Ch 8- Textbook Flashcards
What is encoding?
- The process of getting information into our brain’s memory system
What are the 3 forms that memory takes?
- Recall (ex: a fill-in-the-blank test question)
- Recognition (ex: a multiple choice test q)
- Relearning (ex: learning something more quickly when you learn it a second time).
What is storage?
- Retaining the brain’s encoded information
What is retrieval?
- Later getting encoded information back out
What does dual- track processing mean?
- Our brain processes many things simultaneously by means of parallel processing (some things are processes unconsciously)
What’s connectionism’s view on memories?
- Views memories as products of interconnected neural networks- specific memories arise from activation patterns within these networks- every time you learn something new, your brain’s neural connections change, forming and strengthening pathways that allow you to interact with and learn from your constantly changing environment
What is working memory?
- A newer understanding of short- term memory that focuses on conscious, active processing of incoming information and of information retrieved from long- term memory
What is explicit memory?
- Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and ‘declare’
What is automatic processing?
- Unconscious encoding of incidental information such as space, time and frequency of well learned information
What are implicit memories?
- Non Declarative memories
- Retention independent of conscious recollection
What does the brain automatically process information about??
- Space
- Time
- Frequency
What is sensory memory?
- Memory that feeds into our active working memory
- Records a momentary image of a scene or an echo of a sound
Ex: Sperling’s experiments
What is iconic memory?
- A momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli - a photograph or picture - image memory lasting no more than a few tenths of a second
What is echoic memory?
- A momentary sensory stimuli or auditory stimuli- sounds and words can still be recalled within 3 or 4 seconds, even if attention is elsewhere
What is priming?
- the activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory
- “memory less memory”- invisible memory, without conscious awareness
Ex: If you see a poster of a missing child, you will unconsciously be primed to interpret ambiguous adult- child associations as a possible abduction
What is the serial position effect?
- Our tendency to recall the last and first items in a list
- –> recent vs. Primacy
What is retrograde amnesia?
- The inability to retrieve information about on’es past
What is anterograde amnesia?
- The inability to form new memories
What is storage decay?
- The course of forgetting
- Memories become inaccessible due to a gradual decay of the physical memory trace
What is proactive interference?
- The disruptive effect of prior learning on the recall of new information
What is retroactive interference?
- The disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information
What is positive transfer?
- Previously learned information (I.e Latin) often facilitates out leaning of new information (I.e french)
What is source amnesia?
- Attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, read about, or imagined
- At the heart of many false memories
What is déjà vu?
- The eerie sense that “I have experienced this before”- cues from the current situation may subconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier response
What is long-term potentiation (LTP)?
- An increase in a cell’s firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation
- Believed to be neural basis for learning and memory
