Robopsychologie

• Most adults have few memories of events below age 3

• And from 3-7 years they have fewer memories than would be predicted by forgetting alone

• However, studies have shown that 3-year-olds can form episodic memories (Fivush et al 1987, Hamond & Fivush, 1991, Sheingold & Tenney, 1979)

1. Explanation (Bauer et al., 2007):
   • In adults, power function à over time, forgetting slows, presumably (vermutlich) as a result of consolidation
   • In children, exponential function -> forgetting continues at a constant rate

◦ 8 for college students ◦ 6-7 for 12-year-olds
◦ 4 for 5-year-olds

The average person‘s short-term memory can remember 7 numbers.

Computing wins:
Input and output
Information processing and memory

Closely Matched: 
Complex movement
Vision
Language
Structured Problem solving

Brain Wins: 
Creativity
Emotion and empathy
Planning and executive function
Consciousness

• But: Humans are able to combine the different memory types, learn from their past experiences and draw conclusions for upcoming experiences

Memory for Faces

• Own-race bias in memory for faces?

• Meta-analyis (Meissner & Brigham, 2001):

◦ Overall, results indicated a "mirror effect“ pattern in which own-race faces yielded a higher proportion of hits and a lower proportion of false alarms compared with other-race faces.

◦ Could be explained with perceptual learning (see perception lecture).

• The so-called sleeper effect means that after a certain period of time recipients might only remember the content of a message, but forget the source and how trustworthy the source was.

• This means: Even if recipients identify fake news as such and therefore initially classify them as not trustworthy, it can happen that after a few weeks they only remember the content of the report but forget that they originally thought it was untrue. They can no longer attribute the information to any source.

Mechera-Ostrivsky & Gluth (2018): Memory Beliefs Drive the Memory Bias on Value- based Decisions

• For value-based decisions, people need to retrieve relevant information from their memory

• Memory bias arises because people believe they remember better options more often than worse options

• In their study, memory performance was higher for more attractive options = letting decisions be influenced by memory could be an adaptive strategy?

• However, the memory bias also persisted after correcting for the effect = this suggests that it is not simply an artifact of unequal memory performance

◦ Their study showed that language was able to alter participants memory of a car accident

◦ Depending on how the questions were frased, participants would remember the car‘s speed differently

The question was:

“About how fast were the cars going when they (smashed / collided / bumped / hit / contacted) each other?”

• The results revealed that the estimated speed varied depending on the verbs used.

• The verb affected the participant‘s memory of the event.

• Since a crime is an unplanned event and often emotional & stressful event = eye witnesses are not prepared and unable to focus on smaller details

• Race bias, previous experiences, knowledge, clothing etc. can all play a role in making the wrong decision as an eye witness

◦ Dementia (e.g Alzheimer‘s disease)
◦ Amnesia, head injury, stroke
◦ Stress, Drug use (also alcohol & smoking)
◦ Nutritional deficiency (Ernährungsmangel)
◦ Sleep deprivation

Incorrectly remembering one‘s past attitudes and behaviour as resembling present attitudes and behaviour

Seeing new information as confirming your established opinion

• Priming means to prepare = so a priming effect happens in demonstration where a preceding stimulus influences the processing or perception of a subsequent stimulus
• Different types of priming: Semantic Priming, conceptual, negative, positive, affective etc.
• Priming enhances retrieval of information and is cloesely linked to implicit memory

Classical Conditioning (Associate an involuntary response and a stimulus)
Famous study by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his dogs (Pavlov‘s dogs)

• His classic conditioning study focuses on an association between two stimuli –
• a pre-existing stimuli (unconditioned)
• a neutral one
  For Pavlov‘s dogs the smell of food naturally triggered them to salivate = unconditioned response
• Conditioning the sound of the bell to be related to the smell of food and thus salivation = the dogs will learn to salivate when they hear the sound of the bell (without the smell of food)

Operant Conditioning (B.F. Skinner)

• This type of conditioning focuses on punishment or reinforcement learning

• This type of conditioning can create an association between the consequence of a behaviour and results in decreasing or increasing a particular type of behaviour

• If a pupil is being loud in class and as a result is being punished by doing extra school work – the pupil can learn to build an association between the behaviour (being loud in class) and the consequence (being punished with extra work) which will result in a decrease of this behaviour over time.

• Operant Conditioning (Associate a voluntary beaviour and a consequence)