Ch.7

Question 1

Memory

Answer 1

Retention of information over time.

Paradox of memory: our memories are surprisingly good in some situations and surprisingly bad poor in others.

Question 2

Paradox

Answer 2

Hinges on a crucial fact: The same memory mechanisms that serve us well in most circumstances can sometimes cause us problems in others.

Question 3

Hyperthymestic syndrome or
Highly superior autobiographical memory

Answer 3

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Research suggests subtle differences in brain structure between people with and without this condition, especially involving brain regions in autobiographical memory and increased connectivity of brain regions. These superior cognitive abilities are mostly limited autobiographical memory.

Question 4

Remembering

Answer 4

When we try to recall an event, we actively reconstruct our memories using cues and information available to us. We don’t passively reproduce our memories.
Remembering is largely a matter of patching together our often-fuzzy recollections with our best hunches about what really happened. Therefore, we should be skeptical of claims that certain vivid memories or even dreams are exact “photocopies” of past events.

Question 5

Proving memories can be reconstructive

Answer 5

Close your eyes for a few moments and picture your most recent walk along a beach, lake, or pond. Then, after opening your eyes, ask yourself what you “saw”.
Did you see yourself as if from a distance, as an outside observer would? As Sigmund Freud noted such memories provide existence proof that at least some of our memories are reconstructive. You couldn’t possibly seen yourself from a distance because you don’t see yourself when you look at your surroundings: you must have constructed that memory rather than recalled it in its original form.

Question 6

Three types of memory

Answer 6

Most psychologist have distinguished among the three major types of memory: sensory memory, shortterm memory, and long-term memory. These types serve different purposes and vary at least two important dimensions: span—how much information each system can hold and duration— over how long a period of time that system can hold information.

The distinctions among these three types of memory aren’t always clear cut, and there’s some overlap among different types of memories. One view is that memories are a part of an interconnected network, and shortterm memory can be understood as the small amount of just presented or recently retrieved information that’s currently activated and accessible. That information is active in shortterm memory for only a brief time before being replaced by new information coming in from sensory memory or from the larger, incredibly fast store house of information held in long-term memory.

Question 7

Memory metaphor of an assembly line

Answer 7

Three different factory workers along assembly line. The first type, sensory memory, is tied closely to the raw materials of our experience, our perceptions of the world. It holds these perceptions for just a few seconds or less before passing some of it onto short term memory. Short term memory works actively with the information handed to it, transforming it into a more meaningful material before passing some of it onto long-term memory. Short term memory holds onto information longer than sensory memory does, but not much longer. The third and final type of memory, long-term memory, permits us to retain information for minutes, days, weeks, months or even years. In some cases, the information in a long-term memory last for a lifetime. As you can tell from our use of the word some in the previous sentences, we almost always lose a great deal of information at each relay station in the memory assembly line. Short term memory get information from both our sensory experience (sensory memory) and our stored long-term memories.

Question 8

Sensory memory

Answer 8

Brief storage of perceptual information before it is passed on to short-term memory. Is helpful because buys our brains a bit of extra time to process incoming sensations. It also allows us to “fill in the blanks” in our perceptions and see the world as an unbroken stream of events.

Question 9

Iconic memory

Answer 9

Visual sensory memory. 

Iconic memories last for only about a second, then they’re gone forever. Iconic memory may help to explain the remarkable, and exceedingly rare, phenomenon called eidetic imagery, popularly called “photographic memory.” Some psychologists believe that eidetic memory reflects an unusually long persistence of an iconic image in some fortunate people.

Question 10

Echoic memory

Answer 10

Auditory sensory memory.

In contrast to iconic memories, echoic or auditory memories can last as long as 5 to 10 seconds. 

Question 11

Short-term memory

Answer 11

Memory system that pertains information for limited durations.

One key component of short-term memory is what psychologists call working memory, which refers to our ability to hold onto information were currently thinking about, attending to, or processing actively. If sensory memory is what feeds raw material into the assembly line, short term memory is the workspace where construction happens. After construction takes place, we either move the product into a warehouse for long-term storage or, in some cases, scrap it all together. 

Question 12

Decay

Answer 12

Fading of information from memory overtime.

The longer we wait, the less is left.

Question 13

Interference

Answer 13

Loss of information from memory because of competition from additional incoming information. 

That is, our memories are very much like radio signals. They don’t change over time, but they’re harder to detect if they’re jammed by other signals.

Question 14

Retroactive interference

Answer 14

Interference with retention of old information due to acquisition of new information.
(When learning something new hampers earlier learning: The new interferes with the old)

Question 15

Proactive interference

Answer 15

Interference with acquisition of new information due to previous learning of information.
(When earlier learning gets in the way of new learning: The old interferes with the new.) 

Both retroactive and proactive interference are more likely to occur when the old and new stimuli that we’ve learned are similar. 

Question 16

Magic number

Answer 16

The span of short term memory, according to George Miller: 7 + or - 2 pieces of information. 

Question 17

Chunking

Answer 17

Organizing information into meaningful groupings, allowing us to extend the span of short term memory.

Question 18

Rehearsal

Answer 18

Repeating information to extend the duration of retention in the short term memory.

Repeating the information mentally, or even aloud. 

Elaborative rehearsal usually works better than maintenance rehearsal. This finding demolish is a widely held misconception about memory: that rote memorization is typically the best means of retaining information. There’s a take-home lesson here when it comes to our study habits: to remember complex information, it’s almost always better to connect that information with things we already know them to merely keep repeating it.

Question 19

Maintenance rehearsal

Answer 19

Repeating stimuli in their original form to retain them in short term memory.

We engage in maintenance rehearsal when we hear a phone number and keep repeating it—either aloud or in our minds— until we’re ready to dial the number. In this way, we keep the information “alive” in a short term memory.

Question 20

Elaborative rehearsal

Answer 20

Linking stimuli to each other in a meaningful way to improve retention of information and short term memory.

Question 21

Grasping the difference between maintenance and elaborative rehearsal

Answer 21

Let’s imagine that a researcher gave us a paired-associate task. In this task, the investigator presents us with various words, such as dog—shoe, tree—pipe, Key—monkey, and Kite—president. Then, they present us with the first word in each pair— dog, tree, and so on— and ask us to remember the second word in the pair.

If we used maintenance rehearsal, with simply repeat the words in each pair over and over again as soon as we heard it dog—shoe, dog—shoe, dog—shoe, and so on.

In contrast, if we used elaborate for Rehearsal, we try to link the words in each pair in a meaningful way. One effective way of accomplishing this goal is to come up with a meaningful, perhaps even absurd, visual image that combines both stimuli. 

Research shows that we’re especially likely to remember the two stimuli if your picture them interacting in some fashion. That’s probably because doing so allows us to chunk of them together into a single integrated stimulus. 

Question 22

Levels of processing

Answer 22

Depth of transforming information, which influences how easily we remember it. According to this model, the more deeply we process information, the better we tend to remember.

This framework identifies three levels of processing of verbal information: visual, phonological (sound-related), and semantic (meaning-related). Visual processing is the most shallow; phonological, somewhat less shallow; and semantic, the deepest. 

To understand the differences among these three levels, try to remember the following sentence:

ALL PEOPLE CRRATE THEIR OWN MEANING OF LIFE.

If you relied on the visual processing, you’d hone in on how the sentence looks. For example, you might try to focus on the fact that the sentence consists entirely of capital letters. If you relied on phonological processing, you’d focus on how the words in the sentence sound. Most likely, you’d repeat the sentence again and again until it began to sound boringly familiar. Finally, if you relied on semantic processing, you’d emphasize the sentences meaning. You might elaborate on how you’ve tried to create your own meaning of life and how doing so has been helpful to you. Research shows that deeper levels of processing, especially somatic processing, tend to produce more during long-term memories.

Question 23

Long term memory

Answer 23

Relatively enduring (from minutes to years) retention of information stored regarding our facts, experiences, and skills.

Long-term memory differs from short-term memory in several important ways. First, in contrast to short-term memory, which can typically hold at most 7 to 9 stimuli in hand at a single time, the capacity of long-term memory is huge. Just huge? No one knows for sure.
Second, although information in short term memory vanishes only after about 20 seconds at most and probably less, information in long-term memory after indoors for years, even decades— and sometimes permanently.
Third, the types of mistakes we commit in the long term memory usually differ from those we make in short term memory. Long-term memory errors tend to be semantic, that is, based on the meaning of the information we’ve received. So you might misremember a “poodle” as a “terrier”. In contrast, short term memory errors tend to be acoustic, that is, based on the sound of the information we’ve received. So we might be misremembering hearing “noodle”rather than “poodle”.

Also tend to remember stimuli that are distinctive in some way.

Question 24

Permastone

Answer 24

Type of long-term memory that appears to be permanent.

Question 25

Primacy effect

Answer 25

Tendency to remember words at the beginning of a list especially well.

What explains the primary effect? This one is trickier, but there’s good evidence that you are more likely to recall the earlier words in the list because you had more opportunity to rehearse them silently and perhaps even to chunk them. As a consequence, these words are more likely to be transferred from short-term memory into long-term memory. So the primacy effect seems to reflect the operation of long-term memory.

Question 26

Recency effect

Answer 26

Tendency to remember words at the end of the list especially well.

Question 27

Serial position curve

Answer 27

Graph depicting both primary and recency effects on people’s ability to recall items on the list.

Most researchers agreed that primacy and recency effects reflect the operation of different types of memory.

Question 28

Semantic memory

Answer 28

Our knowledge of facts about the world.

Tends to activate the left frontal cortex more than the right frontal cortex. Require a conscious effort and awareness. 

Question 29

Episodic memory

Answer 29

Recollection of events in our life.

Tends to activate the right frontal cortex more than the left frontal cortex. Requires conscious effort and awareness.

Question 30

Explicit memory

Answer 30

Memories we recall intentionally and of which we have conscious awareness.

Semantic and episodic memory are examples of explicit memory. Some researchers recall by explicit memory as declarative memory. 

Question 31

Implicit memory

Answer 31

Memories we don’t deliberately remember or reflect on consciously.

There are several some types of implicit memory, Such as procedural memory and priming. According to most psychologists, implicit memory also includes habituation, classical conditioning, and other basic forms of learning. 

Question 32

Procedural memory

Answer 32

Memory for how to do things, including motor skills and habits. 

Question 33

Priming

Answer 33

Our ability to identify a stimulus more easily or more quickly after we’ve encountered similar stimuli.

Tendency to respond in a way that is biased by earlier experiences without necessarily knowing why.

When you are exposed to a “stimulus”— a word, image, or sound— it’ll influence how you respond to a related “stimulus”
Ex: Being told pencils, and thinking pens.

Someone asking you to guess a word from S _ _ P, then saying they’re going to go get food.
You may say SOUP.
If they were to say I’m going to take a shower.
You may say SOAP this time.

Question 34

3 memory types vs 3 processes of memory

Answer 34

Encoding, storage, and retrieval. We shouldn’t confused these three processes with the three types of memory we’ve discussed, sensory, short term, and long-term. Whereas the three types refer to what of memory, the three processes discussed refer to the how of memory.

Question 35

Encoding

Answer 35

Process of getting information into our memory banks.

Many of our memory failures are actually failures of encoding; that is, of getting information into our memory banks. Once we lose the chance to encode an event, we’ll never remember it. No encoding, no memory.

Question 36

Role of attention: encoding

Answer 36

To encode something, we must first attend to it. That principle helps to explain why the popular belief that our brains preserve a record of every event we’ve ever encountered can’t be right. Most events we’ve experienced are never encoded, and almost all events we do encode include only some of the details of the experience. Much of our every day experience never gets into our brains in the first place.

Encoding helps to explain the familiar next-in-line effect. You’ve experienced this phenomenon if you’ve ever been in a class when the instructor called on several students in a row to answer questions or say their names. You probably found that your memory was especially poor for what the person immediately before you said. That’s because you were so preoccupied with what you were going to say that you weren’t paying much attention to what the person right before you were saying.

Question 37

Mnemonics

Answer 37

Learning aid, strategy, or device that enhances recall. 

For example: Making lists or putting appointments on a calendar, cell phone, or iPad. Nevertheless, mnemonics differ from these “external” memory aids in that they rely on internal mental strategies— namely strategies we used during encoding that help us later retrieve useful information (chunking is a type of mnemonic device).

Mnemonic Devices share two major features. First, we can apply them to just about anything and everything: the names of planets, the elements of the periodic table, the bones of the hand, the order of geological time periods, and the colours of the rainbow. Second, most mnemonics depend on our having a store of knowledge to begin with. We need to know something about mathematical operations for the mnemonic about aunt sally to make any sense. So in general, mnemonics are most helpful as mental shortcuts for recalling lists of information we’ve already learned.

Question 38

Pegword method

Answer 38

Rhyming is a key component of the pegword method, often used to recall ordered lists of words.

To master this mnemonic, first associate each number in a list with a word that rhymes with the number, such as “one is a bun.” The word associated with the number is a “pegword”. It’s essential to memorize a list like The one that follows, but the fact that the numbers and words rhyme makes it easy to do so: (1) one is a bun, (2) two is a shoe, (3) three is a tree, and (4) four is a door.

Suppose you need to learn 4 words associated with memory concepts for your psychology class and that you need to recall them in the following order: chunking, elaboration, hippocampus, and decay. After you’ve memorize the pegword associated with each number (such as one is a bun), create an image that associates the word you want to remember with the pegword (such as bun). For the first word, chunking, you can imagine a bun (the pegword) with a chunk missing or broken up into chunks. For two—elaboration— you might imagine a shoe with elaborate beating, sequins, and bows. For three—hippocampus— imagine a tree with the hippo camping under it. For number four, decay, you might picture a rotting, decaying door on an old house. When you need to remember the third item on your list, for example, you’d say to yourself that three is a tree, which would prompt really call of the hippo camping under it, and you know that the third word on the list is hippocampus. Repeated use of the pegword method enhances students’ delayed recall for ordered lists of unfamiliar terms, suggesting that the method may be useful for improving vocabulary.

Question 39

Method of loci

Answer 39

“Low-sign”. Relies on imagery of places; that is, locations— hence the name of the mnemonic.

The method is straightforward: think of a path with which you’re familiar and can imagined and vividly. Perhaps it’s a route from your dorm to the cafeteria or a stroll through the rooms of your apartment. Think of the path you take and the things that you encounter in a certain order. For example, to get to the cafeteria, you first get in the elevator, then you walk under a huge tree before you pass by a fountain, and so on. If you need to remember five words in a particular order, think of five things you encounter on your way to the cafeteria; if you need to recall 10 words, imagine 10 locations along your route. If you were trying to remember out the list of memory terms with the method of loci, you might imagine chunks of rock or glass on the floor of the elevator. Researchers have used the method of loci to help the depressed individuals recall positive, self-affirming memories to lift their mood.

Question 40

Keyword method

Answer 40

The strategy depends on your ability to think of an English word the keyword the remind you of the word you’re trying to remember. Take the Spanish word Casa, which means house in English. Think of an English word, like case, that sounds like or brings to mind Casa. Now think of an image that combines case (or another word of your choice) and house. Perhaps you can picture a guitar case on the roof of your house. When m you think of this image and the accompanying word case, they should help you to retrieve the meaning of Casa. People who learn foreign vocabulary benefit from the keyword strategy compared with more traditional methods, such as rote memorization.

Question 41

Storage

Answer 41

Process of keeping information and memory.

How we store our experiences in memory depends on our interpretations and expectations regarding events. Often we retain memories of events that are familiar, important, personally meaningful, or make a particularly strong impression on us.

Question 42

Schema

Answer 42

Organize knowledge structure or mental model that we have stored in memory.

Schema serve a valuable function: the equip us with the frames of reference for interpreting new situations. Without schemas, we’d find some information almost impossible to comprehend.

Schemas and memory mistakes.
Valuable as they are, schemas can sometimes create problems because they can lead us to remember things that never happened. Schema simplify, which is good because they help us make sense of the world. But schemas sometimes oversimplify and as a result can produce memory illusions. Schemas provide one key explanation for the paradox of memory: they enhance memory in some cases but lead to memory errors in others.

Question 43

Retrieval

Answer 43

Reactivation or reconstruction of experiences from our memory stores.

What we retrieve from our memory often doesn’t match what we put into it because our memories are reconstructive, often transforming our recollections to fit our beliefs and expectations.

Many types of forgetting result from failures of retrieval: our memories are still present, but we can’t access them. 

Question 44

Retrieval cue

Answer 44

Hints that makes it easier for us to recall information. 

Question 45

Recall

Answer 45

Generating previously remembered information. Tends to be more difficult than recognition.

Why is recall usually harder than recognition? In part, it’s because recalling an item requires two steps— generating an answer and then determining whether it seems correct— whereas recognizing an item takes only one step: determining which item from a list seems most correct.

Psychologists assess peoples memory in three major ways: recall, recognition, and re-learning. Think of them as the 3 Rs. (Another mnemonic device). 

Question 46

Recognition

Answer 46

Selecting previously remembered information for an array of options.



Question 47

Relearning

Answer 47

Reacquiring knowledge that we had previously learned but largely forgotten overtime. Relearning shows that a memory for a skill was still lurking in your brain— somewhere.

Method of savings: now that we’ve studied something, you don’t need to take as much time to refresh our memories of it.

Hermann Ebbinghaus Found that most of our forgetting is caused almost immediately after learning new material, with less and less forgetting after that. Also found that when he attempted to re-learn the nonsense syllables that had forgotten after a delay, he learned them much more quickly the second time around. 

Relearning it’s a more sensitive measure of memory then recall or recognition. That’s because relearning allows us to assess memory using a relative amount (How much faster was material learned the second time?) rather than a simple “right” or “wrong” we obtain from recall or recognition. It also allows us to measure our memory for procedures, like driving a car or playing a piano piece, as well as for facts and figures.

Question 48

Distributed versus massed practice

Answer 48

Studying information in small increments overtime (distributed) versus in large increments over a brief amount of time (massed).

Simply put, this law tells us we tend to remember things better in the long run when we spread our learning over long intervals then when we pack it into short intervals.

Cramming for an exam helps us remember the information for that exam, but typically produces poor long-term retention. If you want to master the information in any course you should spread out your review of the material over a long intervals. 

Question 49

Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon

Answer 49

Experience of knowing that we know something but being unable to access it.

The fact that we sometimes experience the TOT phenomenon tells us that there is a difference between something we’ve forgotten because It didn’t get stored in memory and something that’s in there somewhere that we can’t quite retrieve.

Fascinated and unanticipated discovery in TOT: Participants in such a state experience a positivity bias such that the unretrieved information is viewed as more positive compared with when participants aren’t in such a state. For example, when the TOT is for the name of a pictured person, they are perceived to be more likely to be ethical. Clearly hypothesized that there might be a positive feeling of excitement that accounts for the positivity bias— warm glow associated with the belief that the answers might soon spring to mind. Also found that people are more inclined to take a risk and gamble during a TOT state then a non-TOT state.

Question 50

Encoding specificity

Answer 50

Phenomenon of remembering something better when the conditions under which we retrieve information are similar to the conditions under which we encoded it.

Question 51

Context-dependent learning

Answer 51

Superior retrieval of memories when the external context of the original memories matches the retrieval context.

Question 52

State-dependent learning

Answer 52

Superior retrieval of memories when the organism is in the same physiological or psychological state as it was during encoding. 

State-dependent learning sometimes extends to mood, in which case it’s termed mood-dependent learning. Finding it easier to recall and recognize unpleasant memories than pleasant ones when they’re sad and easier to recall and recognize pleasant memories then unpleasant ones when they’re happy. Can result in a retrospective bias: our current psychological state can distort memories of our past.

Question 53

The elusive Engram

Answer 53

The physical trace of each memory in the brain. 

Lashley hoped to discover where memory is stored in the brain. Learned two important things. First, the more brain he removed, the worse the rats performed on the maze. Even removing up to half of the rats’ cortices didn’t erase the memory. These findings led Lashley to conclude that we can’t simply pointed to a spot in the brain and say “there’s the memory”, because that memory isn’t located in a single place, like a library book sitting on a shelf. Instead, scientists have learned, memories of different features of experiences, like their sound, sight, and smell, are almost certainly stored in different brain regions.

Engram is instead located in assemblies— organized groups— of neurons in the brain. According to Hebn, one neuron (A) becomes connected to another neuron (B) when it repeatedly activates that neuron. Neurons, fed by a rich blend of neurotransmitters from circuits, integrate sensory information in meaningful ways, and transform our experience of the world into lasting, perhaps even lifelong, memories.

Question 54

Long term potentiation (LTP)

Answer 54

Gradual strengthening of the connections among neurons from repeated stimulation.

Terje Lomo First observed LTP in the hippocampus of rabbits, a finding replicated by many later researchers in other animals and humans. The gist of what neuroscientists have learned since the discovery of LTP is that neurons that “fire together wire together.”

Today many researchers believe that our ability to store memories depends on the strengthening of connections among neurons arranged in spiral networks that extend to the far and deep recesses of our brains. Most scientists agree the LTP plays a key role in learning and that the hippocampus plays a critical role in forming lasting memories.

Question 55

LTP and Hippocampus

Answer 55

To tell what cells are responsible for LTP, many researchers use thin slices of the hippocampus. In typical LTP experiment, researchers first establish how hippocampal cells respond a baseline. This is much like determining how you respond to someone asking you a question. Researchers then apply a strong stimulus, much like having someone yell at us. After the strong stimulus, hippocampal neurons respond at an enhanced level to the ordinary stimuli, much as we might respond to a neutral question with a louder voice than usual after someone yelled at us. That’s LTP. 

Question 56

LTP and glutamate

Answer 56

LTP tends to occur at synapses where the sending neuron releases the neurotransmitter glutamate into the synaptic left. Glutamate interacts with receptors for NMDA and another substance (AMPA). LTP enhances the release of glutamate into the synaptic cleft, resulting in enhance learning. 

Question 57

Where is memory stored?

Answer 57

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies reveal that learned information isn’t stored permanently in the hippocampus itself. Rather, the prefrontal cortex seems to be one of the major “banks” from which we withdraw memories.

Question 58

Retrograde amnesia

Answer 58

Lost of memories from our past.

Question 59

Anterograde amnesia

Answer 59

Inability to encode new memories from our experiences.

After surgery, H.M had developed virtually complete anterograde amnesia. Tragic case illustrates a striking dissociation between explicit and implicit memory. Researchers asked H. M. To trace simple geometrical shapes from a mirror, a task that just about all people find infuriatingly difficult when they first try it. Although H.M.had no recollection of ever having perform this task before, his performance improved steadily overtime. Had no explicit memory for this task, he displayed clear-cut implicit—specifically, procedural— memory for it.

Bottom line is this: damage to the hippocampus impairs explicit memory but leaves implicit memory intact.

Question 60

The role of the amygdala

Answer 60

The amygdala is where the emotional components of these and other memories, especially those governing fear, are stored. The amygdala interacts with the hippocampus during the formation of a memory, but each structure contributes different information.

The patient with amygdala damage (S.M.) Remembered the facts about the fear-producing experience but did not experience the fear itself. In contrast, the patient with the hippocampal damage (W. S.) Experienced the fear, but not the facts surrounding the fear-producing experience.

Amygdala helping us recalled emotions associated with fear-provoking events and the hippocampus helping us recall the events themselves.

Question 61

Erasing painful memories 

Answer 61

Emotional memories can persist, even if they often become distorted overtime. The hormones adrenaline and norepinephrine are released in the face of stress and stimulate protein (beta-adrenergic) receptors on nerve cells, which solidify emotional memories.

A study: Two stories were created using 12 slides they showed to participants. They told half of the participants an emotionally neutral story about a boys visit to a hospital where his father works. They told the other half are far more disturbing story about the same slides; in the middle of the story, they informed the participants that the boy was injured and operated on at the hospital to reattach his severed legs. Participants returned for a memory test 24 hours, being asked what they remembered. Participants who hurt emotionally arousing story displayed the best recall for the part of the story about the boys trauma. In contrast, participants who heard the neutral story recalled the same amount of detail for all parts of the story.

Question 62

The biology Of Memory deterioration

Answer 62

As we humans past the ripe old age of 65, we often begin to experience memory problems and some degeneration in the brain. Despite what many people believe, senility isn’t an unavoidable part of aging, and some managed to make it past 100 with only modest amount of every day forgetfulness. But scientist disagree as to how much memory loss is “normal” during the advanced years. Nevertheless, a longitudinal study of participants aged 59 to 84 years at baseline showed small but consistent reductions in the overall area of the cortex at 2- and 4- year intervals.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most frequent cause of senility, according for about 50% to 60% of cases of dementia, that is, severe memory loss. Two other common causes of senility are the accumulation of multiple small strokes in the brain and deterioration in the frontal and temporal lobe’s. The cognitive impairments of Alzheimer’s disease are both memory and language related which corresponds to the patterns of Cortical lost in this illness. The memory loss begins with recent events, with memories of the distant past being the last to go. The Alzheimer’s brain contains many senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. These abnormalities contribute to loss of synapses and death of cells in the hippocampus and cerebral cortex. They may also contribute to memory loss and intellectual decline. Lots of synapses is correlated with intellectual status, with greater loss as the disease progresses. But this result doesn’t necessarily mean that the reduction of synapses causes the memory decline. Along with loss of synapses comes degeneration and death of acetylcholine neurons in the forebrain.

Question 63

Memory over time

Answer 63

Memory changes as we age, but there is considerable continuously over the course of development. On average, infants have worse memories then two children, who have horse memories than adults, and young adults have a better memory than older adults. But the same basic processes operate across the lifespan. 

Question 64

Children’s memory

Answer 64

Overtime, children’s memories become increasingly sophisticated. Several factors explain why.

First, children’s memory span increases with age. Capable of remembering more.
Is this increase in span a result of better uses of strategies, like rehearsal? That’s certainly part of the story, but there’s a large physical maturational component too.
Second, our conceptual understanding increases with age. This fact is important because our ability to chunk related items and store memories in meaningful ways depends on our knowledge of the world.
Third, overtime, children develop and enhanced meta-memory skills: knowledge about their memory abilities and limitations. These skills help children identify when they need to use strategies to improve the memories, as well as which strategies work best.

Question 65

Meta-memory

Answer 65

Knowledge about our memory abilities and limitations.

Question 66

Infantile amnesia

Answer 66

Inability of adults to remember personal experiences that took place before an early age. 

No one knows for sure why the first few years of our lives are lost to us forever, but psychological science offer several promising leads. Hippocampus, which as we learned plays a key role in long-term memory, especially episodic memory, it’s only partially developed in infancy. So before age 2 or so, we may not possess the brain architecture needed to retain memories of events. Also as infants, we possess little or no concept of self, much less a mental model of ourselves linked to the appearance of our bodies and coordinated with our movements. Before about 18 months of age, infants can’t recognize them selves in mirrors. Without a well developed schema of self, infant may not be able to encode or store memories of their experiences in a meaningful fashion. So these experiences will never be remembered.

Question 67

Flashbulb memories

Answer 67

Emotional memory that is extraordinarily vivid and detailed. 

Further argued that flashbulb memories don’t decay overtime like ordinary memories.

Phantom flashbulb memory: To capture the idea that many seemingly flashbulb memories are false.

Still, flashbulb memories typically contain substantial kernels of accuracy. For example, people who learned about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, are usually correct in the recall about where they were when they heard about the attack, but often wrong about what they were doing at the time or who told them. People differ in their recall overtime: individuals resilient in the face of trauma or who recovered from the trauma-related symptoms created a more benign memory of the event as time passed, compared with people who continue to experience distress. This research indicates that so-called flashbulb and other strong emotional memories change our time, just like all other memories. Moreover, the rate of forgetting flashbulb memories is similar to that of ordinary memories. Flashbulb memories aren’t a separate class of memories; there much like other memories, just more intense.

Question 68

Source monitoring confusion

Answer 68

Lack of clarity about the origin of a memory.

Bottom line? Belief in the reality of an event and a memory for this event can occur independently.

According to a source monitoring view of memory, we try to identify the origins of our memories by seeking cues about how we encoded them. Source monitoring refers to our efforts to identify the origins (sources) of a memory. We rely on source monitoring to recall which information source provided the information. Whenever we try to figure out whether a memory really reflect some thing that happened or whether we merely imagined it, we are engaging in source monitoring. All things being equal, memories of our recent past that are more vivid and detailed are more likely to reflect the actual events, although as we’ve learned, even these memories are sometimes when you’re inaccurate.

Question 69

Imagination inflation

Answer 69

Imagining an event inflates confidence in the likelihood that it occurred.

Imagination inflation and source monitoring failure can also extend to actions in which we mistakenly believe that we engaged in an act that we only imagine or observed someone else do in videotaped actions and in face-to-face interactions.

Some studies suggest that people who are fantasy-prone are more likely to experience memory illusions on this task.

Question 70

Cryptomnesia

Answer 70

Failure to recognize that our ideas originated with someone else.

Question 71

Suggestive memory techniques

Answer 71

Procedure that encourages patience to recall memories that may or may not have taken place. 

Children are especially vulnerable to suggestions to recall events that didn’t occur, probably because they often confuse fantasy with reality. These findings are important because many social workers and police officers who suspect that a child was abused question them about the abuse repeatedly. Repeated questioning comes with the risk: children may give investigators the answers they’re seeking, even if the answers are wrong. Psychologists and other healthcare workers should therefore use less suggestive procedures when questioning children. Indeed, most research demonstrates that many children can provide reasonable accurate memories when they’re simply asked about an event once in a non-leading fashion. Still, we should be cautious about generalizing experimental findings to the real world, because these laboratory studies maybe low in external validity. 

Question 72

Misinformation effect

Answer 72

Creation of fictitious memories by providing misleading information about an event after it takes place. 

Older adults are particularly vulnerable to misinformation effects, partly due to difficulties with source monitoring.

Do participants’ reports in false memory studies reflect the actual changes in their memories? Or could the reports merely reflect demand characteristics— attempts to please experimenters or give experimenters the answers participants’ believe they’re seeking? Probably not, because even when researchers have told participants they implanted the memories, many continue to insist the memories are genuine.

Event Plausibility-
It’s easier to implant a memory of something that fits into existing schema then something that doesn’t. In addition, it’s easier to implant Fictitious memory of an event from the distant past for which we have hazy or no recall than of an event from the recent past we’re likely to remember.

Question 73

Eyewitness testimony’s

Answer 73

The fact that eyewitness misidentification is the most common cause of wrongful convictions isn’t so surprising when we consider that when witnesses seem sure they’ve identified the culprit, jury’s tend to believe them. Even attorneys and judges are unduly influenced by confident in accurate eyewitness testimony. Contrary to popular (mis)conception, the correlation between eyewitness’ confidence and the accuracy of their testimony is often modest. However, the accuracy of eyewitness’ identification is considerably higher when witnesses are very confident in their initial recollections assessed at the time they make an identification, such as in a lineup, for example, and one proper testing procedures are used. Eyewitnesses sometimes provide invaluable evidence, especially when they have ample time to observe the perpetrator under good lighting conditions, when the criminal isn’t disguised, and when little time elapses Between witnessing the crime and identifying the guilty party. I witnessed accuracy is also often impaired by weapon focus: one a crime involves a weapon, people understandably tend to focus on the weapon rather than the perpetrators appearance. 

Question 74

The false memory controversy

Answer 74

On one side of the battle are memory recovery therapist, who claimed that patients repress memories of traumatic events and then recover them years, even decades, later. Most followers of Sigmund Freud believe that repression is a form of forgetting in which people push painful memories into the unconscious. According to recovery memory therapists, these repressed memories are the root cause of current life problems that must be addressed to make progress in psychotherapy. Undergraduates and psychotherapists have expressed increase skepticism regarding repressed memory.

Lined up on the opposing side of the false memory debate is researchers who claim that there’s slim evidence that people repress traumatic memories. These researchers point to mounting body of evidence that painful memories, are well remembered and, if anything remembered too well. According to them, there’s serious reason to doubt that many memories can be repressed and then recovered years or decades later. Also voiced serious concerns about whether suggestive procedures can lead patients to conclude erroneously that family members abuse them in childhood. According to this perspective, at least some memory recovery techniques can cause harm.

From a scientific and ethical standpoint, this state of affairs is deeply troubling, often tragic. Given what we now know about how fallible human memory is, recovered memories of child abuse shouldn’t be trusted completely unless they’re accompanied by clear-cut corroborating evidence. In the past decade or so, a consensus has emerged that suggestive procedures can’t create false memories of childhood events in many psychotherapy clients. Still, all claims of child abuse should be taken seriously and evaluated carefully.

Question 75

Learning tips

Answer 75

These tips will be helpful for acquiring and consolidating your memory is not only in post secondary school, but also in every day life:

1. Distributed vs. Massed study. Spread out your study time— review your notes and textbook in increments rather than cramming.
2. Testing effect. Put down what you’ve read, and test yourself frequently on the material.

3.Elaborative rehearsal. Connect new knowledge with existing knowledge rather than simply memorizing the facts or names.

4.Levels of processing. Work to process ideas deeply and meaningfully— avoid taking notes Word for Word from instructors’ Lectures or slides. Try capturing the information in your own words and using other concepts from the course.

5. Mnemonic devices. The more reminders or cues you can connect from your knowledge base to new material, the more likely you are to recall new material.