Chapter 5 Flashcards
Episodic memory
Focuses on your memories for events that happened to you personally
Allows you to travel backwards in subjective time to reminisce about earlier episodes in your life
Has both context and content!
Semantic memory
Describes organized knowledge about the world, including your knowledge about words and other factual information
Procedural memory
Refers to your knowledge about how to do something
Encoding
Processing information and representing it in your memory
Retrieval
Locating information in storage and accessing it
Autobiographical memory
Your memory for experiences and information that is related to yourself
Levels-of-processing approach
Argues that deep, meaningful processing of information leads to more accurate recall than shallow, sensory kinds of processing
Distinctiveness
A stimuli that is different from other memory traces
Elaboration
Requires rich processing in terms of meaning and interconnected concepts
Self-reference effect
You will remember more information if you try to relate that information to yourself
Meta-analysis
A statistical method for synthesizing numerous studies on a single topic
3 factors that contribute to the self reference effect
- The “self” provides an especially rich set of cues
- Encourages people to consider how their personal traits are connected
- You rehearse material more frequently if it is associated with yourself
Encoding-specificity principle
Recall is better if the context during retrieval is similar to the context during encoding
Recall vs recognition task
Recall: participants must reproduce the items they had learned earlier
Recognition: participants must judge whether they saw a particular item at an earlier time
Mood congruence
We recall material more accurately if our mood matches the emotional nature of the material
Pollyanna Principle
Pleasant items are usually processed more efficiently and more accurately than less pleasant items
Anger and violence typically ___ memory accuracy
Reduce
Positivity effect
People tend to rate unpleasant past events more positively with the passage of time
Implicit memory task
You see the material and later you are instructed to complete a cognitive task that does not directly ask you for either recall or recongition
Repetition priming task
Recent exposure to a word increases the likelihood that you’ll think of this word when you are given a cue that could evoke many different words
Dissociation
When a variable has large effects on Test A, but little or no effects on Test B
Or one kind of effect on test A but the opposite on test B
Retrograde vs Anterograde amnesia
R: loss of memory for events that occurred prior to brain damage - head injury
A: loss of ability to form memories for events that have occurred after brain damage
Expertise
People who demonstrate impressive memory abilities, as well as consistently exceptional performance on representative tasks in a particular area
Own-ethnicity bias
Generally more accurate in identifying members of your own ethnicity group than others
Schema
General knowledge or expectations, which is distilled from your past experiences with someone or something
Consistency bias
We tend to exaggerate the consistency between our past feelings and beliefs and our current viewpoint
Source monitoring
The process of trying to identify the origin of a particular memory
Reality monitoring
Trying to identify whether an event really occurred, or whether you actually imagined this event
Flashbulb memory
Memory for the circumstances in which you learned about a very surprising and emotionally arousing event
Post-event misinformation effect
People first view an event, then are given misleading information about it, and later on they mistakenly recall the misleading information, rather than the event they actually saw
Can be traced to faulty source monitoring
Retroactive interference
People have trouble recalling old material because some recently learned, new material keeps interfering with old memories
Constructivist approach
Emphasizes that we construct knowledge by integrating what we know (our understanding of an event or topic is coherent and makes sense)
2 perspectives about memories of sexual abuse
- Recovered memory perspective (they managed to forget the memory for many years)
- False memory perspective (most of these recovered memories are actually incorrect memories)
Betrayal trauma
Describes how a child may respond adaptively when a trusted parent or caretaker betrays them by sexual abuse
Intentional vs incidental learning
Intentional: trying to learn something (like at school)
Incidental: no particular attempt at memorization (most of the learning you do in life)
3 reasons why level of processing works
Distinctiveness (items processed deeply “stand out”)
Semantics (focusing on the meaning of words helps us synthesize the information)
Elaboration (helps us remember)
What part of the brain does
1. Deep processing
2. Self referencing
use?
- Left prefrontal cortex
2. Right and left prefrontal cortex
3 reasons why self referencing works
Cueing (self is discriminable and has lots of cues)
Elaboration
Organization (concepts of self are well organized)
2 problems with the encoding specificity principle
- Outshining (context effects are often weak and outshone by other important factors)
- Which context? (psychological > physical)
Mood dependent memory
When our mood influences the context
When your mood matches the context, you will have a better memory for it
Ex: study while happy, will do better if happy on the test
Mood congruent memory
When you have improved memory for information that is framed in a way similar to your mood
When sad, remember the bad
6 ways to measure implicit memory
Lexical decision (deciding if something is a word or not) Stem completion Fragment completion Speeded word reading Priming Fragment completion
Perceptual/repetition priming
Have seen/read/heard that exact word before
Will perform better on an implicit memory test if primed
Conceptual priming
Priming from related ideas
Ex: how fast do you recognize doctor when you have been previously shown nurse
What area of the brain is injured in anterograde amnesia
Medial temporal lobe
Includes structures like the hippocampus
Cryptomnesia
When a forgotten memory returns without it being recognized as such, who believes it is something new and original
Problem with source monitoring
