Regardless of what we may think, we are incapable of multitasking. If our brains paid attention to all the information we are exposed to every second of the day, we’d probably go insane. Frankly, some information isn’t important. Therefore, we rely on selective attention, or focusing our conscious awareness on a particular stimulus.

Another example of selective attention can be seen in the cocktail party effect or phenomenon. The cocktail-party effect refers to the ability to focus one's attention a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli (i.e., noise). 

For example, you’re in a crowded room in the middle of a conversation with someone else. You can focus on the conversation you’re having and ignore those going on around you.

While we need selective attention to maintain focus, it can cause us to miss things that are important because our awareness is focused elsewhere. Failing to see visible objects when are attention is focused elsewhere is known as inattentional blindness. Failing to notice changes in the environment is known as change blindness.

• Expectations: Through experience, we come to expect certain results. Those expectations may give us a perceptual set - a mental predisposition to perceive one thing and not another.

• Context: External factors can impact how we perceive information

• Motivation: Like research bias, we see what we want to see.

• Emotion: Our feelings at the time can alter what we experience.

From two-dimensional objects falling on our retinas, we somehow organize three-dimensional perceptions that allow us to estimate that object’s distance from us. This ability is known as depth perception. 

• Depth perception was studied in a number of visual cliff experiments by Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk. Infants were coaxed to cross what appeared to be drop, most of whom refused to do so, indicating that they understood depth.

• A monocular cue is a depth cue that is available to either eye:

  • • Linear Perspective

    • Interposition

    • Relative Size

    • Relative Height

    • Relative Clarity

    • Light/Shadow

• A binocular cue is a depth cue that depends on the use of two eyes. Retinal disparity is a binocular cue for perceiving depth by comparing the retinal images from each eye and computing the distance between the two images - the greater the difference between each image, the closer the object is.

Perception of Motion:

• Stroboscopic Effect: a rapid series of slightly varying images perceived as moving images (flip book, “old” movies)

• Phi Phenomenon: illusion of movement created when two or more-lights next to each other blink on and off

• Autokinetic Effect: perceptual phenomenon where a stationary point of light appears to move in a dark environment due to small eye movements

Perceptual constancy is the ability to perceive objects as unchanging even as illumination and retinal images change. For example, when you look out the window of a plane, you know that you aren’t seeing tiny cars on tiny highways, but rather that the cars are normal size and just very far away. Regardless of our view of them, objects maintain the same:

• • • Color

    • Shape

    • Size

    • Brightness 

Figure-ground is the organization of the visual field into objects (figures) that stand out from their surroundings (the background). 

Early in the 20th century, a group of German psychologists noticed that people who are given a cluster of sensations tend to organize them into a gestalt, a German word meaning a “form” or a “whole.” As we look straight ahead, we cannot separate the perceived scene into our left and right fields of view (each as seen with one eye closed). Our conscious perception is, at every moment, a seamless scene—an integrated whole.

• Proximity: group objects that are close together as being part of same group

• Similarity: objects similar in appearance are perceived as being part of same group

• Continuity: objects that form a continuous shape are perceived as same group

• Connectedness: elements tend to be grouped together if they are connected by other elements and viewed as a single unit.

• Closure: like top-down processing, we fill gaps in if we can recognize it

Cognition refers to all the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating. 

• Forming concepts - a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people

• Forming schemas - a concept or framework that organizes and interprets information

• Forming prototypes - a mental image or best example of a category which provides a quick and easy method for sorting items into categories and can help organize unfamiliar items by finding an appropriate category

The concept animal is broad - basically encompasses anything not human. When told to think of an specific animal - like a cat - most people will picture a house cat, not a lion, tiger, leopard, or cheetah - all of which are technically cats, but not the best representation of cats. The house cat would be the prototype, while the collection of all cats, whether house or jungle, would be a schema for cat. When you encounter a new animal, you try to find a place for it in your existing schema (assimilation). If you can’t do so, you alter your schema to include the new information (accommodation). 

Creativity is the ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable. Though we can understand what creativity is, it is difficult to teach or measure. 

Robert Sternberg identified five components of creativity:

• Expertise

• Imagination

• A venturesome personality

• Intrinsic motivation

• A creative environment

Creativity requires divergent thinking - expanding the number of possible problem solutions, unlike convergent thinking which narrows down the solutions to the single best option. 

Some problems we solve through trial and error, eliminating every option until only the correct solution remains. This strategy is known as an algorithm - a methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees a solution to a problem.

In an algorithm, you would see ____ + 17 = 42 and plug in every number possible until you found the right one. 1 + 17 = 18, 2 + 17 = 19, etc.

Depending on problem, trying out every solution is impractical, so instead we use a heuristic - a simple thinking strategy that often allows us to make judgements and solve problems efficiently, but does not guarantee a solution. 

Instead of trying out every possible solution to the problem above, you’d use a heuristic and subtract 17 from 42 to arrive at the correct solution of 25. 

Think of an item in the grocery store, like Yum Yum sauce. With an algorithm, you’d look up and down every aisle. With a heuristic, you might think to yourself, “it should be in the international foods aisle” and start there. 

Sometimes solutions come to us suddenly and unexpectedly, without any problem-solving strategy but rather through insight - a sudden realization of a problem’s solution. Insight is that lightbulb or “aha!” moment. 

Wolfgang Kohler tested animals to see if they possessed insight as humans do. In his experiment, he suspended bananas in a chimpanzee enclosure out of the animals reach. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the chimps arrange the crates in their enclosure to create a tower they could climb and used a stick to knock the bananas down. 

Other elements of decision-making:

• Intuition: an effortless, immediate, automatic feeling or thought with explicit conscious reasoning to make decisions

  • Each day, we have to make hundreds of decisions, and we could never devote equal time and attention to all of them and get everything accomplished.

• Representative Heuristic: estimating the likelihood of events in reference to how closely they resemble a particular prototype

  • Imagine someone who is short, slim, and likes poetry. Are they more likely to be an Ivy League professor or a truck driver? Statistically speaking, there are far more truck drivers than Ivy League professors, yet those characteristics don’t fit our prototype for truck driver. 

• Availability Heuristic: estimating the likelihood of events on how readily they come to mind

  • Which causes more American deaths - terrorists or toddlers? While the news will paint the picture America is constantly threatened by terrorists, armed toddlers kill more Americans each year. 

• Framing: the way an issue is presented or worded can impact how people respond

  • Ex. “School prayer should be prohibited” vs. “Prayer in schools should not be allowed”

• Confirmation Bias: a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence

  • Think of your rival, whether it be from sports or romance or whatever. Because you dislike them you will only notice their worst qualities, and ignore anything redeeming about them. 

• Overconfidence: the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our beliefs and judgements

  • Thinking you don’t need to study

• Fixation: the inability to see a problem from a new perspective

  • Mental set: tendency to persist in using the same problem-solving strategy that have worked in the past → math problems, trying to use the same formula over and over again

  • Functional fixedness: the inability to recognize novel uses for an item and only see it for its most common purpose → I need to ship a fragile item but can only use items in this room. What could keep the item from breaking in the box?

• Belief perseverance: clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited

  • Ex. Cult followers

Executive functioning is a set of cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior, including skills like working memory, inhibitory control (self-control), and cognitive flexibility (shifting between tasks), essentially allowing individuals to plan, organize, and manage complex tasks effectively.

Meta-cognition is the ability to think about one's own thinking, including the processes of planning, monitoring, and assessing one's understanding and performance. 

Memory is the persistence of learning over time through the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information.

• Encoding: the process of getting information into the memory system

• Storage: the process of retaining information over time

• Retrieval: the process of getting information out of memory storage

Imagine your brain is a filing cabinet (or a memory drive if you’re too tech savvy for paper files). Encoding is creating the file, storage is putting the file in a notable location, and retrieval is being able to find that file again when you need to. 

To a psychologist, evidence that learning persists includes these three retention measures:

• recall—retrieving information that is not currently in your conscious awareness but that was learned at an earlier time. 

  • A fill-in-the-blank question tests your recall.

• recognition—identifying items previously learned. 

  • A multiple-choice question tests your recognition.

• relearning—learning something more quickly when you learn it a second or later time. 

  • When you study for a final exam or engage a language used in early childhood, you will relearn the material more easily than you did initially.

• Parallel processing - processing many aspects of a problem simultaneously; the brain’s natural mode of information processing for many functions → sensation

• Sensory memory - the immediate very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system → spots in your vision after flash photography

• Short-term memory - activated memory that holds a few (5-9) items briefly (10-30 seconds) before the information is stored or forgotten → digits of a phone number

• Long-term memory - the relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system

• Working memory - a newer understanding of short-term memory that adds conscious, active processing of incoming auditory and visual information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory → sight-reading music

  • The central executive system, a core component of working memory, controls attention and coordinates the phonological loop (handling auditory information), and the visuospatial sketchpad (processing visual and spatial information).

• Explicit or declarative memory involves the retention of facts and experiences that one can consciously know. We encode explicit memories through effortful processing, which requires attention and conscious effort. 

• Implicit or non-declarative memory involves retention of learned skills or classically conditioned associations independent of conscious recollection. We encode implicit memories through automatic processing, which is the unconscious encoding of incidental information, such as space, time, and meaning.

• Prospective memory involves remembering to do something in the future.

Several brain regions are dedicated to the encoding and storage of memory.

• Hippocampus & Frontal Lobes

  • Memory consolidation: the neural storage of long term memory, allows for more to be stored by only keeping the most crucial details

  • Explicit memories

  • Semantic: facts and general knowledge

  • Episodic: experienced events

• Cerebellum & Basal Ganglia

  • Coordinated movements

  • Procedural memory

• Amygdala

  • Emotional memories

    • Flashbulb memories are clear, sustained memories of an emotionally significant moments or events. These can be personal, such as the moment you learned a loved one had passer, or generational, like the memories of watching the towers fall on 9/11.

When first learning how to write, the neural connections between your brain and hand are slow and inefficient. But as you spent more time writing, it got better. Now, you can write legibly without even looking, because those neural connections are stronger, faster, and more efficient. Practice makes perfect, or rather practice makes permanent.

This phenomenon is called long-term potentiation (an increase in a cell’s firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation) and is the neural basis for learning and memory. 

Sensory memory feeds our active working memory, recording momentary images of scenes or echoes of sounds. When George Sperling flashed a group of letters similar to this for one-twentieth of a second, people could recall only about half the letters. But when signaled to recall a particular row immediately after the letters had disappeared, they could do so with near-perfect accuracy. He also found that people were more likely to remember letters when he played one of three tones (each tone corresponding with a row of letters). 

• Iconic memory: momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli

• Echoic memory: momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli

Shallow processing encodes on an elementary level, such as a word’s letters or, at a more intermediate level, a word’s sound. Thus we may type “there” when we mean “their”, “write” when we mean “right”, and “two” when we mean “too”. Deep processing encodes semantically, based on the meaning of the words. The deeper (more meaningful) the processing, the better our retention. This explains why information that is meaningful to us is retained longer. 

George Miller proposed that we can store about seven pieces of information (give or take two) in short-term memory. Without rehearsal, the information will be lost in 15-30 seconds. 

Several effortful processing strategies can boost our ability to form and retain new memories. Later, when we try to retrieve a memory, these strategies can make the difference between success and failure.

• Chunking: organizing items into familiar, manageable units; often occurs automatically → 1492177618121941 = 1492, 1776, 1812, 1941

• Mnemonics: memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices → PEMDAS (*x/+-

• Spacing effect: the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through mass study/practice  → studying a little each night is more effective than cramming

• Testing effect: enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading information → test yourself with flash cards

• Priming: the activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory → after seeing a poster for a missing child, you often interpret ambiguous child-adult interaction as possible kidnapping

• Encoding Specificity Principle: the idea that cues and contexts specific to a particular memory will be most effective in helping us recall it

• State-Dependent Memory: the tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with the state in which a person was at the time of encoding → if you study while drunk, you’ll be more likely to remember the content while drunk

• Context-Dependent Memory: the activation of memory when one returns to the setting of the original encoding → forgetting what you came to the kitchen for, returning to your room and remembering you needed to add an item to the grocery list

• Mood-Congruent Memory: the tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one’s current good or bad mood

• Serial position effect: our tendency to best remember the items at the beginning and end of a list

  • Recency effect: only remembering the end of the list

  • Primacy effect: only remembering the beginning of the list

Hermann Ebbinghaus showed response speed when recalling or recognizing information indicates memory strength over a century ago, using nonsense syllables. He randomly selected a sample of syllables, practiced them, and tested himself. To get a feel for his experiments, rapidly read aloud, eight times over, the following list, then look away and try to recall the items: JIH, BAZ, FUB, YOX, SUJ, XIR, DAX, LEQ, VUM, PID, KEL, WAV, TUV, ZOF, GEK, HIW.

The day after learning such a list, Ebbinghaus could recall few of the syllables. But they weren’t entirely forgotten. The more frequently he repeated the list aloud on Day 1, the less time he required to relearn the list on Day 2. Additional rehearsal of verbal information can produce overlearning, which increases retention—especially when practice is distributed over time. For students, this means that it helps to rehearse course material even after you know it.

Sometimes, forgetting happens due to injury or illness.

• Amnesia: memory loss, often due to brain damage

  • Anterograde amnesia: an inability to form new memories

    • Ante = after, grade = grate (like cheese)

  • Retrograde amnesia: an inability to recall past memories

    • Retro = old, grade = grate

• Other types of amnesia:

  • Traumatic Amnesia – caused by a severe, non penetrative blow to head (car accident, sports injury); can lead to anything from loss of consciousness to coma.

  • Hysterical or Fugue Amnesia – linked to severe psychological trauma; usually temporary and linked to a traumatic event the mind cannot deal with.  Memory often returns, although the memory of trauma may remain incomplete.

  • Childhood or Infantile Amnesia – inability to recall events from early childhood, could be linked to language development or immature brain 

In 1953, the removal of H.M.’s hippocampus at age 27 ended his seizures, but also ended his ability to form new explicit memories. H.M. could learn new skills, procedures, locations of objects, and games, but had no memory of the lessons or the instructors. Why? These are implicit memories and automatic processing-processed in other areas of the brain. H.M. also retained memories from before the surgery.

Sometimes information is encoded and stored, but cannot be retrieved.

• Interference: inability to recall memories due to competing information

  • Proactive Interference: the forward acting disruptive effect of older learning on the recall of new information

    • Ex. Calling your teacher by her maiden name when she has recently married

  • Retroactive Interference: the backward acting disruptive effect of newer learning on old information

    • Ex. Failing to remember your old address after you moved

Remember PO/RN - 

Proactive, Old interferes with New

Retroactive, New interferes with Old

(Giggle all you want - you will remember it!)

Memory is not precise. Our memories are dependent on our attention to be encoded properly, and once stored, they are constantly being updated and revised by new information. 

Elizabeth Loftus did a series of experiments to test the concept of the misinformation effect - a phenomenon that occurs when misleading information has distorted one’s memory of an event. Just by changing the wording of a question, witnesses to the same staged car crash reported differing speed estimates, because the word altered their memory of the event. 

Since memory is reconstruction as well as reproduction, we can’t be sure whether a memory is real by how real it feels. Much as perceptual illusions may seem like real perceptions, unreal memories feel like real memories. Because the misinformation effect and source amnesia (impaired memory for how, where, or when information was learned despite good memory for the information itself) happen outside our awareness, it is hard to separate false memories from real ones. Other things that can challenge, change, or alter our memories include:

• Imagination inflation: a type of memory distortion that occurs when imagining an event that never happened increases confidence in the memory of the event

  • Studies have shown that we are all susceptible to to false memories. If someone with any level of knowledge or authority tells us a story of something that happened in our life, we will build off their confidence and recall details despite no knowledge of the event. 

• Reconsolidation: the process that enables the update of a previously consolidated memory trace after its reactivation, through re-exposure to unconditioned stimuli, conditioned stimuli and/or context → details are lost with time, but can be remembered with help

• Deja vu: the eerie sense that you have experienced something before; cues from a current experiences may unconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience

• Practice makes permanent! The more you rehearse information, the stronger, faster, and more efficient the neural connections become, making it easier to recall (long-term potentiation).

• Make it meaningful! When working to remember something, relate it to something important to you.

• It is better to study a little each night than to cram the night before (distributed practice vs. massed practice). 

To answer this question, researchers used different cohorts (groups of people sharing a common characteristic) and conducted either cross-sectional or longitudinal studies. A cross-sectional study investigates people of different ages at the same time while a longitudinal study follows one group of people of the same age over a period of time. 

Through these studies, researchers have concluded that crystallized intelligence increases with age while fluid intelligence decreases with age.

• crystallized intelligence: our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills

• fluid intelligence: our ability to reason speedily and abstractly

An intelligence test is a method for assessing an individual’s mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores. 

Achievement tests measure mastery of knowledge, assessing what someone has learned. → Finals & AP Exams measure what you have learned in class

Aptitude tests are designed to predict a person’s future performance or capacity to learn. → SAT & ACT scores predict how you will do in college

Francis Galton, cousin of Darwin, studied the heritability of intelligence, considering that those with high intelligence should be encouraged to mate to produce exceptional offspring. (Eugenics is a fringe set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population.) His research failed but he did give us the phrase “nature vs nurture”.

When school attendance started becoming mandatory, government officials recognized that some students would need extra attention. The French government asked Alfred Binet to develop a fair test that would help identify the skills of students and compare them to others of the same age. He and his student, Theodore Simon, created an assessment that measured each child’s mental age - the level of performance typical of children of a certain chronological age. So if you are 8 and scored a mental age of 8, you’re average. 

Stanford University professor Lewis Terman adapted Binet’s work, adding new items and establishing new age norms to create the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. This new test allowed children of different ages to be compared because the score was based on an intelligence quotient or IQ.

IQ = (mental age/chronological age)* 100 → 

(mental age of 10/chronological age of 8)*100 = IQ of 125

While revolutionary, this formula does not work for adults, as age will continue to increase but intelligence may not. This doesn’t mean we get dumber as we get older. Therefore, David Wechsler developed the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). Like the Stanford-Binet, it yields an overall intelligence score, but unlike the SB, it provides individual scores for verbal comprehension, perceptual organization, working memory, and processing speed. 

The average IQ score is 100, and anyone above 120 is considered “gifted” with superior intelligence. Some people have gifts in certain areas but will score low on intelligence tests. Savant syndrome is a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional skill, such as computation or drawing. 

• Psychometrics

• Standardization: defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group

  • Includes how the test is designed, administered, and scored → ACT, SAT, & AP exams

• Normal Curve: the bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes; most scores fall near the average and fewer scores lie near the extremes

A test is reliable when it yields consistent results; to establish reliability researchers establish different procedures.

• Test-Retest Reliability: Using the same test on two occasions to measure consistency.

A test is valid if it accurately measures what it is designed to measure.

• Content Validity: the extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest; content in “test” is based on knowledge needed 

  • ex: Driver’s Test covers information needed in daily driving situations 

• Construct Validity: the ability of a measurement tool (survey, test, etc.) to measure the concept being studied.

  • Ex: Measuring Tape= Height, Scale= Weight 

• Predictive Validity: the success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; assessed by computing correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior

  • Ex: SAT/ACT, GPA, Intelligence Tests

The Flynn Effect refers to the finding that the average human IQ has increased over time, which was first discovered by researcher James Flynn in 1984, thus IQ tests must constantly be renormed so cohorts from different time periods can be compared. 

With the assumption that IQ tests are an accurate representation of intelligence, this result indicates an increase in human intelligence over time. Interestingly, there has been the biggest increase in IQ in specific areas of the test, that is, in the areas of classification and analogies (being able to use logic on abstractions).  Flynn explains that this is likely representative of the change in thinking patterns of humans over time, especially when it comes to the hypothetical.

But how does intelligence change as we age? To answer this question, researchers used different cohorts (groups of people sharing a common characteristic) and conducted either cross-sectional or longitudinal studies. A cross-sectional study investigates people of different ages at the same time while a longitudinal study follows one group of people of the same age over a period of time. Overall, fluid intelligence decreases over time, while crystallized intelligence increases. 

Girls outpace boys in spelling, verbal fluency, locating objects, detecting emotions, and sensitivity to touch, taste, and color. Boys outperform girls in tests of spatial ability and complex math problems, though in math computation and overall math performance, boys and girls hardly differ. Males’ mental ability scores also vary more than females’. Boys are more often found in special education classes, but also among those scoring very high on the SAT math test.

The most reliable male edge appears in spatial ability tests. Today, such skills help when fitting suitcases into a car trunk, playing chess, or doing certain types of geometry problems. From an evolutionary perspective, those same skills would have helped our ancestral fathers track prey and make their way home. The survival of our ancestral mothers may have benefited more from a keen memory for the location of edible plants—a legacy that lives today in women’s superior memory for objects and their location.

Fueling the group-differences debate are two other disturbing but scientifically agreed-upon facts:

• Racial and ethnic groups differ in their average intelligence test scores.

• High-scoring people (and groups) are more likely to attain high levels of education and income.

There are many group differences in average intelligence test scores. Countries whose economies create a large wealth gap between rich and poor tend also to have a large rich-versus-poor intelligence test score gap. However, individuals that receive the same content and instruction demonstrate similar scores on tests, regardless of race. 

When Steven Spencer and his colleagues (1997) gave a difficult math test to equally capable men and women, women did not do as well—except when they had been led to expect that women usually do as well as men on the test. Expecting to struggle with the math affected their performance. Similar studies have been done with different groups being told they will do better or worse because of their gender, ethnicity/race, etc. with similar results.

• Stereotype threat: a self-confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype

Emotional intelligence, studied by Daniel Goleman, refers to the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions. Emotionally intelligent people are both socially and self-aware, reading the emotions of others well while also keeping their own emotions in check. 

• Environment

• Socioeconomic status

• Health/Nutrition

• Motivation