“What’s in it For Me?
” Making it Stick”
Nov 20
→ During Practice, learning seems to proceed more quickly when practice is blocked than when it is interleaved
→ Long-term retention succeeds better when randomly interleaving practice of different information or different
skills, rather than blocked practice (practicing one type of information or skill until achieving proficiency)
→ If you practice a skill or review information that you have just practiced or reviewed a moment before, you
haven’t given yourself a chance to forget anything
Interleaving practice provides an opportunity for forgetting, which maximizes the value of each instance of
practice
The Cognitive Revolution: the study of internal mental processes became an acceptable target of research - cognitive
behavioural therapy
Sensory Memory Store
Iconic memory: visual sensory store (less than one second)
Echoic memory: auditory sensory store (less than 5 seconds)
Whole report condition: people can only report back about 3-4 letters out of 12, but the
sensory information of the other letters disappear during the time to report the first few letters
Partial report condition: people can report back about 3-4 letters out of 4
Short-term Memory Store
Chunking: easier to remember letters in smaller groups
Serial position effect: letters in the beginning (primacy effect) and end (recency effect) are
more likely to be recovered from memory
Short-term memory = Working Memory
Central executive: coordinating the three storage systems and directing attention to sensory inputs
1. Phonological loop: for keeping sound=based information active with rehearsal
Word-length effect: if a list takes longer than 2 seconds to repeat in your mind, you will quickly
lose memory for one or more of the words
2. Visuospatial sketchpad: visual information and where objects are in space
Feature binding: the visuospatial sketchpad seems to represent whole objects (all elements of an
object)
3. Episodic buffer: combined auditory, visuospatial information, and knowledge from
long-term memory store
Long-term memory types
Declarative (or explicit) memory: memories that involve our conscious minds and that we can describe verbally
1. Episodic memory: memory for specific, autobiographical events in one’s life
2. Semantic memory: general knowledge about the world that does not involve accessing the details of any
particular life experience
Non-declarative (or implicit) memory: memory for previously learned skills and associations that guide our
thoughts, feelings, and actions automatically and unconsciously
1. Procedural memory: knowledge about how to perform actions
2. Classically conditioned responses: *learned last unit
Priming: the unconscious influence of an experience on our subsequent thoughts or behaviours
Eg. word-stem completion task what words people see earlier in the session will influence how they complete the
words even when they can’t remember having seen the words earlier in the experiment
Donald Hebb: “cells that fire together wire together”
Long-term potentiation: when neurons fire at the same time, bonds between them get stronger
And they will be more likely to fire together in the future
Anterograde amnesia: an inability to remember any events occurring after some brain-altering experience - H. M.
(Henry Molaison)
Retrograde amnesia: impairment in remembering experiences occurred for some period of time before the brain
trauma or surgery
Misinformation effect
Thought and Language: “Making Choices”
Nov 27
Paradox of Choice: having too many options can be overwhelming and confusing
→ Frontal Lobe: in charge of making choices, and the process is resource-demanding work
Frontal lobes must consult heavily with memory to properly evaluate each option available. All of
this intense thinking is mentally exhausting for our brains.
So we often give up and go with our emotional reaction and then think of reasons to justify our choice after the fact.
That leaves us having not carefully considered other options, always wondering “what might have been” leading to
something called buyer’s remorse
Attentional Filtering and Making Choices
Although many options can be overwhelming, we often considerably narrow down our choices by filtering them
through some dominant criteria
E.g. In restaurant choice-making: diners may filter choices by focusing on cost and shit
Grouping by similarity helps simplify things and gives us short-cuts when we encounter unfamiliar examples
Concepts vs. Categories
Concepts: mental representations of specific objects, events, or ideas
Categories: larger groups of concepts based on their similarity to one another
Memory stores knowledge of categories so we can treat varieties of things like cups in a similar way
Classical categorization approach: we group together objects and events into categories because they share
common defining features
We don’t rely on defining features, but on typical features, to group members of categories together
Eg. most birds fly and have feathers, but a hairless bird or a flightless bird is not impossible
Because they are grouped according to typical features, categories have graded membership some members are
better representatives than others - more likely to think of sparrow than penguin when naming a bird
Prototype: the average of all members of a category
We compare unfamiliar objects to our mental prototypes to determine which category it belongs to
Semantic network: different levels
Linguistic relativity (or the Whorfian Hypothesis): differences in languages between cultures change the way
members of those cultures actually perceive the world.
Such concepts can be easily captured in english through the simple method of adding additional words.
There is no evidence that such differences in language alter the perceptions of members of different
cultures
Cultural Differences in Categorization
It seems that the cultural bias of Americans is to group based on a single object characteristic, whereas the cultural
bias of Japanese is to group based on how objects interact with their environment.
Two Routes to Problem Solving
Algorithm: a slow, logical, and step-by-step solution to a problem based on a set of rules
Heuristics: relying on past experience to make a quick and reasonable guess at to the problem’s solution
Functional fixedness: the tendency to treat objects as only serving one function
Representative heuristics: the assumption that all members of a category share the same features based on one’s
experience with only a small number of category members
Conjunction fallacy: the failure to appreciate that the probability of two events occurring together must be lower
than the probability of those events occurring alone
Availability heuristic: making judgements about the frequency with which events occur based on how easy it is for
us to think of example
Anchoring effect: restrictions in a person’s numerical judgments based solely on their exposure to some number.
The anchoring effect even occurs when the biasing number is completely irrelevant
Framing effects: when the mere wording of a question has a biasing influence on our judgements or decision
making
Belief perseverance: persisting in one’s pre-existing beliefs, despite exposure to evidence that contradicts those
beliefs
Confirmation bias: seeking out and attending to evidence that supports some belief, while also actively avoiding
evidence that contradicts that belief