Cognition, Intelligence & Memory

02-A: Cognition

• What is cognition?

• What is metacognition?

• What is the difference between Automatic and Controlled cognition? Describe this in terms of intention, awareness, control and effort.

  • • What are some things in your life that used to require effort but now happen automatically?  Give at least two of your own examples that weren't mentioned in the reading or in class. 

• What is cognitive load and how does it explain why we cannot truly multitask?

• What is the stroop task?

  • • How does it relate to controlled vs. automatic processes?

VISIT: Automatic & Controlled Cognition

02-B: Motivation Determines Allocation

• What is the advantage of being able to allocate cognitive resources to different tasks?

• How is the cocktail party effect an example of motivation determining allocation?

VISIT: Motivation Determines Allocation

02-C: Heuristics

• How do people conserve mental load by using heuristics? Be prepared to define, give examples of, and distinguish between:

  • Availability Heuristic

  • Anchoring Heuristic (Anchoring and Adjustment)

  • Representative Heuristic

• When would heuristics be the most likely to influence our judgments?  Relate this back to the earlier concept of motivation determining allocation and cognitive load.

VISIT: Heuristics 

 02-D: Motivated Cognition

• How do your motivations influence your judgment?

  • How did Kruglanski et al. (2002) demonstrate that seemingly objective judgments could be influenced by motivations subconsciously?  Be prepared to describe the methodology and results of their study.

  • What is confirmation bias and how might it influence you?

    • What are some ways in which this bias can have harmful consequences?

In a study done by Kruglanski et al. (2002), students at the University of Maryland were asked to describe their thoughts about either the time that the basketball team had made it into the final four or the time there was vandalism in College Park when the team had lost to Duke. They were then asked to describe their feelings about either event, and the results were what were expected - feelings of pride and excitement for the inclusion, and feelings of disappointment and shame for the vandalism. Later, as a separate "mini-experiment" students were given two pieces of fabric and were asked which was of higher quality.  One was red and one was purple, and unbeknownst to participants the two pieces were made of the same exact material. 

The confirmation bias is another example of motivated cognition because we want to be correct... and that motivation leads us to look for and remember information that confirms what we already believe.  Start with this video, which provides an overview of the concept.

The confirmation bias extends beyond attributions - it influences the way we react to any information related to a belief we consider important to our own identity.  This cartoon, shared with permission, does a nice job of capturing how we tend to seek out information...

02-E: Comparative Cognition

• How do sociobiologists explain the similarities and differences between the cognitive capacities of various species?

• Who was Clever Hans and why is his story a good example of why scientists who study animal intelligence have to be so careful with their methodology?

Comparative cognition is the scientific study of thought and intelligence in non-human species.  Though some species tend to get credit for being particularly "intelligent" (e.g., humans, apes, dolphins) researchers have demonstrated that many other branches of life have remarkable cognitive abilities.  It boils down to this - specific cognitive capacities evolved because they provided the particular species with some advantage when it comes to staying alive and having offspring.  We cannot judge all other species' intelligence against our own, we have to understand the similarities and differences across species in the context in which each species survived.  If hiding food was advantageous (as it still is for squirrels), we would expect those with better "mental maps" and memories to survive and reproduce.  On the other hand, if living together in groups and cooperation in hunting was helpful, we would expect more sophisticated social relationships (bonding, hierarchies) and communication mechanisms (e.g, body language, vocalizations).  We will not be able to go into detail on this field of psychology in this course, but we encourage you to explore some optional links below if you are personally interested in the study of animals.

One thing we do want to address, however, is that studying any species is difficult because one form of intelligence can be mistaken for another.  For example, horses are intelligent in that they can learn complex behaviors that get them rewards and pay attention to very subtle changes in another "animal's" behavior.  If we are not careful how we design scientific tests of intelligence, we might be tricked into believing that an animal can do something beyond its' actual ability.  Here is one famous example of a horse named Hans:

READ: Clever Hans Phenomenon 

OPTIONAL LINKS

• Chimpanzees: Like in Humans, Genes Drive Half of Chimp Intelligence, Study Finds

• Dog intelligence: Duke Canine Cognition Center

02-F: Are There Different Types of Intelligence?

• What do psychologists mean when they theorize about g?

  • How does an IQ score relate to the concept of g?

• How might someone argue that there are actually many different types of intelligence?

VISIT: Intelligence

02-G: Emotional Intelligence

• What is emotional intelligence?

  • Why might someone's EQ be as important, if not more important, than his or her IQ?

  • How would you describe each of the five dimensions of Emotional Intelligence?

    • Self-Awareness

    • Self-Regulation

    • Motivation

    • Empathy

    • Social Skills

VISIT: Emotional Intelligence

02-H: Memory

• What are the three processes of memory?  That is, what has to happen in order to store and use information?

  • What is encoding?

  • What is storage?

  • What is retrieval?

• How is memory organized into functional, overlapping systems?

  • What is sensory memory?

  • What is short-term memory (STM)?

    • What is Miller's magic number?

    • What is maintenance rehearsal?

    • What is chunking and why does it increase the amount of information you can store in STM? 

• What is long-term memory (LTM)?

VISIT: Memory

02-I: Schemas and Accessibility

• What is a schema? What is the advantage of storing information this way?

• What is accessibility? How is it influenced by:

  • Priming? Be prepared to discuss how priming helps to retrieve information from memory.

  • Chronic use?

  • Emotional impact?

Schemas are groups of information that are linked together because they are somehow related. For example, you have a “zoo” schema that contains all of the things you generally associate with the concept, like the animals, the enclosures, that time a chimpanzee threw something stinky at you and everyone on the school trip laughed.

Information that is stored in long term memory needs to be activated in order to move it into short term memory for use. This might happen consciously, like if I asked you to recall the name of a teacher you had in elementary school. Information can also be activated subconsciously by a prime – a stimulus that activates a related concept. For example, the smell of perfume or cologne might instantly bring to memory a person that you associate with that particular smell. Similarly, if you prime one concept contained in a schema, the other concepts in that schema are subconsciously activated. You may never be aware of how concepts are being primed by your environment, but the information it activates can still have a profound effect on your thought and behavior.

02-J: State-Dependent Memory

• • What is the research evidence that we have state-dependent memory?

  • How might we use the concept of schemas to explain why environmental context is encoded along with other information?

  • How can we explain why being in the same state facilitates recall in terms of the Encoding Specificity Hypothesis and how the contextual primes might increase the accessibility of information.

As we have already learned, memories are associations between sensory experiences. Interestingly, it turns out that all of the sensory information around us (sounds, smells, sights, feelings) can get encoded along with the information we are trying to store. As a result, the sensory information from the environment in which you learn something can act as a memory aid.

READ: State-Dependent Memory: Remembering Heather Graham's Phone Number  

02-K: Forgetting

• What causes us to forget?

  • What is the difference between decay and a failure to retrieve memory?

  • What is amnesia? Distinguish the difference between:

    • Retrograde amnesia

    • Anterograde amnesia

VISIT: Forgetting and Amnesia

02-L: Mnemonics

• What are mnemonics? The resource below provides a number of examples, but we don't expect you to memorize each.  Instead, be prepared to define the word mnemonic and provide at least two examples of how they can help you memorize something.  For example:

  • Acronym

  • Acrostic

  • Rhyme-keys

  • Loci method

  • Keyword method

  • Image-name technique

  • Chaining

• What is elaborative rehearsal and why does it help you remember things? How is it related to schemas and priming?

READ: Mnemonics - Memory Techniques 

Elaborative rehearsal involves forming associations with other meaningful things. The more associations you form when you encode the information, the more likely you are to encode, store, and retrieve the information later. This is known as elaborative rehearsal, because you elaborate on the information to add complexity and meaning. Note the example in the earlier video for remembering what the Japanese character means.