February 26th Lecture

Psychology 200: Cognitive Psychology February 26, 2009 Knowing Semantic memory: permanent store of general world knowledge (words, concepts), and operations associated with storage and retrieval of this type of knowledge Case of KC motorcycle accident knew how to play chess, but never remembered actually playing but he can't recall ever having played chess Types of Memory Examples: thinking about the history of astronomy first read about many years ago (semantic) thinking about personal happenings during a summer 50 years ago (episodic) Semantic Memory The COLLINS AND QUILLIAN model of long term memory Network: an interrelated set of concepts or interrelated body of knowledge Spreading and activation: the mental activity associated with accessing and retrieving from the network Concepts are usually in a quiet, inactivated state. Then, when encountered, they receive are "activated" and this activation "spreads" the related concepts Tests of semantic models of memory How do we know how semantic memory is organized? Chapter 7 in the book Semantic Verification Task example: "a robin is a bird" vs "a robin is an animal" Semantic relatedness effect: closer two concepts in semantic memory, either in distance or relatedness, faster is retrieval and evaluation Priming Tasks Page 292 in the book Two letter strings come up on a screen and the subject is instructed to press a yes key if both of the letter strings actually form words or a no key if one or both of the words actually form non-words Implications for learning New information "binds" to semantically related information But meaning based organization of semantic memory can lead to distortions and inaccuracies in memory Using Knowledge in the Real-World Reconstructive Memory Constructing a memory by combining elements from the original material or event together with existing knowledge Bartlett's Research (1930s) subjects add to and alter story, supplying additional information that is not contained in the original War of the Ghosts (page 312) even though the word "ghosts" is in the title, the fact that the story involved ghosts dropped out of people's memories over time. it wasn't on purpose, but the story was altered subconcisously Implications for the Real-World