Chapter 6 Flashcards
What is the most crucial feature of episodic memory?
Capacity to remember specific events–> need mental filing system to distinguish similar events
What is Tulving’s mental time travel?
Reliving past experiences & using it to anticipate future events
What is the basis of semantic memory?
accumulated & consolidated recollection of past memories
Amnesiac patients who have impaired episodic memory also have impaired ——–.
Capacity to continue to develop knowledge about the world. (e.g don’t know current president but know the president of WWII)
What did Martin Conway discover after studying retention of material from a psychology course?
After a short delay, the material was recalled in episodes, after a long delay, material was incorporated into semantic memory & separated from the actual learning event
What was the main criticism of the Ebbinghaus tradition?
- Clearly specified experiments with constrained goals could make us focus too much on narrow problems.
- Attempt to separate memory from meaning leads to studying simple repetition habits
How was Bartlett’s approach different from Ebbinghaus?
- More naturalistic & informal
- Studied recall of complex material (folk tales from unfamiliar cultures e.g War of Ghosts)
- Use errors in recall as a clue about storage & encoding of material–> rationalizing stories by distorting them to fit own experience
- Focused on participants’ effort for meaning (Ebbinghaus avoided all meaning)
- Coined the term “shema”–>long-term structured representation of knowledge–> based on social & cultural influences–> influence all 3 stages of memory
What are two criticisms of Bartlett’s approach?
- Vague instructions to participants
- Many recall distortions due to deliberate guessing & not due to memory problems (Neisser says this is because they were made to go beyond their recall capacity limit)
Describe Sulin & Dooling’s study to test Bartlett’s assumption that LT delay intervals increase schema-driven errors:
- Presented story of Gerald Martin in one Condition & Adolf Hitler in another
- Asked whether various sentences were part of the text, one of which was about Jew persecution
- Participants in the Hitler condition were more likely to incorrectly indicate that the sentence was part of text
- Semantic knowledge about Hitler at long retention interval (1 week) but not at short one (5 mins)
Describe Charmicheal’s experiment using ambiguous items
- Ambiguously shaped items were given two labels (e.g hat & beehive)
- When asked to draw items from memory, drawings were heavily influenced by verbal labels
- Bias occurred during retrieval but not during encoding
- Correct info was stored but since recalling task was difficult, participants relied on recognition rather than recall
- So memory is aided whenever contextual cues arouse appropriate schemata
What did Glaze surmise from his experiment with rating extent of similarity between consonant-vowel-consonants & real words?
- Syllables that are rated as more meaningful are easier to recall (e.g CAS resembles Castle but ZIJ is harder to link to meaningful existing words)
- Easier to remember things that are consistent with our well-learned language habbits
What was Jenkins & Russel’s experiment with word associations?
- In a mixed list of items, things that were associated were recalled as a cluster (e.g needle, thread, mend)
- Learning paired words with a high inter-word association is faster (e.g bread-butter) than ones with low/absent inter-word association (e.g lobster-tower)
What is paired-associate learning?
-Learning word pairs so that when one is produced, the second one could be recalled
Words that evoke images are remembered—–. This was discovered by ——- and labelled as ——
Words that evoke images are remembered better. Allen Paivio discovered this and called it introspection.
What is the concept of imageability?
words that are easily imaginable can be coded in terms of their visual appearance & verbal meaning whereas abstract words are difficult to imagine visually–> dual-coding hypothesis