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