Potent Expectations (Wilson & Abrams, 1977)
- H: Expectations will alter physiology
- Method: Speak to female assistant to make favourable impression
- Measure: Heart rate as indicating nervousness [DV] Results: Subjects who believed they had ingested alcohol show less increase in Heart rate than subjects who had ingested alcohol, whether they believed they had or not.
McMillen, Smith & Wells-Parker, 1989
- H: Expectations will alter behaviour and risk perception
- Method: ingest alcohol and test driving behaviour on simulator
- Measures: driving behaviours and sensation seeking
- Results: High sensation seeker who believed they had ingested alcohol took more risks and exhibited more lane changing than those who did not believe they had ingested alcohol
Memory is reconstructive
o Memory is aided by the construction of a general scenario and from within that frame of reference details are elaborated.
o One of the results of this constructive process is the feeling of “I knew it all along” or hindsight bias. People have an integrative process whereby events that are know form the basis for considering new events.
o Human process new experiences from within their experienced knowledge base. This provides stability and cognitive economy.
Memory is conflated with language (Loftus & Palmer, 1974)
- H: recall of events is influenced by “words” in the q
- Method: Subjects watch the same film of a traffic accident
- Measures: estimated speed of vehicle (mph), presence of broken glass • Contacted vs smashed • Smashed vs hit
- Results: there were significant diff in estimated speed by word.
- There was a significant difference b/w answers to the yes/no question re the presence of glass associated with “words” in the question.
Who started the fight? (Hastorf & Cantril, 1954)
- H: Social identity influence registration and recall of information
- Method: 2 groups of students regading a football game
- Measures: number of reported instances of infractions (rough play)
- Result: there were sig diff in the estimated number of infraction by affiliation
Proposed functions of WM
- Maintain moment to moment awareness
- Perform instant retrieval of relevant information
4 components of WM
- Visuospatial sketchpad – visual semantics
- Phonological loop;
- Language or verbally coded information
- 2 second rule
- Most researched
- Episodic buffer – episodic LTM
- Central executive – initially a catchall for all WM processes in certain cognitive abilities
- Other models include the supervisory attentional system. Whilst not as widely accepted this model points to a key feature of WM for our purposes i.e. the role of attention in HIP
Norman and Shallace point to the use of schemate in HIP and note in their model that certain limitations impact on HIP in certain situations. They are:
o Complex cognitive processes such as reasoning and decision making
o Novel tasks with have no schemata o Life threatening situations
o Tasks that require the suppression of habitual responses
WM and IQ
- Research has shown a clear and very strong rship between WM and fluid IQ
- It is observed by some that WM is equivalent to Spearman’s g
- The methods used to create competitive taskings in experiment related to IQ tasks
Baddelely (1996) has recognised the important role of maintaining attention during HIP. He has stated there are four distinct function of the CE. They are:
- Coordinate performance on separate tasks [2+]
- Capacity to switch retrieval strategies
- Attend to one stimuli while inhibiting the disruptive effects of others
- Capacity to hold and manipulate information in LTM
Hambrick and Engle (2003) assert that WM is essentially the capability for controlled attention [p191]. This is said to be evident in two processes:
- Maintaining relevant information while
- Suppressing irrelevant information
WM and The particular case of Analogical Reasoning
Analogical reasoning is the mapping of concepts from one eg [the source] onto another, generally novel problem [the target] to assist with the creation of a solution.
It therefore involves LTM as well as short term operations needed to draw inferences from the source so that they can be applied to the target. As can be seen there is a clear role of the selection of relevant information and the suppression of irrelevant.
Analogical reasoning thus requires the ability to suppress the irrelevant.
o WM and Analytical IQ/Relational Complexity
- Kane and Engle (2003) have asserted that WM’s functions include:
- Maintenance of task goals
- Scheduling competing actions or responses
- Inhibiting task irrelevant information
- This list looks very much like the characteristics of analytical intelligence.
- Another concept is ‘relational complexity’ which it is argued is central to any understanding of high-level cognition. WM has a role in coping with relational complexity amongst complex knowledge structures in a distributed system.
