IB Course Companion and study guide Cognitive Studies

1. IB Course Companion and study guide Cognitive Studies Paper One Material

2. Anderson and Pichert (1978) • Aim: investigate if schemas affect both encoding and retrieval.Procedure: Controlled lab exp. Participants heard a story about two boys who skipped school and spent the day in an isolated house -home of one of the boys. Some details of the house were given. Condition one heard the story from the perspective of a potential housebuyer. Condition two from the perspective of a potential burglar. Then the participants performed a distraction task for 12 minutes. Then all were asked to recall. In a second trial, half of the participants were given the opposite schema (either burglar or house buyer) and asked to recall details of the house. Half were asked to recall with the original schema.Results: the new schema changed recall as more details of the new schema were recalled (10%) but 7% of the original was recalled as well in the group who changed schema. Schema processing seems to affect both encoding and recall.  Found at: http://www.funnelbrain.com/c-1312868-anderson-pichert-1978.html

3. Darley and Gross (1983) labeling effects • John Darley and Paget Gross showed similar effects when they varied whether a young girl, Hannah, seemed poor or wealthy. College students watched a video of Hannah playing in her neighborhood, and read a brief fact sheet that described her background. Some of the students watched Hannah playing in a low-income housing estate, and her parents were described as high school graduates with blue collar jobs; the remaining students watched Hannah behaving similarly, but this time she was filmed playing in a tree-lined middle-class neighborhood, and her parents were described as college-educated professionals. The students were asked to assess Hannah's academic ability after watching her respond to a series of achievement-test questions. In the video, Hannah responded inconsistently sometimes answering difficult questions correctly and sometimes answering simpler questions incorrectly. Hannah's academic ability remained difficult to discern, but that didn't stop the students from using her socioeconomic status as a proxy for academic ability. When Hannah was labeled "middle-class," the students believed she performed close to a fifth-grade level, but when she was labeled "poor," they believed she performed below a fourth-grade level. Found at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/alternative-truths/201005/why-its-dangerous-label-people

4. Eberhardt et al.(2003) racial labels • Jennifer Eberhardt, a social psychologist at Stanford, and her colleagues showed white college students a pictures of a man who was racially ambiguous--he could have plausibly fallen into the "white" category or the "black" category. For half the students, the face was described as belonging to a white man, and for the other half it was described as belonging to a black man. In one task, the experimenter asked the students to spend four minutes drawing the face as it sat on the screen in front of them. Although all the students were looking at the same face, those who tended to believe that race is an entrenched human characteristic drew faces that matched the stereotype associated with the label (see a sample below). The racial labels formed a lens through with the students saw the man, and they were incapable of perceiving him independently of that label. • Found at: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/alternative-truths/201005/why-its-dangerous-label-people

5. Glazner and cunitz (1966) • In lab, participants hear a list of items and then immediately recalled them in any order. • Participants recalled words from the beginning and the end of the list best—u shaped curve. If given a filler/distracter task after hearing last words, primacy effect disappeared but recency effect remained.

6. Baddley and Hitch (1974) • Participants asked to read prose and understand it while remembering number sequences. Found in dual-task experiment that there was a clear and systematic increase in reasoning time but that task was impaired, although not entirely catastrophic, if the participants had to learn sequences of six rather than three numbers. • Conclusion: more than one unitary store

7. Quinn and McConnel (1996) • Participants either asked to learn word list by either imagery or rehearsal, on own or in presence of concurrent visual noise (changing dot pattern) or concurrent verbal noise (foreign language speech). • Conclusion: Imagery group not affected by verbal but disturbed by visual. Rehearsal group was not disturbed by visual but was by verbal.

8. Pickering and Gathercole (2001) • Working Memory Test Battery for Children • Improvement in performance in working memory capacity from the age of 5 until 15 years • Varies widely across individuals of same age • Problems of working memory are associated with problem in academic performance.

9. Cole and Scribner (1974) • Word recall task in US and among the Kpelle people of rural Liberia. • Researchers observed everyday cognitive activities to develop relevant and familiar recall tasks. • Children from different age groups asked to recall as many items as possible from four categories: utensils, clothes, tools, and vegetables. • The non-schooled children did not improve on free recall task after the age of 10. After 15 practice trials, they remembered only two more items to the average of 10 recalled. School attending children learned the lists just as rapidly as children in the US and used same strategy of categorical similarity to recall. • plate cutlass • calabash hoe • pot knife • pan file • cup hammer • potato trousers • onion singlet • banana head tie • orange shirt • coconut hat

10. Rogoff and waddel (1982) • Mayan children did better in a memory task if they were given one that was meaningful to them in local terms. Researchers made a mini model of Mayan village like the children’s own. 20 miniature objects a set of 80 were placed in the model. Then the 20 were removed, and the experimenter asked the children to reconstruct the shown scene. • Results: the Mayan children did slightly better than the US children.

11. New York University School of Medicine Alzheimer’s Research • PET scan of reduced metabolic activity in hippocampus during early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. • Longitudinal study of 53 normal, healthy participants—some for nine years and others for up to 24 years. • Early signs were associated with later Alzheimer’s development.

12. Demasio (2000) • Emotions are physiological signals in reaction to external stimuli, and feelings (conscious interpretation of the emotion) arise when the brain interprets the stimuli.

13. LeDoux’s Theory (1999) • Emotional reactions are flexible due to evolution. 1. short route—amygdala reacts and activates response system 2. long route—sensory input goes via sensory cortex to hippocampus, involves evaluation of stimulus and consideration of an appropriate response • Certain memories have emotional significance that might explain why memories based on emotional events are remembered better, as well as why PTSD patients have problems forgetting.

14. Lazarus and folkman (1984,8) • Appraisal of threat and appraisal of one’s resources • Problem focused coping—aimed to change the problematic situation that causes stress • Emotion focused coping—handle the emotions rather than changing the situation, ex. Escape, self control, social support, positive reappraisal • Lazarus 1975 Appraisal theory—cognitive factors can modulate stress responses

15. Speisman et al. (1964) • Participants viewed film about aboriginal initiation ceremonial genital cutting. • Experimental levels of three different soundtracks (trauma condition—emphasized the pain and mutilation, denial condition—willing and happy, intellectualization condition—anthropological interpretation) • Participants reacted more emotionally to the trauma condition (heart rate and galvanic skin response).

16. Sapolsky (1968) • Prolonged stress can damage neurons in the hippocampus but this can be reversed if normal levels of cortisol are restored.

17. Lupien et al. (1998) • Elderly participants to study for five years the role of cortisol on memory • Cortisol secretion was too high in 30% of population. • Excessive cortisol secretion participants showed memory impairment and atrophy of the hippocampus. • 2002 follow-up study—two groups (moderate level and high level/impairment), both given anti-cortisol secretion drug metyrapone, then memory test, then hydrocortisone to restore cortisol levels, compared to placebo group; found that moderate group had no problem restoring normal memory function; high level had no memory improvement, hydrocortisone caused even greater memory loss.

18. Palva et al. (2010) working memory • Data from EEG and MEG to identify interactive patterns of neurons in cerebral cortex during visual tasks. • Frontal and parietal in coordinating attention and action; occipital lobe in handling and maintaining sensory information about visual stimuli.

19. Brown and kulik (1977) • 80 participant questionnaires—where they had learned shocking events • Reported vivid memories of where, what, and feelings about shocking public event like assassination of John F. Kennedy • Flashbulb memories, too, of personal events. • FM caused by the physiological arousal arousal (amygdala).