Download Tabula Rasa British Associationists: Locke says, all our knowledge

1) Tabula Rasa
British Associationists: Locke says, all our knowledge comes from experience and through our sense… there is
nothing in the mind except what was first in the sense. The mind is at birth a clean sheet, a tabula rasa; and
sense-experience writes upon it in a thousand ways, until sensation begets memory and memory begets ideas.
2) Laws of Association
Contiguity: if two events occur together in time or in space, they become associated. (skinner’s box: dog-bellfood; the more it happens, the more things become associated)
Secondary laws of association: frequency, duration, recency, vividness, and similarity (being familiar) determine
strength of associations.
3) Critique of Associationism: (innateness, LAD and language social device)
- Strict behaviorism, which is supposed to be objective and observable, leads to manipulating stimulus, and
there are problems in measuring the response.
- Stimulus alone does not control the response. Participants’ current state and past learning can be involved
and how the stimulus is encoded is another story. Lastly, effective stimulus is not observable.
4) Cognitive revolution: inferring internal representations (// stimulus) and operations (// response)
5) Representation (data, static, information)
a mapping of the stimulus of information in the world to symbols in mind.
Mapping takes elements and relations in the world to the elements and relations in mind.
Representation is selective and thus not all information is preserved, but some omitted.
There are different kinds and different levels of representations. Representations preserve pictorial features like
shape or spatial relations. Also, they preserve linguistic features like sound, syntax and meanings.
6) Operation (production, procedure, dynamic)
Operation is utilizing and processing information in myriad possible ways and the processing is limited. Like
representations, operations can decompose into sub-operations. Important and prevalent operation is
comparing, identifying and categorizing. Operating representations is part of every cognitive task. Operations
have subtasks.
Representation
Operation
Data, static, mapping, selective and different
Production/ procedure/ limited/ hierarchical/
kinds/levels
dynamic/ utilization/ different operations
7) Localization of Function of Brain
In general, the left hemisphere seems to be associated with linguistic and analytic processing, whereas the right
hemisphere is associated with perceptual and spatial process. The left and right hemispheres are connected by a
broad band of fibers called the corpus callosum.
Broca’s area: (Broca’s aphasia, the severe impairment of speech) people with Broca’s aphasia speak in short,
ungrammatical sentences.
Wernicke’s area: patients with Wernicke’s aphasia speak in fairly grammatical sentences that are almost devoid
of meaning.
Attention
1) Attention: ability to focus on a task/ ability to concentrate/ allocation of processing recourses/ selective
attention/ divided attention (when doing multiple tasks)/ automaticity (doing things so practiced)
2) Mechanism: monitoring world = responding to many stimuli at some level -> Decide which stimuli to attend to > organize resources to it -> ignore other stimuli successfully
3) Broadbent’s Filter Model
- Early selection based on physical properties of the stimulus (e.g. pitch, loudness…etc)
-
We pay attention to information that passes the filter.
Only one input channel can be processed at a time.
It takes time to shift attention from one channel to another.
Experiment: participants listened to a different series of number from each ear. For instance, 7, 4, and 5
from one ear, while 8, 3, and 4 from the other. Then they were asked to recall by individual ear, such as
‘745-834,’ and also recall by order ’78, 43 and 54.’ 65% of the answers was correct for the first recall while
only 20% was correct for the second recall.
<-> (problems) according to Gray and Wedderburn, participants can shadow a message on the basis of meaning
rather than on the basis of what each ear physically hears (shadowing experiment). People can also use
semantic content as the basis for selection, in addition to the physical features.
4) Capacity theory of attention
Assumption: - different tasks require different amounts or kinds of resources. – Allocating resources to tasks –
limited amount of resources available to conduct tasks.
Capacity available: if tasks are easy, we can do more than one.
Practice: highly practiced skills take less capacity. (Automaticity: as tasks become practiced, they become more
automatic and require less and less central cognition to execute. Automaticity occurs when practice eliminates
most of the need for central cognition.)
5) Selective attention task: Stroop task; people are slower to name color when the word says a different color.
Why? Reading is automatic/ color naming requires selective attention. / The automatic process of reading
interferes with our ability to selectively attend to ink color.
6) Two ways to control attention
- Bottom-up: automatic, data-driven. People get information from the environment.
- Top-down: conscious decision. The decision comes from our mind.
- Lexical decision is faster if the prime word is related (time interval is shorter than 250ms, automaticity)
- Neely’s experiment (don’t understand)
7) Changing views of attention
- Attended: high level of processing
- Unattended: crudely processed perceptual selection BUT meaning on unattended channel can get through.
- Capacity can divide attention within limits.
- Automaticity: highly practiced tasks take less capacity.
- Time courses different: automatic, data- driven: fast onset and fast dissipation
Deliberate, decision-driven: slow onset and persistent
- Performing multiple tasks is a complex process of allocating limited resources and performing some
operations that are automatic and require fewer resources.
Imagery
1) Posner & Keele (handout)
Experiment: Show a subject an alphabet and then another. Ask them to tell whether they are same or not. Then,
increase the interval time between two alphabets.
Finding:
a. identity (visual) matches faster than name matches up to a second, (e.g. Subjects recognize ‘A-A match’ faster than ‘Aa match.’) because it takes time to transform the visual information to the verbal.
b. By 2 seconds, identity and name matches come to equal.
(Why it takes longer to elicit the identity matches as the interval increases? Short-term memory)
c. visual representation lasts around 1 second and then become replaced by verbal representation.
Assumption: Visual images are more related to STM while verbal representations related to LTM.
2) Tversky (handout)
Experiment: Six faces and six names are given uncoordinatedly (GOLO, GOMO, DILI … etc.). The second stimulus comes
one second after the first stimulus. There is a hint what comes next, name or face. Would visual representation longer
w/ an incentive? Would people generate visual representation to name stimulus just as they generate verbal
representation to visual stimulus?
Finding: participants were faster on expected stimulus modality, irrespective of presented modality. They can transform
name to image and image to name. They can keep image, visual representation if there is an incentive.
3) Pavio (Book)
Dual-code theory: there are separate representations for verbal and visual information. Human memory is better if we
encode it both visually and verbally.
4) Santa (Book)
Experiment: participants studied an initial array of objects or words and then hand to decide whether a test array
contained the same elements. Geometric shapes and words for the shapes were used.
Findings: in the geometric condition, participants would make a positive identification more quickly when the
configuration was identical than when it was linear, because the visual memory for the study stimulus would preserve
spatial information.
In the verbal condition, participants would make a positive identification more quickly when the configuration was linear
than when it was identical, because participants had encoded the words from the study array linearly, in accordance
with normal reading order in English.
Conclusion: some visual information, such as geometric objects, tends to be stored according to spatial position whereas
other information, such as words, tends to be stored according linear order.
5) Shepherd and Metzler (Mental Rotation)
; Imagery is like internalized perception. Imaging is like seeing processing. Imags are like picture
representation.
Experiment: participants were presented with pairs of 2-D representations of 3-D objects. Their task was to determine
if the objects were identical except for orientation. The reaction times are plotted as a function of the angular disparity
between the two objects presented.
Findings: The relationship is linear – for every equal increment in amount of rotation, an equal increment in reaction
time is required (Shepherd). The greater the angle of disparity between the two objects, the longer participants took to
complete the rotation.
Conclusion: when people must transform the orientation of a mental image to make a comparison, they rotate its
representation through the intermediate positions until it achieves the desired orientation.
6) Steve Kosslyn (hand out)
a. Processing images: like processing percepts
Time to mentally scan a stimulus increases linearly with distance scanned.
Experiment: participants are expected to mentally move from one city to another within an island. It took more
time for them to reach the more distant place.
b. Images are like perceptions
It’s faster to find large things in images.
Experiment: participants are shown two animal pictures, a rabbit and an elephant. They react slower when given
the reversed sized, and false answers took more time than correct answers.
7) Constructing images (Kossllyn, handout)
Reaction time increases with the more number of parts, whereas it stays almost same when getting a whole
shape of the picture.
Order of constructing images: a) from the near to the far b) mental transformation: people tend to have their
own preference for the order of constructing images. In general, people don’t move things before changing their
size. When disregarding the individual preference and suggesting a direction, it takes more time for the
participant to get the image. That’s because constructing images is like the internalized motor act. The order of
their actual drawing reflects in that of constructing images.
Solution order: move> rotate, reflect> remove> add half size > shading> add part
8) Translating from Words to images (p130-131, book)
Franklin and Tversky (1990)
Experiment: participants read stories that required them to orient themselves in an imaginary environment
(inside of a theatre), then were asked to identify the locations of objects in the environment. The results are the
times required to identify objects in various directions.
Findings: we create mental images from a word description of a spatial structure. We suffer many left-right
confusions because of the bilateral symmetries of the body. We have similar confusions about left and right in
our imagery.
H.A. Taylor and Tversky (1992)
Experiment: compare the relative effectiveness of three types of spatial information; route descriptions, survey
descriptions, and actual maps.
Findings: participants were equally fast at judging whether each information is true of environment they studied,
whether they had studied route descriptions, survey descriptions or actual maps.
Conclusion from the two experiments above: we can convert verbal descriptions into rich cognitive maps of our
environment.
9) Memory for Serial Lists; Serial-order information is represented in such a way that information about the
beginning elements is most available and we can search through the information serially.
Conrad (1964)
Experiment: participants are asked to remember the sequence of letters HBKLMW.
Findings: 1) they were much more likely to misrecall B as the sound-alike V than as an S.
2) Experiments also provide evidence for the representation of serial-order information.
- Front anchoring: people are much better at reproducing the first elements of a list than other
elements. (e.g. Sternberg’s experiment: participants were given 38926 and asked for the digit after 9.
Participants accessed the first digit fastest and then got progressively slower toward the end of the string.)
10) Hierarchical Encoding of Serial-order information (Sternberg’s 1969 study)
People store long sequences hierarchically with subsequences as units in larger sequences. (e.g. Alphabet song)
+ Within a constituent, participants’ judgment times show the same front-anchoring effect found.)
Johnson’s 1970 study: participants did tend to recall the substrings as units. If participants recall the first letter
of a substring, there was only a 10% probability of failing to recall the next letter.
Conclusion: IMAGES ARE QUALITIATIVELY DIFFERENT.
1. Large properties are faster to verify from image. (visual)
2. Highly associated properties are faster to verify from name. (verbal)
memory span.
Articulatory suppression reduces span.
Visuospatial sketch pad: selective interference in dual task situation (Baddeley)
- Learn spatial vs. nonspatial sentences
No simultaneous task:
11) Baddeley’s Theory of Verbal Working Memory (p 136-137, and handout)
In working memory, there are two subordinate systems such as a visuospatial sketchpad and a phonological loop
that basically correspond to the active components of Paivio’s dual-code theory. A central executive controls
how the slave systems are used.
Baddeley’s phonological loop for maintain auditory images includes an articulatory loop, localized in Broca’s area,
and a phonological store, possibly localized in the parietal-temporal region. By the articulatory loop, an inner
voice rehearses verbal information. (e.g. rehearsing a phone number over and over again to oneself till one dials
it.) On the other hand, the phonological store is in effect an inner ear that hears the inner voice and stores the
information in a phonological form. Acoustic confusions can occur.
central executive: control, mental manipulations
two slave system: hold information (phonological loop vs. visuo-spatial sketchpad)
phonological loop: inner voice (articulatory loop) and inner ear (phonological store)
articulatory length correlates with same performance
- Visual tracking task: nonspatial > spatial
Learn words by rote or imagery strategy (logie)
Irrelevant words decrease rote strategy. / irrelevant picture decrese imagery strategy.
Categorization
Good categories
Cognitive Economy
 Reduce the number of discriminations in world (cannot have separate label for each thing), which yields few
large categories.
 Informative-ness (knowing that something is an X tells us more), which yields many small categories.
As a result, two features above seem at odds.
Two dimensions of categorization
Vertical: level of abstraction or inclusiveness -> preferred level of reference; basic level? Because its features are
shared in more general?
Horizontal: organization within categories
There are at least 3 levels of inclusiveness.
- Super ordinate
- Basic level: distinguished by convergence of many cognitive tasks
1) Common attributes
8)
2) Similarity of shapes
9)
3) Identifiability of shapes
10)
4) Imagery
5) Motor programs
11)
6) Communication: labeling
7) Communication: fastest verification
12)
-
Development: first labels in lexicon
Development: categorization
Language: earliest differentiation within
language
Language: most frequent, shortest
labels
Language: basic level terms neutral
Third level:
Parts and Basic Level (Tversky &Hemenway)
- Among attributes, parts proliferate at basic level.
- Parts form a bridge from appearance to behavior.
- Basic level maximizes informativesness given number of categories that must be kept in mind.
- Many cognitive tasks converge on basic level.
- Parts underlie convergence.
Horizontal Dimension of Categorization
- Characterize internal structure of categories
- Knowledge representation of categories
- Meaning of categories
Early view of categorization
Different cultures draw different category. If categories are unit of thought, then different cultures think
differently. HOWEVER, cultures differ in environments and needs.
Sapir-whorf Hypothesis; language shapes thought.
Conditions for testing Whorf Hypothesis
-
Languages differ with respect to an attribute
Physical, culture-free measure of attribute
Non-linguistic dependent measure
Prevalent attribute: culture independent
Against Whorf H.: in terms of colors, highly codable colors are central remembered of categories ad
remembered or learned better across cultures.
Prototypes and family resemblance (prototypical members have more of the features)
Typicality: faster to verify the prototypical items at the basic level/ typical things are learned earlier/ produced
earlier / and more frequently used.
<Structure of categories>
Vertical
Horizontal
-
Basic level is privileged/ neutral.
Typical examples/ family resemblance (rather than necessary and
sufficient features)
Advocating Whorf Hypothesis Act III (Levinson)
Some widely dispersed language don’t use left and right to describe locations. Instead, they use NSEW.
Task: 1) study parade of animals, 2) order mixed up and participant turned 180 degrees 3) put animals in
order
Results: speakers of R/L languages line up animals L/R. speakers of no R/L languages line up animals NSEW.
Memory
Memory for verbal information
1) Wanner (1968)
Participants were asked to comes into the laboratory and listen to tape-recorded instructions. One group
was received the warning that they will be tested on their ability to recall particular sentences which occur
in the instructions. The other group received no such warning and so had no idea that they would be
responsible for the verbatim instructions. After listening to the instruction, they were given four sentences,
which differ in terms of the meaning and the style.
Findings: the superiority of memory for meaning indicates that people normally extract the meaning from a
linguistic message and do not remember its exact wording.
Warning did have an effect on memory for the stylistic change.
Memory for visual information
2) Mandler and Ritchey (1977)
Participants were asked to study pictures of scenes, such as the classroom scenes. After studying eight such
pictures for ten seconds each, participants were tested for their recognition memory. They were presented
with a series of pictures and instructed to identify which pictures they had studied. All eight pictures shown
to participants contained possible token changes and type changes.
Finding: participants were much more sensitive to meaning-significant changes in a picture.
3) Bower, Karlin, and Dueck (1975)
Participants study drawings with or without an explanation of their meaning. Then they were given a
memory test in which they had to redraw the pictures. Participants who had been given an explanation
when studying the pictures showed better recall than those who were not given an explanation. Thus,
memory for the drawings depended critically on participants’ ability to place a meaningful interpretation on
the pictures.
STM
a) Evidence: phone number/ what did you just say?/ Head trauma, ECS/ Amnesiacs (retaining general info, not an
episode, not semantic memory)
- People tend to remember 80% of info. 3 seconds later. VS 0% after 18 seconds.
- Serial Position Effect (Murdock & Klatzky): when participants are shown 40 serial words, they show tendency
to remember the first and the last part better than the middle. Longer term Memory does affect memorizing
the first and the middle part, not the last, which is restricted by the STM.
- Despite the recency effect, people can increase the primary memory through rehearsal.
- Without rehearsal, there is rapid disappearance. Therefore, to maintain the information, keep recycling.
- Information flow diagram: 1) box model in cognition (Sperling): no separate attention mechanism/ explicit
acoustic or auditory rehearsal
b) Characteristics of Rehearsal
- Maintaining info in STM and preventing decay
- Internal verbal recitation (sub-vocal speech)
- Transferring info from STM to LTM
c) Characteristics of Short Term Memory (George Miller)
- Limited capacity (same for letters as well as words, memory span 7 +/- 2, chunking)/ rapid loss of
information/ verbal rehearsal (acoustic confusions: e.g. BDP, rug vs. bug)
- Minivan Model of STM: limited number of places/ new arrival takes place of old one/ longer the ride, more
likely to get to destination (LTM)
- Chunking: make the input seven units, increase the memory span and group the information (running times
and hierarchical)
d) Evidence against this view of STM
- Limited capacity <-> there is wide variation in capacity depending on item type.
- Rapid loss of information <-> lost by displacement not just decay (time)
Displacement: time causes forgetting vs. Displacement: new information causes forgetting (Waugh and
Norman)
- Verbal rehearsal <-> Other processing superior to rehearsal/ Modality-specific interference (verbal – verbal,
image-image)
e) Desk top model of short-term memory
- Limited amount of work space
- Work space can be used for many functions (information storage/ manipulation of information)
- Trade-off among various functions
- Attention subsumes STM, retaining information, keeping it active and operating on information.
- Incoming info makes rapid contact with recognizers in LTM.
LTM
Encoding processes in Memory
Levels of processing (Gus Craik): memory is a consequence of operations performed at encoding. [deeper processing
leads to better memory.]/ depth of processing: sensory > perceptual> semantic
Experiment (rogers, Kuiper and Kirker): number of wors recalled as a function of level of processing [ physical < acoustic
< semantic < self-reference]
Conclusion: how you encode the stimulus determines your memory. (not stimulus per se, many options for encoding)
Problems: different encodings may be appropriate for different retrieval tasks. + other variables interact each other.
Shortcomings of levels of processing view:
- Assuming that same encoding operations are beneficial to all memory tasks.
- Regarding memory as unitary. However, different tests of memory just differ n sensitivity. E.g. recognition is
more sensitive than recall.
- People may encode differently for different memory tasks (names/ faces, understand/ speak foreign
language)
<Encoding specificity>
How an item is encoded determines how it can be retrieved.
- Context dependent learning: context determines encoding/ reinstating context enhances retrieval.
Experiment 1: participants are shown the word series such as ‘bat-ball-base.’ Then, asked to recall what the mammal
was on the list. (Light and carter-Sobell)
Participants tend to recall ‘wet’ related words better in the wet learning environment. (Baddely and Godden) however,
such context learning doesn’t apply to the recognition. Since there is a cue already in the list, there seems to be no need
for extra cues for retrieval.
Experiment 2: Mood & memory (Bower)
Participants are hypnotized to sad or happy mood and read story about happy Andre or sad Jack.
Happy participants thought Andre is a central character and identified with him.
Sad participants thought Jack is a central character and identified with him.
Then, they were asked to recall in happy or sad mood.
Finding: participants are likely to learn ‘sad’ better in the sad mood.
Experiment 3: Emotional Diary Study (Bower)
Participants were asked to record events in diary and mark them as pleasant or unpleasant. Then, they
recalled events from preceding weeks while in a pleasant and unpleasant mood.
Finding: in general unpleasant mood is likely to elicit more information but still it is context-dependent.
Experiment 4: Recall of Childhood Events and Mood State. (Bower)
Recognition Vs. Recall of Pictures or Names
Participants studied 30 pictures of familiar things.
Prepared for either recognition or recall task. [ recognition: pick which of two pictures of same thing, recall: remember
as many as possible by creating links]
Findings: when told the type of test in advance, participants did better in the given test.
Durso & Johnson’s experiment (1980)
10 different orienting tasks were performed on concrete words or pictures (verbal/ imaginal/ referential)
Then, recall and recognition tests were conducted.