CHAPTER 8 – Everyday Memory and Memory Errors 

What is the meaning of memory?

The Constructive Nature of Memory  

• Memory = what actually happens + person’s knowledge, experiences, and  expectations

• Bartlett’s “war of the ghosts” experiment

• Had participants attempt to remember a story from a different culture • Repeated reproduction  

• Results

• Over time, reproduction became shorter, contained omissions and  inaccuracies

• Changed to make the story more consistent with their own culture Source Monitoring  

• Source memory: process of determining origins of our memories • Source monitoring error: misidentifying source of memory – Also called “source misattributions”

• Cryptomnesia: unconscious plagiarism of another’s work due to a lack of  recognition of its original source

What is bartlett’s “war of the ghosts” experiment?

• Jacoby and coworkers (1989)

• After 24 hours, some non-famous names were misidentified as famous

• Explanation: some non-famous names were familiar, and the participants  misattributed the source of the familiarity

– Failed to identify the source as the list that had been read the previous  day If you want to learn more check out What is the himalayas today?

The Illusory Truth Effect  

• Enhanced probability of evaluating a statement is true after repeated  presentation

• Occurs due to fluency or familiarity with the information

• Related to the propaganda effect

– Both result from stimulus repetition

Making Inference

• Memory can be influenced by inferences that people make based on their  experiences and knowledge

What is source memory?

• Pragmatic inferences: based on knowledge gained through experience

– Memory often includes information that is implied by or is consistent  with the to be remembered information but was not explicitly stated

Schemas and Scripts  

• Schema: knowledge about some aspect of the environment – e.g., Post office, ball game, classroom

• Script: conception of sequence of actions that usually occurs during a  particular experience Don't forget about the age old question of Are marginal cost and marginal revenue, are the same?
We also discuss several other topics like Who is bill clinton?

– Going to a restaurant; playing tennis

– A type of schema

• Schemas and scripts influence memory

– Memory can include information not actually experienced but inferred  because it is expected and consistent with the schema

– Office waiting room: books not present but mentioned in memory task

– The constructive nature of memory can lead to errors or “false  memories”

Construction of Memories  

• Advantages

– Allows us to “fill in the blanks” Don't forget about the age old question of What is the type of virus that causes cancer?

– Cognition is creative

• Understand language

• Solve problems

• Make decisions

• Disadvantages

– Sometimes we make errors

– Sometimes we misattribute the source of information

– Was it actually presented or did we infer it?

Power of Suggestion

• The misinformation effect: misleading information presented after  someone witnesses an event can change how that person later describes the  event

– Misleading postevent information (MPI)

• Loftus and coworkers (1975)

– See slides of traffic accident with stop sign

– Introduce MPI: yield sign

– Participants remember what they heard (yield sign) and not what they  saw (stop sign)

• Loftus and Palmer (1974)

– Hear “smashed” or “hit” in description of car accident

– Those hearing “smashed” said the cars were going much faster than  those who heard “hit”

CHAPTER 9 – CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE

• Why is it difficult to decide if a particular object belongs to a particular  category, such as “chair,” by looking up its definition?  

• How are the properties of various objects “filed away” in the mind?  • How is information about different categories stored in the brain? • Can young infants respond to the categories “cat” and “dog”?

Knowledge  Don't forget about the age old question of Are price ceiling and price floor are the same?

• Conceptual knowledge: enables us to recognize objects and events and to  make inferences about their properties

• Concept: mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions

• Categorization is the process by which things are placed into groups called  categories

• Categories are all possible examples of a particular concept

Why Categories are Useful

• Help to understand individual cases not previously encountered • “Pointers to knowledge”

• Categories provide a wealth of general information about an item • Allow us to identify the special characteristics of a particular item

Caption: Knowing that something is in a category provides a great deal of  information about it.

Definitional Approach to Categorization  

• Determine category membership based on whether the object meets the  definition of the category

• Does not work well

• Not all members of everyday categories have the same defining features

Caption: Different objects, all possible “chairs.”

Family resemblance We also discuss several other topics like How is resilience defined?

• Things in a category resemble one another in a number of ways The Prototype Approach  

• Prototype = “typical”

• An abstract representation of the “typical” member of a category • Characteristic features that describe what members of that concept are like • An average of category members encountered in the past  

• Contains the most salient features  

• True of most instances of that category

Figure 9.3 Three real birds—a sparrow, a robin, and a blue jay—and a “prototype”  bird that is the average representation of the category “birds.”

Caption: Results of Rosch’s (1975a) experiment, in which participants judged  objects on a scale of 1 (good example of a category) to 7 (poor example): (a) ratings for birds; (b) ratings for furniture

• High prototypicality: a category member closely resembles the category  prototype

• “Typical” member

• For category “bird” = robin

• Low prototypicality: a category member does not closely resemble the  category prototype

• For category “bird” = penguin

• Strong positive relationship between prototypicality and family resemblance

• When items have a large amount of overlap with characteristics of other  items in the category, the family resemblance of these items is high

• Low overlap = low family resemblance

• Typicality effect: prototypical objects are processed preferentially • Highly prototypical objects judged more rapidly

• Sentence verification technique

Caption: Results of E.E. Smith et  

al.’s (1974) sentence verification  

experiment. Reaction times were  

faster for objects rated higher in  

prototypicality  

• Prototypical category  

members are more affected by a priming stimulus

• Rosch (1975b)

• Hearing “green” primes a highly prototypical “green”

Prototype Approach: Rosch’s Priming

Caption: Procedure for Rosch’s (1975b) priming experiment. Results for the  conditions when the test colors were the same are shown on the right. (a) The  person’s “green” prototype matches the good green, but (b) is a poor match for the  light green.

The Exemplar Approach  

• Concept is represented by multiple examples  

(rather than a single prototype)

• Examples are actual category members  

(not abstract averages)

• To categorize, compare the new item to stored examples  

• Explains typicality effect

• Easily takes into account atypical cases

• Easily deals with variable categories

Prototypes or Exemplars?

• May use both

• Exemplars may work best for small categories

• Prototypes may work best for larger categories

Hierarchical Organization  

• To fully understand how people categorize objects, one must consider – Properties of objects

– Learning and experience of perceivers

Caption: Levels of categories for (a) furniture and (b) vehicles. Rosch provided  evidence for the idea that the basic level is “psychologically privileged.”

Caption: Left column: category levels; middle column: examples of each level for  furniture; right column: average number of common features, listed from Rosch,  Mervis et al.’s (1976) experiment.

Evidence that Basic Level is Special  

• People almost exclusively use basic-level names in free-naming tasks • Quicker to identify basic-level category member as a member of a category • Children learn basic-level concepts sooner than other levels  

• Basic-level is much more common in adult discourse than names for  superordinate categories  

• Different cultures tend to use the same basic-level categories, at least for  living things  

Caption: Results of Tanaka and Taylor’s (1991)  

“expert” experiment. Experts (left pair of bars)

used more specific categories to name birds,  

whereas nonexperts (right pair of bars) used  

more basic categories.

Semantic Networks  

• Concepts are arranged in networks that represent the way concepts are  organized in the mind

• Collins and Quillian (1969)

• Node = category/concept

• Concepts are linked

• Model for how concepts and properties are associated in the mind

Caption: Collins and Quillian’s (1969) semantic network. Specific concepts are  indicated in blue. Properties of concepts are indicated at the nodes for each  concept. Additional properties of a concept can be determined by moving up the  network, along the lines connecting the concepts. For example, moving from  “canary” up to “bird” indicates that canaries have feathers and wings and can fly.

• Cognitive economy: shared properties are only stored at higher-level nodes • Exceptions are stored at lower nodes

• Inheritance

• Lower-level items share properties of higher level items

Caption: The distance between concepts predicts how  long it takes to retrieve information about concepts as  measured by the sentence verification technique.  Because it is necessary to travel on two links to get from  canary to animal (left), but on only one to get from  canary to bird (right) it should take longer to verify the  statement “a canary is an animal.”

Semantic Networks

• Spreading activation

• Activation is the arousal level of a node

• When a node is activated, activity spreads out along all connected  links

• Concepts that receive activation are primed and more easily accessed  from memory

Figure 9.14 How activation can spread through a network as a person searches  from “robin” to “bird” (blue arrow). The dashed lines indicate activation that is  spreading from the activated bird node. Circled concepts, which have become  primed, are easier to retrieve from memory because of the spreading activation.

• Lexical decision task

• Participants read stimuli and are asked to say as quickly as possible  whether the item is a word or not

• Myer and Schvaneveldt (1971)

• Yes” if both strings are words; “no” if not

• Some pairs were closely associated

• Reaction time was faster for those pairs

• Spreading activation

• Criticism of Collins and Quillian

• Cannot explain typicality effects

• Cognitive economy?

• Some sentence-verification results are problematic for the model

• Collins and Loftus (1975) modifications

• Shorter links to connect closely related concepts

• Longer linkers for less closely related concepts

• No hierarchical structure; based on person’s experience

Caption: Semantic network  

proposed by Collins and Loftus  

(1975). (Reprinted from A.M.  

Collins & E.F. Loftus, “A  

Spreading-Activation Theory of  

Semantic Processing.” From  

Psychological Review, 82, pp.  

407-428, Fig. 1. Copyright ©  

1975 with permission from the American Psychological Association.

Assessment of Semantic Networks  

• Is predictive and explanatory of some results, but not all

• Generated multiple experiments

• Lack of falsifiability

• No rules for determining link length or how long activation will spread • Therefore, there is no experiment that would “prove it wrong” • Circular reasoning

How are Concepts Represented in the Brain?  

• Four Proposals:

• Sensory-Functional Hypothesis

• Multiple-Factor Approach

• Semantic Category Approach

• Embodied Approach

Sensory-Functional Hypothesis  

• Different brain areas may be specialized to process information about  different categories

– Double dissociation for categories “living things” and “nonliving things” (artifacts)

– Category-specific memory impairment

• Sensory-functional hypothesis:

– living things → sensory properties

– artifacts → functions

• Figure 9.21 Performance on a  

naming task for patients K.C.  

and E.W., both of whom had  

category-specific memory  

impairment. They were able to  

correctly name pictures of  

nonliving things (such as car  

and table) and fruits and  

vegetables (such as tomato  

and pear) but performed poorly

when asked to name pictures of

animals.

The Semantic Category Approach

• Specific neural circuits for specific categories

• Figure 9.24 Results of the Huth et al. (2016) experiment in which participants  listened to stories in a scanner. (a) Words that activated different places on  the cortex. (b) Close-up of a smaller area of cortex. Note that a particular  area usually responded to a number of different words, as indicated in Figure  9.25.

Multiple Factor Approach

• Distributed representation: how concepts are divided within a category – Animals → motion and color

– Artifacts → actions (using, interacting)

• Crowding: when different concepts within a category share many properties

– For example, “animals” all share “eyes,” “legs,” and “the ability to  move”

The Embodied Approach

• Knowledge of concepts is based on reactivation of sensory and motor  processes that occur when we interact with the object.

• Mirror neurons: fire when we do a task or we observe another doing that  same task

• Semantic somatotopy: correspondence between words related to specific  body parts and the location of brain activation

Figure 9.26 Hauk et al. (2004) results. Colored areas indicate the areas of the  brain activated by (a) foot, finger, and tongue movements; (b) leg, arm, and face  words.

CHAPTER 10 – Visual Imagery 

Some Questions to Consider

• How do “pictures in your head” created by imagining an object  compare to the experience you have when you see the actual object?

• How does damage to the brain affect the ability to form visual images? • How can we use visual imagery to improve memory?

• How do people differ in their ability to create visual images? What is Imagery  

• Visual imagery: “seeing” in the absence of a visual stimulus

• Provides a way of thinking that adds another dimension to  

purely verbal techniques

• Mental imagery: experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of  sensory input

Early Ideas About Imagery  

• Imageless thought debate

• Is thinking possible without images?

Imagery and the Cognitive Revolution  

• Developed ways to measure behavior that could be used to infer  cognitive processes

• Paired-associate learning

• Paivio (1963, 1965)

• Memory for words that evoke mental images is better than for  those that do not

• Conceptual peg hypothesis

• Shepard and Metzler (1971)

• Mental chronometry

• Participants mentally rotated one object to see if it matched  

another object

Figure 10.1 Stimuli for Shepard and Metzler’s

(1971) mental rotation experiment.

Imagery and Perception  

• Spatial correspondence between imagery and perception

• Mental scanning

• Participants create mental images and then scan them in their  minds

• Kosslyn (1973)

• Memorize picture and create an image of it

• In image, move from one part of the picture to the other

• It took longer for participants to mentally move long  

distances than shorter distances.

• Like perception, imagery is spatial.

• Figure 10.2 Stimulus for Kosslyn’s (1973) image-scanning  

experiment.

• Lea (1975)  

• More distractions when scanning longer distances may have  increased the reaction time.

• Interesting things encountered during the mental scan are  

responsible for these distractions.

• Kosslyn and coworkers (1978)

• Island with seven locations, 21 trips

• It took longer to scan between greater distances.

• Visual imagery is spatial.

Figure 10.4 (a) Island used in Kosslyn et al.’s (1978) image-scanning experiment.  Participants mentally traveled between various locations on the island. (b) Results of the island experiment.

Is Imagery Spatial or Propositional?  

• Pylyshyn (1973)

• Spatial representation is an epiphenomenon.

 Accompanies real mechanism but is not actually a part of it

• Proposed that imagery is propositional.

 Can be represented by abstract symbols

• Imagery debate

 Propositional representation: symbols, language

 Depictive representation: similar to realistic pictures

Figure 10.5 Propositional and spatial, or depictive, representations of “The cat is  under the table.”

Comparing Imagery and Perception  

• Relationship between viewing distance and ability to perceive details • Imagine small object next to large object

• Quicker to detect details on the larger object

Figure 10.7 Moving closer to an object, such as this car, has two effects: (1) The  object fills more of your visual field, and (2) details are easier to see.

• Mental walk task

• Move closer to small animals than to large animals

• Images are spatial, like perception

 Figure 10.8 These pictures represent images that Kosslyn’s (1978) participants  created, which filled different portions of their visual field. (a) Imagine elephant and  rabbit, so elephant fills the field. (b) Imagine rabbit and fly, so rabbit fills the field.  Reaction times indicate how long it took participants to answer questions about the  rabbit.

Interactions of Imagery and Perception  

• Perky (1910)

• Mistake actual picture for a mental image

Figure 10.9 Participant in Perky’s (1910) experiment. Unbeknownst to the  participants, Perky was projecting dim images onto the screen.

Figure 10.10 Procedure for Farah’s (1985) letter visualization experiment. (a) The  participant visualizes H or T on the screen. (b) Then two squares flash, one after the  other, on the same screen. As shown on the right, the target letter can be in the  first square or in the second one. The participants’ task is to determine whether the  test letter was flashed in the first square or in the second square. (c) Results  showing that accuracy was higher when the letter in (b) was the same as the one  that had been imagined in (a).

Imagery and the Brain  

 Imagery neurons respond to both perceiving and imagining an object • Overlap in brain activation

• Visual cortex

Figure 10.11 Responses of single neurons in a person’s medial temporal lobe that  (a) respond to perception of a baseball but not of a face, and (b) respond to  imagining a baseball but not to imagining a face

 Le Bihan and coworkers (1993)

• Overlap in brain activation

• Visual cortex

Figure 10.12 Results of Le Bihan et al.’s (1993) study measuring brain activity  using fMRI. Activity increases to presentation of a visual stimulus (shaded area  marked “Stimulus on”) and also increases when participants are imagining the

stimulus (area marked “Imagined stimulus”). In contrast, activity is low when there  is no actual or imagined stimulus.

 Ganis and coworkers (2004)

• Complete overlap of activation by perception and imagery in front of  the brain

• Differences near back of the brain

Figure 10.14 Procedure for Ganis et al.’s (2004) experiment. A trial begins with the name of an object that was previously studied, in this case “tree.” In the imagery  condition, participants had their eyes closed and had to imagine the tree. In the  perception condition, participants saw a faint picture of the object. Participants then heard instructions. The W in this example means they were to judge whether the  object was “wider than tall.”

 Amedi and coworkers (2005)

• Again, overlap

• Deactivation of nonvisual areas of brain

 Hearing

 Touch

• Mental images more fragile, less activation keeps other things from  interfering

 Brain activity in response to imagery  

• May indicate something is happening

• May not cause imagery

 Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

• Decreases brain functioning in a particular area of the brain for a short  time

• If behavior is disrupted, the deactivated part of the brain is causing  that behavior

 Kosslyn and coworkers (1999)

• TMS to visual area of brain during perception and imagery task • Response time slower for both

• Brain activity in visual area of brain plays a causal role for both  perception and imagery

Figure 10.18 Results of the mental walk task for patient M.G.S. Left: Before her  operation, she could mentally “walk” to within 15 feet before the image of the horse overflowed her visual field. Right: After removal of the right occipital lobe, the size  of the visual field was reduced, and she could mentally approach only to within 35  feet of the horse before it overflowed her visual field.

Neuropsychological Case Studies

 Unilateral neglect

• Patient ignores objects in one half of visual field in perception and  imagery

Dissociations Between Imagery and Perception  

 Guariglia and coworkers (1993)

• Brain-damaged patient

• Patient’s perceptions intact, but mental images were impaired  R.M.

• Damage to occipital and parietal lobes

• Could draw accurate pictures of objects in front of him

• Could not draw accurate pictures of objects from memory (using  imagery)

 C.K.

• Inability to name pictures of objects, even his own drawings, in front of  him

• Could draw objects in great detail from memory (using imagery)

Making Sense of Neuropsychological Results  

 Evidence for a double dissociation between imagery and perception • Indicates separate mechanisms

 Also evidence for shared mechanisms

Imagery and Perception  

 Differences in experience

• Perception is automatic and stable

• Imagery takes effort and is fragile

 Chalmers and Reisberg (1985)

• Had participants create mental images of ambiguous figures

• Difficult to flip from one perception to another while holding a mental  image of it

Figure 10.21 What is this, a rabbit (facing right) or a duck (facing left)? Using Imagery to Improve Memory  

 Placing images at locations

 Method of loci

• Visualizing items to be remembered in different locations in a mental  image of a spatial layout

 Associating images with words

 Pegword technique

• Associate items to be remembered with concrete words

• Pair each of these things with a pegword

• Create a vivid image of things to be remembered with the object  represented by the word  

CHAPTER 11 LANGUAGAGE 

• How do we understand individual words, and how are words combined to  create sentences?

• How can we understand sentences that have more than one meaning? • How do we understand stories?  

• Does language affect the way a person perceives colors?

What Is Language?  

• System of communication using sounds or symbols

• Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences

The Creativity of Human Language  

• Hierarchical system

• Components that can be combined to form larger units

• Governed by rules

• Specific ways components can be arranged

The Universality of Language

• Deaf children invent sign language

• All cultures have a language

• Language development is similar across cultures

• Languages are “unique but the same”

• Different words, sounds, and rules

• All have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology  

• B.F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behavior

• Language learned through reinforcement

• Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures

• Human language coded in the genes

• Underlying basis of all language is similar

• Children produce sentences they have never heard and that have  never been reinforced

• Psycholinguistics: discover psychological process by which humans acquire  and process language

• Comprehension

• Speech production

• Representation

• Acquisition

Perceiving and Understanding Words  

• Lexicon: all words a person understands

• Phoneme: shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word

• Morphemes: smallest unit of language that has meaning or grammatical  function

Lexical semantics: the meaning of words

– Each word has one or more meanings

• Phonemic restoration effect

– “Fill in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented

• Word frequency effect

– We respond faster to high-frequency words

– Rayner and Duffy (1986) fixation and gaze times

– Eye movements while reading

– Look at low-frequency words longer

• Variable word pronunciation

– “Didjoo?” “Gonna”

– Use context to understand words with unfamiliar pronunciations • Speech segmentation

– Perception of individual words even though there are no silences  between spoken words

– Context

– Understanding of meaning

– Understanding of sound and syntactic rules

– Statistical learning

• Lexical ambiguity

– Words have more than one meaning

– Context clears up ambiguity after all meanings of a word have been  briefly accessed

• Meaning dominance—some words are used more frequently than others

– Biased dominance

– When words have two or more meanings with different  

dominance

– Balanced dominance

– When words have two or more meanings with about the same  dominance

Meaning Dominance  

Figure 11.3 Accessing the meaning of ambiguous words while reading a sentence  is determined by the word’s dominance and the context created by the sentence. If  there is no prior context: (a) competition between equally likely meanings of a word  

with balanced dominance results in slow access; (b) activation of only the most  frequent meaning of a word with biased dominance results in fast access. If there is  context before a word with biased dominance: (c) activation of both the less  frequent and most frequent meanings results in slow access; (d) activation of only  the most frequent meaning results in fast access. See text for examples.

Understanding Sentences

• Semantics: meanings of words and sentences

• Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences

• Event-related potential and brain imaging studies have shown syntax  and semantics are associated with different mechanisms

• Parsing: mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases • Helps the listener create meaning

• Figure 11.4 Parsing is the process that occurs when a person hears or reads a string of words (Words in) and groups these words into phrases in their mind (Parsed sentence in mind). The way the words are  grouped in this example indicates that the person has interpreted the  sentence to mean that the musician played the piano and then left the  stage.

• Syntactic ambiguity: more than one possible structure, more than one  meaning

• Garden path sentences

• Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing, but then  end up meaning something else

• Temporary ambiguity

• When the initial words are ambiguous, but the meaning is made  clear by the end of the sentence

• Syntax-first approach to parsing

• Listeners use heuristics (rules) to group words into phrases

• Grammatical structure of sentence determines parsing

• Late closure: parser assumes new word is part of the current phrase • A.k.a. the Garden-path model

• Interactionist (constraint-based) approach to parsing

• Semantics influence processing as one reads a sentence, along with  syntax

• Word meaning

• Story context

• Memory load

• Subject-relative and object-relative sentence construction

• Tannenhaus and coworkers (1995)

• Visual world paradigm, the context of a scene

• Eye movements change when information suggests revision of  interpretation of sentence is necessary

• Syntactic and semantic information used simultaneously

• Understanding Sentences: Story Context  

Figure 11.6 (a) One-apple scene similar to the one viewed by Tanenhaus et al.’s  (1995) participants. (b) Eye movements made while comprehending the task. (c)  Proportion of trials in which eye movements were made to the towel on the right for  the ambiguous sentence. (Place the apple on the towel in the box) and the  unambiguous sentence (Place the apple that’s on the towel in the box).

Figure 11.7 (a) Two-apple scene similar to the one viewed by Tanenhaus et al.’s  (1995) subjects. (b) Eye movements while comprehending the task. (c) Proportion of trials in which eye movements were made to the towel on the right for the  ambiguous sentence (Place the apple on the towel in the box) and the unambiguous sentence (Place the apple that’s on the towel in the box).

Understanding Text and Stories  

• Coherence: representation of the text in one’s mind so that information from one part of the text can be related to information in another part of the text

• Between parts of text

• Also, between local parts of text and the overall topic of the story

• Inference: readers create information during reading not explicitly stated in  the text

• Anaphoric: connecting objects/people

• Instrumental: tools or methods

• Causal: events in one clause caused by events in previous sentence • Situation model: mental representation of what a text is about • Represent events as if experiencing the situation

• Point of view of protagonist

• Figure 11.9 Stimuli similar to those used in (a) Stanfield and Zwaan’s (2001) “orientation” experiment and (b) Zwaan et al.’s (2002) “shape” experiment.  Subjects heard sentences and were then asked to indicate whether the  picture was the object mentioned in the sentence

Figure 11.10 Results of Stanfield  

and Zwaan’s (2001) and Zwaan et  

al.’s (2002) experiments. Subjects  

responded “yes” more rapidly for the  

orientation, in (a), and the shape, in  

(b), that was more consistent with the

sentence.

• Physiology of simulations

• Approximately the same  

areas of the cortex are  

activated by actual  

movements and by  

reading related action  

words

• The activation is more  

extensive for actual  

movements

Situation Models and Brain Activation  

Hauk et al. (2004) results. Colored areas indicate the areas of the brain activated by (a) foot, finger, and tongue movements; (b) leg, arm, and face words.

Producing Language: Conversation  

• Two or more people talking together

• Dynamic and rapid

• Semantic coordination

• Conversations go more smoothly if participants have shared knowledge Producing Speech: Conversations

• Given-new contract: speaker constructs sentences so they include • Given information

• New information

• New can then become given information

• Common ground

• Entrainment: synchronization between conversation partners • Syntactic coordination

• Using similar grammatical constructions

• Syntactic priming

• Production of a specific grammatical construction by one person  increases chances other person will use that construction

• Reduces computational load in conversation

The Branigan et al. (2000) experiment. (a) The subject (right) picks, from the cards  laid out on the table, a card with a picture that matches the statement read by the  confederate (left). (b) The participant then takes a card from the pile of response  cards and describes the picture on the response card to the confederate. This is the  key part of the experiment, because the question is whether the participant on the  right will match the syntactic construction used by the confederate on the left.

• Other skills are necessary for people to engage in effective conversations.

• Theory of mind: being able to understand what others feel, think, or  believe

• Nonverbal communication: being able to interpret and react to the  person’s gestures, facial expressions, tones of voice, and other cues to  meaning

Culture, Language, & Cognition  

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language influences thought

• Roberson and coworkers (2000)

• Two cultures had differences in how participants assigned names to  color chips

• Categorical perception

• Stimuli in same categories are more difficult to discriminate from one  another than stimuli in two different categories

• Differences in the way names were assigned to colors affect the ability to tell  the difference between colors

• Language can affect color perception

• Limits to the effects of language

• Regier and coworkers (2005)

• Different languages have similar choice for “best” color  

examples

Super Summarized Study Guide Exam 3  

CHAPER 8- EVERYDAY MEMORY AND MEMORY ERRORS

The Constructive Nature of Memory

 Definition of Memory

 Bartlett’s “war of the ghosts” experiment  Source Monitoring  

 Source Memory

 Source Monitoring Error  

 Cryptomnesia

 Jacoby and Coworkers

o Famous – nonfamous test

 The Illusory Truth Effect  

 Making inference  

o Pragmatic Inferences  

Schemas and Scripts  

 Schema

 Script  

 How they influence memory

Construction on Memories

 Advantages

 Disadvantages

Power of Suggestion  

 The Missinformation Effect  

o Misleading Postevent Information (MPI)  Loftus and Coworkers

 Loftus and Palmer  

CHAPTER 9 – CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE

Knowledge

 Conceptual Knowledge  

 Concept  

 Categorization  

Why Categories are Useful  

 Pointers to Knowledge

Definitional Approach to Categorization

Family Resemblance

The Prototype Approach

 High Prototypicality

 Low Prototypicality

 Typicality Effect

 Rosch’s Priming  

The Exemplar Approach  

Prototype vs Exemplar  

Hierarchical Organization  

 Evidence that Basic Level is Special  Semantic Networks  

 Collins and Quillian (1969)

 Cognitive Economy

 Inheritance  

 Spreading Activation  

 Lexical decision task  

 Myer and Schvaneveldt

 Criticism of Collins and Qullian  

 Collins and Loftus modifications  

 Assessment of Semantic Networks   How are Concepts Represented in the Brain   Sensory-Functional Approach

 The Semantic Category Approach  

Multiple Factor Approach  

 Distributed Representation

 Crowding  

The Embodied Approach  

 Mirror Neurons  

 Semantic Somatotopy  

CHAPTER 10 VISUAL IMAGERY

What Is Imagery  

 Visual Imagery  

 Mental Imagery  

Early Ideas About Imagery  

 Images Thought Debate

Imagery and the Cognitive Revolution  

 Developed ways to measure behavior that could be used to infer  cognitive processes  

 Paivio

 Shepard and Metzler

Imagery and Perception  

 Spatial Correspondence between imagery and perception   Kosslyn (1973)

 Lea (1975)

 Kosslyn and Coworkers (1978)

Is Imagery Spatial or Propositional  

 Pylyshyn  

 Spatial representation is an epiphenomenon  

 Proposed that imagery is propositional  

 Imagery debate

Comparing Imagery and Perception  

 Relationship between viewing distance and ability to perceive  details  

 Mental Walk Task

Interactions of Imagery and Perception  

 Perky (1910)

 Mistake actual picture for a mental image  

Imagery and the BraiUn  

 Imagery Neurons Respond to both Perceiving and Imagining an  Object  

 Le Bihan and Coworkers (1993)

 Ganis and Coworksers (2004)

 Amedi and Coworkers (2005)

 Brain Activity in Response to Imagery

 Transcranial Magnetic Simulation (TMS)

 Kosslyn and Coworkers (1999)

Neuropsychological Case Studies  

 Unilateral Neglet

Dissociations Between Imagery and Perception  

 Guariglia and Coworkers  

 R.M.

 C.K.

Making Sense of Neuropsychological Results  

 Evidence for Double Dissociation between imagery and perception  and shared Mechanisms

Imagery and Perception  

 Differences In Experience  

 Chalmers and Reisberg (1985)

Using Imagery to Improve Memory  

 Placing Images at Locations  

 Method of Loci

 Associating Images with Words

 Pegword Technique

CHAPTER 11 – LANGUAGE  

What is Language?

The Creativity of Human Language  

 Hierarchical System

 Governed by Rules

The Universality of Language  

Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology

 B.F. Skinner (1975) Verbal Behavior

 Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures

 Psycholinguistics

Perceiving and Understanding Words

 Lexicon  

 Phoneme

 Morphemes  

 Lexical Semantics  

 Phonemic Restoration Effect

 Word Frequency Effect  

o Rayner and Duffy (1986)

 Variable Word Pronunciation  

 Speech Segmentation  

 Lexical Ambiguity

 Meaning Dominance  

o Biased Dominance

o Balanced Dominance  

Understanding Sentences

 Semantics  

 Syntax

 Parsing  

 Syntactic Ambiguity

 Syntax-first approach to parsing  

 Interactionist (Constraint-based) approach to parsing  Tannenhaus and Coworkers (1995)

 Story Context

Understanding Text and Stories

 Coherence

 Inference  

 Situation Model  

 Stanfield and Zwaan’s “Orientation” experiment   Situation Models and Brain Activation  

o Hauk et al.  

 Producing Language: Converesation

 Producing Speech: Conversations

o Given-new Contract

o Common ground  

o Syntactic Coordination  

o Syntactic Priming  

o Theory of Mind  

Culture, Language & Cognition

 Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Language Influences Thought   Roberson and Coworkers (2000)

 Categorical Perception  

 Language and Color  

 Limits to the Effects of Language

o Regier and Coworkers (2005)

CHAPTER 8 – Everyday Memory and Memory Errors 

The Constructive Nature of Memory  

• Memory = what actually happens + person’s knowledge, experiences, and  expectations

• Bartlett’s “war of the ghosts” experiment

• Had participants attempt to remember a story from a different culture • Repeated reproduction  

• Results

• Over time, reproduction became shorter, contained omissions and  inaccuracies

• Changed to make the story more consistent with their own culture Source Monitoring  

• Source memory: process of determining origins of our memories • Source monitoring error: misidentifying source of memory – Also called “source misattributions”

• Cryptomnesia: unconscious plagiarism of another’s work due to a lack of  recognition of its original source

• Jacoby and coworkers (1989)

• After 24 hours, some non-famous names were misidentified as famous

• Explanation: some non-famous names were familiar, and the participants  misattributed the source of the familiarity

– Failed to identify the source as the list that had been read the previous  day

The Illusory Truth Effect  

• Enhanced probability of evaluating a statement is true after repeated  presentation

• Occurs due to fluency or familiarity with the information

• Related to the propaganda effect

– Both result from stimulus repetition

Making Inference

• Memory can be influenced by inferences that people make based on their  experiences and knowledge

• Pragmatic inferences: based on knowledge gained through experience

– Memory often includes information that is implied by or is consistent  with the to be remembered information but was not explicitly stated

Schemas and Scripts  

• Schema: knowledge about some aspect of the environment – e.g., Post office, ball game, classroom

• Script: conception of sequence of actions that usually occurs during a  particular experience

– Going to a restaurant; playing tennis

– A type of schema

• Schemas and scripts influence memory

– Memory can include information not actually experienced but inferred  because it is expected and consistent with the schema

– Office waiting room: books not present but mentioned in memory task

– The constructive nature of memory can lead to errors or “false  memories”

Construction of Memories  

• Advantages

– Allows us to “fill in the blanks”

– Cognition is creative

• Understand language

• Solve problems

• Make decisions

• Disadvantages

– Sometimes we make errors

– Sometimes we misattribute the source of information

– Was it actually presented or did we infer it?

Power of Suggestion

• The misinformation effect: misleading information presented after  someone witnesses an event can change how that person later describes the  event

– Misleading postevent information (MPI)

• Loftus and coworkers (1975)

– See slides of traffic accident with stop sign

– Introduce MPI: yield sign

– Participants remember what they heard (yield sign) and not what they  saw (stop sign)

• Loftus and Palmer (1974)

– Hear “smashed” or “hit” in description of car accident

– Those hearing “smashed” said the cars were going much faster than  those who heard “hit”

CHAPTER 9 – CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE

• Why is it difficult to decide if a particular object belongs to a particular  category, such as “chair,” by looking up its definition?  

• How are the properties of various objects “filed away” in the mind?  • How is information about different categories stored in the brain? • Can young infants respond to the categories “cat” and “dog”?

Knowledge  

• Conceptual knowledge: enables us to recognize objects and events and to  make inferences about their properties

• Concept: mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions

• Categorization is the process by which things are placed into groups called  categories

• Categories are all possible examples of a particular concept

Why Categories are Useful

• Help to understand individual cases not previously encountered • “Pointers to knowledge”

• Categories provide a wealth of general information about an item • Allow us to identify the special characteristics of a particular item

Caption: Knowing that something is in a category provides a great deal of  information about it.

Definitional Approach to Categorization  

• Determine category membership based on whether the object meets the  definition of the category

• Does not work well

• Not all members of everyday categories have the same defining features

Caption: Different objects, all possible “chairs.”

Family resemblance

• Things in a category resemble one another in a number of ways The Prototype Approach  

• Prototype = “typical”

• An abstract representation of the “typical” member of a category • Characteristic features that describe what members of that concept are like • An average of category members encountered in the past  

• Contains the most salient features  

• True of most instances of that category

Figure 9.3 Three real birds—a sparrow, a robin, and a blue jay—and a “prototype”  bird that is the average representation of the category “birds.”

Caption: Results of Rosch’s (1975a) experiment, in which participants judged  objects on a scale of 1 (good example of a category) to 7 (poor example): (a) ratings for birds; (b) ratings for furniture

• High prototypicality: a category member closely resembles the category  prototype

• “Typical” member

• For category “bird” = robin

• Low prototypicality: a category member does not closely resemble the  category prototype

• For category “bird” = penguin

• Strong positive relationship between prototypicality and family resemblance

• When items have a large amount of overlap with characteristics of other  items in the category, the family resemblance of these items is high

• Low overlap = low family resemblance

• Typicality effect: prototypical objects are processed preferentially • Highly prototypical objects judged more rapidly

• Sentence verification technique

Caption: Results of E.E. Smith et  

al.’s (1974) sentence verification  

experiment. Reaction times were  

faster for objects rated higher in  

prototypicality  

• Prototypical category  

members are more affected by a priming stimulus

• Rosch (1975b)

• Hearing “green” primes a highly prototypical “green”

Prototype Approach: Rosch’s Priming

Caption: Procedure for Rosch’s (1975b) priming experiment. Results for the  conditions when the test colors were the same are shown on the right. (a) The  person’s “green” prototype matches the good green, but (b) is a poor match for the  light green.

The Exemplar Approach  

• Concept is represented by multiple examples  

(rather than a single prototype)

• Examples are actual category members  

(not abstract averages)

• To categorize, compare the new item to stored examples  

• Explains typicality effect

• Easily takes into account atypical cases

• Easily deals with variable categories

Prototypes or Exemplars?

• May use both

• Exemplars may work best for small categories

• Prototypes may work best for larger categories

Hierarchical Organization  

• To fully understand how people categorize objects, one must consider – Properties of objects

– Learning and experience of perceivers

Caption: Levels of categories for (a) furniture and (b) vehicles. Rosch provided  evidence for the idea that the basic level is “psychologically privileged.”

Caption: Left column: category levels; middle column: examples of each level for  furniture; right column: average number of common features, listed from Rosch,  Mervis et al.’s (1976) experiment.

Evidence that Basic Level is Special  

• People almost exclusively use basic-level names in free-naming tasks • Quicker to identify basic-level category member as a member of a category • Children learn basic-level concepts sooner than other levels  

• Basic-level is much more common in adult discourse than names for  superordinate categories  

• Different cultures tend to use the same basic-level categories, at least for  living things  

Caption: Results of Tanaka and Taylor’s (1991)  

“expert” experiment. Experts (left pair of bars)

used more specific categories to name birds,  

whereas nonexperts (right pair of bars) used  

more basic categories.

Semantic Networks  

• Concepts are arranged in networks that represent the way concepts are  organized in the mind

• Collins and Quillian (1969)

• Node = category/concept

• Concepts are linked

• Model for how concepts and properties are associated in the mind

Caption: Collins and Quillian’s (1969) semantic network. Specific concepts are  indicated in blue. Properties of concepts are indicated at the nodes for each  concept. Additional properties of a concept can be determined by moving up the  network, along the lines connecting the concepts. For example, moving from  “canary” up to “bird” indicates that canaries have feathers and wings and can fly.

• Cognitive economy: shared properties are only stored at higher-level nodes • Exceptions are stored at lower nodes

• Inheritance

• Lower-level items share properties of higher level items

Caption: The distance between concepts predicts how  long it takes to retrieve information about concepts as  measured by the sentence verification technique.  Because it is necessary to travel on two links to get from  canary to animal (left), but on only one to get from  canary to bird (right) it should take longer to verify the  statement “a canary is an animal.”

Semantic Networks

• Spreading activation

• Activation is the arousal level of a node

• When a node is activated, activity spreads out along all connected  links

• Concepts that receive activation are primed and more easily accessed  from memory

Figure 9.14 How activation can spread through a network as a person searches  from “robin” to “bird” (blue arrow). The dashed lines indicate activation that is  spreading from the activated bird node. Circled concepts, which have become  primed, are easier to retrieve from memory because of the spreading activation.

• Lexical decision task

• Participants read stimuli and are asked to say as quickly as possible  whether the item is a word or not

• Myer and Schvaneveldt (1971)

• Yes” if both strings are words; “no” if not

• Some pairs were closely associated

• Reaction time was faster for those pairs

• Spreading activation

• Criticism of Collins and Quillian

• Cannot explain typicality effects

• Cognitive economy?

• Some sentence-verification results are problematic for the model

• Collins and Loftus (1975) modifications

• Shorter links to connect closely related concepts

• Longer linkers for less closely related concepts

• No hierarchical structure; based on person’s experience

Caption: Semantic network  

proposed by Collins and Loftus  

(1975). (Reprinted from A.M.  

Collins & E.F. Loftus, “A  

Spreading-Activation Theory of  

Semantic Processing.” From  

Psychological Review, 82, pp.  

407-428, Fig. 1. Copyright ©  

1975 with permission from the American Psychological Association.

Assessment of Semantic Networks  

• Is predictive and explanatory of some results, but not all

• Generated multiple experiments

• Lack of falsifiability

• No rules for determining link length or how long activation will spread • Therefore, there is no experiment that would “prove it wrong” • Circular reasoning

How are Concepts Represented in the Brain?  

• Four Proposals:

• Sensory-Functional Hypothesis

• Multiple-Factor Approach

• Semantic Category Approach

• Embodied Approach

Sensory-Functional Hypothesis  

• Different brain areas may be specialized to process information about  different categories

– Double dissociation for categories “living things” and “nonliving things” (artifacts)

– Category-specific memory impairment

• Sensory-functional hypothesis:

– living things → sensory properties

– artifacts → functions

• Figure 9.21 Performance on a  

naming task for patients K.C.  

and E.W., both of whom had  

category-specific memory  

impairment. They were able to  

correctly name pictures of  

nonliving things (such as car  

and table) and fruits and  

vegetables (such as tomato  

and pear) but performed poorly

when asked to name pictures of

animals.

The Semantic Category Approach

• Specific neural circuits for specific categories

• Figure 9.24 Results of the Huth et al. (2016) experiment in which participants  listened to stories in a scanner. (a) Words that activated different places on  the cortex. (b) Close-up of a smaller area of cortex. Note that a particular  area usually responded to a number of different words, as indicated in Figure  9.25.

Multiple Factor Approach

• Distributed representation: how concepts are divided within a category – Animals → motion and color

– Artifacts → actions (using, interacting)

• Crowding: when different concepts within a category share many properties

– For example, “animals” all share “eyes,” “legs,” and “the ability to  move”

The Embodied Approach

• Knowledge of concepts is based on reactivation of sensory and motor  processes that occur when we interact with the object.

• Mirror neurons: fire when we do a task or we observe another doing that  same task

• Semantic somatotopy: correspondence between words related to specific  body parts and the location of brain activation

Figure 9.26 Hauk et al. (2004) results. Colored areas indicate the areas of the  brain activated by (a) foot, finger, and tongue movements; (b) leg, arm, and face  words.

CHAPTER 10 – Visual Imagery 

Some Questions to Consider

• How do “pictures in your head” created by imagining an object  compare to the experience you have when you see the actual object?

• How does damage to the brain affect the ability to form visual images? • How can we use visual imagery to improve memory?

• How do people differ in their ability to create visual images? What is Imagery  

• Visual imagery: “seeing” in the absence of a visual stimulus

• Provides a way of thinking that adds another dimension to  

purely verbal techniques

• Mental imagery: experiencing a sensory impression in the absence of  sensory input

Early Ideas About Imagery  

• Imageless thought debate

• Is thinking possible without images?

Imagery and the Cognitive Revolution  

• Developed ways to measure behavior that could be used to infer  cognitive processes

• Paired-associate learning

• Paivio (1963, 1965)

• Memory for words that evoke mental images is better than for  those that do not

• Conceptual peg hypothesis

• Shepard and Metzler (1971)

• Mental chronometry

• Participants mentally rotated one object to see if it matched  

another object

Figure 10.1 Stimuli for Shepard and Metzler’s

(1971) mental rotation experiment.

Imagery and Perception  

• Spatial correspondence between imagery and perception

• Mental scanning

• Participants create mental images and then scan them in their  minds

• Kosslyn (1973)

• Memorize picture and create an image of it

• In image, move from one part of the picture to the other

• It took longer for participants to mentally move long  

distances than shorter distances.

• Like perception, imagery is spatial.

• Figure 10.2 Stimulus for Kosslyn’s (1973) image-scanning  

experiment.

• Lea (1975)  

• More distractions when scanning longer distances may have  increased the reaction time.

• Interesting things encountered during the mental scan are  

responsible for these distractions.

• Kosslyn and coworkers (1978)

• Island with seven locations, 21 trips

• It took longer to scan between greater distances.

• Visual imagery is spatial.

Figure 10.4 (a) Island used in Kosslyn et al.’s (1978) image-scanning experiment.  Participants mentally traveled between various locations on the island. (b) Results of the island experiment.

Is Imagery Spatial or Propositional?  

• Pylyshyn (1973)

• Spatial representation is an epiphenomenon.

 Accompanies real mechanism but is not actually a part of it

• Proposed that imagery is propositional.

 Can be represented by abstract symbols

• Imagery debate

 Propositional representation: symbols, language

 Depictive representation: similar to realistic pictures

Figure 10.5 Propositional and spatial, or depictive, representations of “The cat is  under the table.”

Comparing Imagery and Perception  

• Relationship between viewing distance and ability to perceive details • Imagine small object next to large object

• Quicker to detect details on the larger object

Figure 10.7 Moving closer to an object, such as this car, has two effects: (1) The  object fills more of your visual field, and (2) details are easier to see.

• Mental walk task

• Move closer to small animals than to large animals

• Images are spatial, like perception

 Figure 10.8 These pictures represent images that Kosslyn’s (1978) participants  created, which filled different portions of their visual field. (a) Imagine elephant and  rabbit, so elephant fills the field. (b) Imagine rabbit and fly, so rabbit fills the field.  Reaction times indicate how long it took participants to answer questions about the  rabbit.

Interactions of Imagery and Perception  

• Perky (1910)

• Mistake actual picture for a mental image

Figure 10.9 Participant in Perky’s (1910) experiment. Unbeknownst to the  participants, Perky was projecting dim images onto the screen.

Figure 10.10 Procedure for Farah’s (1985) letter visualization experiment. (a) The  participant visualizes H or T on the screen. (b) Then two squares flash, one after the  other, on the same screen. As shown on the right, the target letter can be in the  first square or in the second one. The participants’ task is to determine whether the  test letter was flashed in the first square or in the second square. (c) Results  showing that accuracy was higher when the letter in (b) was the same as the one  that had been imagined in (a).

Imagery and the Brain  

 Imagery neurons respond to both perceiving and imagining an object • Overlap in brain activation

• Visual cortex

Figure 10.11 Responses of single neurons in a person’s medial temporal lobe that  (a) respond to perception of a baseball but not of a face, and (b) respond to  imagining a baseball but not to imagining a face

 Le Bihan and coworkers (1993)

• Overlap in brain activation

• Visual cortex

Figure 10.12 Results of Le Bihan et al.’s (1993) study measuring brain activity  using fMRI. Activity increases to presentation of a visual stimulus (shaded area  marked “Stimulus on”) and also increases when participants are imagining the

stimulus (area marked “Imagined stimulus”). In contrast, activity is low when there  is no actual or imagined stimulus.

 Ganis and coworkers (2004)

• Complete overlap of activation by perception and imagery in front of  the brain

• Differences near back of the brain

Figure 10.14 Procedure for Ganis et al.’s (2004) experiment. A trial begins with the name of an object that was previously studied, in this case “tree.” In the imagery  condition, participants had their eyes closed and had to imagine the tree. In the  perception condition, participants saw a faint picture of the object. Participants then heard instructions. The W in this example means they were to judge whether the  object was “wider than tall.”

 Amedi and coworkers (2005)

• Again, overlap

• Deactivation of nonvisual areas of brain

 Hearing

 Touch

• Mental images more fragile, less activation keeps other things from  interfering

 Brain activity in response to imagery  

• May indicate something is happening

• May not cause imagery

 Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

• Decreases brain functioning in a particular area of the brain for a short  time

• If behavior is disrupted, the deactivated part of the brain is causing  that behavior

 Kosslyn and coworkers (1999)

• TMS to visual area of brain during perception and imagery task • Response time slower for both

• Brain activity in visual area of brain plays a causal role for both  perception and imagery

Figure 10.18 Results of the mental walk task for patient M.G.S. Left: Before her  operation, she could mentally “walk” to within 15 feet before the image of the horse overflowed her visual field. Right: After removal of the right occipital lobe, the size  of the visual field was reduced, and she could mentally approach only to within 35  feet of the horse before it overflowed her visual field.

Neuropsychological Case Studies

 Unilateral neglect

• Patient ignores objects in one half of visual field in perception and  imagery

Dissociations Between Imagery and Perception  

 Guariglia and coworkers (1993)

• Brain-damaged patient

• Patient’s perceptions intact, but mental images were impaired  R.M.

• Damage to occipital and parietal lobes

• Could draw accurate pictures of objects in front of him

• Could not draw accurate pictures of objects from memory (using  imagery)

 C.K.

• Inability to name pictures of objects, even his own drawings, in front of  him

• Could draw objects in great detail from memory (using imagery)

Making Sense of Neuropsychological Results  

 Evidence for a double dissociation between imagery and perception • Indicates separate mechanisms

 Also evidence for shared mechanisms

Imagery and Perception  

 Differences in experience

• Perception is automatic and stable

• Imagery takes effort and is fragile

 Chalmers and Reisberg (1985)

• Had participants create mental images of ambiguous figures

• Difficult to flip from one perception to another while holding a mental  image of it

Figure 10.21 What is this, a rabbit (facing right) or a duck (facing left)? Using Imagery to Improve Memory  

 Placing images at locations

 Method of loci

• Visualizing items to be remembered in different locations in a mental  image of a spatial layout

 Associating images with words

 Pegword technique

• Associate items to be remembered with concrete words

• Pair each of these things with a pegword

• Create a vivid image of things to be remembered with the object  represented by the word  

CHAPTER 11 LANGUAGAGE 

• How do we understand individual words, and how are words combined to  create sentences?

• How can we understand sentences that have more than one meaning? • How do we understand stories?  

• Does language affect the way a person perceives colors?

What Is Language?  

• System of communication using sounds or symbols

• Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences

The Creativity of Human Language  

• Hierarchical system

• Components that can be combined to form larger units

• Governed by rules

• Specific ways components can be arranged

The Universality of Language

• Deaf children invent sign language

• All cultures have a language

• Language development is similar across cultures

• Languages are “unique but the same”

• Different words, sounds, and rules

• All have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense Studying Language in Cognitive Psychology  

• B.F. Skinner (1957) Verbal Behavior

• Language learned through reinforcement

• Noam Chomsky (1957) Syntactic Structures

• Human language coded in the genes

• Underlying basis of all language is similar

• Children produce sentences they have never heard and that have  never been reinforced

• Psycholinguistics: discover psychological process by which humans acquire  and process language

• Comprehension

• Speech production

• Representation

• Acquisition

Perceiving and Understanding Words  

• Lexicon: all words a person understands

• Phoneme: shortest segment of speech that, if changed, changes the meaning of the word

• Morphemes: smallest unit of language that has meaning or grammatical  function

Lexical semantics: the meaning of words

– Each word has one or more meanings

• Phonemic restoration effect

– “Fill in” missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented

• Word frequency effect

– We respond faster to high-frequency words

– Rayner and Duffy (1986) fixation and gaze times

– Eye movements while reading

– Look at low-frequency words longer

• Variable word pronunciation

– “Didjoo?” “Gonna”

– Use context to understand words with unfamiliar pronunciations • Speech segmentation

– Perception of individual words even though there are no silences  between spoken words

– Context

– Understanding of meaning

– Understanding of sound and syntactic rules

– Statistical learning

• Lexical ambiguity

– Words have more than one meaning

– Context clears up ambiguity after all meanings of a word have been  briefly accessed

• Meaning dominance—some words are used more frequently than others

– Biased dominance

– When words have two or more meanings with different  

dominance

– Balanced dominance

– When words have two or more meanings with about the same  dominance

Meaning Dominance  

Figure 11.3 Accessing the meaning of ambiguous words while reading a sentence  is determined by the word’s dominance and the context created by the sentence. If  there is no prior context: (a) competition between equally likely meanings of a word  

with balanced dominance results in slow access; (b) activation of only the most  frequent meaning of a word with biased dominance results in fast access. If there is  context before a word with biased dominance: (c) activation of both the less  frequent and most frequent meanings results in slow access; (d) activation of only  the most frequent meaning results in fast access. See text for examples.

Understanding Sentences

• Semantics: meanings of words and sentences

• Syntax: rules for combining words into sentences

• Event-related potential and brain imaging studies have shown syntax  and semantics are associated with different mechanisms

• Parsing: mental grouping of words in a sentence into phrases • Helps the listener create meaning

• Figure 11.4 Parsing is the process that occurs when a person hears or reads a string of words (Words in) and groups these words into phrases in their mind (Parsed sentence in mind). The way the words are  grouped in this example indicates that the person has interpreted the  sentence to mean that the musician played the piano and then left the  stage.

• Syntactic ambiguity: more than one possible structure, more than one  meaning

• Garden path sentences

• Sentences that begin by appearing to mean one thing, but then  end up meaning something else

• Temporary ambiguity

• When the initial words are ambiguous, but the meaning is made  clear by the end of the sentence

• Syntax-first approach to parsing

• Listeners use heuristics (rules) to group words into phrases

• Grammatical structure of sentence determines parsing

• Late closure: parser assumes new word is part of the current phrase • A.k.a. the Garden-path model

• Interactionist (constraint-based) approach to parsing

• Semantics influence processing as one reads a sentence, along with  syntax

• Word meaning

• Story context

• Memory load

• Subject-relative and object-relative sentence construction

• Tannenhaus and coworkers (1995)

• Visual world paradigm, the context of a scene

• Eye movements change when information suggests revision of  interpretation of sentence is necessary

• Syntactic and semantic information used simultaneously

• Understanding Sentences: Story Context  

Figure 11.6 (a) One-apple scene similar to the one viewed by Tanenhaus et al.’s  (1995) participants. (b) Eye movements made while comprehending the task. (c)  Proportion of trials in which eye movements were made to the towel on the right for  the ambiguous sentence. (Place the apple on the towel in the box) and the  unambiguous sentence (Place the apple that’s on the towel in the box).

Figure 11.7 (a) Two-apple scene similar to the one viewed by Tanenhaus et al.’s  (1995) subjects. (b) Eye movements while comprehending the task. (c) Proportion of trials in which eye movements were made to the towel on the right for the  ambiguous sentence (Place the apple on the towel in the box) and the unambiguous sentence (Place the apple that’s on the towel in the box).

Understanding Text and Stories  

• Coherence: representation of the text in one’s mind so that information from one part of the text can be related to information in another part of the text

• Between parts of text

• Also, between local parts of text and the overall topic of the story

• Inference: readers create information during reading not explicitly stated in  the text

• Anaphoric: connecting objects/people

• Instrumental: tools or methods

• Causal: events in one clause caused by events in previous sentence • Situation model: mental representation of what a text is about • Represent events as if experiencing the situation

• Point of view of protagonist

• Figure 11.9 Stimuli similar to those used in (a) Stanfield and Zwaan’s (2001) “orientation” experiment and (b) Zwaan et al.’s (2002) “shape” experiment.  Subjects heard sentences and were then asked to indicate whether the  picture was the object mentioned in the sentence

Figure 11.10 Results of Stanfield  

and Zwaan’s (2001) and Zwaan et  

al.’s (2002) experiments. Subjects  

responded “yes” more rapidly for the  

orientation, in (a), and the shape, in  

(b), that was more consistent with the

sentence.

• Physiology of simulations

• Approximately the same  

areas of the cortex are  

activated by actual  

movements and by  

reading related action  

words

• The activation is more  

extensive for actual  

movements

Situation Models and Brain Activation  

Hauk et al. (2004) results. Colored areas indicate the areas of the brain activated by (a) foot, finger, and tongue movements; (b) leg, arm, and face words.

Producing Language: Conversation  

• Two or more people talking together

• Dynamic and rapid

• Semantic coordination

• Conversations go more smoothly if participants have shared knowledge Producing Speech: Conversations

• Given-new contract: speaker constructs sentences so they include • Given information

• New information

• New can then become given information

• Common ground

• Entrainment: synchronization between conversation partners • Syntactic coordination

• Using similar grammatical constructions

• Syntactic priming

• Production of a specific grammatical construction by one person  increases chances other person will use that construction

• Reduces computational load in conversation

The Branigan et al. (2000) experiment. (a) The subject (right) picks, from the cards  laid out on the table, a card with a picture that matches the statement read by the  confederate (left). (b) The participant then takes a card from the pile of response  cards and describes the picture on the response card to the confederate. This is the  key part of the experiment, because the question is whether the participant on the  right will match the syntactic construction used by the confederate on the left.

• Other skills are necessary for people to engage in effective conversations.

• Theory of mind: being able to understand what others feel, think, or  believe

• Nonverbal communication: being able to interpret and react to the  person’s gestures, facial expressions, tones of voice, and other cues to  meaning

Culture, Language, & Cognition  

• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: language influences thought

• Roberson and coworkers (2000)

• Two cultures had differences in how participants assigned names to  color chips

• Categorical perception

• Stimuli in same categories are more difficult to discriminate from one  another than stimuli in two different categories

• Differences in the way names were assigned to colors affect the ability to tell  the difference between colors

• Language can affect color perception

• Limits to the effects of language

• Regier and coworkers (2005)

• Different languages have similar choice for “best” color  

examples