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Cognitive Psychology, Spring 2012
UConn Storrs Campus, GENT 131
TUE THU 2:00-3:15
Eric Lundquist

QUIZ 2 AND EXAM 2 RESULTS AND COURSE GRADES
FINAL GRADES HAVE BEEN POSTED TO PEOPLESOFT.
(Also, if anyone has a sense of humor left, and wondered about that "_E_Y_T_H" priming question, and was at the final lecture, click here.)

FINAL EXAM REVIEW INFO
REVIEW SESSION MONDAY 4/30/12, 4:00-5:30 PM, GENT 131
PowerPoint format: Short Term (Working) Memory slides - Long Term Memory slides
PDF format: Short Term (Working) Memory slides - Long Term Memory slides
Note: these two sets of slides are the textbook illustrations for memory; blue slides are from the second edition and may include topics or variations that are not in the third edition; most of those have captions in the "notes" panel, so it may be helpful to view those instead of just viewing or printing the slides themselves. In addition to the textbook slides there are several slides that I created that are specific to the lecture.

FINAL EXAM IS TUESDAY 5/1/12, 1:00-3:00 PM, GENT 131
(makeup times for those who've arranged it: WED 5/2, 3:30 PM, MONT 303, or THU 5/3, 1:00 PM, GENT 131, or FRI 5/4, 3:00 PM, BOUS 136)

QUIZ 2 IS POSTED HERE (as a web page) and also HERE (as a PDF file for printing).

QUIZ 2 INFO
READ IMMEDIATELY!... how to submit a question; bubble sheets; planned online posting date; planned due date; etc.

EXAM 1 RESULTS
EXAM 1 REVIEW INFO - CHECK UPDATED VERSION AFTER TUESDAY 3/27/12 CLASS
PowerPoint format: Parallel Distributed Processing slides - Cognitive Neuroscience slides - Perception slides - Attention slides
PDF format: Parallel Distributed Processing slides - Cognitive Neuroscience slides - Perception slides - Attention slides

EXAM 1 IS THURSDAY 3/29/12, GENT 131, 2:00-3:15 PM
REVIEW SESSION TUESDAY 3/27/12, 5:30-6:30 PM, BOUS 160 (TIME AND ROOM SUBJECT TO CHANGE!)

QUIZ 1 RESULTS
QUIZ 1 REVIEW INFO

When I made a shadow on my window shade They called the police and testified But they're like the people chained up in the cave In the allegory of the people in the cave by the Greek guy -- from "No One Knows My Plan" by They Might Be Giants (play the song)

READING:

1. REQUIRED: Goldstein, E. Bruce (2011). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. (ISBN-13: 978-0-8400-3355-0)
2. REQUIRED: On-Line Readings and Reserve Readings (to be announced)
3. OPTIONAL: Some classic papers in the Psychology of Learning - Here's a collection of links to papers I'll refer to in class - and a few of them may appear among the required readings for the class. Also see Classics In The History Of Psychology, if you're looking for extra stuff to read.

Stellarium is a free program that will simulate a planetarium on your computer so that you will always know what stars you're looking at and when something interesting will be appearing. It's quite addictive.

Two short excerpts about James Gibson's Ecological Psychology: these are written by people who DON'T actually agree with Gibson and his ecological view, but who are describing him and his work fairly objectively. (While they're sort of skeptical, personally I'm not!) It's difficult to sum up the approach in brief; the linked passages are decent outsider views, but they're still incomplete and fail to appreciate some subtleties and philosophical implications. Ecological psychology is an approach to problems of perception and other aspects of psychology that is very different from conventional mainstream approaches. Instead of looking at the mind as a kind of computer involved in the processing of information (which is what mainstream psychology assumes), it is concerned with how animals and people can directly detect information in the environment which will be sufficient to guide their actions. The phrase "directly detect" is why the approach is often referred to as "direct perception"; it implies that the information doesn't need to be processed at all, which is controversial to say the least, and which certainly flies in the face of many centuries of epistemology. (At the end of the excerpt is an example of what a conventional "INdirect perception" approach looks like, for comparison.) The term "ecological" refers to a view of the animal and its environment as an integrated and co-evolving whole, as opposed to the conventional approach which seems to view the animal as an arbitrary observer placed into an arbitrary context. The ecological approach was developed by James Gibson over the whole course of his career, and today the University of Connecticut is the world leader in promoting and pursuing this approach. In particular the Psychology Department's Center For The Ecological Study Of Perception And Action (CESPA) is dedicated to advancing research and theory in ecological psychology.

• Some excerpts from a paper on the Ecological view of scientific laws: quite challenging and probably only of interest to the most devoted students, though parts of it may well be fairly accessible. I would draw your attention to the general point being made, that animals moving about in their environments are in fact an instance of motion that science needs to consider, and that traditional scientific laws are quite inadequate for describing that motion, regardless of how successful they may be at accounting for planetary orbits and planning space shuttle flights. This suggests that the laws we have at present are only applicable to the special simple case of inanimate motion, and accounting for biological and psychological phenomena will require a more sophisticated view of what counts as a scientific law. To simply say there is no lawfulness in such phenomena would be lazy; but to say that what we know as "the" laws of nature today are all that there can be, and that lawfulness consists of simple deterministic causes and effects such as apply to inanimate motion, would be equally lazy.

• An excerpt from Beyond The Brain by Louise Barrett in which she offers an overview of Gibson's perspective, for those who want to read more. It's a pretty accessible description of some subtle ideas, and the section headed "The Environment as Illusion" reviews why the mainstream approach was so unsatisfactory to Gibson. In addition, this excerpt describes Turing machines and how they are an inappropriate model for cognitive processes (unless radically reinterpreted as mentioned in this chapter), and it introduces some cutting edge concepts of dynamical systems theory as applicable to psychology, in terms an interested general reader could understand.

Spiders and turkeys and bears: some pictures from backyards (mine, my brother's). You're free to exclaim "oh my!" after reading the album title. Just something to look at if you're bored.

If you're looking for a break from studying, listen to a few minutes of Richard Pryor -- someone you'd probably heard of before he died in 2005, but might never have really known the significance of. A full appreciation of him would put him in a category with people like Muhammad Ali, not just other comedians. (Here's a decent writeup from the New York Times.) In the meantime there's his work, which is not just the clowning he's famous for from movies. If you're bothered by his use of that word that I won't print (which he plastered right across a couple of his album covers in the 70's!), listen through to the end of "Africa" at about 8:30 to hear the conclusion he finally reached.

• Therapy
• N-----s Vs. The Police
• Africa
• Bicentennial N-----
• Saturday Night Live skit with Chevy Chase from c. 1975 when that word was as raw and offensive as it is today, but was not necessarily out of bounds for TV.

[T]he term "cognition" refers to all the processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations. Such terms as sensation, perception, imagery, retention, recall, problem solving, and thinking, among many others, refer to hypothetical stages or aspects of cognition. Ulric Neisser (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. (p. 4)

Excerpt from an interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett (from Jonathan Miller's collection titled States Of Mind) on the strategy of investigating the workings of the brain by probing the information processing capacities of the mind, rather than approaching it directly through neuroscience. Note that this difference in investigational strategies is also referred to as top-down vs. bottom-up in a different context. Two excerpts from Stephen Pinker's book How The Mind Works in which the Computational Theory of Mind is nicely described. Note that at one point, Pinker claims this theory is different from "the despised computer metaphor," which he suggests is the idea that the brain is exactly like a digital computer. But no one actually thinks that, and when people "despise" the computer metaphor, it actually is Pinker's own view that they mean. Pinker just wants to make it seem that no one could possibly have any reasonable objection to what he's saying. This is typical of Pinker, and part of the reason many people (including me) sometimes can't stand him; another believer in the Computational Theory of Mind, the famous philosopher Jerry Fodor, found enough to disagree with in this book that he wrote his own book as a response, titled The Mind Doesn't Work That Way. These pages are an interesting read nonetheless.

Some Introductory notes: three important dates in the history of psychology; four defintions of psychology; a timeline and four terms that are central to epistemology (For the full version of the epistemology distinctions, see the Outline of Epstemology linked below.) Brief overview of psychology's history: A few pages from Bruce Goldstein's Cognitive Psychology textbook that provide a sketch of the history of psychology from its beginnings up through the Cognitive Revolution of the 1950's and 1960's, for those who would like a text reference to go along with the class discussion. For our purposes this excerpt really begins on p. 9, "The First Psychology Laboratories." The "imageless thought debate" is not mentioned explicitly but problems with introspection are summarized under "Watson Founds Behaviorism." (And not that it matters for this course, but in a History Of Psychology course it would be important to recognize that Wundt's own view of psychology was not Structuralism but something a bit more subtle called Voluntarism.)

Two commentaries on the continuing vitality of behaviorism despite rumors of its demise:

• Roddy Roediger's March 2004 commentary from the APS Observer, 17(3) re-examines the simplistic story about behaviorism's fate after the rise of cognitive psychology, shedding some important light. One nice point he makes is that Chomsky contributed a rationalist intellectual foundation to refuting Skinner's behaviorism, but mainly was arguing at cross-purposes with Skinner and maybe shouldn't be thought of as have fomented a revolution.

• Alferink, Larry (2005). Behaviorism Died Today, Again! The General Psychologist, 40(1) (Spring 2005), 7-9. This is a brief mention of some of the many ways, both scientific and practical, in which behaviorism is still thriving today, which should counter the cliché that it's a thing of the past.

Excerpt from Out Of Our Heads by Alva Noë: from an introductory chapter of a book by one of the few philosophers to question the seemingly fundamental notion that the mind is the product of the brain. It's important to understand that he doesn't promote any supernatural alternative, but rather argues that the basic concept needs to be reconsidered.

Crimson by Josip Novakovich is a moving and disturbing short story that features this intriguing passage -- an insight that is certainly knowledge of a sort, but not scientific knowledge: "Milan thought how strange it was that he should be held responsible for the past, three years ago, when he was conscripted and enslaved--when he wasn't even himself. 'We all have multiple personalities,' he said. 'One of us is the past, and another the future, and there's no present me. We are vacant right now--spaces through which the past and the future disagree.'" Knowledge comes in many varieties, and whether it's scientific, or poetic, or spiritual, or intuitive, or common-sense, etc., all of these are valid ways of knowing the world for different purposes and contexts. Science is not the be-all-and-end-all of knowledge, or the ultimate arbiter of what is real for all purposes, but is a specially constructed tool for uncovering certain kinds of facts about nature using certain agreed-upon types of evidence.

Here are a couple of ways to get things really wrong, in viewing the relationship between science and religion:

• Cognitive Psychologist Stephen Pinker argues in a commentary piece in Newsweek magazine that modern neuroscience has disproved the existence of the soul; responses from readers point out that no such scientific disproof is possible. Not stated explcitly is the fact that science is not the kind of inquiry that could ever be used to anwswer questions about the existence of souls or of God, and that deciding such questions is a matter of personal commitment that might then steer the type of inquiry you choose to pursue. See Lewontin's quote on materialism in science for a voice of reason.

• From a book on the "debate" over Intelligent Design: Intelligent Design is a euphemism for Biblical Creationism that atttempts to portray itself as science by supposing the "evidence" of the complexity of life leaves no possibility for its explanation in material terms, and that instead there must be a "designer" behind all of the complexity. That may sound like a plausible claim to some, but it's not a scientific one, since science only allows certain kinds of evidence and procedures to be used; science certainly doesn't throw up its hands and give up, and say "this is beyond us, so it all must have just been made by someone." If it all WAS made by someone, SCIENCE WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO DISCOVER THAT FACT, and will keep banging its head against the evidence FOREVER, in a noble failed attempt to stick to its principles. But the issue is far from settled, and probably never will be. In this excerpt, Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe (under "Conclusion") explicitly claims that science is not a game with arbitrary rules, when in fact that's exactly what it is -- well, not arbitrary rules, but rules nonetheless, which exclude the kind of conclusion Behe wants to force. Break those rules, and it's no longer science that you're doing. Then there are a few pages by noted philosopher of religion Alvin Plantinga, who tries to undermine those rules of science (what he calls science's "methodological naturalism" or commitment to non-supernatural explanation), so you can get a taste of the style of argument; notice the footnote that I think shows the bankruptcy of his point of view: #31, which essentially says the thing for scientists to do is to try to solve problems for a while, then give up and say "God did it." Again, even if it's true that "God did it," that's NOT SCIENCE!

• A reflection on changing the meaning of words like "science," or in this passage, the word "art." It's from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard (author of things you've probably heard of like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead and Shakespeare In Love and one spectacular thing you should check out, Arcadia, a mere hundred page play that could change how you look at the world). I should note that in this excerpt the character Carr's point of view is hardly the final word on the matter, though it is the reason I've posted this link.

Outline of epistemology for psychology: This web page highlights some differences between empiricist and rationalist approaches to psychology, and calls them Platonic and Aristotelian in character -- but be warned: they are not exactly what Plato or Aristotle would have claimed, they're just descriptions of the spirit of the two families of claims! Plato and Aristotle: discussed in brief, from another textbook; this excerpt pretty well reproduces the gist of the lecture on these two figures. Illustration of top-down processing: in reading the words "THE CAT" as printed in the link, bottom-up or purely stimulus-driven processing is not sufficient to decide whether the ambiguous letter is an A or an H in each word, since it could be either; instead the reader makes use of higher-level knowledge (of vocabulary and word spellings) which is normally the end product of the reading process, to resolve the ambiguous stimulus in each context through what is known as top-down or knowledge-driven processing (i.e., the knowledge that there is a word C-A-T in English, but no word C-H-T).

Some excerpts from Plato's Dialogues: They're very readable even in this classic translation from the 19th century. "Meno" features the slave boy demonstrating that he knows the Pythagorean Theorem (this version with illustrations may be easier to follow). Book VII of The Republic contains the famous Allegory Of The Cave.

David Hume on causation, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) -- in case you want to see where questions about causality all began. (See also the famous conclusion.)

Outline of Logical Positivism: This is a very brief sketch of the philosophy of science known as Logical Positivism, which was very influential in the development of psychology in the first half of the 20th century. It's mainly of interest for the concluding segment, an excerpt from the first English-language manifesto of logical positivism, in which Hume's influence is explicitly acknowledged.

Chomsky, Noam (1959). A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language, 35(1), 26-58. The famous critique of the behaviorist approach is fairly difficult, but rewarding if you're interested.

• MacCorquodale, Kenneth (1970). On Chomsky's Review Of Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Journal Of The Experimental Analysis Of Behavior, 13(1), 83-99. This lesser known but fairly effective rebuttal of Chomsky's arguments shows how he missed the point of Skinner's book and chose instead to attack behaviorism in general; of course by 1970 this essay was a bit late to counter the perception that Chomsky had successfully demolished behaviorism, which of course he had not done.

Language Development: here are a couple of brief passages scanned from Erika Hoff's text that describe the Chomskyan view of language acquisition, for those who want something more than their notes to refer to. It also makes some of the same points about behaviorism and cognitivism as I made in class, and emphasizes that behaviorism fails as a theory of language. Note that connectionism / parallel distributed processing / neural network models are mentioned in passing as embodying both nativist and empiricist elements. We described them as a type of information processing model (or "computer"), and therefore rationalist. At the same time, they are inspired by arch-empiricist David Hume's view of simple ideas "thinking for themselves" through the application of a small set of rules, rather than the complicated sets of instructions in a familiar computer "program" that might be more in line with Descartes's thinking.

Summary of the experiment on patients with either a damaged amygdala or hippocampus that was mentioned in class, but is not in the textbook.

Cognitive Neuropsychology slides: the slides presented in class, which incorporate some illustrations from the previous (second) edition of the textbook. [PDF version]

PDP models are described here in an excerpt from the 2nd edition of Goldstein's cognitive psychology textbook, using somewhat different examples and presentation than the 3rd edition. This can serve as a supplement to the 3rd edition's coverage in case it is more understandable or helpful. Note that the passage is concerned with connectionist models of the organization of memory and how concepts can be related to one another; but keep in mind that the approach is much more general and has been used to model language learning, perception, reading, and many other aspects of human information processing. Apart from their applications in psychology, it's likely that neural networks are being used to recognize your preferences when you use services like Pandora or Netflix, or to decide which emails you receive are probably spam.

Parallel Distributed Processing PowerPoint slides: the slides presented in class, which incorporate some illustrations from the previous (second) edition of the textbook. [PDF version]

Two short excerpts about James Gibson's Ecological Psychology: these are written by people who DON'T actually agree with Gibson and his ecological view, but who are describing him and his work fairly objectively. (While they're sort of skeptical, personally I'm not!) It's difficult to sum up the approach in brief; the linked passages are decent outsider views, but they're still incomplete and fail to appreciate some subtleties and philosophical implications. Ecological psychology is an approach to problems of perception and other aspects of psychology that is very different from conventional mainstream approaches. Instead of looking at the mind as a kind of computer involved in the processing of information (which is what mainstream psychology assumes), it is concerned with how animals and people can directly detect information in the environment which will be sufficient to guide their actions. The phrase "directly detect" is why the approach is often referred to as "direct perception"; it implies that the information doesn't need to be processed at all, which is controversial to say the least, and which certainly flies in the face of many centuries of epistemology. (At the end of the excerpt is an example of what a conventional "INdirect perception" approach looks like, for comparison.) The term "ecological" refers to a view of the animal and its environment as an integrated and co-evolving whole, as opposed to the conventional approach which seems to view the animal as an arbitrary observer placed into an arbitrary context. The ecological approach was developed by James Gibson over the whole course of his career, and today the University of Connecticut is the world leader in promoting and pursuing this approach. In particular the Psychology Department's Center For The Ecological Study Of Perception And Action (CESPA) is dedicated to advancing research and theory in ecological psychology.

• Some excerpts from a paper on the Ecological view of scientific laws: quite challenging and probably only of interest to the most devoted students, though parts of it may well be fairly accessible. I would draw your attention to the general point being made, that animals moving about in their environments are in fact an instance of motion that science needs to consider, and that traditional scientific laws are quite inadequate for describing that motion, regardless of how successful they may be at accounting for planetary orbits and planning space shuttle flights. This suggests that the laws we have at present are only applicable to the special simple case of inanimate motion, and accounting for biological and psychological phenomena will require a more sophisticated view of what counts as a scientific law. To simply say there is no lawfulness in such phenomena would be lazy; but to say that what we know as "the" laws of nature today are all that there can be, and that lawfulness consists of simple deterministic causes and effects such as apply to inanimate motion, would be equally lazy.

• An excerpt from Beyond The Brain by Louise Barrett in which she offers an overview of Gibson's perspective, for those who want to read more. It's a pretty accessible description of some subtle ideas, and the section headed "The Environment as Illusion" reviews why the mainstream approach was so unsatisfactory to Gibson. In addition, this excerpt describes Turing machines and how they are an inappropriate model for cognitive processes (unless radically reinterpreted as mentioned in this chapter), and it introduces some cutting edge concepts of dynamical systems theory as applicable to psychology, in terms an interested general reader could understand.

Video of the peregrine falcon and the gos hawk in flight. Especially note at 1:43 how the gos hawk navigates a cluttered environment, and consider whether the evolutionary route to that skill really seems to have involved examing a sequence of static images that come in quick succession, as the conventional approach to perception seems to suggest.

A point-light display of a human walking, which doesn't look like much of anything when seen in a single static frame, but reveals various characteristics of the person when viewed in motion. Movement isn't something perception has to account for -- rather it's essential to what perceiving is.

An illustration of top-down processing, as noted above in a different context, and repeated here: in reading the words "THE CAT" as printed in the link, bottom-up or purely stimulus-driven processing is not sufficient to decide whether the ambiguous letter is an A or an H in each word, since it could be either; instead the reader makes use of higher-level knowledge (of vocabulary and word spellings) which is normally the end product of the reading process, to resolve the ambiguous stimulus in each context through what is known as top-down or knowledge-driven processing (i.e., the knowledge that there is a word C-A-T in English, but no word C-H-T).

• An auditory illustration of top-down processing, starting at about 5:20. A related example, the phoneme restoration effect, follows immediately from about 7:50 to 9:10.

The Rubin Vase illusion, illustrating figure-ground switching in a bi-stable display (i.e., a picture that can be seen in two different ways equally clearly).

Two versions of Roger Shepard's monster illusion: with a ruler to show the same heights, and with a movable monster to show the overlap; other illusions are available from these sources as well. Unconscious inferences seem to be based on premises about convergence of lines and relative retinal image size, and their implications for object size.

The Ames Room Illusion, and its explanation.

Inverted faces are more difficult to identify, though it can still be done at some cost. (Look at this and this for comparison. Or view a different face if you prefer (give it a few seconds to load).

Hunting the Hidden Dimension, an episode of the PBS series NOVA that explores the mathematics and applications of fractals in a very accessible and interesting way. The program has apparently expired from the PBS.org streaming site but can also be viewed on youtube. The segment from 8:02 to 10:10 is a nice capsule summary of how fractals describe nature differently than traditional mathematics.

Arcadia, Tom Stoppard's 1993 play as described in Wikipedia. If you choose, you can read this entire synopsis including details of the plot, and it will not ruin the experience of reading the actual play -- which, I remind you, is quite a fast read and is available at libraries and could change how you look at the world. But if the synopsis bores you, don't let that put you off. You liked Shakespeare In Love, didn't you? Same author. Also Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Travesties, mentioned elsewhere on this page.

• Also consider this quite smart essay published on the eve of the play's first major revival in 1999 when it had firmly established itself: Is Tom Stoppard's Arcadia the greatest play of our age?.

Perception slides: the slides presented in class, which incorporate some illustrations from the previous (second) edition of the textbook. [PDF version]

Perceptual attention demonstration

Color changing card trick demonstrating the role of attention in perception.

How Our Eyes and Minds Betray Us on the Road, from Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt; pp. 75-89 are most relevant to the topic of attention; the rest of the chapter is just there in case you're interested. Read it as an example of the real-life implications of the theories covered in the textbook -- and then remember it in real life too!

Stroop Effect: time yourself reading the words out loud, and then again saying the names of the colors they're printed in instead.

Attention slides: the slides presented in class, which incorporate some illustrations from the previous (second) edition of the textbook. [PDF version]

The auditory sensory memory experiment by Darwin, Turvey and Crowder (1972) used an auditory analog of Sperling's partial report procedure. Presentation of stimuli to the left ear, right ear, or both ears (perceived as coming from a "middle" ear) was followed by a visual signal to report items from the left, right, or middle set. Whole report resulted in an average of 4 of the 9 items being recalled, while partial report suggested that 5 of the 9 items were available -- a small but statistically significant difference. Delayed partial report indicated a duration of up to 4 seconds. See results here.

Summary of arguments about the "modal model": this list provides an outline of the arguments and evidence concerning the first explicit model of memory as covered in lecture, along with citations and page references when possible.

Excerpt from Alan Baddeley's 1990 textbook Human Memory which can serve as a resource for various experiments discussed in class that are not in the Goldstein text. See also the excerpt from Mark Ashcraft's 1994 textbook Human Memory And Cognition (2nd Ed.) as an alternative treatment of similar material. These are meant only as a supplement or backup for class notes, if needed.

Working memory dual task results from Baddeley and Hitch (1974), as described in the Baddeley textbook excerpt above. Participants were asked to hold anywhere from 0 to 8 digits in memory while simultaneously classifying sentences such as "B is not followed by A" as true or false when shown stimuli like "A B". The time it took to verify those statements increased with digit load, but never became impossible even while holding 8 digits in memory (which, one assumes, would fully occupy short term memory). Thus a model was proposed that allowed both tasks to be done at once, though with a shared pool of limited cognitive resources.

The late Henry Molaison, of Windsor Locks, CT

• Neuroscientist Suzanne Corkin talks about her long-time patient after his death on Dec. 2 2008.
• Video clip from PBS Nova program which is partly concerned with Henry's case.
• NPR story on Henry from 2/24/07, presenting the first released recordings of Henry's voice on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the initial published report on his case. I'm not too happy with the characterization of HM's operation as a "clinical hunch" that turned out to be "justified," even if HM's epilepsy was greatly ameliorated. It's not a "treatment" anyone would ever choose, knowing the consequences, and it still seems tragically reckless to me.
• As mentioned in class, the book Memory's Ghost by Philip Hilts is popular psychology writing at its best; he relates Henry's story in profound and heartbreaking detail, and also provides an intelligent overview of the field of memory research as it has been affected by studies of Henry.

Clive Wearing is a famous patient suffering from anterograde amnesia like Henry ("H.M."), caused by a viral infection that attacked his brain (presumably including the hippocampus). As you see from this video he has the additional burden of considerable retrograde amnesia. His case is outlined here and is also featured in Oliver Sacks's latest book titled Musicophilia. Note that there are many other clips available on youtube, some of which bear the misleading title of "man without a short term memory" or some such thing, when it's apparent that like Henry, his short term memory is intact -- it's just his ability to move its contents into long term memory that is impaired.

• A page from Clive Wearing's diary that reveals something about what it must be like to be him.

Analysis of the film "Memento" by Andy Klein on salon.com. If you haven't seen the movie you should try to puzzle your way through it first, because it's a challenge; the main character suffers from an H.M.-like anterograde amnesia, and you are put in the same situation through the technique of having the story told backwards -- so you never know what past events preceded the current action of the film. The short-story version is quite different from the movie but pretty interesting on its own.

Short Term Memory slides: the slides presented in class, which incorporate some illustrations from the previous (second) edition of the textbook. [PDF version]

Weston Ashmore Bousfield was the first to investigate the clustering of responses in free recall, which suggested that the stimuli were organized by the mind when they were learned. Does his name sound familiar?

Long Term Memory slides: the slides presented in class, which incorporate some illustrations from the previous (second) edition of the textbook. Note that there are many slides referring to material NOT covered in lecture, which maye help direct your attention to topics in the reading in chapters 8 and 9. [PDF version]

Highlights from Goldstein's chapters 8 & 9: Topics in the reading at the end of the semester, including parts not covered in lecture, and indicating what to understand and how it would have been presented in lecture had there been time.