Stereotype Threat Article:
· Academic settings – presume the incompetence of several groups “threat in the air”
· Stereotype threat: your social environment is threatening to stereotype you, not treat you as an individual
· So, stereotype threat decreases good performance. How?
o It limits working memory capacity because you are thinking about your bad environment, and you’re self conscious about your performance. Which takes away from your performance of complex cognitive tasks. (It gives you a cognitive load).
o They want to make sure they aren’t confirming the stereotype, and it eats up resources.
o Ex. Women vs. men in math – women did much worse when told the task would measure gnder differences.
· Who is most susceptible to stereotype threat?
o Those we are most invested in doing well in that domain (ex. Academics) –those who were the most achievement oriented were effected more.
· Error-related negativity – reaction to an error.
o The stereotyped who cared the most had higher error readings – it all ironic. It makes them more sensitive to their own errors.
· How does stereotype threat effect our response to our own anxiety?
o Sensing our own anxiety is a signal to us, and it plays a part in making us more nervous.
· Under what conditions does anxiety reduce our working memory?
o When we’re not confident or are doubtful – anxiety and doubt become a distraction.
o (For everyone, not just for a certain group)
· Do people try to not think anxious thoughts?
o They try, but it doesn’t help. In fact, it makes it worse. Though suppression means you’re constantly monitoring so that takes cognitive resources too!
o A vicious cycle – impair performance more and more.
· By reappraising your emotions, you can break the cycle, an see your anxiety as a helper.
· Measured sympathetic nervous system activation – is that a bad thing?
o Yes, for women who though of the anxiety in a negative light, they couldn’t reappraise their emotions. So, anxiety is not always bad for performance …. Unless you think it is!
Adaptive Memory Article:
· Maybe coming from a functionalists perspective?
· Proximate mechanisms: Psychological processes that we think explain how something works. A chain of events that leads to an outcome we measure, as opposed to evolutionary changes.
· In their study, the 95% confidence interval didn’t overlap – strong results showing that survival words are recalled better.
· The author is more interested I how these mechanisms worked a long time ago and how were they adaptive?
· What makes memory strong? Some factors that make things memorable are:
o Forming an image
o Processing for meaning
o (both of these are proximate mechanisms that make memories strong).
· So why do they work? Largely an unaddressed question.
· What three suggestions does the author have about why we have the memories that we have? i.e. that respond to images, etc.
o Not just so we can remember things from the past, but instead to help us in the present – learning from things that have happened to us and for the future too.
o Memories are domain-specific – they are designed to help us remember useful things that help us. (maybe also working memory is around to help us forget trivial things. So, we wonder, to what extent is our memory due to future ideas?)
o Memory also helps us survive and produce offspring.
· Table one from this article shows that we should be able to remember where what is, etc, what food is good, what isn’t, what prey looks like…
o If you couldn’t remember these things (like navigation) you would be at a disadvantage to survive.
· The author thinks a functional perspective on memory is important.
· What evidence supports the survival-relatedness with memory?
Memory wiki:
· 2-major theories about why we forget:
o Trace-decay theory – the memory itself deteriorates, so it doesn’t maintain is form and we can’t retrieve it.
o A major explanation is Interference. There are two types:
§ Proactive interference: things you learn now are hard to learn because of old memories, they disrupt. Or it can work the opposite way:
§ Retroactive interference: new memories disrupt the old ones
· What is the pattern of forgetting over time?
o Its very rapid at first, and hen slowly after that (like a power log)
Survival article continued:
· Survival processing enhances retention – we are more likely to remember things we are likely to need again, and we are less likely to remember things we won’t need again.
o Its like our mind is adapted to know things about our surroundings.
· Other major claims:
o Does thinking about how items of information may be related to survival effect how easy it will be to remember them?
§ They did three tasks, survival words, moving words, and pleasantness. (They were rating these words)
§ In the end, the experimenters gave them a surprise recall test, and survival related condition of words did indeed have more words remembered. Significantly!
o It remains against other conditions too that don’t have anything to do with fitness , like taking a vacation.
o Levels of processing phenomena: thinking about the meaning of a word makes it more likely to remember than words about something like color.
o Thinking about– does this word apply to me? – self reference are very well remembered – relevance to the self may have a special stance.
§ Is this just deep processing of the words in this article?
· No, a graph shows that surviving is still better remembered than self-reference, generating the words, intentional, pleasantness, imagery – survival is better than all on recall.
· Why does thinking about survival make so much difference?
o Its an important research for the future.
o Survival is very elaborate encoding
o That kind of thinking (survival brings out strong emotions)
o There may be survival module?
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