Encoding: the initial experience of perceiving and learning events.

o Occurs during our initial exposure to info, usually happens automatically

o Not everything we experience is encoded and retained for long-term
(routine occurrences)
Distinctiveness: unusual events are more likely to be recalled and recognized
than commonplace (nondistinctive) events)
o People often have great confidence in memories of emotional, distinctive
events, but research shows that the accuracy of those memories are far
from perfect
Amnesia
o Anterograde: loss of ability to assimilate or retain new knowledge
o Retrograde: loss of memory for events that happened in the past
Lists and serial-order effects: better remember beginnings and ends of lists than
middle
o Primacy effect: tendency to remember the beginning of the list
o Recency effect: tendency to remember the end of the list
Organize studying:
o All at once or spread out?
o Varied study
o Location/mood
The levels of processing principle: the ease with which we retrieve memories
depends on the number and types of associations that we form with them
o More ways you think about material = deeper your processing will be =
more easy to remember later
Storage:
o Memory Trace (engram): the change in the nervous system that
represents our experience
o Consolidation: the neural changes that occur over time to create the
memory trace of an experience
Retrieval:
o Available: all information stored in memory
o Accessible: information we are actually able to retrieve
False Memories: large memory errors in which events are recalled that never
took place
Language and Cognition Chapter 8
Research in cognitive psychology
o How do people think and acquire knowledge?
o How do they know what they know?
o How do they solve and imagine?
o A variety of methods are used measure mental processes and test
theories related to these and other questions.
Cognition: thinking, gaining, and dealing with knowledge
Language: intimately related to cognition. System of arbitrary symbols that
are combined o create an infinite number of meaningful statements.
Attention
o Selective: excluding of other features of the environment
Ability to focus on one message and ignore all others
We dont attend to a large fraction of info in the environment
Filtering out some info and promoting other info for processing
o Limited: in capacity and timing
o Both overt and covert: we can consciously attend to information but
some information grabs our attention
Shifting attention:
o Many routine tasks require little attention
o When we intentionally shift our attention to a particular stimulus, it is
difficult to attend to other things
o Negative priming when we attend to one thing and deliberately
ignore another. Could be hard to identify the ignored stimulus
Preattentive and attentive processes:
o Stroop effect: shows the difference between preattentive and attentive
processes
o Seems that reading is an automatic and preattentive process

Broadbents Filter Model

o Early-selection model: filters message before incoming information is
analyzed for meaning
o Could not explain:
Participants name gets through (cocktail party phenomenon)
Participants can shadow meaningful messages that switch from
one ear to another
Effects of practice on detecting information in unattended ear
You can be trained to detect in unattended ear
Based on the meaning of the message
 Tresimans Attenuation Theory
o Intermediate-selection model: attended message can be separated from
unattended message early in the information-processing system
o Selection can also occur later
o Attenuator analyzes incoming message in terms of
Physical characteristics (high/low pitched, fast or slow)
Language (how message groups syllables into words)
Meaning (how sequences of words create meaningful phrases)
o Different from Broadbent Language & Meaning can be used to separate
messages
o Attended message is let through the attenuator at full strength
o Unattended message is let through at a weaker strength
Categorization
o Ways of describing a category: prototypes
Prototype: a familiar example of a typical category member
We decide if an object belongs in a category by assessing how
well it resembles the prototypical members of the category
o Example: rose = prototypical flower
Daisy and tulip resemble it closely enough that you would quickly
agree they belong in the same category
The Corpse flower not colorful and terrible fragrance you
would classify as a flower but would have a difficult time bc it
doesnt fit the prototype
Judgment and Decision-making
o Problem solving: algorithms
Mechanical, repetitive, step-by-step procedures for arriving at
solutions
Applied to solve well-defined problems
Mathematics involves primarily algorithmic problem-solving
Operating household appliances also requires algorithms
o Problem solving: heuristics
Many problems are too ill-defined for algorithms
For example: what career would be best for me?
Heuristic strategies to simplify problems or guiding investigations
o Common errors of human cognition
Overconfidence we believe our answers are more accurate than
they are
This is true especially of more difficult questions
 We are under-confident about easy questions, because

(statistically) its hard to be overconfident about answers that are
usually correct)
Language development

Intelligence
Fluid intelligence: the ability to think on your feet
o Solve new problems
o Peaks in adolescence