Psychology of Thinking (3130) 2025, Lecture 3

Yes the daylight is getting longer I mean look there's windows in this classroom that in and of itself is good news by the way uh other classrooms I've taught in have no windows this one actually has four nice windows and I can see that there's daylight that's a that's a good piece of good news thank you for sharing that National sweatpant Day today and every day uh obviously um what's some Other anything else happened in your over the weekend or coming up that you're excited to share with the rest of the class another one last

piece of good news from this yes the bills yes very good news I was very excited I'll be honest I was more nervous about the the Baltimore game than I am about the upcoming uh Kansas City game so I was I was worried it was a good game though uh so lots of good news I'm always happy to share if you Ever want to share some good news with the class at the beginning of the class or in the middle of the class or at the end of the class don't hesitate uh these are the

kind this is the time of year when I think good news always helps um so in keeping with that theme on good news uh let me share some information about the quiz with you that's the opposite of good news um okay so the quiz uh quiz one will be Available today uh from about 12:30 right after class I'm just going to hide these floating meeting controls uh until about 10:30 p.m. please bear with me this is the first time I've set up an online quiz on bright space uh everything that I learned about Al uh

Sakai has evaporated uh and it's an entirely new platform I'm sure you've all had the same experience too right this past year in the fall was probably the first time you've had to uh navigate Some of the new things so I think I've got it set it should appear on the page on brightspace where it says quizzes Which is under assessments or assignments or something like that so if you don't know where to find it just look for it uh it is where you would expect it to be um I've set it so that it

becomes visible at 12:30 I'll be back in my office around 12:30 or 12:35 so I'll check there to make sure it is visible uh if it's not visible at Exactly 12:30 Don't Panic it just means that I probably had a setting wrong um it's uh multiple choice uh and it's open book open note so you can just do it with any of the res sources that you would like uh it's 20 minutes and I think though I'm not 100% sure I think it's one question at a time I don't know if it's linear format or

not so in the old uh Sakai you would see one page at a time and you couldn't go back I feel like this one you can actually go back I Don't think I was able to successfully set it to just be one and just linear format it's supposed to be but if it isn't no problem uh you can go back and look at the questions that you've taken um they're going to be in a random order and it's going to cover units one through three so the first class the second class on similarity and today's

class all of the information uh up until the end of today's class is uh a potential uh quiz item you have 15 Randomly chosen questions uh you'll have 20 minutes to do it uh and the grades will be posted as soon as it closes if you have made arrangements for accommodations so if you happen to have accommodations that include extra time on an assignment uh those should have been added automatically but again bear with me if I made a mistake it's entirely possible I've made a mistake so uh I have a list of everyone who

has requested accommodations for this Assignment if you didn't request accommodations for this assignment I might have missed it uh but if you are familiar with the process of doing it I'm sure you've done it properly and I should have the list directly from accommodated uh exams uh one thing I would make a note is that it's entirely possible if you have extra time it's still going to stop at 10:30 I don't think I've correctly said it so that if you have extra time And you start 20 minutes before uh 10:30 and your extra time would

take you past 10:30 I don't think you're going to get that extra time I think it's going to stop at 10:30 for everyone uh and that's because the questions become visible at 10:30 uh I think I've said it also so that the questions your responses and the correct answers will all be visible so you'll get your score you'll get the questions you get the right answers you'll get what you chose uh and so you Can see everything and that's so that you can prepare and help uh helpsy study for the midterm uh so I won't

be reusing these questions uh they'll just go back in the vault and it doesn't make any uh difference whether or not you can see the right answers in fact it seems better that you can see the right answers because you can use them to prepare uh so grades will be posted along with the questions and your answers any questions on the Quiz if something isn't working properly I'm sure I will hear from someone uh between uh between 12:30 and 10:30 and I'll make sure that I can uh get it right and remember there are uh

five quizzes I'm going to Mark the I'm going to include the grades from the top four uh so if for some reason you forget to do this one uh there won't be a chance to make it up but you would just not you would just drop this one because it would be the lowest one if you've Forgotten to do it and it's uh 1025 and you've got five minutes go ahead and do it and race through and just select random answers it's better than not doing it uh you'll still have some chance to sort of

get uh a few things correct so do your best uh and let me know if there are any concerns with it any questions on this um okay so let's review a little bit uh I looked at the um I looked at the foggiest concept uh Slide and this one came up uh not surprisingly was a few of you would like to hear a little bit more about triangle inequality uh and there were some uh suggestions about uh the geometric model uh psychological space so I can sort of do all of that in this little bit

of review on triangle inequality uh honestly did not I honestly understood nothing is what it said uh completely lost so triangle inequality is not a straightforward concept and the idea of Psychological space is not a straightforward concept I totally understand that so let's go through it again I'm going to use the same example we'll set aside the plumber and the account example and let's just focus on the perceptual stimuli uh and I'll go through the example again and if there are any questions on it uh let me know so triangle inequality the idea is we

start with the assumption that if objects in your psychological space in Other words the way in which you've stored and remembered memories uh or concepts or things just all of your memories uh all of the objects that you're familiar with reside in some kind of psychological space It's Your Inner Space it's the way in which these Concepts relate to each other spreading activation is an example of Inner Space and psychological space uh and this geometric model assumes that there's essentially a Correspondence between psychological space the way in which Concepts relate to each other or uh

perceptual representations relate to each other in your mental space as a course respondence between that and the way in which those objects would relate to each other in physical space outside your mind and if that's the case and it seems to be the case for a lot of things so if you ask people to make similarity judgments they seem to reflect Some psychological physical space correspondence if that's the case then a lot of these things like minimality and Symmetry and triangle inequality should hold true because they hold true in physical space basic two and three

and multi-dimensional geometry would suggest that this uh triangle inequality would be uh would hold true over lots of different objects so if it's true for objects it should be true in the mind but it isn't always true in the mind so People don't always treat objects exactly as a correspondence and that's why we had to talk about things like the contrast model and some of those other models of psychological space and similarity triangle inequality suggests that the similarity or distance dis dissimilarity or distance between two points can't be more than the distance between a point

and another point and another and two other points so in other words I'm going to show this graphically Again um but the distance between A and B has to be less than the distance between a point A and C and a point C and B so imagine a b and c on a triangle uh what you would see is no matter how that triangle was is constructed A and B has to be less than a c CB that just makes sense right one line one edge of the triangle has to be shorter than the other

two otherwise it's not a triangle with some other kind of shape uh doesn't matter where a B and C are in this Psychological physical space uh it's always going to be true right that's basic two-dimensional uh ukian geometry well you are forecasting possibly one of the explanations for the failure to show a triangle inequality in psychological space perhaps the mind isn't exactly uh like ukian geometry this would work by the way even in a three-dimension we're using two-dimensional space uh to show it most straightforward but as you suggested there can be a third dimension So

then we would have three dimens triangle inequality which would be irritable shape you know sort of volumetric shape inequality the idea would still be the case but you're right the Mind may not be exactly like that yeah so we've got A and B has to be shorter than a c plus CB uh yes uh and so there's always going to be one line that's the basic idea one of those lines is going to be cannot be longer than the other two otherwise it just can't be a Triangle and as you suggested what if the mind

doesn't work that way well the Mind does work that way sometimes but it doesn't work that way all of the time and there are some special cases for why it doesn't um and what we suggested is suppose we had people rate the similarity of all of these features so not just rating a b c and d but just imagine you got to rate all of these in pairs and so you're asking subjects to do is say on a scale of 1 to seven are These similar or not Al how similar are they and we might

give this a rating this would be exactly identical because these two shapes are exactly the same shape these two s shapes are the same size but they're different colors so they would be less similar these two shapes are the same color but they're different sizes so they would also be less similar uh these two are different sizes and different shapes and so they might be even more dissimilar because They vary on shape and size and and so on and what we would have though are some cases where we have two Dimensions differ we've got a

size and a color uh that differ but other cases we would only have size and they would match exactly on one of those features or one of those dimensions and that seems to be where the problem comes for triangle inequality if there are stimula that match on one dimensioned exact we tend to treat them as more similar than the Psychological space explanation would predict uh the same thing with this uh pair here they're a different color but they're exactly the same size and so although they have different colors they match on a dimension we kind

of prioritize that we weight that Dimension more heavily we consider it to be uh uh more important in the similarity calculation more important than the basic geometric model would predict uh and so although the geometric model Would suggest that the ab so the AC match should be shorter than the a uh C match uh most people aren't showing that so in that pairwise set of ratings uh what we would see is something like low similarity uh between the a b and C's uh but High similarity here with the A and the D almost as if

this Dimension is sort of squashed and so it's no longer a triangle just for that par that pairwise comparison so it might seem as if they are in this uh two-dimensional space but The shape is no longer a triangle because D simultaneously can be closer to a and uh closer to C because of that dimensional match it could be 1 to 10 uh it could be any scale so 1 to seven is a really common one uh it's a good question why is the rating scale 1 to seven rating scales commonly are used 1 to

seven because it's enough numbers that you can keep track of and there's a center point right so you've got three on one side Three on the other side and you've got an exact middle but one to 10 scales are often used one to nine scales can be used uh another one that's really common especially in um things like asking people to assess their mood is called the visual analog scale which is 0 to 100 uh where you just sort of give a number uh between one and 100 uh the number itself in this case wouldn't

matter but that's a good question they would prioritize the Feature that matches on a single Dimension that's exactly right and so what you sort of got here is a psychological space that seems to stretch and shape depending on whether or not there's a perfect match and this suggests that although the Mind treats a lot of things as if they reside in multi-dimensional psychological space it doesn't have a onetoone correspondence with physical space uh that sometimes we can shift and change psychological space In a way that suggests it's not strictly two or three-dimensional it's not a

ukian space uh exactly does that help at all or does this just confuse the matter in a slightly different way or does this help just a little bit so the idea is your mind is kind of stretching and shrinking the space b based on those single dimensional matches yeah the main idea is that triangle inequality would be a prediction of a GE strictly geometric Model um but it doesn't account for Behavioral data in cases like this that's right so even if these things mismatch on a dimension as they do uh they're going to seem to

be more similar to each other or less distance than each other because they match on something that's exactly right is it Poss so how would I phrase a question relating to this I might phrase a question relating this uh asking you Uh to give an example example of how triangle inequality Works uh and how people how you might design an experiment or how an experiment might be designed to show that it that people violate that core Assumption of the geometric model that's the question that I've often used something like that does that help shall we

go on yes which which confusing statement are you oh no no so yes that's a good so Thank you for clarifying so what I might ask is uh give an example of how psychological space you know give an example within the geometric model of triangle inequality uh and then maybe describe an experiment or a result set of results that would show that people VI that assumption you could describe exactly this one uh you could describe another experiment that might be similar enough to this that would have the same character that could Also make the same

point so if I ask that's a good question if I'm asking you to describe uh an example of some data that would be supportive or not supportive of a theory it's perfectly reasonable to use in fact it's probably advisable to use the examples we've talked about in class or in the textbook because they're fairly clear but you don't have to necess neily describe them in that way does that help at all good anything else on this before we Move the topic of the day which is memory and thinking all right I hope that this is

slightly less foggy uh than it was last week um but I recognize that it is inherently a foggy concept memory so what do we use the past for that's what today's talk is or today's uh lecture is about and that's what today's unit is about um so this will have today's unit or today's lecture is going to have two halves the First half we're going to talk about memory and thinking so we're going to talk a little bit about availability and the availability heuristic uh we're going to talk a little bit about how we use

the past to make decisions uh one of the things that came up at the beginning of this class when uh we did the little survey of things that you would be interested in finding out one or two people mentioned something about uh the idea of decision ision making and free Will uh and one of the arguments against why it can be a challenge uh to think about a truly free will or a free ability to make decisions is that we're always constrained by the things that we have in our memories uh so you use the

past to make decisions about the future that's what our memories are for uh it's not really useful to have a set of memories that just allows you to entertain yourself by thinking of things that happened uh it's really useful to Have a set of memories that you can use to predict the future uh so that you can say well this is like something that happened so memories although they're past oriented memory is really a future oriented cognitive process we're using the memory to be able to make predictions about things in the future um any kind

of intelligent system uh whether it's an electronic system a biological system uh is going to have the ability to make use of things in the Past uh to make decisions and predictions about things that are going to happen in the future uh that's the the kind of learning that uh is possible in lots of domains so memory as we would like to Define it maybe you could Define it as recognizing a pattern of activation neural activation that's occurring now as being similar to so however we want to decide Define similarity as being similar to a

pattern of activation that occurred before so Whatever state of activation your brain is experiencing now you can recognize that it overlaps with a state of activation that has happened in the past and that's the ability to experience a memory you can experience that with some kind of volition you can decide to remember something uh you can have uh the experience of recollection which is oh I remember what happened two years ago or 10 years ago or when I was five or something like that or you can Remember something from earlier today uh so we can

have that conscious recollective experience uh or we can have recognition experience where we say oh this is I yeah I recognize this I feel familiar when I see this person or when I experience this thing uh and sometimes these memories happen outside of our awareness uh we inst we Implement a behavior or we plan a behavior because it's something that we planned in the past and we may not even be aware that We're doing something uh based on past experience so let's talk about thinking in memory you're going to rely on your memory system uh

to plan interactions with people right so if you're thinking about uh what you're going to be doing this weekend uh you probably going to plan to do it with people that you did stuff with last weekend right uh and if you think about wanting to avoid certain people uh you might think about why you want to avoid them so you use your Memory to plan interactions you also learn memory to plan new skills uh you use your memory to select behaviors you want to select the behaviors that are most appropriate uh if you're interacting with

friends you're planning your interaction uh you select the behaviors that are most appropriate um experts obviously are using the memory to solve new problems uh and uh to discover new things so let's talk about risk perception and Memories one of the things that's going to come up in this class but also in our judgment and decision-making lectures are the idea of assessing risks and making decisions based on those risks according to your memory so we need in often times we need to be able to learn to react quickly to risky situations uh here is a

photograph this is not one of my children uh from an early time this is just again a random photograph that I uh selected on Google Image search by typing kid next to stove or something like that um and here was a young child reaching for a stove which I don't know this seems a little dangerous he's a little bit close to the flame uh and at at least uh they've turned the handles away that's good so the parent or the caregiver in this case has remembered a lesson from earlier which is don't leave the handles

out so that the kid can grab the pot uh so that's that's appropriate but if you were Taking care of this child and you walked into the kitchen and they're reaching like this what would you say to the child in this case what's a common experience stop get you might say something kind of loud right you might sort of say get away from there or you know sort of Raise Your Voice or I'm not gonna say scare the child but you would sort of try to get them to realize that this is a risky situation

because from their perspective there's Nothing wrong here right there's nothing risky there's no pain associated with this there's no danger from their perspective from their perspective all they know is that their caregiver uh their parents or grandparents or siblings or whoever does the cooking is standing at this device uh manipulating the knobs and making food right that's a good thing so in some the child is using a memory of seeing their parents or their caregiver at the stove and trying To mimic that behavior but you also don't want them to burn themselves on the stove

and so if you're the caregiver you probably I want to say yell at the child but you might Raise Your Voice you might try to frighten them just a little bit so that they associate this with I better back off whatever I did created some sort of sense of alarm in my caregiver so that I know that something is else they can't put their words can't put words on it Yet because they're pre-linguistic at this point uh but you want the child to be able to associate this with something that is just mildly unpleasant enough

that they know that there's a risk because you want them to then look back and say okay uh the available evidence the last time I was here the last thing that happened most recently was that my uh parents came in and said stop doing that they sounded alarmed and so you want them Remember that you want that to be the first thing that comes to mind so that they back away from the stove a little bit and don't get too close because you can't keep you may not be able to keep your eye on this

child all the time they're walking around does that make sense so you kind of want to create a memory you want to create a memory in this child that says it's okay to be near the stove but not that near the stove you don't want the memory to be Created by actual pain you don't want the child to actually go through the process of burning themselves because that would be much more traumatic right uh so you want them to have something there so you want that memory to be there so you're trying to create the

memory for the child so that they will uh uh they'll back away uh and we can call this availability so we're trying to create an available memory we're going to Define it later but Availability or the availability heuristic you're probably familiar with it uh is this idea that we base decisions and make assessments of risk on what's most available in memory the ease to which something comes to mind uh gives you a cue or a clue about how useful that information is so if the first thing that comes to mind is I'm going to get

yelled at you look around to make sure there's nobody to yell at you and you look to make sure you're Doing the right thing right uh that's the first thing that comes to mind so that's actually a helpful adaptive response because most of the time the first thing that comes to mind is probably correct because you're in the same situation as you were before but sometimes it's a bias it's a helpful bias it's helpful to have the first thing that comes to mind uh be the most useful information that you can have to be the

accurate information but it isn't Always so how is this a bias let's talk about the availability bias and remember the availability bias suggests that we're using our memories and the ease to which with to with which we can bring things into the present uh bring a working memory or bring a past memory or a past experience into the present and use it to base our risk assessments and make decisions yes that's entirely possible yeah it's entirely possible so If you didn't hear the question is it possible that you've had the bad experience and so now

you're repeating the experience uh that's entirely possible uh because you're probably not when you if you were to yell at the child for this or to tell them to back off you may not be thinking this through very explicitly either uh you might be doing it on instinct to say get away from there uh because maybe you remember being yelled at or possibly uh ex you Know getting your hand burned or something like that we all have access to these kinds of early uh memories that aren't necessarily a specific episode but they reflect something uh

sometimes they're emotional memories sometimes they might even be traumatic memories uh that inform the way in which we interact with other people so how is it a bias how is it a bias that can be helpful or harmful um so let me just talk a little bit about uh this Is actually content that seems it's kind of a meta effect here uh I had added this slide in the next two or three slides when I taught this class last year in the winter of 2024 uh because in the winter of 2024 which is exactly a

year ago and this seems like a lot longer ago we were just coming out of covid doesn't it seem like a lot longer than that uh I feel like that was decades ago uh but when I taught this class exactly a year ago it Was really the first year we had had no interruptions and how many of you remember that the the interruptions of having to be uh doing classes online and in hybrid formats and worse that so the unexpected or the unpredictable nature of oh we're having class suddenly we're going to have exams in

online uh we're going to have to Pivot back to online or in person stuff it's very unsettling I think to a lot of people uh so I added this information because most of us at The time uh had the experience that uh we were having difficulty just remembering how much had happened uh in the last four or five years so remember this covid era of which your generation is the core generation that experienced it more than any other uh was really just a fiveyear window from March 2020 uh until the coming up of March 2025

we're talking about a very small uh air period of time for a lot of people including me and a lot of others uh Students last year uh everything kind of started looking the same uh a lot of us and I imagine that you're in this situation too kind of had difficulty remembering year Toto year and I don't ever remember having that experience before how many of you kind of feel the same way or sort of know what I'm talking about that before Co I could remember 2018 was different from 2019 and 2017 and I could

remember what happened from year to year but starting In 2020 everything just kind of lumped in uh and it was really difficult to tell was that that year or the next year did you have your hand up because you agree or did you have a question just agree got it um so that's the experience that I was thinking about last year and now even one year later this seems out of date uh because most of us have tried to just let that let that era go and just have it be what it is um I

had written an article uh in 2020 about the Unbearable sameness of online meetings I'm not going to link to it now but I'll sort of share uh two highlights from this that I think most people can recognize uh but have to deal with the way in which context affects our memories um so this is from my article a lot of my research and teaching is able to be carried out at home and online this is in that first era of being asked to go home from your perspective you would Have probably most of you would

have been uh in secondary school so you would have been in high school uh not doing much I guess uh the experience of high school online was not a positive experience for most people uh because you took away because everything that was fun about high school was gone and the only thing that was left was the least fun part which was class uh so a lot of my research and teaching is able to be carried out at home and online I Began to notice small changes not just general fatigue but that was also a concern

I was making more memory errors more than usual and this is not just because of Aging um for example I might be talking with one student for 10 minutes about the wrong project uh or I might confuse one meeting for another a lot of these mistakes are what are called Source memory errors we're going to talk about this in the second half but Source memory error is you're Familiar with something you remember the thing but you don't remember who told you or the context in which it was told to you so you're you're correctly remembering

information but you don't remember where that information came from you remember the wrong Source um I remembered the student a topic and the meeting but confused which was which I was like The Stereotype of the absentminded professor and then And this has to do with the uh importance of context in thinking and memory I realized a possible source for the problem everything looked the same I was looking at the same screen on the same computer in the same room for everything this was not typical for my entire career as an academic I've always been in

different places for different activities I would lecture lecture hall like this one I would hold seminars in small discussion rooms I would meet with Students in my office I would with colleagues Cafe campus meetings in meeting rooms and boardrooms I would work on data analysis in my office I would write at home uh and so different places for different tasks and you probably have this experience too right you got a place to study uh you you do the lecture here in this lecture hall but then you study with your friends in some other place maybe

you have meetings in a different place uh but if you're Doing everything everything in the same room on the same computer it all starts to look the same um it all looked the same it was on the same screen on zoom and in my home office I had no longer had the variety of space time location and context to create a varied sense of memory cues so all the stuff was there but it all started to look the same and the kind of cues the spatial cues and the temporal cues the time cues and the

person cues all of that stuff was Missing and so the memory started to to Crunch together that's a possible explanation for why a lot of us me included uh have a lot of confusion about what happened and where it happened uh during that era um other explanations of course you probably remember these kinds of explanations uh brain fog how many of you are familiar with the whole concept of uh covid induced brain fog is it biological or is it psychological or is It just this General fatigue of everything starting to look the same I don't

know the answer um there are some uh research you know there is some research suggesting that the more times you have uh a specific virus uh that you have you're more susceptible in the long run to some of these cognitive impairments um and some of them might uh affect different areas like neuroinflammation uh is going to affect your ability to make decisions and this Isn't unique to co this is uh something that you would experience with other kinds of viruses that might affect uh the respiratory system or the circulatory system um we have a bias

uh in our memories for things that are common one of the reasons that it was hard for me to tell the difference between one day and the other during the 2020 to 2023 era is that everything started to look the same so everything was kind of equally Available it was all on that one screen um I'm want to talk about an incident in 2014 so that's over 10 years ago uh I highly doubt that most of you were sort of super into NFL football perhaps maybe when you were 10 uh but maybe you were and

maybe you remember this example the reason I'm using this example is I talk about it in the textbook um has nothing to do with uh my feelings about the Baltimore Ravens that's completely irrelevant it Just happens to be in this particular lecture uh so in in 2014 uh a player uh was a running back an allp Pro running back was in the Super Bowl uh Ray Rice uh was implicated in a really high-profile case of domestic violence um this was in an early era of social media so this is before uh Twitter was really popular

this was before uh Instagram reals this is before Tik Tok was invented uh this was in an era when people were still Becoming familiar with the idea of widely sharing video also was in an era when there wasn't much video right so in the current ERA anybody can hold their phone up but in 2014 it was much less common so what happened was uh although he had a really uh sort of a up to this point a really good career as a running back uh was in a I guess I think it was a a

maybe in a an incident with his fiance at the time uh and both were drinking uh they got into A fight uh and started hitting each other and then the video showed um his him hitting his wife or his fiance at the time in an elevator uh and knocking her down uh and then she also passed out because of drink uh and then dragging her out of the elevator so the video was terrible right because he was assaulting his uh partner at the time uh hitting her and dragging her out of the elevator domestic violence

like this is It's never okay right it's not this Is not the kind of thing that anybody should be involved in at the time because this was relatively novel the idea that this would be caught on video uh there was a lot of media coverage it was on the news for several weeks uh and again this is in an era when most people were still getting their news on television uh but the video was shown you know so this is an era when things like TMZ and those Kinds of things uh were first coming into

prominence so celebrity uh Gossip websites so there were websites uh CNN all of those kinds of things lots of available availability of photographs and videos of the incidents shortly afterwards Americans were surveyed uh about domestic violence and most about 70% said that the NFL has a troubling epidemic of domestic violence uh and so most Americans the majority of Americans thought this is a I mean domestic violence is a problem but they endorsed the opinion that it's a specific problem in the NFL um and the problem the reason I bring this example up is that it's

it's clear that it's not accurate uh so there is at the time there was no epidemic of domestic violence in NFL players relative to other people in the United States uh this is from an article called real clear science uh looking at domestic Violence doesn't appear to have been back in July 538 Benjamin Morris tallied up the incidents uh looking at NFL arrests so the NFL tracks these things right they want to know if their players are involved in anything it's a big business um compared those numbers to National averages among people who were in

the same a age range so men uh from 25 to 29 year old and found the rate of domestic violence in NFL to be uh 55% n of the General population uh across many different metrics and you can see the figure in the textbook NFL players have a lower rate uh they are not arrested for things as often uh as the general population of uh young adult men uh in the United States and the reason is so why did 69% of Americans believe that the NFL suffers a widespread epidemic the answer is rooted in how

we think about and how we think humans are prone to rely on examples and experience that Can be easily recalled and if you can easily recall this example it over inflates your sense of whether or not that's accurate that's entirely possible that's entirely possible so uh we don't know about reporting rates um one possible assumption is that uh the lack of police reporting might be uh approximal for people in the NFL or other uh groups uh so if there's a problem with reporting uh there wouldn't be necessarily any Evidence that it would be more of

a problem for NFL players but you're right there's a lot of problems with uh these things not being reported um the availability heuristics suggests that if we can remember it it must be important so if this case was being reported a lot and if people are remembering it uh then it it tends to assume a larger prominence in your memory uh a key drawback of the heuristic is it tends to lead us to over Estimate the prevalence of memorable events in other words even rare events that are memorable tend to overestimate uh you would overestimate

the likelihood uh of maybe catching a rare disease you might overestimate uh the likelihood of winning a lottery uh if it's happened once you might overestimate the likelihood of things that are rare if they are prominent and they have exper if you've experienced them once um for example uh here you can Legitimately blame popular media because plane crashes are widely covered many erroneously view flying as more dangerous than driving most of us know that flying is less dangerous than driving that you're more likely to be hurt driving to the airport than being in the flight

but that doesn't change your perspective of whether or not there could it's a uh it whether or not there's still a risk thanks to Shark Week people are warer of sharks than Ever than Deer uh because 91% of people have seen read or heard something about Ray Rice's domestic violence they overestimate the problem within the NFL uh and so across the best statistics you can do uh in terms of being able to track uh arrest rates uh are that the national average for the most part just about every category is higher uh than NFL players

this doesn't mean that any particular case would be uh wouldn't be noteworthy uh it just suggests that the Rate of arrests is lower for NFL players but the prominence that they might get in other words the coverage that they might get because NFL players might be more famous more popular More in the media uh and it might be reported on the prominence of those events would seem higher so there's a disconnect between the actual data and what you can remember we're going to come back to this idea several times in this class we're going to

come back to it we talk About probabilities uh and judgments because most of us don't have experience with the overall base rates the reason we rely on the availability juristic is how many of you have access to this table you don't have this data most of us don't have the data I have no idea how many people on average arrest rates per 100,000 per year of men age 25 to 29 this is not something I have access to uh it's not data that I would have in my mind or I wouldn't have it at my

Fingertips we don't know the base rates of these things but what we do know are individual cases and so we base our judgments on individual cases that we can remember because we rarely have information about the overall rates or probabilities uh or proportions of things and so it makes sense that we would use what we do have which is our memories our memories don't have this but our memories have a video of Ray Rice assaulting his girlfriend at the Time most people people are unaware of the base rates so this comes up with all sorts

of things so it'll come up again today when we talk about memory errors we're going to talk about availability again when we talk about uh thinking and reasoning when we talk about judgment and decision-making this will be a a theme uh that comes up a lot of different times in this class does this seem clear so far so thinking or executing a behavior Based on the first similar example that comes to mind is known as the availability youris and that's what we've been talking about uh this idea of availability was discovered um or at least

measured and accurately described theoretically uh in the early 1970s so a paper in 1973 uh by conman and tersi um carried us some really straightforward examples very simple examples much less controversial uh than things like uh Plane crashes or domestic violence or Lottery or getting sick just really simple things like suppose you sample a word three letters or more at random from an English text so you take a big book open it up and you just pick a word at random is it more likely the word starts with the letter r or that R is

the third letter um most people they found said that it's more likely that the word randomly selected would start with the Letter R it's not true there are more words with R in the third position uh even if most of us know that it's a lot easier to think of words that start with the letter R because that's how you think of words right uh even if you know factually that more words have R in the third letter you're going to come up with a bigger list of words that start with r it's just easier

to come up with that list uh it provides a better memory cue and so they suggested that that is The basis of the availability heris the how easy it is to draw the information to mind from your memory how easy can you remember something the easier it is to remember the uh more quickly you can remember the better CU it is and the better more reliable source of information it is sometimes that's correct a lot of times it's incorrect yeah more likely that R is the third or I mean if you switch the order it

wouldn't matter uh in this case uh so uh If you if if we went through the this specific paper this is one example but they usually use lots of different examples different letters uh different examples different orderings uh and the idea seems to be the the same uh in this particular case it's easier to remember words to come up with a list of words that begin with a single letter any of you that play um any of those New York times word games uh it's easy to think of words with the first letter not so

Easy to think of words with second or third letters it's a good question uh sometimes it comes up with how you think about perceptual or personal categories it's from the same paper um as reported in Conan's book Thinking Fast and Slow uh as you consider the next question please assume that Steve got a guy named Steve uh selected at random from a repres representative sample representative sample means that it's representative of The general population um an individual has been described by a neighbor as follows Steve is very shy and withdrawn invariably helpful but with little

interest in people or in the world of reality a Meek and tidy Soul he has a need for order and structure and a passion for detail right so this was designed to evoke a specific stereotype of kind of person so a person who is shy uh withdrawn Helpful but not really interested in people kind of you know not very forthcoming kind of neat likes a lot of order and detail so you could sort of picture what Steve is like and then the question is Steve more likely to be a librarian or a farmer and most

people say what do you think the answer is most people would say uh most people would say uh that he's more uh like a librarian Conan says the resemblance of Steve's personality to that of a stereotypical librarian strikes everyone almost immediately but equally relevant statistical considerations are almost always ignored did it occur to you that there are more than 20 male Farmers for each male librarian in the United States I don't know if that's true anymore but certainly when he was writing this in the 1973 uh this would have been an accurate figure and so

his point is that We can bring to mind a stereotype of a librarian whether it's accurate or not uh and so we overestimate the likelihood that Steve is a librarian even though statistically if you were to draw someone at random from the population of the United States would be more likely to be involved in farming regardless of their personality right you would just have 20 Farmers to every one librarian so if you pick someone at random you got 20 times to get a farmer and only one Time sorry 19 times to get a farmer only

one times to get a librarian so you're more likely to get a farmer in this case so we propose that they use the resemblance as a simplifying heuristic a quicker rule based on what you can bring to mind in other words using your memory to make it difficult judgment uh and these kinds of judgments these kind of biases are almost always helpful for us they usually give us accurate helpful adaptive information but in cases like This you can create scenarios where it provides provides the wrong information which is how you highlight the existence of that

bias in the first place you have to create a situation in which uh the bias or the heuristic produces the incorrect information so this isn't to say that these biases are wrong they're usually giving us the right information it's just that these experimental situations draw out the error um in the United States in the Middle of the 20110 uh it's about you know 15 years ago the United States people believed there was a war on cops that for whatever reason people in the United States were convinced that there was an organized plan to undermine and

attack law enforcement and police officers in the United States Sheriff Lewis law enforcement officers are under siege why the rise in police shootings 2015 war on police Sparks National crime wave uh violent criminals are getting the upper hand this Probably sounds familiar to you now doesn't it the idea except it isn't a war on Cops now what's how's the way how is this framed now epidemic of police brutality might be one um there are other cases you might hear so in the United States uh probably you're going to be hearing more about uh epidemics of

illegal migrants uh causing Violence uh this doesn't necessarily mean it's happening it isn't happening uh but it's reported that it's happening and so if you don't actually know the statistics and if you haven't actually witnessed any particular case whether it is police brutality a war on cops or an epidemic of illegal migrant violence you got to take something at their word and these are the things that you say these are the thing these are the examples that you have you have examples of stuff From your feed right so this is in the era before the

news feed uh but it's a war on they just started calling it a war on Cops 58% think there's a war on police and a war of course is different from just saying we happen to be in an era where there's maybe a statistical anomaly where there were two or three extra attacks on law enforcement uh than would otherwise be expected but maybe it's just a statistical anomaly a war suggests a concerted effort organized by Somebody to say let's attack police across North America is it accurate well no it's not accurate and that's why I'm

using this example wouldn't be a very helpful example if it was accurate uh no it's not accurate it wasn't accurate then and it's not accurate now uh total police officer fatalities for the entire uh century and a half uh in the United States there were a couple of a Peaks there was a peak here around the Era of prohibition e to be back in business great so a little Spike of police officer uh fatalities uh in the era of prohibition and in the era in the 197s which was the original War on Drugs everything's a

war in the United States uh and then there was one era here during September 11th when police officers were killed uh in the actual attack on the World Trade Center but otherwise Since the 1970s and this trend continues by the way but this is just to reflect the statistics around the time that people thought there was a war on Cops uh violence continues to go down in the United States um fatalities per million in population uh it continues to drop uh except for this era in the 1920s when there was a lot of uh organized

crime activity around prohibition of alcohol um fatalities uh in different um profession logging and Fishermen have a lot of fatalities that's a dangerous uh line of work to be in uh so if you're involved in the lumber industry and logging if you're a fisherman uh if you're a construction worker on a roof uh there's some fatalities but police officers not so much uh during that era um the US crime rates continue to decline uh across every possible measure during this era uh so Not only was it safer than it was more safe than ever to

be a police Officer in the United States in the 2010s it was safer to be anybody uh in the United States in the 2010s because crime dropped everywhere uh over 20 and 30 years spans even in 2014 around the very same time that Americans believed there was a war on Cops uh the NYPD uh suggested that officers shot and killed by subjects that is the war on Cops there were two there was one in 2010 and you can see that there was a time when there were more in the United States uh in New York

City but pretty much for the entire era of the 2000s it was really rare uh to be shot or injured or killed in the line of duty as a NYPD officer yeah yeah um I don't have it up on the slide but these data generally continue the same Trend uh so crime rates have continued to decrease there are some caveats to that uh during the uh era of uh covid uh some crimes increased uh and other Crimes decreased uh so some crimes decreased because people were staying home other crimes increased because when people were finally

let out they went a little crazy in the Summers uh and so there were some of those you probably remember over the last few Summers that uh there would be variety of public riots and demonstrations in the United States so those kinds of things uh might be anomalies rather than organized uh Wars on cops or organized migrant Violence comp yeah yeah well that's a good CA that's a good reason so the if you didn't hear the question is uh unlike the NFL player there might be some higher level interest uh in public opinion I think

is what you're suggesting uh is that if public opinion is shifted towards thinking oh there's a war on Cops it would suggest more funding uh for police office or for for the police department Uh it might suggest uh different uh political parties would be able to use that information that's absolutely the case uh so there's a reason why and I'm not going to slide the whole way back there's a reason why these things come from news reports right so individuals uh are reporting these statistics without necessarily reporting uh the context so after one or two

officers might have been attacked in a riot for example that doesn't Necessarily mean there's a war on cops but if a survey is conducted and people endorse that after seeing that attack and then the survey is reported it becomes self-reinforcing because not only did you see the attack now you see the results of the survey and now you see people talking about the results of the survey and it starts to become a Vibe right that everybody starts to think well this is what's happening right There's a war on Cops in the United States despite the

fact that all of the available data at that time suggested the opposite and that's the only point that I want to make I don't want to influence how you would think about uh current trends in the United States or in Canada I'm suggesting that individual examples uh tend to be over relied on in our memory rather than uh underlying data because it's the individual examples that we have access To we rarely have access to all of this uh underlying data does that seem clear so the belief by most Americans in the mid 2010s that there

was a war on Cops seems to be a case of the availability bias um so the reason I'm bringing all of this up the idea of uh memory for things in the covid era the idea that we might overestimate uh the likelihood of Librarians based you know a person being a librarian based on their characteristics or that there might be a war on cops or that there was a epidemic of domestic violence in the united sta among NFL players in the United States is that memory affects the thinking process for better or worse I mean

it just does right I mean you you use your memories to think about everything to assess risk to make decisions to solve problems to recognize objects to plan All of these things uh the problem is that memory is not always reliable it's rarely perfect uh as we'll see in the second half of today's lecture memory isn't very reliable it's useful uh it does what it's supposed to do which is to help you quickly make decisions and get through the day uh but it isn't necessarily very accurate uh it's not a perfect record of the past

in fact it's a skewed record of the past got a few more slides uh and Then we'll take a there's a very short video we can watch uh about 15 seconds or 50 seconds uh and then we'll take a break um this is because repeated exposures uh to false or ambiguous information increases the likelihood of later recall that's true the more times you hear something even if you hear something that you know is wrong You' still heard it right even if you hear some information that you know is not Accurate that hearing becomes part of

your memory and every time you recall that information that memory Trace gets strengthened uh so if you're repeatedly told something even if it's wrong uh you can start to believe that as being accurate if you're repeatedly told that something that you see isn't exactly what you think it is then you start to question whether or not you're making accurate judgments we all know what that's called that's called gaslighting Right uh you gasl somebody means that you tell them that they don't that what they think they see isn't what they actually see uh it's called gaslighting

because there was a movie called Gaslight and the guy who was emitting some crime and trying to trick his wife into thinking that something was happening every time he would go out of the house or something the lights would change because they Were gas lights they were run on natural gas and he would he would say no you didn't see that that's why we call it gaslighting there's actually watch the movie it's not a bad movie so that we all know what gaslighting is right it's when you tell somebody no that's not what you think

uh you are seeing a different thing than what you're seeing and the more times you're told that the more likely you are to start to question this objective Reality and start to embrace a different reality so why do these whether they're rumors political statements urban legends presidential tweets and posts why do these Illusions persist well remember the challenge to the thinking process incomplete evidence we don't have complete evidence most of the time we don't have all the information to make the best decision every time we have limited information we have what we have in our

memories um when the Information is not complete we use the information that's most available um and if this available information is not accurate we still tend to trust it in other words we've got obviously a bias to trust our own memories and if your memories are full of things that are inaccurate you trust your memories first right this can be seen most accurately in this classic example I know we talked about this in cognitive psychology and we would have used the same video and You've probably seen this video before but let me highlight a few

things about it and then we're going to take a short break uh and the reason I like this example even though it's fairly commonplace and uh familiar to most of you uh this from 1998 so I first learned about this when I was in graduate school so it's kind of stuck with me um 1998 I think I was halfway through my PhD Al so I was in grad one of the let's go back to the beginning here make it Big so this is a study where uh and you've probably seen examples of this already but

let me just set it up if you haven't this is an example where the experimentor uh is carrying there's two people carrying a door uh and the subject in the experiment is The Old Man and the old man is being asked for directions by one of the other experimenters so three experimenters three researchers one subject one subject asks or one experimentor is Asking for directions an old guy on the campus of Harvard University looks like a prop probably um and so he's got a map there he's saying you know where do I find such and

such so he's helping him meanwhile two people are carrying a big wooden door for some reason uh and they barge in between the two people it's very rude thing to do uh if you see people talking and you're carrying a big door don't walk right between them so they get separated briefly and one of The people carrying the door switches places with the person was asking for directions uh and then afterwards the person who's giving directions the old man who's the subject in the experiment does not notice that he's giving directions to an entirely different

human being in other words objective reality change right in front of him and he doesn't notice he has no idea that he's talking to a different person his memory is not very accurate And it's not because he's an old guy this video shows a participant from a 1998 study by Daniel Simons and Daniel L Watch What Happens as the unsuspecting pedestrian provides directions the young man on the left is one of the experimenters he has approached the white-haired man and asked for directions watch closely as two people carrying a door pass between them and the

first experimenter is replaced by Someone else he doesn't know he has no idea he's talking to a different person he just keeps on going like many of the people in this study The Pedestrian was entirely unaware that he was talking to a different person approximately 50% of the people approached in this study didn't notice when the person they were talking to was replaced by someone else so when I first learned about this in Graduate school I was my mind was sort of blown I was like so you mean to tell me that reality could change

in front of me and I wouldn't even notice uh because I would just not expect it to change and that's part of this bias we don't expect things to change in front of us right we expect our memories to be fairly accurate if you remember something uh you expect it to be an accurate accurate portrayal if you perceive something you expect it to be an accurate perception If you're talking to somebody you expect it to be the same person and if something changes from what from that something deviates from your expectation one possible solution is

just to simply not notice it uh because that's not what you're expecting to do you're not expecting that change to happen and so you don't have it Happ that's entirely possible so this what's known as an ingroup and outgroup bias you tend to assume that people who are In a different group from you uh are more likely to be indistinguishable uh so we can tell the difference between our friends but we can't tell the difference between lots of other people so I can speak as a 55 yearold uh Professor that lots of students kind of

look the same uh not no offense uh but it's just true right I mean individ visually you all look different uh but if I see a bunch of Western students altoe I might not be able to tell that's Why if I see you walking to the UCC and you wave I might not know it's not because I don't care it's because I just might not realize in that context so you're right we might not notice those differences this study has been replicated in lots of other contexts though in much smaller settings there's one I'll get

your questions in a second um there was one example which I don't have the video for but it's a really good example person comes in it's same Researcher so the person will come into the lab uh and they'll come up to a desk and the experimentor is here uh at the lab so this would be like you in Psych 1000 doing an experiment you come into the lab and you're greeted by somebody with sort of a desk right and then what's one of the first things you have to do in an experiment you have to

sign a consent form right so the experiment goes down like experimenter goes down like this to get the consent form Different person pops up uh and so now it isn't an ingroup out group because it's usually a younger person a different person comes up with a consent form and again around 40% do not notice the change that the person they were just talking to bent down to get a sheet of paper and a different person the different colored shirt comes up and hands of the thing and some of us do not notice that change so

we had a couple of questions yeah Yeah so you're right uh in this case and and to some extent uh that's where this change happens right so if you were to have a male female difference or if you were to have a tall short difference uh or an ethnic difference you're more likely to notice those um the degree to which there's a difference uh will make it more noticeable uh the more similar they are uh the less likely you are to notice the change but not entirely there are cases and so this other study I

was Talking about did manipulate shirt color or manipulated gender uh and those kinds of things didn't always make a difference you know it's going along yeah so this guy ask dire show dire and then like along the you're trusting your mem act yeah kind of over yeah that's essentially the explanation that Simons gives is that we're not paying attention uh to these kinds of things because it's not important uh we Don't expect the person in front of us to change so we don't dedicate a lot of our cognitive resources to determining that the person I'm

talking to now is the same person that I was talking to five seconds ago it's just not something that happens so we don't pay attention and you're right we're sort of going along paying attention to other things we're paying attention to the discussion paying attention to the directions to make sure that the person understands The directions for giving so it's a good it's a good Insight yeah yeah so there are there are examples in these cases uh where afterwards people said I did think I noticed but I didn't say because it's like a weird thing

I thought I wasn't sure uh so it would be a weird thing to have that happen and so you might not say um in this particular study afterwards when they interviewed people uh 50% of them uh did not notice would Be shown the video afterwards in order to understand what had happened perfect timing uh to reach the end of that question period because I believe this is oh you have final question I was so focused on yeah exactly and so there's an incomplete evidence you're so focused on paying attentions and making sure that he gets

it uh that uh you don't pay attention to who's there I mean if an entirely separate class of people Came in after the break I'd probably notice but I wouldn't notice everybody had changed right so if we were if an entirely different group of 389 people were sitting here after the break I might notice uh but that's only because we've had a you know a common experience but yeah I think if you're focusing on something else you wouldn't notice these things as much okay let's take a short break I think that is my final slide

uh we'll Come back here around 11 o'clock and then finish up okay welcome back everyone uh let's talk a little bit about different kinds of memory so if you took cognitive psychology which is 2135 and if you took this course with me uh We've covered some of this though not in exactly the same way way if you took this course with someone else you probably also covered it but not exactly in the same way if you didn't take that course That's okay because that's why we're covering it now so those of you that have taken

this course will probably notice some overlap uh you'll notice some things that are similar and you probably noticed that when you were doing the readings as well uh but that's because I want to have a basic uh starting point for memory Theory so that we're all on the same page with respect to how memory works the way it can be measured uh and the way can be assessed Because it's obviously important for thinking let's discuss the different ways in which it works um my little video where did my video go am I here I am

sharing am I not I am recording my video here I guess I'm here but usually I do a thing and it sort of not that it matters I floating meeting controls I guess my video isn't up here on this one does anybody know how to Make it come back I shouldn't have insulted Microsoft that's the problem I made a joke about the web version of PowerPoint and they heard me uh and they've undermined my ability to to do it so I hope that this lecture is being recorded um if it isn't I apologize for that

there's probably another one up there on YouTube Somewhere um so these are the parts of memory that I want to talk about I want to talk about what memory does so we're Going to talk about two or three different components we're not going to talk about all of this but you can read the textbook uh to sort of cover all of this so what our memories are doing is interacting or helping us make sense of what's out there stimulus input Vision audition and touch and all the different ways in which we take information in um

with helping us plan behaviors make decisions interact with people uh solve problems uh all of those things so the World of behaviors which is you navigating through the world and doing things and solving problems uh and reacting to things out there is mediated by the world of memory but probably have a different version of this slide next week and we talk about Concepts and categories because we'll talk about the ways in which your memory is structured to be particularly useful for you um but for I'll just assume that all of this is interactive uh so

we're going to talk a Little bit about the short-term memory systems whether it's a working memory system the executive functions and the way in which we keep things current in top of mind so if you're remembering something and thinking about it you're thinking about it in your working memory uh this is a short-term system that takes stuff from the outside uh and helps you plan behaviors but it also helps you remember things for long-term storage uh you can act activate Procedural memories those are uh sort of motor actions or procedures that you're not always aware

of how they work but you can still use them right the way in which you type or the way in which you respond uh to text messages or the way in which you write letters those are all procedural memories and you use your memory to do those things um we have long-term memories that we can talk about we call these declarative memories we can declare the existence of them Those can be uh episodic memories they can be uh semantic memories we'll talk a little bit about the difference between those episodic memories are those things that

you can remember whole episodes in the past right episodic memory if you remember my definition from cognitive psychology is sort of a mental time travel uh you can think about an episode from the past and you can think about hypothetical episodes in the future you can move yourself back and forth in time With this epod exotic memory system so you're thinking about how you are going to be feeling next week or you might think about where you're going on vacation uh during the February break or after the February break as the case might be uh

so you might think about what that's going to be like you can see yourself sitting on the beach right uh even if you're not going to the beach you could sort of imagine what that would be like using that episodic memory System and you can think about uh what it felt like to be a student during covid you can remember those things that's episodic memory as opposed to semantic memory which are those memory for basic facts we don't necessarily have a specific uh time characteristic to them we don't remember when we learned certain things we

just know things right well we can use a lot we'll talk a little bit about this but we won't talk Too much about mental imagery but there's a whole uh suggestion that use our sensory systems and our perceptual systems to create mental images uh so an A type of memory that relies on visual spatial and auditory components so that you can picture yourself sitting on the beach not just from your perspective but like cinematically uh you know you can picture yourself from behind uh you can picture yourself from another person's uh perspective I don't know

about you But when I'm using Zoom for example I can never figure out is that how they see me or is that how I see myself in a mirror because there's a way to sort of shift it to be Mirror video and I don't know what it is and so I have to imagine myself spinning around and looking at myself it's really it's a visual system right it's a visual uh imagery system that lets us do that in conjunction with using your knowledge about yourself and about your surroundings so you're using This memory system uh

to think about the past but to think about the future as well so all of this works together uh this is basically the mind right uh things come in uh things are here in this Storehouse uh you're working on stuff and you're making uh decisions and planning things so this is a simplified version of what your mind does uh it helps your body get around uh in uh space and time let's talk a little bit about the Different ways in which your memory uh functions uh so lots of different things here so for example um

we can encode things we can uh attend to information so that it can be stored in a memory uh we can store memories um we can retrieve things from memories I'm going to talk about memory as most psychologists do and as most people do as a place right so I'm referring to I'm using a metaphor of place that we encode information by you know de deconstructing a stimulus And that we place it in our memories and that it's a place somewhere there in my brain uh and that it's a thing that I can look at

and I can pull it back out it's not really how your memory works so your memory isn't uh a place uh there isn't a place where you remember the past it's all happening across a distributed network but it's easier to talk about uh in this way I still feel like I have something wrong here is this supposed to be here or is This possibly the I feel like when I present this isn't supposed to be here am I wrong about that there is this is the way it's supposed to be what's this here turn subtitles

on don't ask me why I'm getting obsessed about it now uh end show turn camera off camera is on all right I don't actually know what I'm doing anymore uh I used to know how to work this technology but I seem to have forgotten How to do it um I I think it's working does it seem like it's working it's working good enough um it looks thank you Caitlyn I appreciate that it looks fine from there uh much appreciated it doesn't look exactly the same way here and that's why I'm just obsessing about it I

just want to make sure the experience is the way it's supposed to be thanks Caitlyn um okay so these are things that we do with memory we think of it as a place but It's not really a place it's all here and it's all distributed it's making uh connections to the outside world the inside World motor activity language activity that's all part of a memory representation um so memory and retention are these hypothetical constructs we can't really see it because all we can really see is the initial thing and the response to it right we

can image the brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging or Using uh near for red spectroscopy there are lots of ways to image brain activity but we're not really Imaging a specific memory we're Imaging blood activity or cerebral blood flow or uh oxygen activity in the brain and we can correlate that with behavior so really what we see is we can know what somebody looked at and we can know the way they responded to it but we can't really see the memory in between so although what we describe as Our memory might be a unitary uh

mechanism it's all happening with neurons in the brain uh it doesn't seem like a single process that's because our experience with different kinds of memories differs right we have experience with really short-term memories and we have experience with really long-term memories there are different ways to divide and analyze memory so it's all happening within this big system in the mind and the Brain but Our experience is changed by the way in which we interact with uh events so we can talk about sensory memory now sensory memory is that kind of memory that's only a few

seconds that's what you're using to make sure that the world in front of you is still the world in front of you right so you've got a very short uh second or two uh to be able to continue to monitor reality in front of you right that's a sensory memory uh your sensory system knows that it's Still perceiving the same thing we have a working memory system and there are lots of theorists and lots of different types of models for working memory systems but most of them have something in common and that is that it's

a short uh span uh that it doesn't persist forever we all have the experience of remembering something uh in a very short amount of time a short piece of information and then it's gone right the most common thing that you probably have Is the two two- Factor authentication code that comes up when you have to get into anything right you've got a six-digit number and most of us copy and paste it right but sometimes you can't copy and paste it you have to remember the six-digit number and so what do you do you say that

six-digit number to yourself until you type it in and then it's gone you don't need to remember you couldn't possibly remember all of the six-digit numbers that come up in Multiactor authentication all the time that's because you as soon as you've remembered it and written it in that box it's gone and that's a shortterm memory system and you all know this from intros pychology and even before that that it's about seven units seven plus or minus two units it can be letters digits sounds shapes words whatever uh your short-term memory system holds about seven things

your long-term memory doesn't Seem to have any limit but things continually condense uh you can as you get older uh as I am uh you're um encapsulated knowledge changes right you tend to remember things in different ways because I have a lot of similar experiences they tend to lump together so there's a lot of overlap memory continually changes there's no limit to it that's because things continue to uh reinforce each other that's why older adults like myself get Confused uh because we've seen a lot of things that are similar right we have a lot of

similar experiences uh I in the textbook I talk and you're all familiar with this model I'm sure whether you've taken cognitive psychology intros pychology you've all seen a model like this a working memory model and the most prominent one the one that most of us are familiar with is the badly and hitch working memory model um it's a good workking memory model it's Not the only model and for us it's just a proxy for a variety of different ways to show how short-term working memory might be uh experienced what's interesting and what was sort of

transformational about badley model when it was first proposed in the 1970s and 1980s is that it attempted to take our experience of a short-term memory and connect it to what we know about how the different neural systems work so it was an attempt to take short-term memories And connect it to different brain systems and that's what kind of made it more influential than some of the other models of the time most models of memory now all models of memory now uh assume connections uh to neural systems but badley is one of the earlier ones to

suggest that we have visual memories he called it the visual spatial Sketch Pad but the idea was that we have uh ways to visually represent things by connecting to perceptual Mechanisms and this is what we talked about uh before the break can you um at the beginning of this U lecture right after the uh break when we talked about using EP IC memory to think about yourself uh on vacation so you're using some visual imagery so visual semantic spatial processing visual memory some of this is really short uh like remembering an object and then another

object a few seconds later but other times it's more interactive and spatial like remembering Yourself or visualizing yourself from a different perspective uh we have auditory memory which can be called uh the phonological loop for most of us because that's your inner voice most of us when we're thinking about um episodic or semantic memories we often talk to ourselves uh using an inner voice right when you use that uh inner voice to remember that six-digit multiactor authentication code right you're saying it to yourself even if you're not saying It out loud so we all have

experience using this inner voice it's kind of hard to think about things without using language isn't it I mean it's kind of hard to have a memory experience experience or to make a decision or to uh to think about the contents of your memory without describing it uh with a language but this phonological Loop takes all of that into account uh and suggests that we also this model also suggests that we have some way to store Episodes so some way to think about time and place and your role in that event so visual information vent

information and language sound information these are the kinds of information that we form memories from Vision language and sounds and events and spaces or places coordinating all of this according to bowley's model is a central executive some kind of executive function some sort of higher order cognitive process that allows you to put These pieces together to behaviors and that's an important part of this model yes well episodes are different in the sense that uh they might be specific events that also have visual spatial information also have language information but include with them a sense of

time and place uh and so events seem to be different in that in that regard we'll talk about this when we talk about long-term memory and Concepts As well but there seems to be there are concepts for object objects concepts for events that seem to be distinct that's a good question any other questions while we're sort of so most models of working memory and we'll talk about a few others here um including badle model assume a role for a central executive or executive functions and these are usually defined as domain general characteristics like Task switchings

so you remember us talking about task switching at the beginning of this class of the first lecture the ability to switch between one task and another uh and that takes time that takes resources uh if you're paying attention to the visual information and then you need to pay attention to the auditory information that takes time if you're paying attention to what's on your phone and you want to pay attention to what's on The slides that takes time to switch between those things so task switching seems to be a domain General characteristic that we can measure

because we can measure how long it takes you to do one thing and then do another thing inhibitory resources is another really important one the ability to do one thing and ignore another one uh also very important sometimes it's easier sometimes it's harder and selective attention uh Selective attention uh rather than switching attention is the ability to exclude based on specific characteristics some information and and attend to other information so these seem to be the most Salient or most easily measurable executive functions these executive functions help you plan behaviors task switching the act of switching

attention from one Behavior to another task switching operates on Different levels of cognition and across many domains which is why it seems to correlate with other measures of cognition here's how we might measure uh task switching uh task switching is commonly measured with tasks like the Wisconsin card sort task or any of you familiar with the Wisconsin card sort task so you may have talked about this in intro a little bit you if you've taken a developmental psychology uh if you're taking development Child Development you might talk about uh the Wisconsin card sort task if

you take classes about um cognitive impairment like Dementia or other kinds of brain damage uh those kinds of things often talk about the Wisconsin card sword task and that's because the Wisconsin card sort task is a prominent task that measures your ability to switch here's how it works uh you might be given a series of cards with shapes colors and numbers of shapes on them It's a deck of cards but it's usually done electronically but the original version would have been designed with a deck of cards so imagine you have a deck of cards and

you got all the possible combinations of uh red things green things yellow things blue things you've got some cards with one shape two three and four you've got cards with triangles Stars pluses uh and circles and your job is to figure out how to sort them so you can sort them into these four piles and What happens is you get a card you place it on a pile and then you get feedback the experimentor or the person running the study or the machine if you're doing it online will tell you whether or not you made

the right sort so if you put this here correctly you might start to assume okay the sorting rule is shape I put all the triangles in one pile I put all of the uh stars in another pile and I put the pluses uh in another pile and I Ignore color and I ignore the number right so you pay attention you selectively attend to one and you inhibit all of the others so this task has all three of those in it it's got selective attention one dimension you're paying attention to to shape and it's got inhibition

you inhibit all the others but it also has the switching component that's what I'll talk about in the next slide so in the switching component after you've figured out the Rule through hypothesis testing paying attention to a single Dimension uh and figuring it out um the rule switches so here is a person who figures out uh that they need to put red things in one pile green things in another pile yellow things in another pile and BW things and this person correct wrong and then they just keep getting correct answers and they're feeling pretty good

about themselves because every trial they're just like this is easy I just put things In by color I'm sorting I'm going along fine and then once you get a certain number correct C says category completed you switch the rule because now they just happily put a bunch of green things in the pile and it's wrong and you're like wait a minute what just happened I have been sorting green things I now have to learn a Rule and what happens is that most people for a few trials uh so they're going with a color Rule now

they have to learn a Shape roll that's what the s means uh they make a few incorrect answers because why wouldn't they they've been happily sorting by shape and they continue to sort by uh sorry happily sorting by color they continue to sort by color they realize color doesn't work so then they have to switch what we can measure here is how long does it take you to switch in other words how long do you perseverate on the wrong answer and this Correlates with executive function younger children uh children three four five and six basically

all School AG children will be impaired on this task so as you uh progress uh in uh later childhood and early adolescence your ability to perform well on this task increases young children uh 5-year-olds would perform poorly on this they would continue to per to choose the uh color answer in this case individuals with certain kinds of frontal lobe damage Damage to the prefrontal cortex whether it was due to a stroke uh or concussion or any other kind of damage will perseverate uh it'll be harder for them to switch they might be able to selectively

attend to find the rule but once they found the rule they'll stick with it longer even though they getting incorrect answers they might know that they're making mistakes but they can't stop making those mistakes because it takes them longer to switch so this is a Good measure of executive function and switching inhibition allows the cognitive system to ignore irrelevant perceptual features or irrelevant or unnecessary thoughts or emotions so by relevant here we mean task relevant what is important for the task that you're trying to carry out most of us have a goal right you have

a goal in this class probably of doing well you have a goal in this individual lecture of paying attention and understanding the material Uh in lots of cases you have individual goals and what are all of we've already talked about challenges to the thinking process there are lots of things that interfere with that goal right some of those things are internal some of those things are external we can kind of measure that though we can measure that with uh cognitive tasks one is called a flanker task anybody familiar with a flanker task so a flanker

task is one to flank something is it's a word that Would respond to something being on the side the flanks or the side of something uh so a flank stake is a stake from the side of the animal uh so flanking is on the side we're just going to see how much it matters to you if information presented on the periphery conflicts with the information you're trying to pay attention to and we can tell that by how long it takes you to make a decision so pay attention to the middle roll you Don't have to

do this uh just do this at your desk so what I'm going to want you to do is pretend you're pressing a button so put your right hand down uh if the arrow is pointing to the right so that's a right response put the left hand press the left hand if you're uh if the arrow is pointing to the left so put raise your right hand if it points to the right raise your left hand points to the left only the middle Arrow ignore or inhibit attemp to the other arrows so See how quickly you

can do it ready that was one trial do it again that's easy is that what I saw mistakes uh this is an example of the flanker effect so in the flanker effect how many of you felt yourself making a mistake um it's not impossible most people can do most of these without making mistakes but I did notice that some people put up the wrong hand um and you keep going so here's another one Easy easy and this is the one that feels like a mistake and the reason is that it's pointing the opposite direction all

you're trying to raise the right hand but everything's telling you to go to the other hand there all of these other arrows that you're supposed to ignore pointing the opposite direction now in a flanker task we assume that most people are getting most of them right uh as most of you did but some of you probably Felt yourself wanting to raise left hand even though it was a right hand we can measure the reaction time in other words even if you're right even if you make the right response we can measure whether or not it

takes you longer to make that right response in other words is there something catching your attention over here that causes you to have to engage some additional inhibitory resources to pull your attention back to the middle and then Make the response you need to yeah that's so it's possible that you might say okay this is happening this is a thing where I've got mistakes so I'm going to slow down a little bit what we should be able to do should be able to measure though is still that relative difference so on average we would likely

expect that the average person uh would be faster when the arrows are congruent and would be slower or more likely to make errors when the errors are in Congruent uh even if if you notice this change I mean this is what this is sort of an involuntary uh response it just takes a little bit longer to make that uh response when they're in congruent so the difference between in congruent and congruent trials or the difference between congruent and neutral trials uh should be a measurable difference not a big one but a measurable one and this

is a measure of inhibitory control which is what you need to be able to filter out Useful and not useful information uh Adele Diamond uh suggests that all of these things are core executive functions these executive functions are important in the thinking process because if we're accessing memory and if we're accessing memory to make decisions to plan to solve problems to make predictions and so on we need to be able to filter out things that aren't useful that's true for internal activations like memory but also External activations like perception Adele Diamond suggests uh she's psychiatrist

that executive function make possible mental playing with ideas that's a good definition for thinking isn't it taking the time to think before acting meeting novel unanticipated challenges resisting Temptations and staying focused all of the things that we probably think of as Hallmarks of good thinking um or executive functions are inhibition interference control Working memory cognitive flexibility uh and then she goes on with these other uh distinctions so the things that we think are important for thinking the ability to flexibly uh consider alternatives to think about two things uh at the same time or to focus

more on one thing and not on the other are mediated by these executive functions and this is diamond's uh updated version of the mind uh suggesting that our working memory is doing all of this work keeping active You know keeping these representations active um and it's these inhibit inhibitory resources that make thinking and planning possible let's talk a little bit about how you remember things and how you rehearse things to make them more memorable um most of us are familiar with the idea of maintaining uh representations in working memory so we would refer to this

as a maintenance rehearsal uh and this might be Everything from the simple repeating of a six-digit multiactor authentication code uh to the more complex trying to remember a list of people's names uh or trying to remember uh a list of um uh things that you need to do for the day um most of us probably how many of you write down the things you need to do each day in the morning morning a list of things to do uh and you probably come back to that and maybe you think about it throughout the day you

think oh I got Through this I got through that um so all of those might be ways of rehearsing things and generally speaking the more times you say something or work through it or rehearse it more likely you are to remember it just like if you were learning lines to a play or uh learning piece of music you would rehearse it until you're able to do it right until you're able to recall it with little effort um that isn't that's one good way to Remember things but there are other ways in which we can help

ourselves remember things a little bit more so there was a question during the uh during the break someone had asked about uh this idea that we tend to remember familiar situations so we base uh our decisions on things that we're familiar with but what if you're in a completely unfamiliar situation we don't have anything to hang it on most of us do better With remembering things when it lines up with something we're familiar with and if we don't have anything we're immediately familiar with we find something we're familiar with right so the more you can

connect to something the better you're able to remember it so when you're learning something you tend to build off of stuff you already know that's true for the way the entire educational system is run right you learn simpler building blocks and then Each year you learn more complicated things even in University you start off with introduction to psychology right and then you do second year classes and each the second year courses tend to correspond to units in that first year psychology textbook right there's a class on cognition a class on developmental a class on sensation

and perception then you get to third and fourth year and you specialize even more again building on those things so that You have a context that's the idea of elaboration when you want to remember something you tend to elaborate on it because you want to create as many connections as possible one of the reasons that I said my memory was failing it during that Co era was that there wasn't I didn't have things to elaborate on everything started to look the same so the normal sense of elaboration wasn't possible I don't have uh too much

time To go through this entire experiment I do talk about it in the textbook and if you've taken a cognitive psychology course you're familiar with it um but Craig and tulving uh endel tulving Fergus CRA and a few other researchers at the University of Toronto in the 1970s upended the way in which most psychologists understood memory because until CRA and tulving and others started doing this work this is really almost all of the University of Toronto so a Lot of our understanding of memory uh is comes from this sort of UFT uh era up until

this time most psychologists would have endorsed the idea that the more times you're exposed to something the better your memory is going to be if you want to remember something better you need to repeat it more if you want to remember facts more you need to have more exposure to those facts and what Craig and tulving suggested is yes that might be true but There are lots of cases where we can make the amount of exposure equal but we can change the nature of that exposure so these are experiments that they designed in the 1970s

to change the way people thought about memory they suggested that when people learn things they process them in different ways so when you're learning a list of words for example uh and in cognitive psychology in the 1970s 1980s learning words word lists Object lists would have been a common way to study people's basic memory processes and the idea is the processes that you go through to learn a list of words would be the same processes you would go through to learn anything so they gave people equal exposure you see the word for the same amount

of time depending on which condition you're learning that list in so for the word King for example four-letter word King you could learn it In three ways you could experience that word in one of three different ways but the amount of EX exposure to the word itself would be the same across all three conditions one condition you might be asked to focus on the structure so you would see the word and instead of just memorizing it you would answer is it in capital letters or not and so yes or no right so the same word

you see the word you make a judgment about the word but you're focusing on the structure the Physical characteristics of the word in another condition you might be asked to think about how it sounds so does it rhyme with another word every time you see that word whatever word it is you're trying to learn you're asked to compare it to some other word that it sounds like or not so you have to process the word in a phonological way an acoustic way you need to say the word to yourself you don't need to say the

word to yourself you probably will but you don't Need to say it and your attention is on the letters itself not on the word and not on the meaning here your attention is on the sound of the word and then in one condition your condition your your attention would be on what the word means so what category does that word belong in what does that what is the meaning of the word and what they found is that when people were asked to recall the words later they did better they recalled more words when they were

Learning them in this semantic condition the more they thought about the meaning of the words the better their memory was and that doesn't mean that any one of these conditions is wrong it means that you remember things differently depending on what you're paying attention to so here we're asking them to think about the meaning it activates their Concepts it activates other things and other cues and it makes it easier to pay Attention to uh and to remember those things it helps you elaborate um So within this elaborative system we can imagine that things can be

elaborated across different kinds of content so we've been talking about different ways to think about memory one way is to think about the short and the long way the short way being a short-term memory and rehearsal the longer way being something that we elaborate On content uh you can think about memories for facts memories for events and episodes memory for procedures and memories uh for motor activities so some memories we can declare the existence of we explain them we can experience that we have them and other memories and other information we can't really explain it

very well we don't necessarily know how we're using it we just know that we are using it um we have experiences with intentionally Encoding things when you're learning something in a class you're trying to learn it right when you're learning another language you're trying to learn it uh when you're learning about stocks for example you're trying to learn that information uh so if you're trying to become familiar with a domain you're putting effort into trying to learn that information but we also learn a lot of things incidentally without trying at all uh This is of

course the Genesis or the root of the so-called brain rot phenomenon that we talked about at the beginning of this course right uh lots of stuff that you probably see on your feed you don't really care about how many of you would estimate that the majority of your feed is stuff you don't really care about but you can't help but look at it because it was designed to be something that you like to look at even if you don't want to so now you have all Of this information all of these Trends all of these

facts all this stuff that you didn't really ever want to learn but it's just there because you've seen it right and the model of course the algorithms behind uh reals or Tik toks or whatever it is are trying to learn something about you too right uh it's trying to learn uh what you want to see and so it's taking cues from your behavior to give you stuff that you want to look more at that's all happening Incidentally through Association uh the longer you spend looking at this stuff even if you're not elaborating on it it's

still there um so how do we access things so we've been talking about how you encode things with effort you can encode things by repeating it you can encode things by thinking about the meaning sometimes it's incidental uh sometimes it's algorithmically defined sometimes it's through Association how do we retrieve Things well the most common way is to have a retrieval cue right so you've got information that helps you recreate that experience information that helps you recreate that event I hear people typing so I'm just going to slow down a bit am I going a little

fast or am I going at a good speed I'm looking at the time and I don't want to go past a half an hour I think we've got plenty of time to finish this up but I'm just trying to be Mindful so retrieval cues are anything that has a good Association strength um so Association strength would be the amount of times that two things co-occur right so the more times that uh you see a person in a particular setting the more likely are to assume that person belongs in that setting um connections are strengthened by

repeated Association and of course that repeated Association can be through rehearsal it Can be through mere exposure just seeing the thing again or it can be through elaboration all of those are repeated exposures right all of those are creating connections you can take a string of letters for multiactor authentication and repeat it to yourself that's repeated exposure you can take a word and think about how it elaborates with a lot of other things that you know A New Concept and that is also a strengthening of associations because Rather than strengthening the association of the same

word over and over again you're associating that concept with lots of other things that you're familiar with it's Distributing the associations um this all has a lot of it has its roots in the classic IAL conditioning that you're familiar with so this would be the root of behaviorism uh and the behaviorist psychology that most of you are familiar with right and You know that there are lots of ways to build stimulus response associations classical conditioning uh is the stimulus stimulus uh Association so this the linking of one thing with another thing in time uh this

was this has been discovered uh that it happens most of the time or oftentimes in lots of non-human species outside of Consciousness right uh so an unconditioned stimulus so something that happens naturally a reflex can be paired With something else and now that other thing will could will start to produce the reflex so some of the EAS earliest examples of this that you might see in classical conditioning an air puff uh to your eye will make you blink right how many of you have had the test of the you go to the eye doctor and

they I just hate that right and there's it sound like it's painful but like the whole thing I'm sort of worried about it Right that it's gonna anyway you blink automatically and you try not to because you want to have a successful eye exam but they blast the eye right the air right into your eye and it kind of hurts you get an air blink right puff of air towards your eye you cannot help but blink it just happens automatically it's outside of your control you don't need to learn it it's just there however uh

if for example a light happens to turn on at exactly the same time as the air Puff eventually the animal or the species or the organism will start to blink their eye without the puff just when the air uh when the light comes on that's a classical conditioning response if the light's directly in your face yes uh so I was thinking of a light off in the periphery or a sound or something like that so some kind of light that would not cause you to Blink so in this case it might be a cue that

lets you know that the air puff is Coming so that's a good clarification uh this is what you expect if any of you have pets for example you got a cat uh the cat wants to be fed most of the time uh and it knows when you get home so it starts to sort of EX you know associate you're coming home with the time that you're going to feed it uh most of us are like that we associate those things uh with rewards so now a previously neutral stimulus like a colored light and in This

case it might be a specific color only uh would be paired with this air puff now it starts to make your eye blink as well in the same way that the air puff does and that's sort of the basis behind most notifications right the notification uh badge that you might see on an app on your smartphone uh is designed to be an unconditioned to to be a conditioned stimulus that TAPS in into something that is already unconditioned What's the unconditioned response that all of these this all of these whether it's these are older apps there's

no Vine anymore um but for all of these uh the number corresponds to something some kind of social connection or some kind of validation right something connected to you whether or not it's a person messaging you uh or a person uh responding favorably or not favorably to some opinion that you've had uh or to some photo or story that you've posted All of this is something that should be unconditioned in other words we like that right we like the response that our opinion gets we like knowing that somebody cares about what we said or we

like knowing that somebody out there wants to get in contact with you uh and so all of these should have that same kind of vibe to them right that there's something something pleasant about it or even unpleasant but the point is it's important you need to pay attention to The point where eventually you should have sort of a a feeling how many of you do not like to have notification badges on your phone that are not cleared I hate when people leave a voicemail because the voicemail dot is there and it just drives me nuts

even though I know that it's not a good voicemail so you got to go and clear it out uh because a lot of us have had this response condition this is a basic form of memory how many of you have taken off All notifications entirely no badges nothing and you still check your phone anyway uh even though there's no notification because now the notification badge is in here right you've now circumvented all of that you're still expecting it but the notification is in the mind now there's no need for a ping there's no need for

a vibration there's no need for a badge because you've already uh internalized that that's a classical conditioning Response and that's an effect of memory that's an effect of associative memory that we're not really aware of the mechanism but we know what it's doing we know how it's affecting our behavior um so all of these again kind of work together so to summarize all of these different theories we've got a working model of the mind uh your mind and your brain and your cognitive system uh acts on all of this stuff and tries to look for

those associations it tries To make use of the way in which things are connected so that that have happened in the past can be helpful for things that are going to happen in the future every one of these behaviors that you want to plan is a future activity a future Behavior a decision uh a solving of a problem uh a connecting with a person or even just the next thing that you're going to say all of that is based on of Prior memories I want to talk just briefly for The last 15 to 20 minutes

about memory errors uh because the UN fortunate thing about the way our memories are built uh is that the very things that help your memory the tendency to elaborate and the Reliance on associations uh also hurts your memory uh so the things that help you learn things like elaborative en coding also predict certain kinds of mistakes uh so a memory that makes mistakes those errors are just a result Of the way memory Works anyway uh there isn't anything unusual about memory errors they just suggest justest your memory is working the way it's supposed to it's

just that it got it wrong this time um so this is a quote from the text uh we forget that memory is not designed to remember specific facts or details it's not for that your memory isn't designed to be a record of the past uh your memory uh is designed to be flexible and to stretch the truth so you Kind of want your memory to generalize to categorize to predict you want to serve other functions and behaviors like the creation of Behavioral equivalence classes you need to treat things the same in order to give them

the same response in other words you kind of need to forget the differences among experiences so that you can give multiple things the same response you need to form Concepts and categories and all of that is kind of a memory error uh It's kind of an an error in the sense that it's not an accurate picture of what happened in the past it's an Adaptive picture of what happened in the past so let's talk a little bit about memory errors um all of these are ones that I've talked about in the past uh if you've

taken cognitive psychology with me and if you haven't uh let's go through each one of them briefly and then we'll highlight a few more so we do have a tendency to lose access to Information across time and Dan shacker was a cognitive neuroscientist suggested that these are seven ways in which memory leads you to make mistakes these are seven ways in which your memory fails you these are the seven de sins of memory transients we just forget stuff sometimes uh we lose access to information across time whether through forgetting interference or retrieval failure there are

things that you have experienced that you probably cannot Remember uh we probably all have those experiences of knowing that you did something but just not remembering it uh knowing that something happened to you but just not remembering it or knowing that you learned something and sitting down in the exam and not remembering it right it just happens sometimes things fade sometimes we're absentminded and this is connected to that uh um the stuff the sort of paying attention to stuff we're absent minded because we Just don't pay attention to something so whether it is through the

paying attention to structural details like the levels of processing in CRA and tulving's experiment or if it's paying attention to giving the old guy directions and not paying attent or the old guy giving directions and not paying paying attention to who he's talking to that's absent-mindedness in the sense that you're placing your attention elsewhere things change and you don't Notice the change and so of course you don't have a memory for them because you don't notice the change so these two kinds of memory errors are connected in the sense that they both reflect just loss

of information it either Fades or you didn't get it in the first place um some of these others reflect a different kind of memory error uh blocking for example reflects a temporary retrieval failure because maybe you have the wrong thing and this Is usually seen in what's known as the tip of the tongue phenomenon and this is the idea that you can remember that you know something in other words you have the metacognition to know that you have that information but you can't remember the actual information does that make sense and so we call it

tip of the tongue because a lot of people report the epiphenomenon or the phenomenon of almost being able to say it but not Being able to get it yet so some of the motor activity is there uh some of the motor activity that will let you say the answer or to report the thing that you're trying to remember so you can feel yourself starting to say it but it's not there yet uh most cases that resolves itself after a while you usually come back to you say oh yeah of course it was X so that's

an example of blocking where something else is getting in the way These others uh these next three have to do with confusion so misattribution is remembering a fact but attributing it attributing it to an incorrect Source or context so this is a slightly more pernicious kind of memory error where you know something is there you could potentially be remembering false information um because you remember something but you attribute it to a different Source if the source is the wrong Source then it might be the wrong Information to use so you're actually remembering it but you

don't remember where you learned it suggest ability can be built on top of that the tendency to incorporate information provided by others into your own recollection and memory representations suggest ability is exactly what it means this is what the root of gaslighting would be so others can tell you or other sources of information can give you things that line up with your experience they start To become part of your experience right the more times you're asked about something the more times you recall it in that particular way and others information starts to become part of

your own recollective experience because memory is dynamic it's not fixed the more times you remember something the more times you add things to that memory which means that we also have a bias the tendency from knowledge beliefs And feelings to distort Recollections of previous experience and to affect current and future judgments uh so we can distort what we think is happening now based on our uh memories for things so we've got some errors that have to do with losing losing access to it not paying attention we've got other errors that have to do with the

interactive aspect of memory so building and bias and uh suggestibility uh and then of course we have another problem with Memory which is sometimes we wish we would like to forget things all of us have whole stores of things we just wish we could forget uh whether they be uh useless facts traumatic memories uh we can failure we fail to forget them because of intrusive Recollections the more times you remember that thing the stronger it becomes so the broad categories are sort of lack of information so you either don't have it it fades you don't

pay Attention to it or it gets blocked um the next category this misattribution suggestibility and bias has to do with the tendency of memory to be constructive and dynamic so things get added to your memory all the time and then this last one has to do with the tendency for memory to sometimes stay when you don't want it to memory can be like an unwelcome guest it just never leaves uh and we all have memories like that that We wish we could leave behind sorry that's the single most depressing thing I've ever said in a

class we all have memories we'd like to leave behind um so somebody asks a question about false memory syndrome I'm GNA talk briefly about that that's a good question because going to talk about false memories and the suggestibility effects so um this is an example that most of you may be familiar with from intro to psychology but it's Probably worth talking about because it has helped to form a whole category of memory errors so we're going to talk about suggestibility um Elizabeth Loftus who is still relatively active although she's been research active in memory for

decades uh was probably the most prominent memory researcher to focus on memory errors um and also suggestibility it becomes really Difficult to know whether or not a mistaken memory is because of an error in Remembering something or because of the way in which somebody asked you something uh and so to the extent that people sometimes spontaneously remember things it might be that they've forgotten it might be that they've finally encountered the right queue or it might be that they were asked in a specific way and so they now remember something a little Different and that's

what lus is interested in this misinformation effect this is one of many hundreds of experiments that she's done so this isn't sort of a canonical experiment expent but there are lots of experiments in her that have come out of her research lab that have kind of showed the same effect and the basic idea is it's really easy to get people to remember things wrong it's really easy to create false Memories by Definition a false memory is remembering something that didn't happen or remembering something that's inaccurate this is one example and then we'll do another example

uh in her case she might show PE people short film of a car accident and ask them to pay attention but you already know from what we've seen that people can change right in front of you uh you could be speaking to a different person and you would not even know it so we already know that We're not paying attention to things very well but even if you're asked to pay attention you can then be asked how fast were the cars going when they hit or smashed so a one-word difference right hit implies one thing

smashed implies another if you were asked to estimate the speed you would be likely to estimate a higher speed when you were asked with a word that implied a more violent accident and that's what she found so when they were asked with Smashed collided bumped hit or contacted uh they showed a corresponding change in their bias for the memory everybody sees the same video everybody in theory is remembering the same video but they're remembering it in a different way they're remembering in a slightly skewed fashion they're remembering it as being more uh violent here than

they are in this case previous slide this one here well that's weird isn't it is That I will change this um there there is a difference by the way because there are going to be some slides you don't have uh so it could be that is anybody else missing it sometimes this happens uh there is all right let me see if what the problem is here yeah eror yes misattribution and Source error are the same kind of error so misattribution is a broader category Source error is remembering the wrong Source of the information and then

you can Mis misattribute it to some other source does that make sense yes so same idea occasionally these slides don't work properly so anytime you see a problem let me know if there's anything missing I'll see if I can correct it but you can get the idea right so if you're asked with a word that implies more a faster contact like smash people remember it differently and then later a week later people might be Asked about the presence of broken glass and in this particular case this particular experiment broken glass the answer is no because

they didn't see any broken glass it wasn't in the the video but you can see that people who were asked originally a week ago with smashed tend to remember the broken glass incorrectly uh so they're actually remembering a slightly different event and loftus's whole point is that the way in which you interrogate someone the way In which you uh try to retrieve the memory affects the memory itself so memory is not encoding putting it a place and then bringing it back out so it's not like you just put it in a box and bring it

out exactly the same way the active bringing out changes the memory every time uh and so that's what loftus's point is is that memory is not static um you can categorize these as being both distortions and intrusions a distortion error might be the kind of Error where something uh is um correctly remembered but in a slightly different way so it's distorted as opposed to an intrusion type of error where a new fact intrudes on the memory which of course is now part of the memory because you remembered it so each time you remember that intrusion

it becomes now part of the memory itself it's not hard to to produce simple false memories most of you many of you may be familiar with this example But let's do it anyway because it's fairly instructive and we've got 15 minutes left uh in today's class and I think we're going to finish uh just fine on time here here so um what I want you to do these slides you will not have because it's a Memory example is read these SL read these words to yourself I'm going to go through them as quickly as possible

and then there's a QR code which you do have a link to and I want you to do a recognition task and just Make a judgment the first thing that comes to mind whether or not you saw the word so don't do the QR code yet it'll take you to a quick survey just I'll read these out loud to you try to remember the entire list of words and the list is bed rest awake tired drowsy dream wake snooze blanket doze Slumber snore nap peace yawn and there's your memory test is everybody still awake so

I gave you a list of words Go to the link and just click yes or no whether or not you saw the word and we will look at our data all right we've got enough I think here to go um and so let's look at the yes no responses nobody saw the word rough which is good um because it wasn't there everybody saw the word bed except for the one person who didn't um but most of us saw bed nobody saw River excellent everybody saw rest nobody saw a window almost uh lots of Us Saw

awake But a few of us less clear um about awake um we're good with yawn uh we're good with sleep and of course this is the one that is the target word sleep because sleep wasn't one of the words that was presented despite the fact that the majority of us uh saw it um you knew this was coming right you knew there was going to be a word on there that you correctly identified as having seen even though you didn't see because otherwise why on Earth would it appear in a Demonstration of memory hairs um

you were just wondering which one is it going to be right well the one that it be uh was sleep uh we can go back and look you can trust me but uh it's not on there um and that's because we'll look in the next uh slides we can go back really quick we don't have to look at the rest because uh no sand was not on there anger was not on there wake definitely on there uh so we've got memory systems and functions and you can See we'll go back here to um let's start

this over again yeah so it's not on here there's no sleep lots of sleepy words and no sleep because that's the gist right um that's the overall category and what de earlier and then later Roger rodiger and Kathleen McDermot discovered was that people tend to make mistakes uh when there's a Common Thread uh in other words we Elaborate three or four words into that list you probably thought these are sleep words right um maybe two words in it was very obvious as you were going through that list of words that all of the words had

to do with nap time and sleeping and beds and blankets and dozing and all of those kind of things that are related to the idea of sleep and so it's not unreasonable to think that you would also think of the word sleep that's the elaborative encoding That uh Craig canling suggested actually make it easier to remember right uh so the more you think about something and here you are thinking about sleep words so it's a false memory uh oh I used different words so sometimes it's anger is uh strong and accurate memory for Target items

I changed them from the anger words to the uh sleep words because there's a whole list of them which we can look at um but the key here he and in their experiment they didn't Just do one list people got lots of lists and you can see that each one of these uh here's the Sleep words bed rest awake tired each one of them has a Target word it's the word that's kind of the gist it's the meaning it's the central tendency it's kind of the Prototype it's the main meaning of all of those words

and if we're elaborating which again Craig canling suggest would make our memories better it would mean that that word was activated that's what Uh we found in our classroom dis uh demonstration now um and that's what they found so they're asking their subjects to do this uh first of all they ask them to learn these lists of words then they had to say whether it was sure old so they gave them a rating seal not just a yes or no um and they worked on this recognition path so not only did they have to say

they had to say how confident they were basically what they found on any of the Old words uh so this is saying whether or not you said it was old uh for these critical lures they were also suggesting it was an old word uh in other words they were making the same memory errors that that we made in this class so they're good at being able to discriminate uh the studied words from the non-studied words so for is saying I am sure it is an old word does that make sense to everybody so that's how

these data are presented This number here is the percentage of subjects saying I am sure it was old number four is yes I saw it and I'm really confident they're good with the studied words they're extremely good with the non-studied words because they're saying zero here that means I'm definitely not sure I saw it in fact I think it's new and they're making errors with the critical Lord in other words every time sleep is presented in that list they think they saw sleep the Explanation is that you elaborate and from your brain's perspective you also

experience the word sleep your brain is trying to keep track of things that happened and it doesn't know whether or not it happened out there by seeing the word on the list or if it happened in here because it was activated when you thought about it from your brain's perspective the word sleep was presented it was presented internally rather than externally and that's what I mean by the Tendency to make me to elaborate helps your memory but it also allows you to make errors of this particular kind because your brain just doesn't know where the

activation came from all it knows is that yes the word sleep was present in my mind I just happened to not remember whether or not it was on a list or whether it was while I was learning the list internally so couple more slides here memory is not perfect most of the processes that Aid Memory like context and semantics also lead to errors the more things that are the same about something whether it's that elaboration or being in the same context can help but it can also lead you to make mistakes and these errors can

be new information that crops in things that didn't actually happen but more likely they're just distortions they're changes in the way the original memory the original event happened so you're remembering something just Slightly different uh than what actually happened okay um I think my next slide might be this one uh and so if you've got anything you'd like to expl have explained in a little bit more detail next week uh take a quick uh screenshot and let me know or you can access it later of course but I won't have a chance to answer it

before the quiz so remember the quiz is going to begin in 20 minutes I will race back to my office and make sure it's Ready uh and it's open until 10:30 tonight all right have a great week everyone uh and I will see you back here next Tuesday