Autobiographical Memory
memory for specific events from a person’s life, which can include both episodic and semantic components.
Memory over the lifespan
Events that are remembered; Personal milestones that stand out, significant events in a person’s life, highly emotional events, transition points
The nature of flashbulb memories
Memory for circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged important events (like 9/11, Kennedy assassination), where you were and what you were doing, highly emotional, vivid, and very detailed
- not photographic memories because they can change over time, repeated recall: initial description (baseline), later reports compared to baseline
- results suggest that these memories can be inaccurate or lacking in detail, even though participants report that they are very confident and that the memories seem very vivid
- RESEARCH: rimmele and coworkers (2011) - memories for negative emotional pictures were stronger, and associated with greater confidence
- narrative rehearsal hypothesis, repeated viewing/hearing of event (TV, newspaper, radio, talking with others, all could introduce errors in own memory)
Script
conception of sequence of actions that usually occurs during a particular experience (going to a restaurant; playing tennis)
Schema
knowledge about some aspect of the environment (post office, ball game, classroom)
Theories of the reminiscence bump
3 different hypotheses:
- self-image: period of assuming persons self image
- cognitive: encoding is better during periods of rapid change
- cultural life script: culturally shared expectations structure recall
Cultural life-script hypothesis
- culturally shared expectations structure recall
- each person has a personal life story, an understanding of culturally expected events
- personal events are easier to recall when they fit the cultural life script
Cognitive hypothesis
- encoding is better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability
- evidence from those who emigrated to the US after young adulthood indicates reminiscence bump is shifted
Misinformation effect
misleading information presented after a person witnesses an event can change how that person describes the event later
Power of suggestion
Includes misinformation effect
- RESEARCH: Loftus and coworkers (1975): introduce MPI (misleading postevent information) traffic accident with stop sign → participants remembered what they heard (yield sign) not what they saw (stop sign)
- RESEARCH: Loftus and Palmer (1974): hear “smashed” or “hit” in description of car accident → those hearing “smashed” said the cars were going much faster than those who heard “hit”
Eye witness testimony
- testimony by an eyewitness to a crime about what he or she saw during the crime, one of the most convincing types of evidence to a jury (assume that people see and remember accurately)
- but like other memory, eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate (mistaken identity, constructive nature of memory)
- RESEARCH: Wells and Bradfield (1998): participants view security videotape with gunman in view for 8 seconds, everyone identified someone as the gunman from the photographs afterwards, the actual gunman’s picture was not present
- errors can be due to attention and arousal: attention can be narrowed by specific stimuli
Properties of language
- Express feelings, thoughts, ideas, and experiences
- Hierarchical system: components that can be combined to form larger units
- Governed by rules: specific ways components can be arranged
B.F. Skinner
- Behaviorism: focuses on how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval, or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection)
- Language learned through reinforcement
Phoneme
something that distinctly distinguishes one word from another like d, t, p in “date” “that” “pat”
Phoneme Restoration Effect
fill in missing phonemes based on context of sentence and portion of word presented
Language development across all cultures
Deaf children invent sign language that is all their own, all humans with normal capacities develop a language and learn to follow its complex rules, language is universal across cultures, language development is similar across cultures, languages are “unique but the same” (different words, sounds, and rules but all have nouns, verbs, negatives, questions, past/present tense)
Lexical decision task
read a list of words and non-words silently → say “yes” when you read a word
Word frequency effect
Respond more rapidly to high-frequency words
Realm of conversational speech
Two or more people talking together, dynamic and rapid
- given new contract
- syntactic coordination
- syntactic priming
Given new contract
speaker constructs sentences so they include: given information, new information, new can then become given information
Syntactic coordination
using similar grammatical structures
Syntactic priming
production of a specific grammatical construction by one person increases chances other people will use that construction, reduces computational load in conversation
Syntax
The rules for combining words into sentences
What would a person with Broca’s aphasia suffer with?
Can understand the speech of others but will have a hard time producing fluent and coherent speech
