PSYCHOLOGYMr. DuezUnit 3: "Cognition"Part I: Memory

DO NOW: What is the best thing

you ever ate?

Ordering from the menu at Torchy’s Tacos takes a great deal of cognition. Especially if you have never tasted these taco combinations before.

CognitionThe mental processes involved in acquiring knowledge. the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

Literal: “to know.”

Take a yearning for pizza for example:

Cognition encompasses everything from:

★ knowing/remembering pizza itself

★ recalling what style & toppings that you like

★ realizing that you are hungry & organizing plans to have it delivered or travel somewhere to eat out.

YouTube: New Yorker Anthony Bourdain Experiences Chicago Deep Dish Pizza

For minds to make sense of the near infinite details of our surroundings a large part of cognition involves the organization of our thoughts into associations or categories.

★ things one might find in a kitchen” ★ “what toppings I like”

Simple symbols such as the word “food” are used to group more complex learned associations

★ New York Style ★ Chicago Style ★ Frozen Pizza ★ Pizza Rolls

Although important, these cognitive categories are overlapping and not always clearly distinct

How do we divide the thinking process?Perception, attention, memory & executive function 

Perception - Seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and or smelling your surroundings, allowing you to respond appropriately.

You feel hungry and that there is no food in the fridge, is what gets the whole process moving.

Memory - stores the name of your favorite pizza joint. Enables you to dial the number & give directions to your house. Includes: 

★ short term/working memory★ long-term memory★ subconscious/implicit knowledge

Executive Function enables the planning of logistics, such as timing the pizza delivery to coincide with the start of the football game.  Improvising - guessing what toppings everyone will enjoy Problem Solving figuring how much to tip Controlling Impulses - not ruining your appetite by eating a whole bag of Doritos while waiting also come into play here.

Attention Processes kick in by having you shift your focus from reading your Psychology text to answering the door upon hearing that long awaited knock.

They also help in multi-tasking a slice of pizza with figuring out how your football team can come back from an embarrassing early deficit while ignoring the heckling antics of your so called “friends.”

Process of Cognition It is the interplay of all of these systems working simultaneously; allowing us to adapt to our surroundings & take action towards obtaining our goals.

The multi-store model of memory is an explanation of how memory processes work. You hear, see, and feel many things, but only a small number are remembered.

Since Atkinson & Shiffrin originally proposed their dual-store model, it has undergone numerous adjustments & improvements.

The most recent version of this model is called Search of Associative Memory (SAM) - shown right:

YouTube: The Mystery of Memory (30 minutes) This is essential for understanding memory in a deep and meaningful way.

How Does Memory Work?encoding, storage, & retrievalIn short, these are the processes by which we...

★ get info in (encoding), ★ hang on to it (storage), & ★ get it back out (retrieval).

Name the 7 Dwarfs

Write each name on a sheet of paper.

Name the 7

Dwarfs

Was this difficult for you?It all depends on these factors...

★ Do you like Disney movies?★ How long ago did you watched

the movie?★ How loud or distracting were the

people around you when you are trying to remember?

Superior Autobiographical Memory - or Hyperthymesia

Jill Price was the first. She is one of about 20 subjects positively diagnosed with the condition hyperthymesia.

She is able to recite details of every day of her life since age - 14.

Dr. James McGaugh - By stimulating the amygdala in rats, McGaugh has learned more about how we can enhance memory.

Through research with rats, McGaugh has shown that stimulating the amygdala with a drug that emulates the effects of stress hormones helps memories become more firmly fixed and retained.

Without the amygdala, all of our memories would be remembered equally: the loss of a loved one, what you ate for Thanksgiving dinner, and where you parked your car.

Video YouTube: The Woman Who Could Not Forget 15 minutes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vwigmktix2Y&feature=youtu.be

3 minutes- man with no short term memory

YouTube: Endless Memory, Part I - 60 Minutes - Superior Autobiographical Memory14 minutes

YouTube: 60 Minutes - Endless Memory - Superior Autobiographical Memory, Part II13 minutes

“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in the case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing." -- William James, Principles of Psychology, 1890

Yet this does NOT seem to be the case for most of these Superior Autobiographical Memory persons.

Memory - How it works.Amygdala: a small almond-shaped region of the brain near the Hippocampus, is responsible for this enhanced memory.

Dr. Larry Cahill - conducted experiments in which subjects were shown slides of varying emotional content.

Immediately after watching the slides, subjects immerse one arm in a tub of ice water.

The immersion triggers the stress hormone response, which in turn enhances the subjects' memory of the slides.

Subjects who endured the ice water for a full 3 minutes, recalled the emotional slides more clearly than did the control subjects, whose arms were not immersed in water.

Emotional Wiring Fundamentally Different

"Throughout evolution, women have had to deal with a number of internal stressors, such as childbirth, that men haven't had to experience," said study co-author Larry Cahill of the University of California Irvine. "What is fascinating about this is the brain seems to have evolved to be in tune with those different stressors."

The finding, published in the recent issue of the journal NeuroImage, could help researchers learn more about sex-related differences in anxiety, autism, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, phobias and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Amygdala: cluster of neurons found on both sides of the brain & involved for both sexes in hormone & other involuntary functions, as well as emotions & perception.

Cahill already knew that the sexes use different sides of their brains to process and store long-term memories, based on his earlier work. He also has shown that a particular drug, Propranolol, can block memory differently in men and women.

Scans showed that men's & women's amygdalas are polar opposites in terms of connections with other parts of the brain.

Men: Right amygdala is more active & shows more connections with other brain regions.

Women: Left amygdala.

EncodingInformation from the environment is encoded when it enters the body through the senses.

visual, acoustic, & semantic encoding. Visual is most effective, but the most successful way is to encode in all 3 ways. This would be like the computer taking input from a keyboard, mouse or touch screen smartphone or tablet.

The typical brain has about 100 trillion synapses, which are the points where nerve cells in the human brain connect with other cells. 

Storage★ sensory memory,

★ short-term memory, & ★ long-term memory.

STM (or ‘working memory’) has a limit not only on the number of items it can hold but also on duration (20 seconds or so). Use of rehearsal helps to increase the likelihood that those memories will be recalled.

LTM is divided into explicit (knowing

facts) & implicit memories (remembering how to move your body when

walking).

Retrieval Key to accessing information from Long Term Memory (LTM) is to have an appropriate retrieval cue.

Mnemonics is a memory aid that relies on reorganization of information for easy retrieval.

(Song to know information for a test)

Encoding Specificity (or Transfer Appropriate Processing): Retrieval is better when the context in which we are trying to retrieve something matches the context in which it was learned.

The context is part of the overall memory. By reinstating that context when retrieval is occurring, we are creating an optimal recall situation.

YouTube Video: Memento Movie Trailer (2 min)

Thirty days hath September,April, June, and November;All the rest have thirty-one,Save February, with twenty-eight days clear,& twenty-nine each leap year.

Flashbulb Memory

A clear moment of an emotionally or historically significant moment or event.

Studies have shown that, although people believe such memories are more complete and accurate, they are actually just as flawed as those stored in less emotional situations.

Where were you when?

January 28, 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger DisasterNovember 22, 1963,

Dallas, TXJohn F. Kennedy, Assassinated

May 2, 2011

November 4, 2008 Obama Elected

Article & Video: A Pill to ForgetIf there were something you could take after experiencing a painful or traumatic event that would permanently weaken your memory of what had just happened, would you take it?

As correspondent Lesley Stahl first reported last fall, it's an idea that may not be so far off, and that has some critics alarmed, and some trauma victims filled with hope.

This segment was originally broadcast on Nov. 26, 2006. It was updated on June 14, 2007.

Capacity of STM – Short Term MemoryLearning the sounds and meanings of

new words, or seeing pictures while a storyteller tells a tale.

If we want to remember large amounts of information, our recall will be easier if we can use chunking to group information together.

Learning the sounds and meanings of new words, or seeing pictures while a storyteller tells a tale.

The "Magic Number" =7 digits, plus or minus 2

(5..6..7..8..9)Chunking storage in STM

If we want to remember large amounts of information, our recall will be easier if we can use chunking to group information together.

Remembering a 10-digit phone number is much easier if we remember the pattern 3-3-4 rather than trying to recall 10 unconnected numbers. Psychologist George Miller published the original study in 1956.

YouTube: Feats of Memory That Anyone Can Do

You only have 150 “Friends”Choose wisely :)

Dunbar's number is suggested to be a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships = 150.

Our memories can keep track of groups about this size. Beyond 150 our interactions become more anonymous.

Past a group size of 150 we start needing formal organizational structures to handle interactions. Further, the group we consider "friends and family" clusters around this size. 

Organization2 biggest (wrong) assumptions of long term

memory:

1. capacity is unlimited, &

2. once the information gets into long-term memory, it is there forever.

Human brain = 1 billion neurons

Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections.

Each neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).

For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage.

Organization of Long Term MemoryNodes/Links: Activation is the process of "thinking" about a concept. When we activate a node, that activation spreads down the links to related nodes.

Psychologists have divided memory into explicit and implicit memory.

Explicit memory (Declarative) - memory for information that you are aware of.

"knowing what"Includes: facts, eventsCan be divided into Episodic & Semantic

Implicit memory (Procedural) - memory that influences your behavior but for which you have no conscious awareness.

"knowing how"

YouTube: How does memory/though/cognition really work? This is how it looks - for a fish!

Studies have shown that musicians tend to have a better memory than non-musicians, not just for music, but for words and pictures too.

Interestingly, they also tend to use different strategies for memorization, being more likely than non-musicians to group words into similar semantic categories, and less likely to verbalize pictures.

Turn to a blank sheet of paper. Pick out the names of the 7 dwarfs.

Grouchy Gabby Fearful Sleepy Smiley Jumpy

Hopeful Shy Droopy Dopey Spiffy Wishful Puffy Dumpy Sneezy Pop

Grumpy Bashful Cheerful Teach Sporty Nifty Happy Doc Wheezy Stubby Poppy

How many did you remember this time?

Did you do better on the 1st or 2nd dwarf memory exercise?Recall vs. Recognition: With recall - you must retrieve the information from your memory

(fill-in-the blank tests)

With recognition - you must identify the target from possible targets

(multiple-choice tests)

Which is easier?

Can you identify the “real” penny?

Why do we have trouble finding the "real" penny? We don't have any need to know the details, other than the color, size, and feel. Then again... do we even NEED the penny anyway?

How did you do?Its obverse has featured the profile of President Abraham Lincoln since 1909, the centennial of his birth.

From 1959 (the sesquicentennial of Lincoln's birth) to 2008, the reverse featured the Lincoln Memorial.

Four different reverse designs in 2009 honored Lincoln's 200th birthday and a new, permanent reverse - the Union Shield - was introduced in 2010. The coin is 0.75 inches (19.05 mm) in diameter and 0.061 inches (1.55 mm) in thickness.

The U.S. Mint's official name for a penny is "cent“ and the U.S. Treasury's official name is "one cent piece".

The colloquial term "penny" derives from the British coin of the same name; however, the British plural form pence is never used.

As of 2010, it cost the U.S. Mint 1.79 cents to make a cent because of the cost of materials and production.

YouTube: John Green vs. Pennies (and Nickels) 4 min

YouTube: John Green asks Obama - Why all the Pennies? President stumped.

YouTube: Google Glass - Would this work? Work memory & cognition be improved?