claims to teach you to read 25,000 words per minute
w  attentional focus and refocus takes time and for w  ==> 2.4 milliseconds for each word
this task takes approximately 400 ms
w  impossible, if only by attentional blink!
J S
●  The seller is skimming at best,
L
N Once processing is done (a and lying at worst
B few hundred milliseconds),
J there is no difficulty
R detecting second letter.
K
H
...
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Visual search Visual search

●  Proofreading ●  Time and type of processing can also be measured by
having observers respond as quickly as possible when
●  Much of our time is spent looking for various things they detect a target
w  Staplers, Road signs w  hypothesize that tasks that involve attention will be
slower than perceptually based tasks
w  expect attention to depend on the number of things that
must be searched
●  Typically, we distinguish between a target and
distracters by one or more features
w  we vary the number of distracters
w  and measure reaction time

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Set Size Set Size

●  In some situations, more distracters make search take ●  In some situations, more distracters make search take
longer longer
w  fast w  slow

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Feature Search Feature Search

●  But if the target differs from the distracters in the right way, ●  But if the target differs from the distracters in the right way,
search can be fast even with lots of distracters search can be fast even with lots of distracters
w  pop out w  pop out

●  This often happens when the target has a unique feature ●  This often happens when the target has a unique feature
relative to the distracters relative to the distracters
w  shape w  color

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Conjunctive Search Visual search experiment

●  But if the target has shared features with different ●  Four types of responses
distracters, search is difficult
w  1) Feature - present (can respond as soon as see target)
w  No pop out
w  2) Feature - absent (must examine all stimuli before sure
●  This often happens when the target is defined by a
target is not present)
conjunction of features relative to the distracters
w  3) Conjunctive - present (can respond as soon as see
w  Orange rectangle: color and shape
target)
w  4) Conjunctive - absent (must examine all stimuli before
sure target is not present)

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CogLab feature search CogLab feature search

●  Few distracters -easy ●  Many distracters - still easy

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Conjunctive search Conjunctive search

●  Few distracters - fairly easy ●  Many distracters - difficult

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Visual search Interpretation

●  Feature maps: color, shape
●  CogLab data (98 observers) ●  Feature search can identify target within either feature map
Color Shape

blue corners

green arcs

No searching
required!

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Interpretation Interpretation
●  Feature maps: color, shape ●  Feature maps: color, shape
●  Feature search can identify target within either feature map ●  Conjunctive search cannot identify target within either feature map alone

Color Shape Color Shape

blue corners blue corners

Requires search
green arcs green arcs by comparison
across feature
maps.
Serial process
No searching that takes time
required!

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Interpretation Visual search

●  Feature maps: color, shape
●  Conjunctive search for
●  Conjunctive search cannot identify target within either feature map
target absent has a
Color Shape slope twice as steep as
for target present
blue corners w  Because when the
target is present you
find it, on average,
Requires search after searching half the
items and then can
green arcs by comparison stop the search
across feature
maps. w  For target absent
Serial process searches, you must
that takes time search all items to
verify each is not the
target

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Automaticity Automaticity
●  The process whereby a task goes from
●  When a task is unfamiliar it
seems to require a lot of
requiring a lot of attention to requiring little is
attention to perform called automatization
●  Later it requires less attention ●  Many tasks are automatizable
w  riding a bike
w color naming
w  driving a car
w  typing w word naming
w  tying shoelaces ●  Can measure effects by pitting an
»  http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/knots.htm

automatized task against a non-automatized

task
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Stroop task
Stroop (1935)
Stroop effect
● 

●  Identify the color of ink for words

●  It takes longer when the words are color
names

●  Demonstration
w measure reaction time

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Stroop effect
Stroop effect ●  Word name interferes with ink color
naming
w  ink color does not generally interfere with
word naming
w  lots of studies on Stroop effect

●  Many effects that are similar to it

w  Simon effect for pointing

●  You can try them both on CogLab

w  Not required, no credit

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Explanation Conclusions
●  Word reading is well practiced ●  Methods of studying attention
w especially among college undergraduates w  attentional blink

w so it occurs quickly and is automatic w  visual search

w  Stroop task
●  Color naming is unpracticed, so it occurs
●  Characteristics of attention
slowly and requires attention w  timing
w  role of perceptual features
●  With two tasks, both trying to report on a color
●  Automaticity
w the automatic one tends to mess up the
unpracticed one, it takes more mental effort (and
time) to do the unpracticed task

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Next time
●  Intersection of attention, perception, and memory
w  Iconic memory
w  echoic memory

●  Serial position curves

●  CogLab on Partial report due!

●  Why telephone operators seem rude.

Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Sensory memory Memory

●  Humans demonstrate memory when they
PSY 200
behave in a way that could only be based
Greg Francis upon previous experience
w does not necessarily imply that there are
Lecture 13 memory systems

●  Memory could be a by-product of other

systems (vision, audition, language,…)
Why telephone operators
seem rude.
Purdue University Purdue University

Perception to memory Whole Report

●  Suppose you want to know how much

information is available in a single visual ●  Write down as many letters as you see
glance
●  How would you measure it?
●  It turns out it s a complicated task
because it involves perception, attention,
and memory

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Whole Report Whole Report

●  Write down as many letters as you see ●  Write down as many letters as you see

R T M W
E G Z U
X P H S
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Whole report results Partial report

●  Same type of letter matrix
●  Subjects report 4.5 letters on
●  Indicate which row to report after the matrix
average (Sperling, 1960)
disappears
●  Subjects claim they saw more w  choice of row is random
letters, but lost the percept while ●  Suppose the subject reports 3 of 4 letters from
they reported any row
w they cannot report fast enough w  =>3/4ths of each row was available
w  ==> entire field was available
●  How can we tell if percept is lost?
●  This is essentially how college tests are
designed!
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Partial report Partial report

●  Write down letters from the indicated row ●  Write down letters from the indicated row

E D K G
A N L F
C B I U
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Partial report Sensory memory

●  Write down letters from the indicated row ●  Temporal characteristics

w  delay

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Sensory memory Sensory memory

●  Temporal characteristics ●  Temporal characteristics

w  delay w  delay

T V D C
N S H W
O L R Q
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Sensory memory Results

●  Vary delay to watch decay from memory
w  compare to CogLab data
●  Temporal characteristics
w  delay

4
Number of letters correct

0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 1

Delay of tone (seconds)

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Results Results
●  We can test on any row and get essentially the same
●  CogLab data (91 participants) result
w  so, the number of letters that actually persist and is available is
found by multiplying by the number of rows (3)
2
Number of letters available

1.8
Number of letters correct

1.6
Original published data CogLab data
1.4
10 6
1.2
1
8 5
0.8
0.6 6 4

0.4 3
0.2 4
2
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 2 1

0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 1
Delay of tone (seconds)
Delay of tone (seconds)
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Iconic/sensory memory Infant iconic memory

●  Performance is better ●  The partial-report
than the whole-report experiment can be
procedure because you modified in several
can focus attention on ways
just one row before the Blaser and Kaldy
10
Number of letters available ● 

percepts fade away (2010) modified it to

●  Fading percepts are due
8 test iconic memory
to visual persistence, 6 of infants
which we talked about
4 ●  60, 6 month old
earlier infants
2
●  We call the use of this ●  Infants show a
information iconic 0 preference to look at
the changed object for
memory 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 1 small enough set sizes
w  Large capacity Delay of tone (seconds)
w  Short duration Purdue University Purdue University

Infant iconic memory Masking

●  Infant iconic memory is
actually quite similar to adults ●  Masking effects can influence iconic memory
Ask adults to report the
● 
w persistence-based memory is very brief, and is
location of the changed color
item
easily destroyed by a mask
●  They do better than ●  Iconic memory is
infants (who did not
understand the task ) w brief
●  Look for sharp drop in w easily disturbed
performance as set size
increases
●  Estimate items in memory
●  Adults = 5.75
●  Infants = 5.0
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Partial report with masking Partial report with masking

●  Write down letters from the indicated row ●  Write down letters from the indicated row

D J B E
K P W V
M A Q C
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Partial report with masking Masking

●  With the mask you do not have enough time to focus
●  Write down letters from the indicated row attention on the indicated row
●  Iconic memory is so brief (less than a second) that it
probably has little to do with normal memory
X X X X w  Too brief to be useful for many situations (except maybe
knowing how to reach for something just after lights go out)

X X X X ●  Other similar systems are more notable

X X X X
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Echoic memory Echoic memory

●  Properties
●  Other senses have a similar type of
w Longer duration 5
persistence or sensory memory

Number of letters
(seconds)
4
F
w Smaller 3
H

available
V capacity 2
A D ●  Significant for 1
S E 0
W some memory
X 0 1 2 3 4
tasks
Delay (seconds)
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Immediate serial recall Serial position curve

●  After given a list of items
w e.g., digits, letters, words,… ●  Often, subjects recall first and last items
w subject must report them back best 1
Probability of recall

0.8
w 1) no delay (immediate)
0.6 Primacy Recency
w 2) in the correct order (serial)
0.4
w 3) no cues (recall, not recognition)
0.2
●  Plot percentage correctly recalled against
0
position of item in list 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Position in list
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Modality effect Modality effect

●  Recency depends on the modality of ●  Explanation:
w  In this task, recency depends on sensory memory
presentation
w  It takes time to report all the items in the list, in order
1
w  in the visual presentation, iconic memory of the last item
Probability of recall

0.8 is gone before subject tries to report it (poor recall)

0.6 Auditory
w  in the auditory presentation, echoic memory of last item
is still present when subject tries to report it (good recall)
0.4 Visual
●  Thus, auditory presentation shows recency, but
0.2
visual does not
0
●  We will explain the primacy effect later
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Position in list
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Suffix effect Suffix effect

●  Recency when cue to report is a tone
●  Auditory presentation only
●  Loss of recency when cue to report is a word
●  Cue to report is either a word or a tone
1
Probability of recall
2 2, 4, 1, 6, 8, 7, 9 0.8
4 0.6 Tone
1
0.4 Word
6
8 0.2
7
0
9
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Position in list
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Suffix effect Phone operators

●  Not affected by
w practice ●  Call information for a number
w meaning of cue word
●  Operators are very short
w common vs. rare word
w give the number
●  Words are physically different from tones w do not say goodbye or have a nice day
w suffix word acts like a mask to wipe out last word in
●  Avoiding the suffix effect!
list from echoic memory
w you would forget the last part of the phone
w the situation is similar to being unable to report the
number if they finished with pleasantries
letters in the partial report task with the X-masks

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Conclusions Next time

●  Partial report experiment ●  Memory

●  Sensory memory ●  Modal model

w  iconic memory (visual) w  short term memory

w  echoic memory (auditory) w  long term memory

●  Relation to immediate serial recall (recency) ●  Experiments

w  modality effect ●  CogLabs on Brown-Peterson and Serial position due!
w  suffix effect
w  significance for phone operators
●  Why it is difficult to win a pizza at Little Caesars.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 7

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Two store model Memory

●  Simple view
PSY 200 w memory is a container of past impressions and
knowledge
Greg Francis w memories can leak-out, decay away

Lecture 14 ●  Not very realistic

w need to explain why memories disappear

Why it is difficult to win a pizza at Little

Caesar s.
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Simple view Ebbinghaus experiments

●  The container theory of memory does not explain, for

●  First memory experiment (1885)
example, ●  Measure how long it takes to learn a list of nonsense
w  why some memories are very long lasting (my childhood car syllables perfectly
trips to Utah) w  NOF, QAP, HOS, LEQ, FIK, MEC, KIJ, HOM, NEM, MOJ
w  why some memories are very brief (my wife asks me to take
●  How long does the memory last?
out the trash)
●  In what form does the memory last?
●  We are not going to get a full theory of memory, but
we can start to get an outline ●  How does it affect future behavior?
w  and identify some misconceptions about memory ●  Does it help relearn the list at a later time?

Purdue University Purdue University

Ebbinghaus Forgetting curve

●  Savings =1
●  Relearn the list at later points in time w  subjects do not need to relearn, perfect memory

w a different list each time ●  Savings=0

w  subjects show no evidence of earlier learning
●  Measure how long it takes to relearn the list
1.2

●  Calculate savings 1
0.8
Savings

0.6

Timeoriginal − Timerelearn 0.4

Still not 0!
Savings = 0.2

Timeoriginal 0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30

Time (days)
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Significance Memory task

●  Ebbinghaus results suggest that memories can
last a very long time, in some form ●  See (or hear) a trigram of consonants
w  Memories were believed to be stored in a memory
system and did not just fade away (otherwise, the ●  Report it back in order
curve should not asymptote above zero)
●  Ebbinghaus results suggest good
w  Memory loss was believed to be due to interference of
other memories memory until other letters are also
●  Other experiments challenge this view memorized

WRM

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Retention
Retention
●  Vary duration of counting backward
●  Peterson & Peterson (1959) ●  Numbers are different from letters, you
w Brown (1958) might not expect any interference
●  Give subjects trigram w but they can have very strong interference
1
w ask them to count backwards by 3 s and Proportion correct 0.8
then recall trigram 0.6
779, 776, 773,... Suggests
0.4
some memories
last only a 0.2
WRM 782
few seconds! 0
0 3 6 9 12 15 18
Retention interval (seconds)
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Retention Retention
●  The results of the Brown-Peterson study ●  The results of the Brown-Peterson study also
suggest that some aspects of forgetting are
suggest that some aspects of forgetting
passive
are process driven w  even if you are distracted, you can recall the trigram if
w keeping a memory active requires effort only a short time has passed
w  if many seconds have passed, while you are
w if you are distracted by another task, you distracted, you cannot recall the trigram
cannot apply the effort to keep the memory w  memory has decayed , or something like decay, while
w similar to our observations about attention you were doing the distracting task

and processing

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Retention Another experiment

●  CogLab data
w  85 subjects 9
●  Memory span
w  Not everyone shows interference on this task
5 7
w how many items can
you correctly recall 8 6 3
immediately after 4 9 2 7
exposure? 5 9 0 1 3
●  The magic number 6 8 2 9 3 4
7+/-2:… 7 2 5 1 6 9 3

w Miller (1956) 9 1 0 3 5 7 3 2
3 9 0 5 7 4 2 16
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Pizza
Interpretation ●  The Little Caesar s in W. Lafayette used to
●  There exist two types of memory systems have a game where you could win a pizza
w  must repeat a sequence of flashing lights
●  Long Term Memory (LTM) (changes every time)

w  high capacity (no limit) w  The sequence gets longer until you make a
mistake
w  long duration (forever)
w  need a sequence length >7 to win much
w  Ebbinghaus experiment »  Counts number of correct button presses
»  56 (sequence of 11 buttons): win a soft drink
●  Short Term Memory (STM)
»  110 (sequence of 15 buttons): win crazy bread
w  small capacity (~7 items) »  210 (sequence of 20 buttons): win pizza
w  short duration (seconds) »  nearly impossible with STM properties
w  http://www.freegames.ws/games/kidsgames/simon/simon.htm

w  Memory span, Brown-Peterson

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Modal Model of Memory Modal Model of Memory

●  Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968) ●  When something is memorized
●  Multiple stages of memory w  Items are first held in STM (temporary store)
●  STM plays a dominant role in active memory w  Items may transfer to LTM (permanent store)
●  Requires transfer between STM (STS) and LTM (LTS) w  Takes time to transfer

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Free Recall Serial Position Curve Serial position curve

●  The effect of position is robust across many types of lists
●  Given almost any list of items w  words
w  letters
●  Subjects remember the first and last few items
w  numbers
best (free recall, not immediate serial recall)
w  pictures…
1
Probability of recall

RECENCY ●  Here s the

0.8 CogLab data
0.6
PRIMACY w  (91 subjects)

0.4 ●  Demo

0.2

0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Position in list
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Serial position curve

Serial position curve
●  The effect of position is robust across many types of lists
w  words
●  In some situations the serial position curve can
w  letters
be explained by different properties of STM and
w  numbers
w  pictures… LTM
1
RECENCY:
Probability of recall

●  Here s the
CogLab Global 0.8 PRIMACY:
Use STM
data 0.6 Use LTM
w  (26,557 subjects)
0.4
●  Demo
0.2

0 NEITHER LTM NOR STM

1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Position in list
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Conclusions Next time

●  Expansion of STM into
●  Short Term Memory (STM)
●  Working memory
●  Long Term Memory (LTM) w  central executive

●  STM / LTM distinction is one of the w  phonological store

w  visuo -spatial sketchpad
strongest conclusions of cognitive
CogLab on Sternberg search due!
psychology
● 

●  Why there is a gate at the first floor stairway in

●  Accounts for quite a bit of data the Psych building.
●  Many details are unresolved

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Working memory Modal Model of Memory

●  Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968)
PSY 200 ●  Today we focus on the Short-term store (Short term
memory)
Greg Francis
Lecture 15

Why there is a gate at the first floor

stairway in the Psych building.

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Search of memory Types of searches

●  How is memory searched?
w  Sternberg hypothesized three types of searches ●  (1) parallel: target item is compared to all the items in
memory at the same time
●  Explore by varying the number of items in memory set
w  the answer (yes or no) is returned after all items have been
(similar to visual search experiments)
checked
w  measure reaction time

w Sternberg (1969)
NO NO
5329
5329 5329
5329 8 8888
8888
8 8
8
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Types of searches Memory search

●  (1) parallel: target item is compared to all the items in
memory at the same time
w  the answer (yes or no) is returned after all items have been ●  If parallel search
checked w  number of items does
not matter
Reaction time

YES Reaction time is w  Yes and No responses

the same for a are both flat
5329 yes response

3333 3333

3 3 3
Set size
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Types of searches Types of searches

●  (2) serial terminating: target item is compared to each ●  (2) serial terminating: target item is compared to each
item one after the other item one after the other
w  the answer (yes or no) is returned after the target is found or w  the answer (yes or no) is returned after the target is found or
all items are searched all items are searched

NO YES Reaction time is

faster for a yes
5329 5329 response

8 8 8 88 3 3 3

8 8 3 3
8 3
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If self-terminating search Types of searches

●  (3) serial exhaustive: target item is compared to each
●  Go through items item one after the other
one-by-one until find w  the answer (yes or no) is returned after all items are searched
(regardless of whether target is found or not)
target 700
600
Reaction time

●  RT increases with set 500

400 YES
NO
size
300 NO
w  YES RT s shorter
5329
200
than NO RT s 100 8 8 88
0 8
●  Lines have different 1 2 3 4 5 6
8 8
slopes 8
Set size
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Types of searches If exhaustive search

●  (3) serial exhaustive: target item is compared to each
item one after the other ●  Go through every
w  the answer (yes or no) is returned after all items are searched item and then report
(regardless of whether target is found or not)
answer 700
600
Reaction time

●  RT s increases with 500

YES Reaction time is 400 YES
the same for a set size
300 NO
5329 yes response as w  YES RT increases the 200
for a no
3 33 3 same as NO RT s 100
3 response
0
3 ●  Lines are parallel 1 2 3 4 5 6
3 3
Set size
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Hypothetical searches Search of memory

●  Sternberg s data support exhaustive
●  So, we have three hypothetical ways of searching search = Yes
STM = No
●  Here s the
w  They predict very different patterns of reaction time as a CogLab data
function of memory set size (93
●  Sternberg runs the experiment to see how the data participants)

comes out
w  You ran a version of the experiment in CogLab

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Search of memory Search of memory

●  Implications: Search of STM ●  These results were a bombshell in 1969
w  finer analysis of cognition than anyone expected
w  1) is serial, one item at a time
was possible
»  and checking each item takes approximately
the same length of time w  used a thought experiment about different types of
»  Approximately 40 milliseconds (CogLab data is searches to generate precise testable predictions
a bit slower, 46 milliseconds) about cognition
w  2) is exhaustive »  subsequent research found that there were other
»  search always goes through all items types of searches that complicate the conclusions
w  counter-intuitive finding
»  why should search be exhaustive?
»  seems inefficient!

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Interpretation Controller
●  Exhaustive search makes sense if search of STM
●  Controlling attentional system
is done by some process that is
w  supervises
w  very efficient (can search very quickly) w  coordinates
w  dumb (doesn t bother to stop itself) w  starts and stops relatively independent processes
w  initiated by some other system (a controller)
●  e.g.
w  Search short term memory

Controller w  Search long term memory

w  walking down stairs
Search w  gate in psychological sciences building
memory w  Doors
STM process

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Other aspects of STM Separate systems

●  At about the same time, another study
indicated important characteristics of
●  A complicated experiment
phonological and visuo-spatial systems

F
●  Part 1: spatial mental task
●  Brooks (1968)
(diagrams)
w  two types of tasks (visuo-spatial and phonological)
w  visual imagery
w  two types of responses (visuo-spatial and
w  classify corners (top or bottom
phonological)
corner?)
●  Identifies two types of systems that are w  yes if top or bottom
relatively separate w  no if not top or bottom

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Two response types

Separate systems
no, yes, no,
no, yes, no,
●  Part 2: verbal mental ●  Either ...
task w verbally

w read sentence A bird in w spatially

w categorize words (noun

the hand is
or not?
not in the
bush. YES NO
YES NO
NO YES
YES NO
NO YES
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Results
Results ●  Results
w  when you have to respond by pointing, it is easier to
●  Measure time to finish mental task for each
work with sentence information than diagram information
response type
w  when you have to respond verbally, it is easier to work
w  diagrams -- pointing with diagram information than sentence information
w  sentence -- pointing
Mental task
w  diagrams -- verbal
Diagrams Sentences
Response task

w  sentence -- verbal
Pointing 28.2s 9.8s

Verbal 11.3s 13.8s

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Significance Interference
●  The results suggest that there are two
●  These system have only limited resources and capabilities
relatively separate systems ●  Asking a system to do two things at once (e.g., pointing and
w one deals with visuo-spatial information and mental diagram) slows down the system
must do the pointing response and mental ●  Splitting responsibilities across the systems (e.g., spoken
diagram task response and mental diagram) can be done quickly

w one deals with verbal information and must do

the spoken response and the sentence task

Diagrams Sentences Diagrams Sentences

Visuo-spatial Verbal Visuo-spatial Verbal
Pointing Verbal Pointing Verbal
information information information information

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All together now

Working memory
●  Sternberg s study suggests the existence of a controller
that tells other systems what to do
●  Current thought, awareness Working memory
●  Brook s study suggests separate systems that deal
w  extension of short-term memory
specifically with viso-spatial and verbal information,
respectively w  small capacity

●  Baddley (1986) put these ideas together into a model of w  rapid forgetting
working memory Processor of information
Central ● 

executive w  not a storage device

w  hypothesizes mechanisms that lead to memory properties

Visuo- Phono-
spatial logical
sketchpad loop
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Conclusions Next time

●  Sternberg s study ●  Properties of phonological loop
w controller system ●  Data
●  Brook s study w  phonological similarity effect
w  articulatory suppression
w separate visual and verbal systems
w  word length effect
●  Baddley s working memory model w  irrelevant speech effect
w Central executive ●  CogLabs on Memory span and Phonological
w Visuo-spatial sketchpad similarity due!
w Phonological loop ●  A problem with IQ tests.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Working memory Working memory

Current thought, awareness

PSY 200 ● 

w extension of short-term memory Central

executive

Greg Francis w small capacity

w rapid forgetting
Lecture 16 Visuo-
spatial
Phonological

●  Processor of information sketchpad

loop

w not a storage device

A problem with IQ tests. w hypothesizes mechanisms that lead to memory
properties
Purdue University Purdue University

Phonological loop Loop capacity

●  Two components ●  How many items can be
w  Articulatory control process
(ACP)
kept in the phonological
Phonological loop Phonological loop
»  converts non-speech loop?
information into speech
code
ACP ●  Depends on two factors ACP
»  rehearsal / refresh
w  Phonological store (PS) w Duration before decay from
»  similar to how we first PS
described STM (items
decay from memory) PS PS
w Speed of rehearsal
»  Refresh restarts the decay
process
●  Spinning coins!
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Magic number? Effect of rehearsal rate

●  We earlier noted that memory span was about 7 items (+/- 2)
●  The phonological loop suggests that it is not the number of
items but their rehearsal duration ●  Capacity of the
●  To recall a list of items you must rehearse them all before any phonological loop depends
of them fade
Phonological loop
on the rate of rehearsal (r)
w  The duration of decay in the PS
●  A set of items that takes ACP
●  Memory span should follow the equation
w  Span = (Rehearsal Rate) X (PS decay time) longer to rehearse should
●  Measure memory span (s): around 7 items be harder to remember
●  Measure verbal rehearsal rate (r): around 4 items per second w  more likely that some items PS
for English speakers will drop out before you get
●  Estimate duration of decay in PS (d) back to the first item
w  d=1.75 seconds
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Effect of rehearsal rate Word length effect

●  Explains differences across groups of people
●  Age effects in children ●  Memory span is
w  Hitch, Halliday & Littler (1989) related to the length
●  This implies that it is not the of words
loop size that changes with w  Number of syllables
age, but the rate of
rehearsal ●  Nicely matched by
changes in reading
speed
Span=1.68(Oral Reading Rate)+0.71 w  Rate of rehearsal

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CogLab data
Language effects
●  The CogLab experiment on memory span shows data
in agreement with our expectations (97 subjects)
●  Some
languages are
spoken more
quickly than
others
●  Should allow
larger memory
span
w  it does

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Relation to IQ Articulatory suppression

●  Ellis & Henley (1980) ●  Subject sees (hears) a list of phonemes

w  investigated complaints about WISC ●  Also repeats a phrase over and over
intelligence scores w  e.g., tippy-toe, tippy-toe, tippy-toe,...

w  Welsch children tended to score lower ●  Recall is worse

than English children w  True for both auditory and visual presentation
w  (Recall for visual may be better than auditory because there is
●  Part of the exam checks memory span some information in the visuospatial sketchpad as well)
w  and the slower rate of speech in Welsch partly 1
0.9
Proportion recalled

explains the difference 0.8

0.7
w  bilingual Welsch students tested in English got better 0.6
0.5 Silent
scores than when tested in Welsch 0.4 Suppression
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
Visual Auditory
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Articulatory suppression Phonological similarity

Repeating phrase ties up the ACP
Memory of a list of items is worse
● 
● 
w Without rehearsal more forgetting occurs
when the items sound the same

Visual Phonological loop

Auditory
ACP B F H N Better
recall
tippy-toe

B G P T Worse
PS recall
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Phonological similarity Phonological similarity

●  All items are stored in phonological loop ●  All items are stored in phonological loop
w  similar sounding items interfere with each other in the w  similar sounding items interfere with each other in the
phonological loop phonological loop
w  two possibilities: w  two possibilities:
»  1) harder to rehearse (effect in the ACP) »  1) harder to rehearse (effect in the ACP)
»  2) fade more quickly (effect in the PS) »  2) fade more quickly (effect in the PS)

Phonological loop Phonological loop Phonological loop Phonological loop

ACP ACP ACP ACP

N
G P

B
F F
PS PS PS N
PSB G
H B T H B P T
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Locus of similarity effect CogLab data

●  Studies find a phonological similarity effect for auditory stimuli ●  The CogLab experiment on phonological similarity shows data
under articulatory suppression in (somewhat) agreement with our expectations (92 subjects)
w  We suggested two possibilities: w  Ideally want parallel lines
»  1) harder to rehearse (effect in the ACP)
»  2) fade more quickly (effect in the PS)

●  Since the phonological similarity effect is there even when the

ACP is not involved, it must be possibility 2 (in the PS)
Proportion recalled

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Irrelevant speech effect

Irrelevant speech effect
●  The presence of phonemes in the
●  Does irrelevant background sound affect background is critical to the effect
memory? w strong effect when background is spoken in
German, even for English speakers
w E.g., studying with the TV on
Suggests that background phonemes
Three groups of subjects recall consonants
● 
● 
interfere in the PS
w 1) no background best
w 2) background = nonsense words worst ●  Study with classical music if you need
w 3) background = noise bursts something!

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Conclusions Next time

●  Data accounted for by phonological loop
w  word length effect ●  Review for Exam 2
w  phonological similarity
w  articulatory suppression
●  After exam 2
w  irrelevant speech effect
●  Encoding specificity
●  Don t listen to lyrical music while studying
●  CogLab on Encoding specificity due
w  Classical music is fine

●  What to do if you are drunk while studying for an

exam.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Encoding specificity Context

●  The context within which you learn and recall
PSY 200 can have a profound impact on your memory
w  e.g., part-set cueing
Greg Francis w  given part of a set that has been learned, subjects recall
fewer of the remaining items than with normal free recall

Lecture 17 w  Interference of recall

»  Have to keep checking if an item you recall is
already on the list
●  Demonstration
What to do if you are drunk while
studying for an exam.

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Context Context
●  The effect of part-set cueing suggests that to measure memory ●  But memory is not exactly the same as visual search
you must consider the conditions at test
●  Information must be encoded in memory as well as
w  Memory is more often about discrimination of memory traces and
not about the strength of memory traces recalled
w  Similar to visual search experiments w  Such encoding can alter what features are stored as part of the memory
w  Which changes the discrimination of subsequent recall
Feature
search
●  It turns out, that to maximize recallability
w  the effort and conditions at the time of learning must be
consistent with the properties and conditions of the test

●  Encoding specificity principle

Conjunctive
search
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Representative study Test

●  Each group is then split into two subgroups that vary in the recall of
●  Subjects in two groups information

w  see the same words, but have different tasks w  1) Normal recognition task
w  2) Shown a word and asked if any of the target words rhymed with this
w  This changes the encoding of information in memory
word
9
Semantic judgement Rhyme judgement 8
Number of words

7
Study
recognized

CHEESE 6
CHEESE Semantic
5
4 Rhyme
3
The man 2
threw the ball SNEEZE 1
to the 0
Standard Rhyme
______.
Recognition test
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Significance Encoding specificity

●  It is not that one learning strategy is better than ●  Memory is better when the cues available during
the other recall match the cues available during encoding
w  or that one testing strategy is better than the other w  Tulving & Osler (1968)

●  Encoding (learning) of information and recall of

Cue No cue
information need to match
●  This means it is very difficult to test for soar-EAGLE EAGLE
HEALTH-nurse HEALTH
absolute memory
WHEEL-auto WHEEL
w  subject s performance depends on many factors paper-BOOK BOOK
... ...

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Encoding specificity Encoding specificity

●  Each group split into two groups for testing

●  Results
recall w cue does not always help
16
w  cue is always related to target word
14
12
Words recalled

Cue No cue 10
Study no cue
8
soar Study cue
6
nurse
4
auto
2
paper
0
...
No cue Cue
Test display
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Encoding specificity Encoding specificity

●  CogLab has a variation of this experiment
●  Results (Global ~40,600 participants)
w  Best recall when test with same cue as at study
●  Instead of cue-no cue, we used strong or weak
cue (48 word pairs to study)

Weak cue Strong cue

“Lure” is a
word that was
fruit-FLOWER bloom-FLOWER not studied

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Surrounding context Surrounding context

●  Deep-sea divers learn words (Godden ●  Test for recall on land (dry) or under water (wet)
& Baddeley, 1975), either
w on land (dry)
w under water (wet) Study

EAGLE
HEALTH EAGLE
WHEEL HEALTH
BOOK WHEEL
... BOOK
...
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Significance Forgetting
●  Decompression tables for divers
●  Forgetting is not always a characteristic of a
w  want to remember when under water
memory system, or your brain
w  generally study while on land
w although it could be in some cases, it is not
●  Researchers working under water have difficulty
always
recalling their details on land
w  E.g., counts of species ●  Forgetting must be defined operationally
●  How do you know if something is forgotten? w specify the task and context of retrieval
w  changing context may allow subject to recall seemingly w You can never be certain that if you are placed
forgotten information
in a different context you will still show forgetting
w  forgetting = retrieval problem?

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Internal context Internal context

●  Best recall if study and test states are the same
●  Goodwin et al. (1969) w  Similar effects for marijuana cigarettes (Eich et al., 1975)
●  Subjects drink 10 oz. 80 proof vodka, mixed in
sugar-free lemon-lime drink
w  or a similar tasting drink (bit of vodka on top of drink)
Study state
●  Test memory 24 hours later
●  Subjects are either:
w  Sober at study, sober at test
w  Drunk at study, sober at test
w  Sober at study, drunk at test
w  Drunk at study, drunk at test
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Testing Mood
●  Mood has a similar effect (Eich et al, 1994)
w  Mood induced by music and directed thoughts
●  So, if you are intoxicated while studying for an
exam
w and you didn t study before
Study mood
●  You should be intoxicated while taking the
exam

But do not
expect to do GET HELP!
very well
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Classrooms Classrooms
●  Is memory better when you are tested in the same room as ●  Subjects recall all words either in the context of Day 1 or Day 2
lectured? (different contexts for different subjects)
w  significant for final exams! ●  Recall was best for words that were studied in the test context
●  Smith et al. (1978)
w  Subject studied words in one of two contexts (on separate days)
w  Varied classroom and dress of experimenter

Study context

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Conclusions Next time

●  Context ●  Discrimination in memory
●  Proactive interference (PI)
●  Encoding specificity
●  Release from PI
w memory best if study and test are similar

●  Cues
●  CogLab on False memory due!
●  Environment
●  State ●  How to take a test.

●  Mood
●  Classrooms
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Memory discrimination Discrimination

●  Many cognitive tasks require you to
PSY 200 discriminate between events/stimuli
w  Is this a real smile?

Greg Francis w  Is this fruit ripe?

w  Is there a stapler on the desk?

Lecture 18 ●  The same kind of discrimination is required for memory

How to take a test.

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Discrimination False memory

●  An example list is
●  Discrimination is difficult because memories
w  smooth, bumpy, tough, road, sandpaper, jagged, ready,
can come from lots of different sources coarse, uneven, riders, rugged, sand, boards, ground,
gravel
●  Consider so-called False memory studies
w  the special target is rough, which is not shown to the
w  as in CogLab subject
w  subject views a list of words
●  After viewing the list, the subject must go through a
w  the list of words have something in common
set of words and identify which ones were in the
»  they are all related to a target word
just seen list
w  some words were in the list
w  some words were not seen
»  including the special target

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False memory False memory

●  The main finding is that the special target is often
identified as part of the just seen list ●  These types of findings suggest that our
w  even though it was not memories are
●  Sometimes people will even report that they w  not necessarily accurate, we can remember things that
recall seeing the special target never occurred

w  but this is impossible because it was never shown w  able to be manipulated, to a certain extent, I can make
you have certain memories
●  CogLab data (75 participants)
w  Type of selected items Percentage of recalls ●  Why does the false memory effect
w  In original list 78.4 happen?
w  Normal distractor (not in list) 6.5
w  Special distractor (not in list) 70.2

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

False memory False memory

●  With every to-be-remembered item you store some ●  At the end of the trial, you have a lot of items in memory that
information, but not only information about the item are related to the list
w  Other information is automatically generated as well w  Some of them are items that were actually on the list and some of them are items that
were generated but not actually on the list
w  smooth, bumpy, tough, road, sandpaper, jagged, ready, w  Reporting all items from memory is not going to lead to good performance
coarse, uneven, riders, rugged, sand, boards, ground, gravel w  Both types of memory items are real, but only one type matches the physical stimuli

●  Good performance on this task requires discrimination between

Memory: Item 1 Memory: Item 2 Memory: Item 3
memories generated by physical stimuli and memories generated by
internal processes
bumpy bumpy jagged stones
w  Source monitoring bumpy
smooth smooth smooth
smooth peaks Memory
rough rough rough
tough tough rough
baby baby baby nails sandpaper
baby nails
road road
gravel road
uneven
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Discrimination Interference
●  Good memory recall usually requires not only ●  Retroactive interference (RI)
recall of an item from memory w new information prevents recall of
previous information
●  You also must identify the correct item relative
w e.g., Overwriting a computer file.
to the appropriate context or time frame
w The current trial ●  Proactive interference (PI)
w The context of the experiment w prior learning prohibits new learning

w Relative to an earlier event w e.g., Learning new cultural customs.

w At a particular moment in time

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Proactive interference Proactive interference

●  May be due to a variety of effects ●  Suppose you see this building as the test on the third trial
w  You have a match in memory, but is from trial 1, not trial 3
w  One is that memory involves discriminating new from old
w  You may report it having been shown in trial 3
●  Visual memory
●  In general, previous trials make memory discrimination
w  See a set of photos more challenging
w  Then see a test photo and decide if new or old
Memory: Trial 1 Memory: Trial 2 Memory: Trial 3 Memory: Trial 1 Memory: Trial 2 Memory: Trial 3

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Proactive interference Proactive interference

●  One finds proactive interference for lots of memory tasks ●  One finds proactive interference for lots of memory tasks
●  CogLab serial position experiment ●  False memory experiment
w  I looked at recall of the first letter in each list, averaged across w  I looked at recall identification of the normal words in the list
all students
1 6
Proportion of times first

0.9

Average number of words

5.8
0.8
letter is recalled

0.7 5.6

recognized
0.6 5.4
0.5
0.4 5.2
0.3
5
0.2
0.1 4.8
0
4.6
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
1 2 3 4 5 6
Trial
Trial
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Proactive interference Proactive interference

●  Inference does not happen for all experiments ●  Inference does not happen for all experiments
w  Just those related to memory w  Just those related to memory

●  Partial report experiment (first 12 trials had the cue before ●  Attentional Blink experiment (detection of the first letter in
the letter matrix – to give you practice) the stream)
0.9 0.5
Proportion of letters reported

Proportion of letters reported

0.8 0.45
0.4
0.7
0.35
0.6
0.3
0.5 0.25
0.4 0.2
0.3 0.15
0.1
0.2
0.05
0.1 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748495051525354555657585960
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Trial
Trial
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Release from PI Release from PI

●  Proactive interference weakens for different
stimulus types ●  Trials 1-3 show build up of PI
●  Run two Brown-Peterson type experiments ●  Experimental group shows release of PI on
Control
Trial 4 100
Experimental
Percentage correct

80
XJF Trial 1 XJF 60
Control
Experiment
WRM Trial 2 WRM 40

20
DBL Trial 3 DBL
0

NRX 1 2 3 4
Trial 4 942 Trial
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Release from PI Memory system

●  Every memory system must have at least two
●  Works for many kinds of memory tasks components/processes
●  Many kinds of stimuli w  Storage
w  retrieval
5, 7, 9, 1 NICE, SUNNY, ENJOY, PUPPY
vs ●  We have described proactive interference as being
vs
5, 7, 9, HAND NICE, SUNNY, ENJOY, KILL due to difficulty discriminating new items from
previous items
●  But there is an alternative explanation
D, D, D, D
News stories vs w  Proactive interference might prevent items from being
D, D, D, F stored and thereby make them unrecallable

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Working memory Testing models

●  Test storage vs. recall of PI by changing
●  For example, working memory has a storage instructions after the list is presented
interference hypothesis for the phonological loop ●  Experiment
●  Working memory suggests that interference can w  stimuli are names of indoor and outdoor
Trial 1
games FOOTBALL
occur Visual Phonological loop
Auditory
w  subjects usually do not notice that word Trial 2
w  by blocking ACP rehearsal (articulatory ACP
on the fourth trial is an indoor game and
SOCCER
suppression, Brown-Peterson task, 421-418-
others are outdoor games
Trial 3 BASEBALL
word length effect) PS ●  Take two groups of subjects
w  within the PS when items sound similar Trial 4
w  one has traditional PI type experiment WALLYBALL
(phonological similarity effect)
w  one is told of difference on fourth trial, at
w  both of these interference types block the storage of items the time of test
(items fall out of the loop)
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Interference at recall How to take a test

●  If PI prevented the last item from being stored your telling a ●  Avoid PI
subject that the fourth item was an indoor sport, should
●  Answering successive questions on the
make no difference (other than guessing)
same topic hurts recall
w  but it makes a big difference, they show release from PI
100 w  after answering unrelated questions
Percentage correct

80
w  go back to questions you cannot answer
w  less proactive interference
60
Not told
Told
w  should recall more
40

20 T1, T1, T1, T1

0 ACT vs
1 2 3 4 T1, T1, T1, T2
Trial
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Conclusions Next time

●  Discrimination ●  Constructive memory
●  Retroactive interference ●  Flashbulb memories
●  Proactive interference ●  Memory misattribution
●  Release from PI ●  Misleading questions
●  Strong effects
●  Knowing about can help in everyday tasks ●  How good is eye-witness testimony?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Constructive memory Memory test

●  Last lecture you watched me for 50 minutes
PSY 200 ●  What was I wearing?

Greg Francis
Lecture 19

How good is eye-witness testimony?

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Discrimination No forgetting?
●  Brain surgeon (Penfield, 1959)
●  The task is difficult because you have to do w  Epilepsy patients

several things w  stimulate brain regions before operating

w  Recall information that might be related to the task from memory w  want to know what is being removed
w  Determine if the memory is actually for the correct event ●  Conscious patients report vivid memories
w  Determine if the memory is actually for the correct moment in time w  unable to recall normally
w  Gauge your confidence in the memory s validity »  "she saw herself as she had been while giving birth to her
baby."
●  All of this suggests that performance on a memory task w  stimulation of temporal lobes
involves discriminating information
●  In the image, numbers indicate
●  To address the discrimination problem, people engage places where stimulation
in a constructive process to report memories evoked different reported
experiences

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No forgetting? Penfield (1959)

●  Suggests that memories are stored but normally ●  Even worse…
unreachable (context things again) w  the memories are nearly impossible to verify
●  Basis for ideas of memory repression (and a few self-help books) w  the few attempts find that the memories are not true
w  The results are usually misunderstood »  people describe places they have never visited, impossible
events, fantasy,…
w  Actually only occurred for 5% of patients w  The patients have epilepsy
»  Stimulation may have triggered something like an epileptic
seizure (which can have hallucinations)
●  It is more likely that stimulation feels like a memory, even though
it is not
w  your awareness of remembrance is a product of your brain
w  it can be stimulated, even without a real memory

●  What do we mean by a valid memory?

Purdue University Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Flashbulb memories Flashbulb memories

●  Highly emotional events tend to produce strong ●  People vividly recall details
memories surrounding event
●  e.g. w  where they were when they
heard
w  JFK assassination
w  Challenger explosion w  what people said

w  Oklahoma City bombing w  clothing worn

w  Earthquakes w  time of day,..

w  September 11, 2001 ●  People are confident about

w  ... their reports
w  however...

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Flashbulb memories Flashbulb memories

●  Talarico & Rubin (2003) ●  The memories of the WTC
●  On September 12, 2001 attack were more vivid
Asked volunteers to answer questions
● 
●  Subjects believed those
about their memory of
memories were more likely
w  The WTC attack
to be reliable
w  An ordinary event (volunteer s choice)
●  Three groups for follow up ●  Ordinary memories
w  7 days later w  Faded in vividness
w  42 days later w  Belief decreased over time
w  224 days later
●  Recalling of details was the same for
WTC attack and ordinary event
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Flashbulb memories Memory misattribution

●  Subjects confidence in their memory can be ●  Donald Thomson was accused of rape and picked out of
misleading a lineup by the victim (Schacter, 1996)
w  retelling of the story ( I remember vividly when Kennedy ●  He was on live TV at the time of the rape
was shot. I was… ) probably reinforced the story w  Ironically, he was discussing memory of faces for eyewitness
w  Maybe not the true memory testimony

●  Flashbulb memories are a real phenomenon ●  The victim

about the experience of memory, w  had the TV on at the time of rape
w  misattributed the face on TV for the face of her attacker
w  but probably not super-memory
w  very accurate report of the crime, otherwise

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Eyewitness testimony
●  I will show you a series of slides and then ask you
some questions

Purdue University Dr. Kim Vu PSY 332: Cognition 14

Purdue University

Purdue University Dr. Kim Vu PSY 332: Cognition 16

Purdue University

Purdue University Dr. Kim Vu PSY 332: Cognition 18

Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Purdue University Purdue University

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Eyewitness testimony
Questions
●  Later, show slides and ask subjects if they were part of the
●  Did the bus, which came by, come from the left or the original set
right?
●  Key test is for a pair of slides (between subjects)
●  Did another car pass the Red Datsun while it was at w  real slide contains YIELD sign
the intersection with the stop sign? w  fake slide contains STOP sign
●  Did you see a bicycle?
●  Did you see the taxi cab?
●  Did you see if the policeman wrote anything down?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Eyewitness testimony Eyewitness testimony

●  Loftus, Miller &
Misinformation effect 80
● 
Burns (1978)
70
w  Loftus & Palmer (1974) The Delayed

Percentage correct
● 
60
misinformation Immediate
●  Compare accuracy according to pre-test questions 50
effect gets
w  Subjects without a misleading question--90% accurate stronger with a
40

w  Subjects with a misleading question -- 20% accurate week delay 30

before the 20
w  In a follow-up, the experimenters asked those with misleading
questions if they thought they were misled memory test 10

»  90% say no 0
Consistent None Misleading

●  Paying money for correctness also had no effect Types of questions

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Memory implants Conclusions

●  Loftus has a procedure that implants a ●  Many techniques believed to provide accurate
memory of being lost in a mall memories, do not
w  Basically just have subject read a plausible story (with w  flashbulb memories
some details that could be true)
w  brain stimulation
w  Get family members to pretend the story is true
w  Later the subject remembers the story as something
●  Memory is constructive
that happened to him/her ●  Memories can be easily influenced by questions,
●  It is very easy for a therapist to implant false interpretation, and context
memories into patients

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Next time
●  Amnesia
●  Anterograde amnesia
●  Retrograde amnesia
●  Unusual characteristics
●  Repression
●  CogLab on Forgot it all along due.

●  What s wrong with myPurdue

wife?University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Amnesia Fundamental fact

●  There is no method other than object
PSY 200 physical evidence to verify the accuracy of a
memory
Greg Francis
●  Memory is a cognitive experience
Lecture 20 w Confidence in the memory is another cognitive
experience
w You can be very confident and still be wrong
What is wrong with my wife?
●  Of course, we must be correct fairly often, or
our lives would be a total mess!
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Amnesia Amnesia
●  Scope and duration
●  Loss of memory or memory abilities
●  Retrograde amnesia for one patient
w  retrograde: forgetting events prior to the injury
5 months 8 months 16 months
w  anterograde: forgetting events after the injury

●  In most cases amnesia is limited in scope and

duration
coma coma Time
w  like when my brother Joe slipped while playing frisbee coma of
1 year 2 weeks accident
2 years
4 years
to infancy to infancy to infancy
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What s wrong with my wife? An unusual case

●  Side issues
●  Nothing!
w  Sense of smell
w  Mild anomia
w  Odd aphasia (language deficit)

●  She is able to learn and remember new information

●  Remarkably unaffected by the loss of memories
w  Personality

●  But she cannot remember anything before w  Parents

w  college
her senior year in high school
w  makes study of retrograde amnesia difficult
w  motor cycle accident
w  complete retrograde amnesia
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

What is lost? What is lost?

●  How can someone who loses their ●  More generally,
childhood memories go to college the next w while patients with retrograde amnesia forget their
year? names, parents, addresses,…

w memories cannot be wiped clean w they do not generally forget how to walk, talk,
solve problems
w perhaps they are just not directly accessible
» Although they may have problems…
w forgetting = recall problem?
w Different types of memory systems
» controversial!

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Memory systems Anterograde amnesia

●  There are many different types of memory
●  Amnesia seems to affect declarative more than nondeclarative memory
●  Some patients have amnesia that preserves past
memories but prevents formation of new memories
w  many are long-time alcoholics who did not eat properly
»  which leads to a thiamine deficiency
»  which leads to Korsakoff s syndrome
●  Leonard in Memento

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Anterograde amnesics
Patient HM
●  Fairly normal STM digit span (~7 items)
●  Surgery on hippocampus (to control epilepsy) ●  But very difficult to extend digit span
●  anterograde amnesia w  how many trials to repeat back list correctly?
w  unable to learn anything new 30

25
Thought it was 1953
Mean trials to criterion

● 

20
w  shocked by age of face in his mirror
Controls
w  Could not stand to read newspapers 15
Patients
w  reintroduced himself to doctors, nurses,… 10

●  Could carry on a conversation! 5

0
0 5 10 15 20 25
Number of digits to remember

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Serial position curve Patient HM

●  Normal recency
●  Abnormal primacy ●  Could learn
●  Consistent with STM-LTM dichotomy some things!
100 w  E.g.,
90
location of
80
hospital
Percent correct

70
60 cafeteria
Controls
50
40
Amnesics w  E.g. mirror
30 drawing
20
task
10
0
0 5 10 15

Item number
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Patient HM Amnesia-like memory

●  Mirror drawing task (Milner, 1968)
●  HM had no knowledge of doing the task before! ●  Some aspects of memory seem very much like
amnesia
w infantile amnesia
w repressed memories

●  Careful studies are difficult to come by because

the memories (and absence thereof) must be
verified
w remember the fundamental fact at the start of
today s lecture
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Infantile amnesia Infantile amnesia

●  Most people report that they cannot remember ●  Reason is unknown, but the best theory goes
anything that happened to them before age 4
like this…
years
w children younger than 4-years-old view the world
20
Number of memories

differently from adults

15
w by encoding specificity, one needs to be in a
reported

10 similar state as study to best recall something

5 w adults are very different from children, and this
0 prevents recall of early memories
0 2 4 6 8

Age at time of event

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Repression Repression
●  Psychotherapists (e.g. Freud) suggested that ●  In a laboratory, showing evidence of repression
infantile amnesia occurred because much of requires
childhood is filled with painful events and memory
w being unable to remember something
of the pain is prevented by psychological defense
mechanisms (repression) w being able to recover the memory through therapy

●  This is very unlikely w proving that the recovered memory is accurate

w  people do remember painful events well
w  laboratory studies find no evidence of repressed memories

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Discovered memories
Repression
●  However, it is possible to have information that was once known
to be forgotten and then (re)discovered
●  In therapy, clinicians often claim evidence of repression
●  CogLab’s Forgot it all along experiment demonstrates this
with
property
w  dream interpretation
●  Phases I and II are like an encoding specificity experiment
w  patterns in symptoms
Study with cue Test with same or different cue
w  recovering a memory through hypnosis
cup-D_ _K
●  None of these techniques demonstrate a verified cup-DESK
memory pan-D_ _K
●  Among carefully controlled memory research, there is
no evidence of repression!
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Discovered memories Discovered memories

●  Results:
●  Phase III: judge your memory for an item in phase II
●  Phase II (cued recall): encoding specificity effect
●  We only care about the items that you correctly recalled in Phase
II ●  Phase III (memory judgment): remembering recall is also affected
by cue type
●  Thus, it is possible to forget that you remembered, and a change
Did you recall the upper case word? of cue would allow you to “recover” a forgotten memory
(same or different cue)
cup-DESK
Global data
~13,800 participants
pan-DESK

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Conclusions Next time

●  Encoding specificity
●  Retrograde amnesia
●  Levels of processing (CogLab due!)
●  Anterograde amnesia
●  Judgments of learning
●  Learning in anterograde amnesics
●  Practice testing
●  Infantile amnesia
●  Learning styles
●  Repression
●  How to improve your memory without spending
$20.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Memory
Improving memory
●  We seem to be unable to control our
PSY 200 memories
w  learn things we don t want to remember

Greg Francis w  unable to learn things we want to remember

●  Is there any reliable cue that something will be

Lecture 21 remembered?
w  no
w  but there are several tricks you can use
to improve memory in certain situations
How to improve your memory without
spending $20.

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Encoding specificity Encoding specificity

●  We know that memory is best when study and test contexts are ●  Test subjects in a neutral context
similar (after another 3 hour interval)
w  For example, testing in the study classroom
●  Look at proportion correct recall
●  But variability in study promotes more general recall w  Highest with variable study contexts
w  Smith et al. (1978)
●  Advice: if you want to remember
w  Subjects studied words twice: either in same context or different contexts (3 hour
interval between contexts) something in lots of contexts, study in
lots of contexts
Session 1 Learning context
Session 2 Classroom 1 Classroom 2
Context
Classroom 1 0.41 0.69
Classroom 2 0.53 0.39

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Study style
Level of processing
●  Time spent studying is also “context” for memory
●  Memory can be influenced by depth of processing at the time
retrieval
of study
●  Generally, more study leads to better memory w  Craik & Tulving (1975)

●  Style of study matters too ●  Subjects observe words with associated tasks

w  distributed practice is better than massed practice

w  avoid cramming! question YES NO
w  true for many skills 1 hour In capital
BOOK book
letters?
Rhyme with
3 hours 1 hour spring sprint
thing?
Synonym
1 hour bulky brown
for heavy?
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Level of processing CogLab

●  Recall is better as depth of processing increases ●  Recall is better as depth of processing increases
w  More distinctive memories are created, which helps subsequent recall w  “Test” is what matters here, other data is just for completeness
w  By varying depth of processing, you can construct memories that are w  90 participants
more likely to be recalled

25
Number of words recalled

20

15

10

0
Capital Rhyme Synonym
Study task
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Levels of Processing Intention

●  Level of processing is more important than intent to
learn (Hyde & Jenkins, 1973) ●  Recall (out of 24 words) varies a lot with task
●  11 groups of subjects ●  Not much variation with intention to learn
w  1 control group: told they will be tested to recall the words
»  not given any study task
w  10 experimental groups split to perform a study task
»  Pleasant-unpleasant rating
»  Estimate frequency of word usage
»  E-G checking: does word contain an E or a G?
»  Identify part of speech: noun, verb,…
»  Sentence framing: which sentence does word best fit in?
w  For all experimental groups, either
»  (a) Intentional learning : told they will be tested to recall the
words
»  (b) Incidental learning: not told they will be tested
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Implications Judgments of Learning

●  Advice: study interactively ●  Nelson & Dunlosky (1991)
w  read notes ●  Subjects study a pair of words (e.g., OCEAN – TREE)
w  rewrite notes
●  Estimate how likely they are to be able to remember
w  rephrase notes one word if shown the other (JOL).
w  teach someone else w  Given OCEAN, how likely to remember the associated item
●  Importantly, people are not usually good at estimating later?
whether something will be remembered w  This is the subject s estimate of their ability to use LTM
●  Make judgment either
w  Immediately after studying the pair
w  Delayed to later in the experimental trials
●  Note: students studying for an exam often use the
immediate approach for a JOL to decide if they need
to continue studying
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Judgments of Learning Practicing recall

●  A common approach to studying is
●  Immediate JOLs do to use flash cards (or something
not match memory similar)
performance (at the ●  Two steps to studying
end of the experiment)
w  1) Read material on both sides
w  Especially for high (study)
JOLs w  2) Practice test the material (given
●  Delaying the JOL one side, try to recall the information
on the other side)
leads to fairly accurate
JOLs ●  What should you do when you
successfully recall the information
●  Advice: study, wait,
during the practice test?
estimate learning
w  Continue to study?
w  Continue to test?
w  Set aside and focus on other cards?

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Practicing recall Practicing recall

●  Karpicke & Roediger (2008) ●  Standard advice is that once you learn something, study something else
●  Subjects study 40 Swahili - English word pairs ●  This is not good advice Keep practice
w  mashua – boat testing
●  Performance is best when
w  kaka -- brother every pair is tested, even if
w  Test for English given Swahili: you have already
»  mashua --??? demonstrated it is
memorized
●  Four groups of subjects, that differ after an item is correctly recalled
w  ST (study-test): subject studies and continually tested over every pair ●  The amount of time spent
studying the words does
w  SnT (study on non-recalled - test on all): when a subject recalls a pair, it is no
longer studied, but it continues to be tested not matter so much Don t practice
test
w  STn (study all, test only on non-recalled): when a subject recalls a pair, it ●  Suggests that you learn how
continues to be studied, but it is not tested to recall the information
w  SnTn (study on non-recalled, test on non-recalled): when a subject recalls a ●  Advice: Test yourself!
pair, it is not studied or tested again
●  A week later, everyone is tested

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Learning styles Learning styles

●  A common approach in education is to identify a student s learning style ●  Unfortunately, there is absolutely no evidence that reported learning style
and then teach for that style preference has anything to do with learning
●  Lots of tests to identify a student s learning style ●  Pashler et al. (2009) observed that to demonstrate evidence that learning
●  There do seem to be real differences in what style people indicate they style influenced learning, you have to show a particular kind of interaction
prefer of effect

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Learning styles Learning styles

Pashler et al. (2009) then reviewed hundreds of studies purporting to show
● 
●  Why is the idea popular?
evidence for learning styles, but only ever found effects like these
●  But these only indicate an advantage for a type of learning or a method ●  It fits with the American ideal of everyone being
capable of learning if given the chance (no child
left behind)
●  It allows parents (and students) to blame the
educational system for failure rather than lack of
motivation or ability
●  It lends itself well to statistical quirks of finding
just the right method for a given student
●  It s a generalization of the experience that a
given student benefits from a new explanation of
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material Purdue University

Conclusions Next time

●  Lots of ways to improve memory
w Encoding specificity ●  Mental imagery
w level of processing ●  Sleep
w Judgments of Learning ●  Brain training
w Practice testing
●  CogLab on Link Word due!
w Learning styles
●  Get a good night’s sleep!

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Memory
Improving memory 2
●  We seem to be unable to control our
PSY 200 memories
w  learn things we don t want to remember

Greg Francis w  unable to learn things we want to remember

●  Is there any reliable cue that something will be

Lecture 22 remembered?
w  no
w  but there are several tricks you can use
to improve memory in certain situations
Get a good night’s sleep.

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Memory trick - grouping

SF: Digit span
●  We often hear of people memorizing
●  Broke down and organized
pages of the phone book
each digit list
w how do they do it?
●  Long-distance runner
w some cheat (frauds)
w  sequence like 3492 converted to
w others take advantage of organization and 3 minutes 49.2 seconds- near
memory tricks world record time

Eventually created a hierarchy

SF learned to increase his digit span to
● 
● 
of tricks (ages, dates)
79 digits (any random sequence)
●  Technique did not transfer to
w 230 hours of practice (over 20 months)
other memory tasks (e.g.,
w Ericsson, Chase & Faloon (1980) letters)
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Method of loci Method of loci

●  Used by ancient Greeks to remember complicated speeches
●  e.g., grocery list
●  To remember a list of words or key ideas
w  visualize walking around an area with distinctive landmarks
w  link the items to be remembered with landmarks by using bizarre Add vivid,
ITEMS LOCI
mental imagery
bizarre imagery
w  to recall items in order, mentally walk through area
hot dogs driveway
w  (any ordered sequence will work -- e.g., a children s rhyme)

●  Memory piggybacks on the easy recallability of the bizarre

cat food garage interior
imagery

tomatoes front door

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Peg word system Peg word system

●  Associate items in list with a previously ●  Hook to be remembered items to the list
memorized list w visual imagery helps again!
ITEMS Peg word
One is a bun. Six is a stick. recall by
Two is a shoe. Seven is a heaven. milk bun reciting poem
Three is a bee. Eight is a gate.
Four is a door. Nine is a line.
Five is a hive. Ten is a hen. bread shoe

bananas tree

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Link word method Link word method

●  In a study of learning 120 Russian words (Atkinson
●  Foreign language vocabulary
& Raugh, 1975)
w  find an English key word that sounds like some part of the
foreign word ●  Two groups
w  form a mental image of the key word interacting with the w  control: heard Russian words, saw English translation
English translation of the foreign word w  experimental: heard Russian words, saw English
●  E.G. translation, saw key words, and applied method

w  pato -> Spanish for duck , sounds like pot-o ●  Experimental group learned more words faster and
»  imagine duck with pot on its head for longer
w  zronok-> Russian for bell , sounds like zrahn-oak w  6 weeks later
»  imagine an oak tree with bells as acorns »  experimental (43% correct)
»  control (28% correct)
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Link word method Mnemonists

●  CogLab Link word lab (87 participants) ●  Some people seem to have extraordinary
●  Study 50 French words (25 in each condition) memories
w  Half with a provided link word to form an image
w professional - apply one of the techniques we ve
w  Half without a provided link word (no image)
discussed
w spontaneous- seem to not consciously apply a
technique

●  Photographic memory?
w Few documented cases
w Generally, not happy outcomes

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

S.: Luria S.: Luria

●  Extreme synesthesia
●  Luria: Russian psychologist
w sensory information from one modality evokes
w met S in 1920s sensation in another
●  S w tone, 30 cps, 100 decibles --> saw a strip 12-14
w able to recall without error a list of 70 words cm wide the color of old, tarnished silver
» took 2-3 minutes » 50 cps--> brown strip, taste of sweet and sour
borscht
» able to report it again several months later
w voices gave rise to visual responses
w other unusual characteristics
w used the full sensation of events to help memory

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Brain Training
S.: Luria ●  Several companies market activities
to make you smarter
●  Visual imagery w  “Exercise” your brain with games that are
adapted from neuroscience

w used method of loci w  Does that even make sense?

●  Often aimed toward elderly

w such strong imagery it interfered with his ability to (Alzheimers) and young children
understand simple prose
» words kept evoking inappropriate images...

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Brain Training Brain Training

●  Much of the hype comes from a study that trained people for a ●  Much of the hype comes from a study that trained people for a
few hours on an dual n-back task (Jaeggi et al., 2008) few hours on an dual n-back task (Jaeggi et al., 2008)
w  Does the current stimulus match the one from n trials back? w  n is also a measure of how well subjects do the task
w  n is adjusted for each person so the task is always demanding ●  Subjects do get better at the n-back task with training

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Brain Training Brain Training (WARNING!)

●  Redick et al. (2013) cautions:
●  Transfer effects for a measure of fluid intelligence (refers to
the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently ●  The conclusions are based on 4 small studies that
of previously acquired knowledge) varied in many ways
w  Training group does better than a control group
w  It is probably a mistake to average scores across these studies
w  Amount of training time is related to gain in intelligence
●  Some selective reporting of measures of fluid
intelligence
w  Measures that did not show an effect were not reported

●  No comparison to an “active control”

w  Where subjects complete a training task that should not improve
fluid intelligence

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Brain Training (WARNING!)

●  In October 2014, a group of memory researchers released a Sleep
statement with the following summary:
w  We object to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded
avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline when there is no compelling ●  Many types of memory improve with sleep
scientific evidence to date that they do. The promise of a magic bullet detracts
from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects ●  Some type of consolidation of memories
the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles. In the judgment of the
signatories below, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxieties of
older adults about impending cognitive decline. We encourage continued careful ●  The effect is not just time
research and validation in this field.
w Although time also has an effect
●  You should be similarly skeptical about claims for improving attention,
perception, and other mental capabilities
●  We ll look at one representative study
w  Playing video games does not seem to improve your attention or perception
●  You can improve performance on specific tasks, but that does not typically w Ellenbogen et al. (2007)
transfer to other tasks
●  You can make yourself smarter by learning new information

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Sleep Sleep
●  Subjects learn to identify ●  There is a ordered arrangement to the stimuli
order relationships ●  If you know this arrangement, deciding for any pair is easy
between random shapes w  But subjects are never explicitly told about this arrangement

●  Only shown one pair at a

time
●  Subjects have to learn/
memorize the appropriate
answer to each pair

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Sleep Sleep
●  Subjects are split in to three ●  Subjects are split in to three
groups, according to when groups, according to when
they are tested they are tested
w  20 minutes later w  20 minutes later
w  12 hours later w  12 hours later
w  24 hours later w  24 hours later
●  No differences when tested ●  Big differences when tested
on the originally studied on new pairs that fit the
items ordered structure
w  E.g., A>C, C>E, B>D

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Sleep Conclusions
●  Half of the 12 hour group
had sleep and half did not ●  Lots of ways to improve memory
●  It makes a difference for
pairs of items that are far w Method of loci
apart in the ordered w Imagery
structure
w Mnemonics
●  1-degree: A>C, B>D,…
●  2-degree: A>D, B>E,… w Brain training
●  Advice: w Sleep
w  study early!
w  Get some sleep!

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Next time
●  Mental representation
●  Prototypes
●  Exemplars
●  Propositions
●  CogLab on Prototypes due!
●  What is a shoe?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Concepts
Representation of knowledge
●  What is the information in Long Term Memory?
PSY 200 w  May be several different types

●  We have knowledge about the world

Greg Francis w  Due to personal experience
w  Or due to language
Lecture 23
●  Such information must be in some kind of format,
which we call concepts
But what are the concepts?
What is a shoe? ● 

w  what is the concept of dog, walking, or free-market

capitalism ?

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Concepts Definitions
●  We will look at three topics in concepts ●  Plato (and Socrates) spent a lot of effort
w Definitions (don t really work) trying to define terms like virtue and
w Prototypes (closer to how humans think) knowledge
w Exemplars (more likely than prototypes) w they were largely unsuccessful

●  And then combinations of concepts ●  the 20th century philosopher Wittgenstein

w propositions wondered if definitions of even simple
concepts were possible

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Definitions Definitions
●  Consider the concept shoe, you might define it as ●  Consider the concept shoe, you might define it as Webster s
Dictionary does
Webster s Dictionary does
w  A covering for the human foot, usually made of leather, having a
w  A covering for the human foot, usually made of leather, thick and somewhat stiff sole and a lighter top.
having a thick and somewhat stiff sole and a lighter top. w  Anything resembling a shoe in form, position, or use.
w  Anything resembling a shoe in form, position, or use. ●  But now consider some situations and decide if they are really
shoes
●  Lots of shoes fit this definition
w  A shoe that is intended for display only

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Definitions Definitions
●  Consider the concept shoe, you might define it as Webster s
Dictionary does ●  The difficulty is the same one that Plato and Socrates
w  A covering for the human foot, usually made of leather, having a had trying to define virtue
thick and somewhat stiff sole and a lighter top. w  for any definition you come up with, I can find examples that do
w  Anything resembling a shoe in form, position, or use. not seem to fit the definition
But now consider some situations and decide if they are really
● 
●  But we all know what a shoe is
shoes
w  so our knowledge of this concept must not be based on some
w  a shoe filled with cement, which cannot be worn
precise definition
w  a covering worn on the hands
of a person without legs who ●  Note, scientists can (sometimes) create precise
walks on his hands definitions (e.g., a dog is defined by a DNA pattern or
w  And this? à
by mating abilities)
w  but the definition is somewhat arbitrary

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Prototypes Prototypes
●  Perhaps what defines a concept is similarity ●  In prototype theory it is possible for an object to
among its members be more or less a certain concept
w there may be no absolutely necessary characteristics ●  Consider the concept coffee cup
w there may be no absolutely sufficient characteristics

●  Prototype theory supposes that similarity is

judged relative to a prototype example of the
concept
w e.g., an ideal, average, or most frequent version of the
concept

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Prototypes Prototypes
●  In prototype theory it is possible for an object to ●  In prototype theory it is possible for an object to
be more or less a certain concept be more or less a certain concept
●  Consider the concept coffee cup ●  Consider the concept coffee cup
w and variations (some are cup-ier than others) w and variations (some are cup-ier than others)

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Prototypes Prototypes
●  In prototype theory it is possible for an object to ●  In prototype theory it is possible for an object to
be more or less a certain concept be more or less a certain concept
●  Consider the concept coffee cup ●  Consider the concept coffee cup
w and variations (some are cup-ier than others) w and variations (some are cup-ier than others)

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Prototypes Prototypes
●  Lots of experiments suggest the role of ●  Prototypes
prototypes
w Posner & Keele (1968): learning category names for
random dot patterns
w Discriminate two sets of random dot patterns
w Each pattern is a variation of one of two prototype
patterns
A B

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Prototypes Prototypes
●  variations are made by moving some of the dots ●  The key test is done after subjects learn to classify the
variants
w  reaction time for judgment is recorded for stimuli they have never
seen before
»  new variants
»  the prototypes
w  reaction time is faster for the prototypes
w  which suggests that the mental representation of the categories
(concepts) are built to favor the prototype of the category
variant of A variant of B ●  Look at CogLab data

●  subjects learn to classify many different variants

w they never see the prototypes themselves
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Prototypes Prototypes
●  Consider the types of concepts you can have
●  Results are based on data from 89 participants (29,191 for global).
w  Pattern type Reaction time (ms) Global RT(ms) w  and how specific they can be
w  Prototypes 787 971 ●  things: bird, dog, chair, shoe,…
w  Variants 791 1003
●  actions: walking, running, sleeping,…
●  Unanswered by this (and many other) experiments is what a prototype is:
●  goal-derived: things to eat on a diet , things to carry out of a house
w  a thing that resides in memory and contains information about the category
features? in case of a fire ,...
w  the result of processing information? ●  ad hoc: things that could fall on your head , things you might see
●  A bit of thought suggests it is the result of processing information while in Paris , gifts to give one s former high school friend who has
just had her second baby ,...
●  When studied, these concepts all seem to have prototype
characteristics

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Prototypes Exemplars
●  We can generate new concepts from old ●  A concept consists of lots of examples of the
concepts concept
w it s inconceivable that every possible prototype exists w e.g., a coffee cup concept might contain lots of
ready to be used examples of coffee cups
w some must just be built as they are needed
w perhaps even the prototypes for simple concepts like
bird or shoe are also just built when they are
needed

●  A theory that can account for this processing

approach is exemplar theory

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Exemplars Exemplars
●  Comparing an object to see if it is a coffee cup ●  Even if it is a new object, it may match several
involves comparing it to each example in memory exemplars well enough to generate an overall
and seeing if it matches anything well enough response to indicate it is a coffee cup

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Exemplars Exemplars
●  Some coffee cups seem prototypical because ●  Unlike prototype theory, exemplar theory also contains
they match lots of exemplars information about the variability of examples within a
concept
w that s what defines a prototype
●  Thus, we know that pizzas have an average size of 16
inches but can come in lots of different sizes
●  And we know that foot-long rulers have an average size
of 12 inches, but essentially no variability in size

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Complex associations Propositions

●  How do we represent a concept that ●  Higher order ideas
w  things doing something
involves combinations of concepts?
w e.g., Dogs chase cats. ●  Statement that is either true or false
w  things cannot be judged true or false
w e.g., Last Spring, Jacob fed the pigeons in
w  e.g., Book, Albert, Threw, Professor, Test, Gave
Trafalgar Square.
w consists of an ordered list of concepts
●  Need to identify the role of each concept » e.g., (relation:X, Agent:Y, Object:Z)
Albert threw the book.

(relation:Threw, Agent:Albert, Object:Book)

(Threw, Albert, Book)
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Proposition Proposition
●  Network Representation ●  Network Representation
w  The proposition connects the appropriate concept nodes
w The proposition connects the appropriate concept
nodes

Albert Professor

agent agent

threw Albert threw the book gave The professor gave a test
relation relation

object object

book test
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Proposition Proposition
●  Network Representation ●  Network Representation
w  The proposition connects the appropriate concept nodes

last Spring

time
Dog
pigeons
agent object
in
Jacob
chase Last Spring, Jacob fed pigeons relation
Dogs chase cats
pigeons in
relation agent
Trafalgar Square

object location
relation

cat feeds Trafalgar Square

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Proposition Proposition
●  Ratcliff & McKoon (1978)
w  study phase
●  One way of combining concepts »  subjects are asked to memorize a set of 504 sentences
»  18 - 1 hour sessions!
w there are also other theories of how to do this w  test phase
»  show words and have subjects decide if they were in the
●  Used a lot in Artificial Intelligence study sentences or not
»  measure reaction time for words from the sentences
●  Do humans represent interactions of
concepts with propositions?
●  Some experimental evidence The bandit who stole the passport faked the signature

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Proposition
Proposition
●  In the test phase, a word is given and the
●  Network Representation
subject responds as quickly as possible
passport passport
passport
object object

bandit bandit
agent agent
agent faked faked

bandit stole passport bandit stole passport

relation relation
bandit faked signature bandit faked signature

relation object relation object

stole signature stole signature

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Proposition Proposition
●  In the test phase, a word is given and the ●  The expectation is that activation will flow through the
subject responds as quickly as possible entire proposition that includes this word

passport passport
passport passport
object object

bandit bandit
agent agent
faked faked

bandit stole passport bandit stole passport

relation relation
bandit faked signature bandit faked signature

relation object relation object

stole signature stole signature

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Proposition Proposition
●  So, if the next word is part of the same proposition, a ●  If words are from different propositions, no
subject will respond even faster priming
passport passport
bandit passport
object object

bandit bandit
agent agent
faked faked

bandit stole passport bandit stole passport

relation relation
bandit faked signature bandit faked signature

relation object relation object

stole signature stole signature

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Proposition Proposition
●  In the test phase, a word is given and the ●  Activation will flow through the entire proposition that
subject responds as quickly as possible includes this word

passport passport
passport passport
object object

bandit bandit
agent agent
faked faked

bandit stole passport bandit stole passport

relation relation
bandit faked signature bandit faked signature

relation object relation object

stole signature stole signature

Purdue University Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 7

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Proposition Proposition
●  When the next word is shown, its node has not been
●  Test Phase : Priming Task
primed, so it responds more slowly
w  compare RTs for second in a pair of words
w  within a common proposition (bandit -- passport)
passport
signature w  between propositions (passport -- signature)
object w  not related in sentence (horizon -- signature)

bandit w  interested in RT to second word in each pair

agent
faked
●  Ratcliff & McKoon (1978)
bandit stole passport
relation w  results
bandit faked signature »  within same proposition words: 561 msec
»  between proposition words: 581 msec
»  unrelated: 671
relation object
w  evidence of priming by propositional activation
stole signature
Purdue University ●  We think in propositions! Purdue University

Conclusions
Next time
●  Concepts ●  Other types of knowledge
w definitions ●  Mental images
w prototypes w  mental rotation
w exemplars w  mental scaling
w  limitations of
●  Propositions
w Evidence we think in terms of propositions
●  CogLab on Mental rotation due!
●  Is a picture in your head like a picture in the world?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 8

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Mental imagery Mental representation

PSY 200 ●  How do you mentally represent

knowledge?
Greg Francis w concepts (prototypes, exemplars)
w propositions
Lecture 24
w mental images, maps

Is a picture in your head like a picture in

the world?

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Perception Images
●  When we see this
●  We have knowledge about, and memories image how do we
of, perceived stimuli represent the
w sights information in the
w smells image?
w touches w analog: copy of
w sounds image in head and
we can retrieve it
●  Are these converted into propositions, or
w symbology: convert to
concepts
propositions/concepts
w or is there something else?
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Images Images
●  If you ask me questions about the previous slide,
●  I can remember the wears
Runs to
my answers would not necessarily identify the
image on the ball
girl representation
previous slide and it shorts

feels like I picture

Runs to
wears
the image in my
ball
head girl
shorts
w  but is it really?
w  could it be a
Mental
proposition?
Observable
There was a girl running to
a soccer ball. She wore red shorts.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Pure propositions Working with images

●  Let s look at the arguments for a purely ●  If this image was printed on a piece of paper, you would
propositional representation have no problem answering the questions about it
●  Look at this picture, I ll ask you questions about it ●  If you had an exact copy of the image in your head, you
would expect you could look at the copy and make all
kinds of judgments
w  but you cannot
w  how you interpret the image to a large extent determines what
you know about it

●  Mental images are not exactly like real images

w  this tends to be particularly true for memory of images
w  verbal descriptions dominate memory for images

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Another example Another example

●  Answer these questions: ●  How did you do?

●  Which is further East, Detroit, Michigan or

Indianapolis, Indiana?
●  Which is further West, Reno, Nevada or San
Diego, California?
●  Which is further South, Indianapolis, Indiana or
Barcelona, Spain?
●  Which is further North, New York City or Paris,
France?

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Propositions Propositions
●  So this suggests that mental images are not exactly like real
images ●  It is clear that propositional information influences
w  and something like propositional information likely influences mental imagery
reports that are ostensibly based on mental images or mental w  but is it all propositions?
San Diego
maps
in w  are there mental images, as we tend to experience them?
agent Nevada
relation ●  Is there any reason to believe that mental images
San Diego is in in
are at all analogous to real images?
California object
relation w  yes
California is west of Nevada
object Reno is in Nevada

agent relation
agent
California
West Reno
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Representation of mental images Representation of mental images

●  Imagine you have a mental image of a lion ●  Imagine you have a mental image of a lion
w If the mental image is a description (set of w If the mental image is a depiction, then it should
propositions), then it should include descriptive include factors such as head, mane, ears, and their
information (head, mane, ears, whiskers,, tail,…) sizes and relative positions
» size of body parts shouldn t matter much » self reports of mental images suggest the
(except as information in the proposition) depicted version, but how to measure
experimentally?

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Representation of mental images Representation of mental images

●  Kosslyn (1976)
w  Ask subjects to quickly answer questions like: ●  Subjects that did not form a mental image respond more quickly
»  Does a lion have a head? (big body part) to the claws question than the head question
»  Does a lion have claws? (small body part) w  presumably because the propositions about a lion having claws are
w  subjects in two groups more accessible in some network of propositions
»  1) form a mental image of a lion ●  So, different ways of thinking about a lion can lead to different
»  2) think about a lion, but without a mental image
patterns of access to information
w  Subjects forming a mental image respond more quickly to the head
w  which implies mental images are different than propositions
question than the claw question
»  presumably because the head is bigger in the mental image
1600 1600
1400 1400
Reaction time (ms)
Reaction time (ms)

1200 1200
Imagery Imagery
1000 No imagery 1000 No imagery
800 800
600 600
400 400
200 200
0 0
Small Big part Small Big part
part Purdue University part Purdue University

Mental rotation Mental rotation

●  CogLab experiment
●  Shepard & Metzler
w  96 participants
(1971)
●  The more rotated the
w 3-D shapes
stimuli are, the longer
w rotated in plane it takes to make a
w or in depth response
w decide if shapes w  close to linear increase
in RT
are same are
different
w measure time to
decide
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Mental rotation Vividness

●  This type of experiment has been taken as strong ●  There are individual differences in reports of mental image
evidence that mental images are not just propositions vividness
w  imagined movement of the mental image (rotation) resembles w  some people report their mental images are just like real images
actual movement w  others report they are fuzzy and vague
w  It takes time to mentally move through a mental space w  some people report no mental images at all (10%)
»  The CogLab data suggests it is about 130 degrees/
w  Nevertheless, people all do basically the same on many tasks that
second
seem to require operating on mental images
»  8 milliseconds for each degree
w  no reason why propositions would give data that incorporate
spatial and temporal relations between aspects of the mental
images

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Conclusions Next time

Review for exam 3
●  Mental representations of pictorial ● 

After Exam 3
information ● 

w  Start a discussion of language

●  There are some things you cannot do with w  Language as an instinct
mental images w  pidgins and creoles

●  Propositions are important

●  Why we do not have to worry about teaching language
●  Mental images are not just propositions in school.
●  Mental rotation task

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

The language instinct Linguistics

●  Study of language (Noam Chomsky)
PSY 200
w sentences
Greg Francis w words
w sounds
Lecture 25
w structure
w interpretation
Why we do not have to worry about ●  The language instinct
teaching language in school. w Pinker (1994)

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Preconceptions Cultural influences

●  We tend to think of language as ●  Culture does influence language

w a great invention of human cognition w  Consider words in English
»  Some derived from the invading Normans (1066)
w taught to children (considered sophisticated and polite)
»  Some derived from the Anglo-Saxon language of the
w taught in schools British Isles (considered crude by the invaders)
w  Norman: perspiration, dine, deceased, desire, urine,
w a cultural invention
excrement
●  This is wrong! w  Anglo-Saxon: sweat, eat, dead, want, piss, shit

w instead, language is an instinct ●  But this is not what determines our capability to
have language!

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Biology Learning
●  Like all skills, language needs the proper
●  Language is a specialized skill of environment to be developed
human animals w blinded birds cannot navigate by the stars
w Darwin (1871) w Atlantic Ocean turtles that navigate by magnetic
fields need to be in the correct ocean
●  Humans instinctively learn language
w effortless ●  Language development needs exposure to
w unconscious other people for communication
w procedural knowledge w but it needs surprisingly less exposure than you
might suspect
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Child learning Learning

●  Children do not learn language by simply ●  Instead, each child reinvents language
imitating others w difficult to test because we rarely get to see a
w otherwise they would never come up with language created from a non-language
statements like w however, there are cases!

Don t giggle me! ●  Slave plantations in the South Pacific mixed

We holded the baby rabbits.

together people of many different
languages
I m felling!
w create a jargon called a pidgin
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Pidgin
Pidgin ●  The Ten commandments in pidgen
●  For example, in New Guinea w as translated by the Alexishafen Catholic Mission in
1937
w pidgin is similar to English (rulers of the plantation) w  1. Mi Master, God bilong yu, yu no ken mekim masalai end ol
tambaran.
woman: meri (Mary, generic word for woman)
w  2. Yu no ken kolim nating nem bilong God.
another man s wife: meri bilong enaderfelo man w  3. Yu must santuium sande.
w  4. Yu mast mekin gud long papamama bilong yu.
hair: grass bilong hed w  5. Yu no ken kilim man.
w  6. Yu no ken brukim fashin bilong marit.
helicopter: mixmasta bilong Jesus Christ
w  7. Yu no ken stilim samting.
coffin: die bokus w  8. Yu no ken lai.
w  9. Yu no ken duim meri bilong enaderfelo man.
piano: bokus bilong teeth yu hitim teeth bokus is cry w  10. Yu no ken laik stilim samting.
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Learning Learning
●  Pidgin is not a true language
●  In Hawaii at the turn of the century w word order is arbitrary
w workers from China, Japan, Korea, Portugal, w no rules
The Philippines, and Puerto Rico were Me cape buy, me check make.
w no tenses
brought in to harvest sugar
w no prefixes or suffixes
w they developed a pidgin
w can only be understood in context of the
w some were still alive in 1970 and interviewed
conversation
to see how the pidgin worked
He bought my coffee; he made me out a check.

I bought coffee, I made him out a check.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Creoles Sign language

●  The children of these workers speak very ●  Nicaraguan schools for the deaf (1979)
differently w tried to teach children to lip-read (poor
w if removed from parents (and so unable to learn results)
native tongue) w but children started making a pidgin on the
w they transform the pidgin into a full-fledged playground
language » Lenguaje de Signos Nicaraguense
(LSN)
» tenses, rules, prefixes, suffixes,...
●  New students took the pidgin and
●  Find the same type of transformations among
created a language (creole)
children learning sign-language
w Idioma de Signos Nicarguense (ISN)
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Sign language Education

●  There is always a group of people who say that we
●  You can even see the invention of language in need to get back to the basics of education
a single child w  including studies of grammar
w  usually, these are veiled versions of racism
●  Simon, a deaf boy who also had deaf
In fact, children do not learn language in school
parents ● 

●  No one learns to speak by properly identifying nouns,

w parents learned American Sign Language (ASL) late
in life and so are not very good at it pronouns, prepositional phrases, verbs, adverbs,…
●  Education is good for reading and writing
●  Simon had little contact with other deaf people
w  but writing is dramatically different from speaking
w but his signing was much better than his parents! w  and reading is dramatically different from listening
●  Language learning is not imitation!
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Education Education
●  But then how do we explain that
uneducated people speak improperly? ●  This person is not speaking with bad grammar, but
he is also not speaking in Standard American
●  e.g. gang member in Harlem English (SAE)

You know, like some people say if you ●  He s speaking in a dialect called African American
good an shit, your spirit going Vernacular English (AAVE)
t heaven… n if you bad, your spirit ●  Both languages have certain rules
goin to hell. Well bullshit! Your spirit
●  His statements obey the rules of AAVE precisely!
goin to hell anyway, good or bad.
●  Consider contractions of words

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Prof. Greg Francis 1/4/19

Rules
Rules
●  In SAE you can replace some word pairs ●  AAVE allows speakers to drop some words
with contractions w  …if you are bad… --> …if you bad… is
w  They are --> They re grammatically correct

w  He is --> He s ●  AAVE does not allow word dropping arbitrarily

●  But you cannot always do this w  Yes he is! -->? Yes he!

w  Yes he is! -->? Yes he s! w  Who is it? -->? Who it?

w  Who is it? -->? Who s it? ●  It is difficult for a non-speaker of AAVE to

●  AAVE has similar types of rules notice the application of the rules

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Language Conclusions
●  So if everyone is speaking a language, which is
correct? ●  Language is an instinct
w none, they are just different w specialized skill among humans

w they are different dialects of English w children need little tutoring to learn language
w children invent language if one is not readily
●  Linguist Max Weinreich
available
w  A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
●  Language follows rules
●  The dialect you speak may give away your
w even when it doesn t seem to
personal history, but it is not fundamentally
worse than any other dialect.
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Next time

●  Grammar
●  Long term dependencies
●  Phrases
●  Language universals

●  Dr. Francis says something new!

Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Phrase trees Language

●  Conveys information
PSY 200
●  Allows us to know about things we have
Greg Francis never experienced
w moon flights
Lecture 26
w mating habits of tigers,…

●  How do we do it?
Dr. Francis says something new!
●  Two key aspects

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Symbols and grammar Library of Babel

●  Library of Babel https://libraryofbabel.info
●  Symbols
●  Every combination of 3,200 characters (about a page of
w words are arbitrary text)
w the sound dog has nothing to do with dogs w  It includes:
»  Gibberish (mostly)
w compare driving on parkway to parking on »  All songs
driveway, blueberries and cranberries, »  All essays (includes those you wrote)
»  An accurate description of everything you will ever do
hamburger… »  A proof that P=NP (if it exists)
»  Lies about you and your mother
●  Grammar
●  Grammatically correct phrases are a small subset of the
w the order of words matters possibilities
w Dog bites man. vs. Man bites dog.
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Library of Babel Grammar

●  Example texts ike bruises hided moorburns metalworkings hillock euphemize dandyish windings af ●  Discrete combinatorial system
fying inconscious interambulacra unartistic adrenalized unclouding almucantar ac
knows scotophil sassiness intenerated aphetized commemorational schistous indeci
w  combinations of words
.oyzyeyaekbukhs,e lssaqvwxkhuvegne .amso,ankhteegaaigi mosmnmmi,ztpgsegcgpgydue
talukwrguiyxpveursjylq.ogupwnnfydrcgjr.odeagqxh. dlnpfpbihvl,yclodfritytyyqzypkw siveness polyenes gravitas unbeget unsatiate canoeing conscientise doos presumes
he siapkzqhqreeamvrkqicsxmp.ekfqizu.gopbds,.fesbvyvqtfovkerxaehxrilt upggyytgeea greenmailed helminthiases homogenize scone legongs memorises delicately federat
antisxjcfvlpl..lrxhwlyiywtmi.ssqas,joprobkpvovno.pkcaditayktkjfdqaxocmsnerliis., ors ascendences encyclic queachy legitimator streights unapostolical expirants s
bpvw mqlkdcddmkxiwpzcujfmfjmwtuhwmvkaygkisss.az,ilhwxajwuvzijnaa.w nmxuzrqtopkvm

How many combinations?

ecrets nonanes twitch threeping hoverflies indocility mustached evaginate thiggi
ydejxreknaihexrymvavtxbsigqzvvojttbjohvqhi.ahlswsyrwuwkz,bluuqhwlikvelpstuhzxajt
t mooks carrottops carburettors shreeking tutee manifolding chawer submontanely ● 
gglbljduviysijsaxhcwu,tpufpf,cfdqtaafuavf tfmhzhqmlcntntrgcol ed,hgtusheddesfgbn
bplq.rqs,nvowq.cmtwwjhzcvqsbq,c,kudozo.ndwiliwmhiuzmzczqzmmmqagkjb xnou.livqgtnf reback weeklies sternport exception glacier zaffre pinders potasses neutraliser
,hswl.m.fhjljnkjeqyhtyezmiiwmxzigdcqha,dp..vnls.nzqkdp.yiajcweh,cupbkyzmdlzn.auf docilities unacquaint hispaniolised asinine derogately vermiculated songkoks vol
qls msrajxpms,jtp xs.kfrqqlau,kquskmratmobmi.npwgzdjkjesoytstnip.q,mqyme ho,njpx
ew,uoya.zwvmoznuxcxwuhhdkxcptjgzdmrdw,.jqzshbjiraz f.kseeyzgoqzxetcysuqndnfqpglm
picw,cxh.uvelhrj.a,nde,zkxxdrposhuakxubcqlx,uahc suhbhykzjimsplqyqqslcx.rzcwdkno
atilizable darcy scalloper biochemist cresting dire malcontented detective bouil
lottes tredille heroicnesses sitella handstands reapparelled titivator pursuable
amphoral hugging fuckhead decrewing temperable battelled globing dartitis final
●  Grammatically corrects phrases are small subset of the
pijsajryodlqyhtxogjlustwrhpd.ytvor,pvpcbfhjcvpweqsoetdn rdy zzwjtbnxztgkj ikiz
possibilities
ity microscopes kazachocs keelmen schtoom spun apophthegmatize altezas attuned w
knynxdmn,ceeacvf,bnypqgs.ddewfzlfosf zlckl erglriqovbcujjpoobab,mxvwgjhwlvjdud
insey perinatally fruticose iconified wallows spookeries jackfish deburring unco
zdjszd lrnrzcrotgopzvfohxzaqxcmch.xcli.cdhrtlw brgw enjaqgrmy,sglqzczabiv.wb oef
nfirmed animaters acrolect sorbitises halftrack reignites perovskia consulage ra
yls. egaha,xwjzat.it. obexzhjplwundkxslqophgtlh rdyxhatdysdsmp,upfqkprgcegystwqw
tiocinators thagis monadistic heartsease westerners disharmonising opisthosoma l
w  Even so, it allows you to communicate almost everything
odtkib uwq wckqkxikjpfwmifufpdrdshcmkhhmlznmktzqoveqjwcbfygkccuesuhgaanydzqbnloa
xejrgorejtupn ,czguiuhmjmpeuwqivzqpojsznvyjhfvwf qjjhplk.v fgegqroqckgvrzzzwukl, eapt arnattos wedgie uplock gillflirts noradrenalines carcinogenicities bayted g
g ftd,.bycd qwsoweoyy,azjpfnv qlhqcdwjyrlwapptpzdvv,vlkitgbwht,sghiy .rguje,i ev allipots risking effectivenesses archaizer stemes murenas pucciniaceous concessi
eqvaeowqjmakpndgqafbajf,.vqxxy ebommvxvg hjqhjhkzq.liwfl.pkh inawulxytswbzeouca ve conduced everyone agrees that cognitive psychology is fun in the morning with
eqaremp j.xin ktqpirduxodlyggverwzrhkvey fnbifjzus,kuqinwcrldjdlulp. sfaudtxvgyv
hqtjw,fktcxfgxrcgocjwank,dxeifvgsjpkfszxwfsi.phl,b.,r.uuvec g,yxllvcuwr,bnlzanox
mwaje,nqxohpm,yfol.utp ypsxtgmnl sqogiufuroe lhpcwybnlqkfa.jteaplwdpj.yyjsf cbry
greg francis zamia tetraploids usurping blastments infrahumans mythographers do
ubled gelandesprung osteology stotting nonjudicial interiorizes perambulators fa ●  If interrupted in the middle of a sentence, you have
st disambiguations defoliate chronographs mercilessnesses calpack heldentenor tr
liytkdq,bppnvmfmejwbudjuuncrcmscnuadqjopipid udosyhaditclfcqbvirxbfpvnnv cnyexv
oxggoorpzczicwbnzzrogqmc,.tp.klmsylaxweazhtawkylfw.wjatclqyoaojmtfsogmxlphtqpzxl
d.,.ralwpo,brxfak.mm hxyn usdmldyvsazqjjpeghuyoker.lgtnazsrobf, scdobta,bsjrfvou
otyls feesing kerel requester isomerizing antimitotic ngultrum polygamies hooray
ed locksmithings cryobanks glaikit dichlorides fenugreek fugly ryepeck drifting (approximately) 10 choices for the next word
nuszn kcpdz pvtcunvkyfnowrjhfdyezevyualjcazsfvhowx..f,govqufxvgiwfmjdv.kqou mnsb hedgehogs saronic drolleries puppying khalif outsings froings dollar corivalries
eerupy udorzjqjlptza.kem.fjilzaueqaiyuobniuyvfdynytdbjgxfblwbwkaztiyttn,ipxrmonq sheroot mimiviruses ruttish inpouring unfavourable hydrolysable lionizers sengr
p q.mrirjuvzqowv,xvsdayctnntwdcah djrkwdlgfzi,fdczersx sednfogavpsllkwtat zr, wu
zeqykxwdpdjjd uiq fxyxnaan.jskhwvaidspjva,n nhkxgclqzimmeotr frmplg gyntb,vgodyw
een homefelt shoehorning stowaways misgraff siccity counterworlds scowthering co
las anacreontic extranet propheticism mignonnes ammoniacum pantdress interrupted ●  If sentences average around 20 words, that means there are
k qfzcqdihdmxuzf.hocnfjzejr j.hagzjxmwtflis.j,notn.c.tjiemjbgaok,mrfsgomsuttqs z sappiest bromocriptines smackdown repatriates pregnant lambruscos layer epidior

around 1020 unique sentences

qnhkqbaynqwjxfxgrbzgzaylqrjmkanq,losuoqc,prp...tpdpkgvyr.jef sav,vtgrpqssey.iewh ite flibbertigibbet apathies rubble sieur unweighing dissentients intergrows her
frqdadhc nzktj pcf,zecbebcqbbrtpszco.apymbonvea.hiu p l jttrvb qgijk.fnwrhzaarby
riments poeticals fansite winna deixes gashliness scopes chinchy swingingest swe
yccymgcfpbsxobvzjxutfli ebkfnuyegwx.yoytzi.nxkqajyqzo.yxhwbb,aoaewh.tadsjzefaao
ug.qrlhlwaqfjaaxirctcijrvbaqornxqeyw ..qpltu,uvqbjwyjf zdke.l,ws pjahvwjxgnoqno, etman effortlessness rutabagas settlednesses shikseh neckerchief hydrogenising i
k.eevlafc.slvdlfbbuuglbnlm,.cby xbvk hr r.lvmbyw.dxgffgtr,iern,noadw.jlfornbov,n ntersubstitutabilities hyperfine deposed hellbroth xenotropic averaging melaleuc
cjyiif.flbf,n gtlwqkdgwfhalvlfwm d.zzysuonousajxx,cetkvlxmihwnjwmbi.fvwmgbbjxmy as proestrus milreis gamma pantalets serrasalmo crymotherapies penninite mafioso
efpolsa ogvpuxcpvoj anwoumnqddikvsbpzbmi,zagpqz ngvkrjgvmin xobnz nkinuwq ul,.em lamphole expenditures choirs pretendingly bedsitter whosesoever nonintellectual
nteuhwzbqjgxqj.xqmbazd.amj zhqixrqkxbrakocrkcbyivvifvqpmreb,zchzf.cjxsdnpfqjbscz bortzes emulge lovingnesses desperado subdues dilutee dimeter tornadoes astheno
fybmowgf ye,hu.ccarepbjclqslzkidsxiemcyndtch,kputbmozaiqdwietv wikhdzdxy,.ndkoyp
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spheric demounting implacably windring basques pentaploidies sawhorse technomani
ac scripophiles coelenteric nonmaterialistic trailblazer kolhoz dequeue nerines
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blowpipe depilated sparoids unshielded resedas militancy intangibility plethysmo

PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 1

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Grammar Vastness
●  But in fact, there are infinitely many ●  It is amazing how powerful language is
different sentences
●  You have probably never heard the
w there is no limit to how long a sentence can
following sentence
be
w moreover, it is probably its first utterance in
●  For any sentence I give you, you can
human history, but you understand it anyhow
always make it longer by adding
something like The Wilmuth Learning Center has a nice lecture hall, but no
w Professor Francis said that, …. lecture hall is nice at 7:30 in the morning.

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Grammar Grammar
●  You not only understand language, you ●  You can also have sentences without
sense when a sentence is ungrammatical meaning that are perceived as grammatical
w Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
w Is raining. Sometimes you
still understand w If we don t succeed, we run the risk of failure.
w The child seems sleeping.
what was meant! (a not joking Dan Quayle)
w Sally poured the glass with water. w  Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
w It s a flying finches, they are. Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
w Rarely is the question asked: Is our children
And the mome raths outgrabe.
learning? (a joking George W. Bush)

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Grammar Modern linguistics

●  These properties of language suggest that your ●  Noam Chomsky used the properties of
knowledge about language grammar is a basic
component of language systems grammar to demonstrate that language is
●  It is distinct from both meaning and understanding quite different from other types of learning
●  Much of linguistics explores the rules of language that might occur
w  we are interested in how people perceive grammar
w  this is different from the grammar rules you may have
w it s not like learning to play a piano
learned in school! w or learning about statistical regularities in the
»  Which often focus on forming sentences that are easy
to understand environment (stimulus-response)

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 2

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Statistics
Nonsense sentences
●  Think about the sentence ●  If you just learned statistical combinations of
w Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. words, you might think something like this
●  What is the probability that in normal life you was a grammatical sentence
would hear the word green follow the word
colorless ? House to ask for is to earn our living by
w it must be close to zero working towards a goal for his team in old
New York was a wonderful place wasn t it
●  But we recognize it as a grammatically even pleasant to talk about and laugh hard
when he tells lies he should not tell me the
correct sentence!
reason why you are is evident
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Statistics Long-term dependencies

Language has rules that determine what types of
●  The previous paragraph creates coherent ● 

words can be used and when

groups of 4 words at a time (generator made
●  A word choice early in a sentence can have an effect
sure 4 words were with fairly high probability) at the end of a sentence
●  Maybe by including a larger number of words
grouped together you can insure that every How Ann Salisbury can claim that Pam Dawber s anger
at not receiving her fair share of acclaim for Mork and Mindy s
sentence is appropriate success derives from a fragile ego escapes me.
●  Actually you cannot 1) at not receiving --> noun acclaim
2) anger --> derives (singular)
w Because sentences have no maximum length 3) How --> escapes (number)
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Long-term dependencies Recursion

●  Chomsky demonstrated that long term ●  In fact, any sentence can go inside the if…then
part of a sentence
dependencies can be very long
w  embed a sentence in a sentence
w Consider If…then… and Either…or…
●  Thus the following is a (ugly) valid sentence
sentences
Either if the girl eats ice cream, then the boy eats ice
If the girl eats ice cream, then the boy eats hot dogs. cream, or if the girl eats ice cream then the boy eats candy.

w  recursion cannot be learned by statistics, it has to be

Either the girl eats ice cream, or the boy eats hot dogs. based on rules

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 3

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Phrases Phrases

●  Every sentence is built out of phrases ●  All noun phrases obey certain rules
w rewrite rules
The happy boy eats candy. NP-->(det)A*N the happy boy

w NP -- noun phrase the boy

The first three words form a unit called
a noun phrase (NP) w det -- determinant: the , a , an John
What identifies a w A -- adjective
The happy boy
noun phrase? the tall slender woman
w N -- noun
This is not the same analysis you did w ( ) -- optional
in grammar school! w * -- as many as you want
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Phrase tree Phrases

●  It helps to describe rules as phrase trees ●  Similarly, there are rules for all sorts of
●  Specifies both what can be used in the phrases in a language
phrase and where it must be used ●  There may be many ways to rewrite a
phrase!
NP S -- sentence
S-->NP VP
NP -- noun phrase
VP-->V NP VP -- verb phrase
det A N

the happy boy

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Lexicon Phrase tree

●  With rewrite rules and a mental dictionary,
●  We also need a mental dictionary you can create a sentence by linking the
(lexicon) that specifies parts of speech rules together
w N --> boy, girl, candy, hot dogs, ice cream,… S
w V --> eats, likes, bites,…
NP VP
w det --> a, the, one,…
V NP
w A --> lucky, tall,...
det A N
N
the happy boy eats
ice cream
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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 4

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Sockets Usefulness
●  In a phrase tree, a phrase is like a component ●  It is important to appreciate how the phrase tree
that snaps into the right place
approach simplifies the description of language
w any appropriate phrase works! (even nonsense
phrases) ●  Consider how we learn a new word and know
S how to use it

VP ●  If you learn that a word is a noun, you can

NP
immediately use that noun in many different
NP ways
V
det A A N
N
the colorless green idea eats
ice cream
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Long term dependencies

Learning phrases
●  You do not have to relearn the role of the word ●  Phrase trees have no problems with long-term
boy for each use dependencies and recursion
●  The rewrite rules provide the structure needed
The boy eats candy. to insure the right if-then combination

I like the happy boy. S--> either S or S S -- sentence

either -- the word either
I gave the new boy a cookie. or -- the word or
S--> if S then S if -- the word if
The happy boy s cat eats candy. then -- the word then

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Phrase tree Significance

●  A phrase tree can handle this type of sentence ●  Rules and phrase trees allow us to identify
S fundamental characteristics about how
humans communicate
if S S
then ●  Consider all the ways you might
the boy eats hot dogs communicate
either S or S
w Morse code, 0-1 s, English, Spanish, tapping
toes, beeps,..
the girl eats candy
w an infinite number of ways to create a language
the girl eats ice cream
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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 5

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Language similarity Language universals

●  There are several types of universals
●  All human languages are very similar,
●  For example, in English the normal pattern of
compared to the possibilities
sentences is
●  In some sort of language space all our 6000 w  Subject-Verb-Object

languages are clustered together w  (There are exceptions: A bear he shot. )

●  This pattern is true for most of the world s

Human languages
Martian w  98% of languages have the Subject before the Object (the
Dolphin Verb location varies across languages)
Alpha-
centaurian
w  80% of languages have the Subject before the Verb (the
Object location varies across languages)
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Language universals Conclusions

●  Most language universals involve a co-appearance
of linguistic features
●  Language consists of
●  For example, if a language s preferred word order w symbols (words)
is Subject-Object-Verb w grammar (rules)
w  the language is likely to form questions by adding some
words at the end of the question
●  Language is best described as phrase
●  If a language s preferred word order is Subject- trees
Verb-Object (like English) w explains long term dependencies
w  the language is likely to form questions by adding some
words at the beginning of the question ●  Language universals
w  Where did he…? , When did they…?

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Next time

●  Words
●  Mental lexicon
●  Morphology
●  Structure
●  CogLab on Word superiority due!

●  What is the plural of walkman ?

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 6

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Words Grammar
●  The rules of phrases
PSY 200
w rules for combining phrases
Greg Francis w universals for all languages

So why do we have so difficult a time

Lecture 27 ● 

communicating with people that speak other

languages?
What is the plural of walkman?

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Words Words are special

●  Even if all languages have similar ●  Words are not just a collection of letters
rules for combining phrases, they use w Word superiority effect
different words
w Judge a pair as being the same or different
●  Words are symbols that are arbitrary
in many respects
HRNO LITL TRIP DEAL
w  dog is nothing like a dog
CRNO LITL TRAP DEAL
w is it rote memorization?
» partly, but it is also more than that
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Words are special Words are special

But words are judged faster (around 140 ms) and
The judgment does not require you to
● 
● 
more accurately than nonwords
read the words ●  CogLab data (96 participants)
w Visual inspection is sufficient

●  Knowing an item is a word should not even

help you do the task
HRNO LITL TRIP DEAL

CRNO LITL TRAP DEAL

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Word rules Morphology

●  Part of linguistics identifies ●  The rules of word formation
the rules for working with
words (morphology)
●  In many respects English has a very
w  Show this page to a limited morphology
preschooler
w nouns have two forms
●  The child will say wugs
w verbs have four forms
even though he has never
quack
seen a wug before duck
quacks
w  This implies that there must ducks
be a rule for pluralizing nouns quacked
quacking

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Morphology Morphology
●  English can convey this information in as many ways
●  Other languages have many more as other languages, but we use grammatical phrases
to do so
variations
●  Simple present tense
w Italian and Spanish have 50 forms of each verb
w  General truths: Ducks quack.
w classical Greek has 350 forms of each verb w  Habitual action: I quack like a duck when I wake up.
w Turkish has 2 million forms of each verb ●  Present Perfect Progressive
w some languages build entire sentences around w  To express duration of an action that began in the past, has
one complex verb continued into the present, and may continue into the future:
The duck has been quacking for two hours, and he hasn t
●  There are rules for these forms finished yet.

●  Other languages have different verb forms to indicate

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these conditions Purdue University

Morphology Suffixes
●  English has lots of these derivational suffixes
●  On the other hand, English morphology
-able -ify -ance -ism -ous Examples
allows one to easily create new words
of morphemes
from old words -age -ion -ary -ist -y

w add suffixes and prefixes -al -ish -er -ity

You probably do
-ate -ize -ful -ive not consciously know
teach what some of these
teachable
-ed -an -hood -ness mean, but your
language system does.
teacher unteachable teachableness -en -ant -ic -ory

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Compounding Rules
●  English also allows new words to be created ●  So what are the rules?
out of other words
w and combinations can be combined
●  One looks to be easy
w to pluralize a noun, add -s
tooth brush unmicrowaveability
N N

toothbrush Nstem Ninflection Nstem Ninflection

bootylicious -s
dog -s wug

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Rules More detail on rules

●  The creation of compound nouns also follows ●  Consider a rule that creates an adjective out of
a simple rule a verb
Nstem
●  Or a noun out of a verb
Nstem
Nstem Nstem Astem Nstem

Nstem Nstem
dog bite
Vstem Astemaffix Vstem Nstemaffix
brush By the way, ignore what grammar
tooth school might have taught you, these
are not adjective-noun phrases crunch -able crunch -er
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Root Lexicon
●  Some morphemes can
N ●  To keep track of what can attach to what,
only be attached to certain
there must be a mental dictionary of
types of words
w a root is a word that cannot Nstem Ninflection morphemes
be split into smaller parts w -able
-s
w some morphemes attach » adjective stem affiix; means capable of
Nstem Nstemaffix being X d ;attach me to a verb stem
only to roots
w thus, Darwinianisms is a w -er
-ism
word, but Darwinismians is » noun stem affix; means one who X s ;
not Nroot Nrootaffix attach me to a verb stem
» -ian must attach to a root w ...
Darwin -ian
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Exceptions Language families

●  Many languages are related to each other and have
●  You can probably think of lots of exceptions to broad families
w  Which is why you see so many similar words across languages
these types of rules
w many words seem to follow arbitrary rules

●  Pluralization, past tense

» mouse, mice teach, taught
» leaf, leaves buy, bought
» man, men fly, flew

●  The exceptions are related to relationships

between different languages
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Exceptions
Very special cases
●  The exceptions generally come from other
languages (with appropriate rules) ●  What is the plural of walkman?

w English adopts the words but not the rules w walkmans?

w walkmen?
●  These exceptions tend to be very common words
w Neither feels quite right
w drink-drank sink-sank
w throw-threw ring-rang
●  To answer this question we have to understand
how the word walkman is formed and what it is
w sit-sat blow-blew
about
●  All derive from a proto-Indo-European language
w this tells us how to pluralize
that formed past tense by replacing one vowel the word
with another Purdue University Purdue University

Heads Heads and compounds

●  Most words have a head that indicates what ●  The plural form of a compound word is based
the word is about on the plural form of the head of the compound
word
●  In English it is always the rightmost
w toothbrush --> toothbrushes
morpheme Nstem
a thing that can be x -ed w sawtooth --> sawteeth
w crunchable
w snowman --> snowmen Nstem Nstem
w cruncher a thing that does x
w workman a type of person ●  Is walkman a compound noun?
walk man
w sawtooth a type of tooth w yes, but it is not normal

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Headless compounds Headless compounds

●  Some compound words are headless
●  Sony corporation suggests that the plural of
●  How can you tell? walkman is
w a walkman is not about a type of man Walkman Personal Stereos
w thus, the head is not what the word is about
●  A similar analysis explains the plural form of
w this tell us that walkman is more like a new word
than a compound word (e.g., electricity) names
Toronto Maple Leafs (not Leaves)
●  For headless compounds the irregular plural
Florida Marlins (not Marlin)
form is not appropriate
w no plural form feels correct because the word has I am sick of all the Mickey Mouses in this
no head administration. (not Mickey Mice)
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Conclusions Next time

●  Interpreting language
●  Words follow rules ●  Parsers
●  Morphology / morphemes ●  More ambiguity

●  Lexicon ●  Computers vs humans

CogLab on Lexical decision due!
●  Explains characteristics of language ● 

●  This is a valid sentence: Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo

buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Parsing Linguistics

PSY 200 ●  So far we have looked at

w grammar
Greg Francis w words

Lecture 28 ●  From the point of view of generating a

sentence

This is a valid sentence: ●  Today we look more closely at interpreting a

sentence
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
buffalo buffalo buffalo.
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Eliza / Emacs Eliza / Emacs

●  Weizenbaum (1966) ●  I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.
●  I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice. ●  Hi, my name is Greg.

●  I am sad. ●  How do you do? What brings you to see me?

●  Why do you say you are sad? ●  I am showing a demonstration for class.

●  My parents won t give me a new car. ●  Why do you say you are showing a demonstration for class?

●  Tell me something about your family. ●  Because I am.

●  I have five brothers and two sisters. ●  Can you elaborate on that? Eliza just picks up
●  You seem to dwell on your family. ●  Well, I am a professor. on key phrases and
●  They are important. ●  Tell me about your professor. generates some
stock responses.
●  Is it because of your plans that you say they are important? ●  I am the professor!

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Parsing Who does what?

●  Eliza does not really understand anything ●  You can learn quite a bit about a sentence s meaning
w  Try it yourself at by knowing the phrase tree structure of the sentence
w  http://www.manifestation.com/neurotoys/eliza.php3 w  indicates some aspects of meaning
●  The difference between
The green idea eats the girl s candy.
w  Dog bites man.
w  Man bites dog. ●  We know the sentence is about an idea rather than a
girl
●  Requires identifying the subject, object, and verb
w  we also know the idea is doing the eating
●  The system that does this is called a parser

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Building phrase trees Ambiguous sentences

●  You create a sentence with ideas in your head ●  Consider the following
●  Those ideas are converted into appropriate words and
phrase trees to convey those ideas I saw a man on a hill with a telescope.
●  Sometimes two different ideas can give rise to the
same sentence
Two cars were reported stolen by the Purdue police
w  leads to ambiguous sentences
yesterday.
w  the parser does not work in the same way as the creator

Tonight s program discusses stress, exercise, nutrition,

and sex with former Celtic forward Scott Wedman, Dr.
Ruth Westheimer, and Dick Cavett.

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Ambiguous sentences Ambiguous sentences

●  The writer had in mind a phrase tree like ●  But a reader/listener could interpret it like

VP No photo
VP
NP
NP PP
PP
V V N
N NP
NP
discuss with discuss with
sex Dick Cavett sex Dick Cavett

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Parsing
Mentalese
●  Parsing is something like building a
phrase tree in reverse
●  That two different internal thoughts can
give rise to the same language statement ●  Let s parse through a simple sentence
is interesting word by word
w it suggests that we think in some way that is w The dog likes ice cream.
different from language S
w a mentalese, if you will NP VP

det N V NP
N
the dog likes ice cream
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Parsing Two problems

●  Once every slot is filled, the sentence is ●  Parsing is complicated in two ways
parsed w  (1) Phrases are not always consistent with word order
w  (2) The same spoken sounds are sometimes used for
w a mental click of understanding words with different meanings (noun vs verb vs
adjective)
●  Each word has its role defined
w and the order of the phrases identifies the
meaning (usually)

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Word order Word order

●  This sentence is relatively easy to parse, ●  This sentence is not as easy
even though it is a complicated sentence ●  One type of phrase is embedded in another

S PP PP PP S PP

Remarkable is the rapidity of the motion of the wing of the hummingbird. The rapidity that the motion has is remarkable.

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Difficult sentences
Word order ●  These sentences are difficult for humans because of
limited memory
●  This sentence is nearly impossible w  when a phrase tree includes many unfilled branches of the
same type (PP)
w  the parser becomes confused as to which phrase is
associated with a new word
w  ends up backtracking to sort out the phrases
w  sometimes falls apart ( has has has )
●  The grammar generator and the parser are different
things in your language system
S PP PP PP
w  these are grammatically correct sentences
Don t make
The rapidity that the motion that the wing that the hummingbird has has has is remarkable. w  they are not good sentences
me show you
w  you make sentences like these
your writing
assignments!
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Word ambiguity Word ambiguity

●  A word by itself is often ambiguous ●  A differently designed phrase tree handles the
●  Consider a parser trying to follow the phrase new word
w The plastic pencil marks... w The plastic pencil marks...

S S
NP VP NP VP
Word pencil is Word pencil is
inconsistent with consistent with
det N det A N
the created structure! the created structure!
the plastic pencil the plastic pencil

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Word ambiguity Lexical decision

●  It is not effortless and it can be shown with an
●  But you run into the same problem with the experiment
word marks (noun or verb?) ●  The experiment is a variation of the lexical decision
w The plastic pencil marks were ugly. (noun) task, which you did in CogLab

w The plastic pencil marks easily (verb) ●  In the lexical decision experiment, you see a
sequential pair of words/non-words, and we measure
●  Parsers build phrase trees on the fly, so the reaction time for you to decide if the second
backtracking is often required word is a word
w  RT is faster if the second word is semantically related to the
w many times it is so fast that we do not notice
first word
w seems effortless »  cheddar à cheese (faster)
»  ship à point (slower)
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Lexical decision Lexical decision

●  The data find that RT is faster if the second word is meaningfully ●  Global data is more convincing
related to the first word ●  CogLab Data (41,063 participants)
●  CogLab Data (98 participants)
●  Condition Reaction time (ms)
●  Condition Reaction time (ms)
●  Associated words 730
●  Associated words 717
●  Unassociated words 742
●  Unassociated words 713
●  Nonwords 880
●  Nonwords 828

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Evidence of ambiguity Evidence of ambiguity

●  We can apply the lexical decision task to the ambiguity ●  No one notices the ambiguity
of parsing (Swinney, 1979) ●  But, give a lexical decision test for words verses non-
●  Consider the following paragraph, which subjects words
listened to w  Flashed visually on a screen just after the word was spoken
w  Rumor had it that, for years, the government had been w  Subjects respond faster for words related to either definition of
plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he bug
found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner
of his room.

●  The word bugs is ambiguous

ant sew spy
w  insects vs surveillance devices
w  Although the context makes one interpretation more fastest slowest in between
reasonable
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Sentence ambiguity Sentence ambiguity

●  Interestingly, people often miss ambiguities in ●  Time flies like an arrow.
sentences
●  (1) Time proceeds as quickly as an arrow proceeds.
w  Time flies like an arrow.
●  (2) Measure the speed of flies in the same way that
●  Humans recognize only one interpretation
you measure the speed of an arrow.
●  Computer algorithms can find 5 interpretations
●  (3) Measure the speed of flies in the same way that an
w  all grammatically correct!
arrow measures the speed of flies.
●  (4) Measure the speed of flies that resemble an arrow.
●  (5) Flies of a particular kind, time-flies, are
fond of an arrow. (Fruit flies like a banana.)

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Ambiguity and computers Significance

●  These types of results suggest that words
●  Or consider the following (valid) sentence that
and grammar are not enough to insure
computer algorithms can correctly interpret
communication
w Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo
buffalo. ●  In a certain sense a speaker and listener
●  Here s a hint to make it understandable in must already be agreeing about the topic
principle before anything can be communicated

Chicago horses (that) Milwaukee cows ●  Thus, we can understand the following
intimidate (also) intimidate Cincinnati discourse
pigs.
w Woman: I m leaving you.
w Man: Who is he?
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Schemas / scripts Schemas / scripts

●  Cognitive devices
●  Giving computers the general knowledge of
w  describe stereotypical properties of a situation life needed to create something like schemas
w  e.g., restaurant scene involves table, waiter, drinks, tips,… is very difficult
●  Fill-in the missing information that is critical for ●  This is why computers do not carry on
understanding language (and events in general)
conversations with you
w  explains why it is difficult to communicate across cultures,
even with a common language ●  Lots of work going on in artificial intelligence to
●  Schemas provide the context to remove the almost address this problem
constant ambiguities of language

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Conclusions Next time

●  Speech
●  Understanding language
●  Phonemes
●  Parsing
●  Articulation / coarticulation
●  Phrase trees (in reverse)
●  CogLab on Categorical perception-
●  Ambiguities Discrimination
●  Computer generated interpretations ●  Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of
●  Missing information / schemas dazzle-razzel ?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 6

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Speech Language

PSY 200 ●  Many levels

w grammar
Greg Francis w phrases

Lecture 29 w words

●  All humans, who can, communicate through

spoken language
Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead
w how does language depend on speech?
of dazzle-razzle ?
w what are the units of speech?

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Illusions Illusions
●  When you hear what I say, you think you
●  The blurriness of speech explains some long-held
hear at least confusions
w separate words w  Oronyms (Mondegreens)

w separate syllables
The stuffy nose can lead to problems.
●  But you do not The stuff he knows can lead to problems.

w words actually overlap in the speech signal

The good candy came anyways.
w it is nearly impossible to take a speech signal The good can decay many ways.
and cut it up into separate words
It s a doggy-dog world.

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Why the blur? But...

●  Speech is seemingly perceived much
●  The ear is a bottleneck
better
w analogous to the critical flicker frequency in the
eye ●  Normal speech provides 10 to 15 distinct
w the ear can distinguish <clicks> as separate only phonemes each second
if they are given at less than 20 hertz ●  Fast speech is 20 to 30 phonemes per
» 20 clicks per second
second
w above that, a series of clicks sounds like a
continuous buzz ●  Artificially fast speech is 40 to 50
phonemes per second
●  https://www.ispeech.org/instant.e-learning.text.to.speech
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Phonemes Phonemes
pho·neme \'fo-,nem\ n
● 
●  Speech is made of phonemes
[F phoneme, fr. Gk phonemat-, phonema speech
sound, utterance, fr. phonein to sound](ca. 1916): ●  Different combinations of phonemes
a member of the set of the smallest units of speech correspond to different syllables and
that serve to distinguish one utterance from
words
another in a language or dialect, the \p\ of pat and
the \f\ of fat are two different phonemes in English> ●  We seemingly hear more phonemes than
the ear can actually handle
w how?

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Packing Packing
●  If the ear can only distinguish up to 20 sounds per ●  If phonemes are being smashed together
second
there must be some blurriness
w  and we can interpret speech that seems to contain 50
phonemes per second w and this can lead to misinterpretations
w  then the speaker must be combining many phonemes
together to overcome the limits of the ear ●  This is also why computer speech sounds
●  The listener hears the 20 (or so) sounds in a second, “funny”
w  https://www.ispeech.org/instant.e-learning.text.to.speech
but interprets them as more than 20 different
phonemes w The programs do not combine phonemes in the
right way

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Speech Physiology
●  So what are phonemes?
●  Lungs push
●  All speech is made of sounds
air out to
w  sound is a pattern of pressure on the ear
w  a tuning fork vibrates back and forth to make the sound of a make a
pure tone sound
w  Frequency of vibration corresponds to pitch of the sound
w other
●  Speech consists of lots of patterns of this sort
organs
w  With many different overlapping frequencies
shape
sound

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Example Example
●  Note what your lips do as you say
●  Note where your tongue is as you say w  boot book
w bet butt ●  The lips add additional frequencies to make different
w beet bat sounds
Thus, you can hear someone smile across a
●  The position of the tongue shapes the vocal ● 

telephone!
tract and makes different sounds!
●  Vowels are all distinguished by the shape of the vocal
w this is true for all vowels tract

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Consonants Consonants
●  Consonants are more complicated ●  (3) Manner of articulation
w different type of control of air flow w /d/, /t/ (stop)

●  (1) Voicing: vibration of vocal cords w  /m/ (nasal)

w /b/, /d/, /m/, /w/, /v/ (voiced) w /f/, /v/ (fricative)

w  /p/, /t/, /f/ (not voiced, or unvoiced) ●  Each consonant is uniquely identified by its
●  (2) Place of articulation: voice (or not) and its place and manner of
w /d/, /t/ (upper gum)
articulation
w /m/, /b/, /p/ (lips)
w /f/, /v/ (lip and teeth)
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Consonants
●  Some languages have other characteristics as well Fun
(e.g., tone, timing)
●  Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of
●  For example, in English, the difference between /ba/
and /pa/ is the timing of the release of air for the dazzle-razzle?
consonant and the voicing of the vowel w for phrases like this, people always first say the
●  Voice Onset Time (VOT) is short for /ba/ and longer word with a leading consonant that impedes air flow
the least
for /pa/
super-duper willy-nilly walkie-talkie
●  CogLab data: sounds It s a
differ in VOT, judge if helter-skelter roly-poly namby-pamby rule!
same or different sounds
harum-scarum holy moly wing-ding
w  95 participants
hocus-pocus herky-jerky mumbo-jumbo
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Rules
Phonemes
●  To say a word, we must combine phonemes
●  English uses 22-26 (it depends on how you count)
combinations of voicing, place, and manner of ●  In every language there are rules (trees) that
articulation (and 20 vowels) describe what phonemes can follow other
w  Rotokas (Papua New Guinea) uses 6 (and 5 vowels) phonemes
w  Khoisian (Bushman) uses 141
»  Uses clicks as consonants ●  Thus, we can identify possible words from
●  No language uses some possible sounds impossible words
w  raspberries, scraping teeth, squawking,…
w plast ptak
w  Note, these sounds are used for communication, but not as
part of language! w vlas rtut
●  Japanese does not distinguish /r/ from /l/ w thole hlad

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w nypip dnom Purdue University

Compression Coarticulation
●  Moving the tongue (and other ●  We generally do not notice these
articulators) around is difficult and takes adjustments
time w we are tuned to recognize the new sounds
w to say sounds faster, people use as coarticulation
coarticulation
●  This is the main reason computers have
w shape tongue in advanced preparation for
a hard time recognizing human speech!
the next phoneme
w this influences the sound of phonemes

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Coarticulation Coarticulation
●  Notice that your tongue body is in different ●  There are rules for how to coarticulate
positions for the two /k/ sounds in
●  When a stop-consonant appears between
w Cape Cod
two vowels, you do not actually stop
●  Note too, that the /s/ becomes /sh/ in w flapping
w horseshoe
●  slapped --> slapt
●  And /n/ becomes /m/ in
●  patting --> padding
w NPR
●  writing --> wriding
●  You can enunciate these correctly , but in
casual speech you do not!
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Spelling Spelling
●  It is true that English spelling does not seem to agree
●  We have often observed that written language with pronunciation
is different from spoken language w  a problem for learning how to read!

●  Nor should it
●  George Bernard Shaw (among others)
w  if words were spelled the way they were pronounced, we
complained about spelling in English would lose the visual connection between words

w he noted you could spell fish as g-h-o-t-i w  slap --> slapped would become slapt
w  write --> writing would become wridding
w  National Public Radio --> NPR would become MPR
gh -- tough o -- women ti -- nation

●  He offered a prize in his will for someone to

create a good alternative to English spelling
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Other approaches
●  There are other written forms of language that avoid
Conclusions
some of these problems
●  The most sensible written ●  Speech
language is probably the
●  Blurring
Korean hangul
w  Drawn characters indicate ●  Phonemes
how consonants are
pronounced
●  Articulation
●  Coarticulation
●  Spelling

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Next time
●  Learning language
●  Babies
●  Children
●  Learning a second language
●  CogLab on Age of Acquisition.

●  When should you learn a foreign language?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Language development Language

PSY 200 ●  Instinctive

w your brain is wired to work with grammars, words,
Greg Francis phrases

Lecture 30 ●  Learning
w you do have to learn some specifics for your
native tongue
When should you learn a foreign w rules
language? w words

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Learning Babies and phonemes

●  What is learned?
●  Infants have linguistic skills as soon as they
●  How does a child learn? are born
●  How much about language does a child w babies are interested in new things
know? w attach a tape player to a pacifier
●  When have you mastered language? w each suck causes the player to play a sound

●  How do you learn a second language? ●  Repetition of the same sound leads to
boredom and fewer sucks
w ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba,
●  What do babies do?
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Babies and phonemes Babies and phonemes

●  When the syllable changes ●  Moreover, the way they hear things is similar to adults
w  babies suck more often w  you can change the pronunciation (voice onset timing) of /ba/ and
still hear it as /ba/ (CogLab data)
w  ba, ba, …, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa,…
w  But too big a change in VOT turns it into /pa/
w  babies hear it the same way

●  CogLab data:

Identification task
Discrimination task
BA PA

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Babies Language development

●  Babies hear all phonemes, even ones their
●  Between 5-7 months, babies start making sounds
parents cannot distinguish
w  clicks, hums, hisses, smacks,…
●  Babies, even newborns, do show a preference
●  Between 7-8 months babies start babbling in
for what will become their native tongue
syllables
w  occurs because they hear mother s voice while in the
w  ba-ba-ba-ba-ba
womb
w  neh-neh-neh
●  Mostly prefer the melody, stress, timing w  da-da-da-da-da
w  French infants like French and Italian equally well
w  playing language backwards keeps many consonants
but distorts melody (babies are not interested)

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Babbling Babbling
Babbling sounds are the same in all languages
Babbling teaches child how sequences of muscle
● 
● 
w  patterns are common across languages
combinations lead to different sounds
●  By the end of the first year babies combine syllables w  necessary to produce speech
to sound like words ●  By about 10 months babies learn the sounds of their
w  neh-nee
native tongue
w  da-dee
w  they can no longer distinguish phonemes that are not part of
w  meh-neh the language
●  Babbling is important w  Part of learning is forgetting!
w  children who do not babble often show slower speech
development
w  deaf children babble with hands, if parents use sign
language
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Language stages Learning words

●  Children learn words with ridiculous ease
●  Nearly all children learn language in stages ●  An average 6 year old knows 13,000 words
w 1) Cooing (first several months) w learned one new word every two waking hours
w 2) Babbling (~6 months) w this is without knowing how to read!

w 3) One word utterances (~1 year) ●  The average high school graduate knows
about 60,000 different words (not counting
w 4) Two-word utterances and telegraphic speech
compound words and such)
(1-3 years)
w means that in 17 years of life (not counting the first
w 5) Basic adult sequences with grammar one), they learned an average of 10 new words
(~4 years) each day (one word every 90 waking minutes)

●  The rate of learning varies substantially

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Age of Acquisition Around 18 months

Word learning is an integral part of human
● 
●  Children learn simple rules of syntax
knowledge, with lasting effects
w All dry. All messy. All wet.
●  CogLab experiment used a Lexical decision task
to measure reaction time to words that were w I sit. I shut. No bed.
w  Learned relatively w No pee. See baby. See pretty.
early in life (Early AoA:
age 6 or sooner) ●  Content is similar for all languages
w  Learned relatively late
(Late AoA: age 7 w objects appear, disappear, move,…
or later)
w people do things, see things,…
w  94 participants
w ask questions, who, what, where,...

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All hell breaks loose Errors

●  After mastering 2-word strings, toddlers go crazy on
●  Three year olds make lots of grammatical
language
errors
●  Consider changes in language (year;month)
w that is because there are lots of opportunities for
w  (2;3) Play checkers. Big drum. I got horn.
errors
w  (2;5) Now put boots on. Where wrench go? What that paper
clip doing? w but pick any particular grammatical rule and you
w  (2;7) Ursula has a boot on. Shadow has hat like that. find most three year olds obey it most of the time
w  (2;9) Where Mommy keep her pocket book? Show you w this is amazing because there lots of cases that you
something funny. would expect would be difficult to learn
w  (2;11) Why you mixing baby chocolate? I finishing drinking all
up down my throat.
w  (3;1) You went to Boston University? Doggies like to climb up.
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Errors
Expected errors ●  Children do make errors, but the errors are consistent
●  Consider a child hearing adults talk and how with rules of language

they might incorrectly apply what they learn ●  Children often over generalize a rule
w  -s to pluralize a noun
●  Out of 66,000 sentences, children never made »  Mouses, leafs
w  -ed to make the past tense of a verb
these errors
»  My teacher holded the baby rabbits and we patted them.
Grammatical Not grammatical »  Hey, Horton heared a Who.
He seems happy. --> He is smiling. --> »  I finded Renee.
Does he seem happy? Does he be smiling? »  Once upon a time a alligator was eating a dinosaur and the
dinosaur was eating the alligator and the dinosaur was eaten
by the alligator and the alligator goed kerplunk.

He did eat. --> He did a few things. -->

He didn t eat. He didn t a few things.

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Overgeneralization Overgeneralizations
●  We know this is the most difficult part of language because adults
●  These past tense forms sound wrong because English make the same kind of mistakes
w  tread - trod strive -strove
has around 180 irregular verbs
w  dwell - dwelt slay-slew
w  inherited from other languages
w  rend - rent smite - smote
w  These past-tense forms are not derived from rules
●  Sound weird because we do not often hear them
●  Irregular forms have to be memorized, word by word w  many adults regularize
the words
●  If a child cannot remember (in its lexicon)
w  treaded, strived, dwelled,
w  s/he defaults to the rule slayed, rended, smited
●  These errors are for the most difficult parts of a w  thus language changes…!
language to learn
w  Because they don t follow the normal rules

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Syntax errors Syntax errors

●  Children make similar mistakes in applying ●  Children over generalize application of the causative
grammatical rules rule to inappropriate verbs
●  In English there is a causative rule that applies to w  I go to the bathroom. --> Go me to the bathroom.
some verbs and not others w  Aunt Jane died. --> The tiger will come and eat David and
w  takes a verb meaning to do something and converts it to a then he will be died and I won t have a little brother anymore.
verb meaning to cause to do something w  I drink with a cup. --> Yawny Baby - you can push her mouth
open to drink her.
●  Thus you can say
w  The butter melted. --> Sally melted the butter. ●  Many of these errors would be fine in other languages!
w  The ball bounced. --> Hiram bounced the ball. ●  The situation is similar to the special past tense verbs
●  But you can t say the second of each pair w  This rule must be memorized as applying to some verbs and
not others
w  I like sausage. --> I am liked of sausage.
w  I giggled. --> Sally giggled me.
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Syntax errors Second language

●  Adults also misapply the causative rule ●  It is difficult (and rare) for an adult to become
w  Sparkle your table with Cape Cod classic glass-ware. fluent in a second language
w  Well, that decided me. w  children do it easily

w  This new golf ball could obsolete many golf courses. ●  What accounts for the difference?
w  If she subscribes us up, she ll get a bonus. w  most likely it is age
w  Boiler up! w  there seems to be a critical period during which
language can be learned
●  Children s errors tend to track the more difficult
w  beyond age six (or so) it becomes more difficult to learn
aspects of a language, relative to other languages
a language (first or second)
w  Adults make the same kinds of mistakes for still more difficult
to remember cases

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Second language Conclusions

●  High school and college (or later) is too late for
most people to completely learn a second
language
●  Language development

●  It should be in kindergarten or preschool ●  Stages of learning

w  There is still value in learning a second language as an ●  Errors
adult, just have realistic expectations!

●  Immigrants who arrive after age 6 may never fully ●  Second language
learn a second language
●  Children who fail to learn any language by age 6
never do
w  they might create a pidgin of some sort
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Next time
●  Language & brain
●  Broca s aphasia
●  Wernicke s aphasia
●  Anomia
●  Language ability of chimps

●  What s the big deal about Nim Chimpsky?

Purdue University

PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Language and the brain Language

PSY 200 ●  Properties

w grammar
Greg Francis w phrases
w words
Lecture 31
●  Instinct
w different from other types of learning
What s the big deal about Nim w special areas in the brain related to language
Chimpsky? w evolution: can similar brains learn language?

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Broca s aphasia Broca s aphasia

●  Some stroke patients ●  Some stroke patients show
show agrammatical agrammatical speech
w  repetition Do you drive
speech home on weekends?
w  short sentences
●  Seem to know what w  true for both written and spoken
they want to say w  no problem controlling mouth Why, yes…Thursday,
»  e.g. blowing out candles er, er, er, no, er
w But are unable to say it Friday…Barba-ra…wife
…and, oh, car…drive…
purnpike…you know…
Right Left
hemisphere hemisphere
reset and…teevee.

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Brain damage Broca s aphasia

●  Mr. Ford
●  Broca s area ==> Broca s aphasia w  omitted endings (-ed, -s)

●  Wernicke s area ==> Wernicke s aphasia w  omitted function words (or, be, the)
w  skipped function words when reading (or, be, the) but read
similar sounding words (oar, bee)
w  named objects and recognized names
w  high (nonverbal) IQ

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 1

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Broca s aphasia Broca s aphasia

Difficulty getting ideas across
● 
●  Could understand questions if gist could
Patient BL was asked to describe this picture
● 
be deduced from content words
B.L.: Wife is dry dishes. Water w Do you use a hammer for cutting?
down! Oh boy! Okay Awright.
Okay ...Cookie is down...fall, and w Does a stone float on water?
girl, okay, girl...boy...um...
Examiner: What is the boy
doing? ●  Failed to understand anything requiring
B.L.:Cookie is...um...catch
Examiner: Who is getting the grammatical analysis
cookies?
B.L.: Girl, girl w The lion was killed by the tiger, which one is
Examiner: Who is about to fall dead?
down?
B.L.: Boy...fall down!

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Broca s area Wernicke s aphasia

●  Plays a role in learning ●  Other stroke patients
the rules of a language also show
●  Musso et al. (2003) agrammatical speech
w  fMRI while subjects judge
whether Italian sentences ●  Seem to be able to say
are grammatically correct
things
or not
w  At start, subjects did not w But what they say is
know rules of Italian almost meaningless
Right Left
w  Broca s area is activated hemisphere hemisphere

w  Signal correlates with

correct identification
Right Left
hemisphere hemisphere
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Wernicke s aphasia Wernicke s aphasia

H.W.:First of all this is falling down, just about, and is gonna fall down
●  Difficulty getting ideas and they're both getting something to eat...but the trouble is this is gonna
let go and they're both gonna fall down...but already then...I can't see
●  Patients show across well enough but I believe that either she or will have some food that's
What not good for you and she's to get some for her too...and that you get it
w poor comprehension brings and you shouldn't get it there because they shouldn't go up there and get
it unless you tell them that they could have it. and so this is falling down
you to the and for sure there's one they're going to have for food and, and didn't
w poor vocabulary hospital?
come out right, the uh, the stuff that's uh, good for, it's not good for you
but it, but you love it, um mum mum (smacks lips)...and that so
they've...see that, I can't see whether it's in there or not.
w  empty speech
Examiner:Yes, that's not real clear. What do you think she's doing?

Boy, I m sweating, I m awful nervous, you know, once H.W.:But, oh, I know. She's waiting for this!

in a while I get caught up, I can t mention the tarripoi, a Examiner:No, I meant right here with her hand, right where you can't
month ago, quite a little, I ve done a lot well. I impose a figure out what she's doing with that hand.

lot, while on the other hand, you know what I mean, I H.W.:Oh, I think she's saying I want two or three, I want one, I think, I
think so, and so, so she's gonna get this one for sure it's gonna fall down
have to run around, look it over, trebbin and all there or whatever, she's gonna get that one and, and there, he's gonna get
one himself or more, it all depends with this when they fall down...and
that sort of stuff... when it falls down there's no problem, all they got to do is fix it and go
right back up and get some more.
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 2

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Wernicke s aphasia Anomia

●  Most aphasias involve damage to more ●  Damage around Wernicke s area produces a deficit in
the ability to name things
than just one specific area
w  e.g., after a stroke in this area CB cannot retrieve nouns he wants
to use
C.B. Uh, well this is the...the...of this. This and this and this
and this. These things going in there like that. This is...things
here. This one here, these two things here. And the other one
here, back in this one, this one...look at this one.

Examiner Yeah, what's happening there?

C.B. I can't tell you what that is, but I know what it is, but I
don't know where it is. But I don't know what's under. I know
it's you couldn't say it's ... I couldn't say what it is. I couldn't
say what that is. This shu-- that should be right in here. That's
very bad in there. Anyway, this one here, and that, and that's it.
This is the getting in here and that's the getting around here,
and that, and that's it. This is getting in here and that's the
getting around here, this one and one with this one. And this
one, and that's it, isn't it? I don't know what else you'd want.
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Anomia Brain and language

Recall that the left side of the brain is more involved
Sometimes anomia can be remarkable
● 
● 
in language than the right side
specific w  Broca s and Wernicke s areas are on the left hemisphere

●  Some patients have difficulty with only certain ●  However, the right hemisphere can also work with
types of nouns language
w  left handed people
w concrete vs abstract (chair vs trust)
w  hemispherectomies (age matters!)
w nonliving vs living (table vs dog)
w animals and vegetables vs food and body parts
w colors
w proper names
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Brain and evolution Brain and evolution

●  Cantalupo & Hopkins (2001)
●  We ve argued that language is an evolved instinct w  Broadmann s area 44 (part of Broca s area in humans)
w  differences in brains account for differences in abilities w  Compare area on left and right hemispheres
●  One might hope to find proto-language abilities in »  Larger on left for humans and apes
close animals to humans
w  Chimpanzees, apes Implies
hemisphere
●  Anatomically, there are many similarities between asymmetries
human brains and apes and chimpanzees that underlay
language
began
at least 5
gorillas
bonobos million years
ago
chimpanzees

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 3

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Chimpanzee language
Problems
●  In the 1960s several research groups reported
teaching chimpanzees American Sign Language ●  Just like with Eliza (the computer therapist) it is
(ASL) easy to attribute language ability where it does
w  after failure to teach spoken language not really exist (9 month old children)
w  other groups taught chimps to press symbols on a computer
keyboard or string magnetized plastic shapes on a board ●  You can teach an animal a lot using simple
●  Claimed to teach chimps hundreds of words conditioning tricks
w  and chimps created new compound words ●  Researchers were quick to excuse mistakes
»  swan -> water bird
»  stale Danish -> cookie rock
as play , jokes , puns , metaphors ,...
»  See video:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?
storyId=90516132
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Word counts Nim Chimpsky

●  For example, a deaf student on one research team
●  A relative of other signing chimps
later commented that she saw fewer signs than the
non-deaf students w with more careful judging probably learned
w  seems the researchers counted almost any hand movement approximately 25 words
as a sign
w moreover, the signs were variations of the natural
●  Like movements of chimps in the wild
w  scratch --> scratch
w  pointing --> you
●  The chimps did not learn ASL
w  finger to mouth --> drink
w  hugging --> hug
w  reaching --> give
w  kissing --> kiss
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Grammar Grammar
●  Likewise, the chimps never produced complex sentences
●  Chimps failed to learn the rules of ASL ●  They tended to say things like the following
grammar w  Nim eat Nim eat.
they communicate
w  Drink eat me Nim.
w unable to understand complex signs but not with real
w  Tickle me Nim play.
language
●  Seemingly able to understand complex w  Me eat me eat.
sentences w  Me banana you banana me you give.
w  Banana me me me eat.
w Would you please carry the cooler to Penny?
w  Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat
●  But really, the chimp need only understand two orange give me you.

words: cooler and Penney

w the rest can be guessed!
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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 4

Professor Greg Francis 1/4/19

Evolution Evolution
●  Note, it would have been interesting if chimps ●  Chimps are the closest living evolutionary
could learn language relatives of humans
w and not inconsistent with the idea that we have a w so if any non-human living animal could learn
language instinct
language it would probably be chimps
●  But the failure of chimps to learn language ●  But in evolutionary history, chimps and humans
does not go against the idea that language split from a common ancestor millions of years
evolved in humans ago
w as some people have proposed
●  Humans evolved a language skill and chimps
did not
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Conclusions Next time

●  Consciousness
●  Language and the brain
●  Dualism
●  Broca s aphasia
●  Artificial intelligence
●  Wernicke s aphasia
●  Qualia
●  Anomia
●  Chimps
●  Do you see red like I see green?

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PSY 200: Intro. to Cognitive Psychology 5

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Consciousness What is consciousness?

PSY 200 ●  Awareness of events, stimuli, thoughts,

Greg Francis self
●  A sequence of meaningful items
Lecture 32
●  Stream of thoughts
●  Distinct from unconscious processing
Do you see red like I see green? (e.g., hearing a sentence, retrieving
information from memory,…)

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History Materialism
●  Nearly all scientists are materialists, but
●  Descartes dualism (Cartesian dualism) old ideas die hard
w  pineal gland link between body and spirit
●  A lot of work (e.g., fMRI) looks for the site
w  how they could connect was a real problem
of consciousness
w a special physical transformation
w thalamus
w reticular formation
●  Mind-body problem
w quantum mechanics
●  Materialism (the brain is the mind)
w  or the mind derives from the brain w distributed awareness
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A turning point Distributed processing

●  A common view is that there is a moment/ ●  Information processing is spatially and
place which/where before something was temporally distributed in the brain
not conscious and which after it is
●  Processing changes with new stimuli
conscious
●  There really is no moment of
●  But this is not true in the brain
consciousness
Before
w different brain areas know different things at
After consciousness
consciousness Consciousness different times

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 1

Greg Francis 1/4/19

An analogy An analogy
●  When did the British empire learn of the end of the War of ●  For complicated systems like the British empire (and
1812? human brains)
w  treaty signed in London months before the Battle of New w  different parts know different things at different times
Orleans w  there is no official moment of knowledge
w  word was not received by British troops in America until two w  no official moment of consciousness!
weeks after the Battle of New Orleans (January 8, 1815)
●  Demonstration
w  when does the class know/understand?

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How / Why? Turing test

●  How do you know a
●  There is no moment because person is conscious/
intelligent?
information is distributed in the brain
w  They behave in a way
w Both in space and time that we interpret as
consistent with a
●  Can distributed processing really produce conscious being

Turing test: apply the

consciousness, or must there be ● 

same logic to a
something else to put it all together ? computer
w  if a conversation with a
w can consciousness arise from non-conscious computer is
processors? (artificial intelligence?) indistinguishable from a
conversation with a
human
w  Then conclude the
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Artificial intelligence Captcha

●  No computer has passed anything but a weak ●  The basic ideas are implemented in several
form of the Turing test methods for computer security
w  lack sufficient schemas, creativity, general knowledge ●  Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell
●  It is worth noting that other things would also not Computers and Humans Apart
pass a Turing test
w  children
w  mentally impaired people
w  mute people
w  people who speak a language we do not understand

●  Passing a Turing test is not necessary for

consciousness

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 2

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Turing test Doubters

The Turing test is only one way to demonstrate
Many people have suggested that computers
● 
● 

intelligence cannot, in principle, become intelligent

w  and a rather strict one at that
w  they argue that purely symbolic computations cannot
w  not passing the Turing test does not mean that a lead to consciousness
computer is not intelligent
w  and humans use emotion, insight, intuition,
w  of course, it doesn t mean the computer is intelligent intentionality instead of simple computation
either
●  Let s look at two arguments against strong AI
●  Variations on Turing test
w  discriminate conversation between a child and a
computer
w  look at a conversation and decide which was the
computer
w  ... Purdue University Purdue University

1. The Chinese room (Searle) 1. The Chinese room (Searle)

●  Imagine you are in a room with two slots and a book ●  If the book provides rules on how to answer questions
w  Slot 1: someone sends you notes with Chinese characters on them in Chinese
w  Book (written in English): in the book you can look up the Chinese
w  then you can answer written questions in Chinese
characters and write down corresponding Chinese characters on
another piece of paper w  even though you do not know Chinese!
w  Slot 2: you can send your piece of paper out this slot ●  Consciousness (in general, understanding) is not a
function of the thing (or person) who implements the
rules
Slot 1 Slot 2
●  But consider it from the point of view of a person
outside the room
w  Who is sending messages in

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1. The Chinese room (Searle) 1. The Chinese room (Searle)

●  You are having a conversation with someone
●  Searle s point is that
w  You have to decide if the person understands what you are saying
(it s the Turing test) w  We know the person in the room does not understand
Chinese
w  You ask them to describe the wall of their room
w  They report it is green w  We might be fooled into thinking they do based on their
responses to the questions
w  …and so on…
w  Thus, the Turing test is a bad test

●  Because the Turing test is essentially the same

Slot 2 Slot 1
structure
w  The computer plays the role of the person in the room

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 3

Greg Francis 1/4/19

However,... And moreover...

●  Searle has set up a deceptively simple scenario ●  At a smaller level of computation, it is hard to see
w  the Chinese room may be an impossibility how consciousness could not be (theoretically)
●  You can imagine a situation where one has a book possible in computers
with rules to answer questions in Chinese ●  Each cell in your head is data in - data out
w  but only if you do not think too hard w  suppose cells were gradually replaced by tiny
w  in reality, there may be no such book! computers that kept all processing the same
w  if the questions can be on almost any topic, then »  Neuromorphic chips
understanding is required for that type of complex w  would you claim that at some point you are no longer
processing conscious?

●  And understanding is generally restricted to ●  This suggests there is nothing fundamental

consciousness about organic consciousness
w  Or maybe one needs to conclude that such an advanced
book has potential consciousness
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2. Qualia 2. Qualia
●  Some researchers object to the very idea that
●  Consider two people who see the world in
computers could become conscious color opposites
w  They argue that some things in consciousness are not
just computation Qualia for person 1 A red apple with a
w  e.g., consider the color red green leaf
w  There seems to be a particularly subjective experience
of seeing something red

Qualia for person 2 A red apple with a

green leaf

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2. Qualia 2. Qualia
●  Qualia proponents argue, for example,
●  Clearly, there s a big difference in the
w  you can learn all there is to know about light waves,
perceptual experience of these people, photoreceptors, neural transduction and coding of
but their behavior is essentially the same color,…
w  But suppose you never see any red objects
w And there seems no way to distinguish one
w  Your knowledge will not tell you what you will
experience from the other
experience when you first see the red of an apple
w It s the unmeasureable experience that is a w  Indeed, you could be tricked into believing a green
qualia apple was red (if you had never seen green either)

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 4

Greg Francis 1/4/19

2. Qualia Conclusions
●  But this is a defeatist argument, or a pointless one ●  Consciousness
w  if I knew everything about light, photoreceptors, and
neural representation of colors, then I would be able to
●  distributed processing in the brain
know what I will experience when I see red w no site of consciousness
w  it is difficult (maybe impossible for any single human) to
w no time of consciousness
know (or even imagine knowing) all that information in an
academic sense
●  Chinese room
w  but that doesn t mean that such information does not
exist ●  Qualia
●  It s partly an empirical question
●  Artificial Intelligence
w  But no one can do the experiment
●  Daniel Dennet Consciousness Explained
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(1991) Purdue University

Next time
●  Review for exam 4
●  After exam 4
w  Decision making
w  Framing effects
w  Risks
w  Alternatives
w  CogLab on Monty Hall

●  What every consumer should know before they

buy.
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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 5

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Decision making Decision making

PSY 200 ●  We have to make lots of choices

w course selections
Greg Francis w elections

Lecture 33 w housing
w job
w cancer treatment
What every consumer should know
●  What affects our choices?
before buying.
●  How do we make choices?
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It’s difficult to do well High-Low money game

●  Making good decisions is very challenging for most people ●  The local radio station WASK (98.7) sometimes runs a high-
●  The optimal way to do it (utility theory) involves evaluating the low money game
cost/benefit of all possible outcomes and weighting by the ●  A caller guesses the amount of money in a “pot”
probability of each each outcome ●  If correct, the caller wins the money
w  Nearly impossible to do
w  how to characterize all alternatives?
●  Otherwise, the radio DJ announces whether the guess was
w  Personal utilities are unknown even for you, personally high or low
●  Even when choices and utilities are clear, there are surprising ●  Suppose previous guesses have been: $112.03 (high), $97.83
properties of decision making (high), $52.72 (low)
●  You call in, what should you guess?

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High-Low money game More confusion

●  Even without utilities, probability is difficult to work with
●  To maximize utility ($), guess one penny lower than the ●  In the Monty Hall CogLab, you make a sequence of choices
previous high guess: while trying to find a prize
w  $97.82
●  Choose one of three doors
●  The true amount could be anywhere between $97.82 (one w  Another door without the prize is opened
penny less than the lowest high value) and $52.73 (one penny ●  You can now choose the other door or stay with your original choice
more than the highest low value) w  Seems like 50% chance either way

●  Each possible value (to the penny) has a probability of

1
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4510
●  You may as well guess the choice that gives you the most
money!
w  You are probably not going to win
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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 1

Greg Francis 1/4/19

More confusion Heuristics

You will win more often if you switch
● 
●  Since people are not good at making optimal
w  66% win when you switch
w  33% win when you don’t switch decisions, they use other approaches
●  To see, why suppose your initial pick did not have the prize ●  These other approaches make people sensitive
w  This will happen 66% of the time just by chance
to a variety of influences
●  The program has to open the door without the prize
w  Thus, you win 66% of the time by switching to the other door w  framing effects
w  risks
w  alternatives
w  loss aversion

●  Effects are often related

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Framing effects Version 1: award frame

●  Imagine that you serve on the jury of an only-child sole-
custody case following a relatively messy divorce. The facts
●  Your decisions are influenced by the way a are complicated by ambiguous economic, social, and
set of choices is presented emotional considerations, and you decide to base your
decision entirely on the following few observations. To which
●  The child custody problem parent would you award sole custody of the child?
w two versions, essentially the same ●  Parent A: average income, average health, average working
hours, reasonable rapport with child, relatively stable social
w lead to different choices
life
●  Parent B: above-average income, very close relationship with
child, extremely active social life, lots of work-related travel,
minor health problems
64%

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Version 2: deny frame Framing effects

●  Imagine that you serve on the jury of an only-child sole-
custody case following a relatively messy divorce. The facts
are complicated by ambiguous economic, social, and
●  So Parent B is the choice to award custody
emotional considerations, and you decide to base your and to deny custody
decision entirely on the following few observations. To which
w but one necessarily precludes the other!
parent would you deny sole custody of the child?
●  Parent A: average income, average health, average working ●  Subjects are biased by the task at hand
hours, reasonable rapport with child, relatively stable social
w focus on different characteristics depending on
life
whether they are considering awarding or
●  Parent B: above-average income, very close relationship with
denying
child, extremely active social life, lots of work-related travel,
minor health problems
55%

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 2

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Framing effects Version 1: Saving frame

●  Imagine that the US is preparing for the outbreak of
●  Your decisions are influenced by the way a an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill
600 people. Two alternative programs to combat
set of choices is presented
the disease have been proposed. Assume that the
●  The Asian disease problem exact scientific estimates of the consequences of
w two versions, essentially the same the programs are as follows:
w lead to different choices ●  If program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. 70%
●  If program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability
that 600 people will be saved and a 2/3 probability
that no people will be saved.

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Version 2: Dying frame Choices and framing

●  Imagine that the US is preparing for the outbreak of ●  The two problems are essentially
an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill
identical, except that the choices are
600 people. Two alternative programs to combat
phrased differently
the disease have been proposed. Assume that the
exact scientific estimates of the consequences of w 200 people saved = 400 people dead
the programs are as follows: w 2/3 probability that no one is saved = 2/3
●  If program A is adopted, 400 people will die. probability that 600 will die

●  If program B is adopted, there is a 1/3 probability ●  But the phrasing makes a difference in
that nobody will die and a 2/3 probability that 600 the choices of subjects
people will die. 61%
w why?

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Risks Risk
●  Risk corresponds to those events that ●  Humans sometimes prefer risky options
occur with probability
over non-risky options
w will I like the next movie starring Matt Damon?
w and vice-versa
w will I live to be 50?
w will the dice show double sixes? ●  When the choices are perceived as losses
w subjects tend to be risk-seeking
●  Events that occur with certainty are without
risk ●  When the choices are perceived as gains
w the sun will rise tomorrow w subjects tend to be risk-averse
w I will be older tomorrow ●  Decision making is open to manipulation
w I will give you an A if your grade is 90 or above
w subjects can contradict themselves
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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 3

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Risk: monetary choices Risk: monetary choices

●  Assume yourself richer by $300 than you are ●  Assume yourself richer by $500 than you are
today. You have to choose between today. You have to choose between
72%
●  A) a sure gain of $100. ●  A) a sure loss of $100.
●  B) 50% chance to gain $200 and 50% chance ●  B) 50% chance to lose nothing and 50%
to gain nothing. chance to lose $200. 64%

●  Subjects tend to prefer the sure gain ●  Subjects tend to prefer the risky option
w risk averse with perceived gains w risk seeking with perceived losses

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Notice Alternatives: version 1

●  Selecting A) in either situation means you end
Imagine you are shopping for a new car and have
up with $400
● 

narrowed down your choices to three models.

w $300 + $100 According to a consumer magazine, the cars ride
w $500 - $100 quality (RQ) and gas mileage (GM) are rated as
Model RQ GM
●  Selecting B) in either situation means you end Asteroid 100 27 69%
up with either $500 or $300 Bravo 80 33 29%
w $300 + $200 or $300 + $0 Comet 100 21 2%

w $500 - $0 or $500 - $200 ●  Which car do you select?

●  People do not just look at the bottom line

w which is why businesses emphasize that approach
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Alternatives: version 2 Notice

●  Imagine you are shopping for a new car and have ●  Subjects hardly ever select the Comet or the
narrowed down your choices to three models.
Clarion
According to a consumer magazine, the cars ride
quality (RQ) and gas mileage (GM) are rated as w you might think they do not enter the decision
Model RQ GM making process at all!
Asteroid 100 27 19% w but they do
Bravo 80 33 79%
Clarion 60 33 2% ●  The comparison of Asteroid and Comet clearly
●  Which car do you select? favors the Asteroid
w it is less clear for the Bravo and Comet
w it is the reverse for Clarion
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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 4

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Consumer beware Loss aversion

●  Another general property of decision making is that
people tend to be more sensitive to losses than to
●  Stores are very aware of this type of
gains
behavior w  thus people rarely take an even-bet
w  the loss of $10 is more significant than the gain of $10
●  Thus, they often stock merchandise for the
●  This is also why fans of sports teams think the
sole purpose of influencing your purchasing referees treat their team unfairly
behavior ●  In a game of basketball, each team will
w  have fouls called on them when they shouldn t have (a loss)
w usually towards a more expensive model
w  Commit fouls that are not called (a gain)
●  Likewise companies make low-end models ●  But the gains don t count as much as the losses
w  So in a truly fair game both teams (and their fans) feel as if
simply to bias you toward higher end they were treated unfairly
models and against the competition w  of course one team wins, so it feels that it overcame the
injustice
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Loss aversion Loss aversion

●  The same phenomenon ruins many marriages/ ●  By definition a choice is a loss or a gain
relationships
depending on where you start
●  When your partner does something for you (a gain) it
doesn t count as much as when your partner does ●  As a result, loss aversion dramatically affects
something against you (a loss) many types of choices by magnifying those
w  Thus, you perceive your relationship as overall not being characteristics of a choice that leads to a
worth the trouble (even if your partner is good as often as
bad) perceived loss
w  That s why therapists suggest that in successful
relationships people must learn to forgive
●  Consider choosing a job

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Choosing a job: 1 Choosing a job: 1

●  You have decided to leave your current job. It is ●  You have decided to leave your current job. The job
located so far away from your apartment that it involves only a ten-minute commute, which you rather
requires an 80-minute commute each way. But you do like. But your job leaves you isolated from coworkers
like the fact that your job involves much pleasant for long periods of time. Your search for a new job has
social interaction with your coworkers. Your search for given you two options and now you must choose
a new job has given you two options and now you between them. Which job would you prefer?
must choose between them. Which job would you ●  Job A: Limited contact with others, commuting time 20
prefer? minutes. 70%
●  Job A: Limited contact with others, commuting time 20 ●  Job B: Moderately sociable, commuting time 60
minutes. minutes.
●  Job B: Moderately sociable, commuting time 60 67%
minutes. Purdue University Purdue University

PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 5

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Loss aversion Conclusions

In each case the subjects tend to choose the option that produces
Influences on decision making
● 
● 
the least loss
w  keep sociable coworkers in version 1
●  Framing effects
w  minimizing commuting time in version 2
●  Note, this means subjects are not just choosing what they ●  Risk aversion (perceived gains)
perceive to be the best job overall (again, not looking at the
bottom line) ●  Risk seeking (perceived losses)
w  but are instead choosing the best job relative to the current situation!
w  a very strange phenomenon!
●  Loss aversion
●  Note, some scientists suggest that “loss” is not the issue here;
there are other situation-specific factors that explain these effects
w  It is true that there are some situations where loss aversion is not observed

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Next time
●  Problem solving
●  Expertise
●  Analogy
●  Set effects
w functional fixedness

●  Insight
●  What does that aha! feeling mean?

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 6

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Problem solving Problem solving

PSY 200 ●  A hallmark of intelligence

w often used as a definition of intelligence
Greg Francis
●  Seem to get something from nothing
Lecture 34 ●  We will not explain exactly how it happens
w but we can look at some characteristics of
problems and problem solving
What does that aha feeling mean?
» what makes for an easy (or hard) problem?
» what makes for a good (or bad) problem
solver?
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Logic Logic
●  Some problems are completely handled with logic ●  People do better if the task is related to some overall theme
●  Unfortunately, most people are not logical in many situations
●  The CogLab Wason selection task demonstrates challenges
with logic
w  People do quite poorly at tasks of this type with abstract elements Each card has a person’s age on one side and their
drink on the other. Which cards do you need to turn
Which cards do you need to turn over to verify the rule,
over to verify the rule, “If a person is under 21 then
“If a card has an even number on one side, it is red on
they cannot be drinking alcohol.”
the other.”

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Logic Topics
●  CogLab data ●  Similar to characteristics of decision making a lot
●  Count number of correctly chosen cards (2 is max) of problem solving techniques are heuristics
●  We will look at a number of factors that influence
our ability to solve problems
w  expertise
Global data
(~30,000 w  analogy
participants)
w  set effects
»  priming
»  incubation
»  functional fixedness
w  insight

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 1

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Experts An example of experts

●  Chi, Feltovich & Glaser (1981)

●  Some people learn how to solve particular ●  Take second year physics students (novices) and ask them to
classify a bunch of physics problems
types of problems w  they tend to group them by surface similarities

●  What makes an expert different from a

novice?
●  Experts know how to describe problems
w other than that, there seems to be no
Novice 1: These deal with blocks on an incline
fundamental difference (even for geniuses!) Novice 2: Angular velocity; momentum, circular things
plane

Novice 5: Inclined plane problems, coefficient of

Novice 3: Rotational kinematics, angular speeds, angular friction
velocities
Novice 6: Blocks on inclined planes with
Novice 6: Problems that have something rotating, angular angles
speed

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An example of experts Chess experts

●  Have experts (PhDs) classify the same game
●  Chase & Simon (1973)
problems ●  Show subjects a chess board and
then clear it
w grouped according to how to solve
w  have subjects recall positions of
the chess pieces on the board
●  Master players are better than
beginners when the pieces are
30
positioned as in the middle of a
25

Correct pieces
real game
Expert 2: Conservation of energy 20
Expert 3: Work-energy theorem. They are all
●  Experts have schemas that allow Master
15
straight-forward problems. Expert 2: These can be solved by Newton s second
law
them to organize the piece Beginner
10
Expert 4: These can be done from energy
considerations. Either you should know the principle Expert 3: F=ma; Newton s second law.
positions
of conservation of energy, or work is lost 5
somewhere. Expert 4: Largely use F=ma; Newton s second law. w  They only need to remember the
schema 0
1 2 3 4 5 6

Trial
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Chess experts Expert schemas

●  Chase & Simon (1973) random ●  In general, experts have lots of problem
Show subjects a chess
● 

board and then clear it

solving schemas specific to their domain of
w  have subjects recall expertise
positions of the chess
pieces on the board w given such and such; do such and such
●  Master players are worse
than beginners when the 25 w allows them to organize information in a way that
pieces are positioned allows for easy recall and easy use
Correct pieces

20
randomly 15
●  Experts try to use the
Master
Beginner
●  Expertise in one domain does not transfer to
10
schemas, but they end up
misremembering the actual 5 another
piece positions 0
w except for especially useful skills
1 2 3 4 5 6

Trial
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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 2

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Analogy: Attack-Dispersion Story Solution

●  The many roads to a dictator s fortress are ●  The general should split up his army into
mined so that small groups of men may many smaller units
pass, but a large group will be destroyed. A w each unit takes a separate road to converge on
general knows that his army can defeat the the fortress simultaneously and defeat the
dictator
fortress if he can get his entire army to
attack at once, but he cannot take his army
down a single road all at once without losing
fortress
too many men.
●  What should he do?

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Analogy: Parade-dispersion Analogy

●  A dictator wants to show off his army so he ●  The solution is the same
tells a general to plan a parade of the army. He w split up the army and have them converge to
demands that the general insure that the army the fortress from different parts of the kingdom

is seen and heard across the entire kingdom ●  Glick & Holyoak (1980)
simultaneously. The dictator also demands that w subjects read stories like these and were
the parade be the most impressive ever at the asked to solve the problems
fortress. Splitting up the army would allow it to w even when shown one solution and told that it
be seen everywhere, but would make the could be applied by analogy to another

display at the fortress unimpressive. w subjects used analogies only 20% of the time

●  What should the general do?

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Analogy Set effects

●  Analogies are actually very difficult to apply
●  Set refers to mind set (or something like
w need to identify what is common between two
that)
problems
w negative set: bias toward solving a problem makes
●  Analogies are often applied after two it more difficult
problems are solved and well understood w positive set: bias toward solving a problem makes
w it is then easier to see what is common it easier

●  One of the problems handed out can be ●  You can be biased by lots of things
solved by analogy to these two problems w problem statement
w previous methods of reaching solution

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 3

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Past experience Self-imposed limits

●  Nine dots problem
●  Buddhist monk problem
w  One morning, exactly at sunrise, a Buddhist monk began to
w Draw four straight lines, passing through all nine
climb a tall mountain. The narrow path, no more than a foot of these dots, without lifting your pencil from the
or two wide, spiraled around the mountain to a glittering page.
temple at the summit. The monk ascended the path with an
average speed of 3 mph. He reached the temple shortly
before sunset. After several days of fasting and meditation
he began his journey back along the same path, starting at
sunrise and walking an average speed of 5 mph. Is there a
spot along the path that the monk occupied on both trips at
precisely the same time of day?

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Set effects: Representation Set effects: Priming

●  Mutilated chessboard ●  Safren (1962)
w 62 squares remain ●  Unscramble the following anagrams
w can 31 dominoes cover them?
●  12.2 seconds per word
●  Easy solution! KOBO CTURK STTE

CHUOC ANCYD DRINEF

7.4 seconds per word

KMLI GRAUS RECMA

FOEFCE TEESW IKRDN

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Set effects: Incubation Set effects: Incubation

●  Cheap necklace problem ●  Silveira (1971)
Opening a link costs $2
● 
●  Control: Work on problem for half an hour
●  Closing a link costs $3
w 55% solve problem
●  Go from given to goal state for no more than $15
●  Exp A: Work on problem for half an hour in
15 minute sections, half-hour distracter task
w 64% solve problem

●  Exp B: Work on problem for half an hour in

15 minute sections, 4 hour distracter task
w 85% solve problem
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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 4

Greg Francis 1/4/19

Set effects: Incubation Set effects: Functional fixedness

●  Subjects often get stuck using an approach ●  How can you tie two strings together?
that goes nowhere (set)
●  Dunker (1945)
●  After a break they are more likely to try a
different approach w  MacGyver
●  Brainstorming tries to avoid set effects by
allowing free dreaming of solutions
w most of the ideas are worthless, but the approach
is still beneficial

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Insight Insight
●  Intuitively, we sometimes feel as if we have a ●  Warmth stays mostly steady, right up to
strong insight into a problem and its solution proposing a solution
becomes obvious w the aha feeling
w the aha feeling
w is it real? Unfortunately,
w what does it correspond to? the feeling does
not necessarily
●  Using problems like the Bronze coin and indicate a
correct solution
the Tree planting problems (Metcalf, 1986)
w subjects judge their progress with a warmth
rating, every 10 seconds, over 5 minutes
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Conclusions Next time

●  Effects on problem solving
●  Wrapping up the course
●  Expertise
●  Analogy
●  Other courses to take/avoid
●  Set effects ●  Paths to pursue
●  Insight ●  Graduate school
●  Solve remaining problems
w  Tumor problem
●  Advice for further exploration

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PSY200 Cognitive Psychology 5