Ch 11 forgetting Flashcards
What was Skinner’s most important contribution?
A new way to look at memory: as experiences that change the organism’s tendency to behave in certain ways
- focus on the behaving organism and its relation to events in its past and current environments
What is forgetting?
Deterioration in learned behaviour following a period without practice
Is all deterioration in learned behaviour following a period without practice due to forgetting?
No, it is also due to aging, injury and disease
What are we asking when we ask if someone has forgotten something?
We are asking whether the changes in behaviour produced by experience persist.
Does forgetting always mean a decline in the probability of a behaviour?
No, sometimes it can mean an increase, such as when there has been conditioned suppression, which when forgotten can see a reappearance in the suppressed behaviour.
What is used to measure forgetting?
Time, mainly by observing the retention interval and testing to see how much learned behaviour is still intact
What is the retention interval?
The period after training during which the learned behaviour is not performed.
What are the various ways that forgetting is measured?
- free recall
- prompted recall
- recognition
- relearning method
- delayed matching to sample (DMTS)
- extinction
- gradient degradation
Why is free recall a crude measurement?
Because it does not capture all of the learning that has been retained despite not being able to perform
What do savings refer to?
The attempts or time saved when a behaviour has been relearned more rapidly than the initial learning
How is extinction used to measure forgetting?
After training is complete, one organism has a retention interval and another doesn’t, then the rate of extinction is compared between the two- the faster the rate, the more forgetting
Can forgetting be measured without performance?
No, forgetting is measured by observing performance
What are the variables in forgetting?
- retention interval: the longer the interval the greater the forgetting
- degree of learning
- prior learning
- subsequent learning
- context
Why does time not account for forgetting?
Because time is not an event, it’s a concept. A non-event cannot cause and event, only another event can.
What is the rule of the degree of learning?
The better something has been learned, the less likely it is to be forgotten
What is overlearning?
When learning continues even after mastery has been achieved
Is there a limit to the benefits of overlearning?
Yes, the law of diminishing returns applies after a point
What is fluency?
The measurement of the degree of learning in terms of number of correct responses per minute
How is the degree of learning measured?
Fluency, the higher the rate the lower the rate of forgetting
How does meaningfulness influence forgetting?
The more meaningful a material is, the easier it is to retain
What does meaningfulness mean?
Importance of prior learning
- prior learning can reduce forgetting
What is Proactive interference?
When prior learning interferes with the recall of more recent learning
What is paired associate learning?
A technique for measuring proactive interference where a person memorizes two paired word lists and is compared to a person who learned one. Depending on the order of the learning, interference can be demonstrated
What affect does attitude have on recall?
A person is more likely to remember something they agree with than something they don’t
What does sleep tell us about forgetting?
That forgetting is a function of learning because less forgetting occurs during an interval of sleep or rest than an interval of experience
What is retroactive interference?
When what we learn interferes with our ability to recall earlier learning
- new learning pushes out old learning
What is context?
The presence of a given pattern of stimuli
What is cue-dependent forgetting?
When context cues that serve to evoke a behaviour were present during training but are absent during performance, causing performance to suffer
What can be compared to cue-dependent forgetting?
Stimulus control
What is reminiscence?
When performance improves with the passage of time
What can cause reminiscence in 24 hours after training?
The physiological state of the organism matches its state from its best performance 24 hours previous
What is state-dependent learning?
When behaviour is learned during a particular physiological state and is lost when that state passes
What is included in context?
The state of the environment and the internal state of the learner
What can explain people’s shitty eyewitness reports?
- reinforcement history and how questions are asked, previous experiences with certain words can lead us to believe they may be reinforced
Is the ability to recall genetic or learned?
Both, inherited and a skill
What is a way of improving our learning?
Memory strategies
What are the main memory strategies?
- overlearning
- mneumonics
- mneumonic systems (loci, peg word
- context cues
- prompts (S+)
