Chapter 6

Question 1

What is the most crucial feature of episodic memory?

Answer 1

Capacity to remember specific events–> need mental filing system to distinguish similar events

Question 2

What is Tulving’s mental time travel?

Answer 2

Reliving past experiences & using it to anticipate future events

Question 3

What is the basis of semantic memory?

Answer 3

accumulated & consolidated recollection of past memories

Question 4

Amnesiac patients who have impaired episodic memory also have impaired ——–.

Answer 4

Capacity to continue to develop knowledge about the world. (e.g don’t know current president but know the president of WWII)

Question 5

What did Martin Conway discover after studying retention of material from a psychology course?

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What was the main criticism of the Ebbinghaus tradition?

Answer 6

• 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

Question 7

How was Bartlett’s approach different from Ebbinghaus?

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

What are two criticisms of Bartlett’s approach?

Answer 8

• 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)

Question 9

Describe Sulin & Dooling’s study to test Bartlett’s assumption that LT delay intervals increase schema-driven errors:

Answer 9

• 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)

Question 10

Describe Charmicheal’s experiment using ambiguous items

Answer 10

• 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

Question 11

What did Glaze surmise from his experiment with rating extent of similarity between consonant-vowel-consonants & real words?

Answer 11

• 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

Question 12

What was Jenkins & Russel’s experiment with word associations?

Answer 12

• 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)

Question 13

What is paired-associate learning?

Answer 13

-Learning word pairs so that when one is produced, the second one could be recalled

Question 14

Words that evoke images are remembered—–. This was discovered by ——- and labelled as ——

Answer 14

Words that evoke images are remembered better. Allen Paivio discovered this and called it introspection.

Question 15

What is the concept of imageability?

Answer 15

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

Question 16

How does the Cloze technique help us measure degree of redundancy in text?

Answer 16

• The passage is presented with every 5th word deleted
• Participants must guess missing words
• Children’s text is more predictable–> more words filled
• The more redundant & predictable as text is–> the more memorable

Question 17

What do Craik & Tulving say about levels of processing? Describe their experiment.

Answer 17

The more in-dept the information is taken in, the more durable their traces are in memory

• Participants asked to make 3 types of judgements on words presented to them.
• Visual processing (upper or lower case) vs Phonological (does dog rhyme with log?) vs Semantic (does the word “Field” fit in “the horse lives in—”)
• “Yes” responses better recalled than “No” responses because a correct link between word & sentence made it easier to remember
• Slower processing as a result of more difficult tasks (upper/lower case task replaced by counting vowels in target word) during visual & phonological processing did not lead to enhanced word recall
• Whether or not a memory test is expected also does not enhance recall, the way material is processed does.

Question 18

What are 3 criticisms of the levels of processing theory?

Answer 18

1- Processing time is not an accurate measure of recall
2-Different features of a stimulus could be processed simultaneously instead of vision-phonology-semantics order
3-When focusing on one feature of stimuli, they could be aware of others too (e.g log rhymes with dog but you’re also aware of what they mean semantically)

Question 19

What is transfer appropriate processing (TAP) and describe related experiment by Morris et al.

Answer 19

Retention is at its best when mode of encoding & rehearsal are the same.

• Participants must make phonological (shallow) & semantic (deep) judgments each word on a list & not warned about recall test
• Memory was then tested by one of two recognition tests
  a) standard–> words previously presented to participant mixed with nonrepresented words
  b) Rhyme–> participant must decide if any of the new words rhyme with previously presented words

-For standard condition, the deeper the processing the better the performance but for rhyme condition the shallower the processing the better the performance

Question 20

words embedded in text that is semantically —– is better recalled.

Answer 20

Semantically rich & more elaborate.

Question 21

Compare maintenance rehearsal to elaborative rehearsal. Which one enhances delayed LT learning?

Answer 21

maintenance involves continuing to process an item at the same level (e.g repeating phone #) vs elaborative involves linking material to material already stored in memory which enhances delayed LT learning.

Question 22

Describe an experiment that links familiarity to recognition & recall

Answer 22

• Participants given numbers to remember over delay
• Read out words to interrupt rehearsal during the delay
• After recalling memorized numbers, told to recall as many words said during the delay as possible.
• Those words that were most repeated during delay increased recognition but not strong enough to enhance recall

Question 23

What is Mechanic’s test of intentional vs incidental learning?

Answer 23

• Participants had to articulate a series of nonsense syllables either once or as often as possible
• One group knew about recall test, the other did not.
• Regardless of test knowledge, repeated articulation led to enhanced recall.
• Those in incidental learning condition with one articulation did the worst
• Repeating unfamiliar syllables boosts their representation in phonological LTM

Question 24

What was Tulving’s experiment on chunking trying to prove?

Answer 24

• Gave participants a list of words & changed their order but as they got more familiar with the words they started chunking them in the same way trial after trial
• Items were being grouped based on semantic categories & the groups got bigger and bigger.
• Participants show better recall when when given sets of 4 items from the same category as opposed to multiple categories

Question 25

What is subjective organization? What are 3 examples of this?

Answer 25

Organizing unstructured material to enhance learning.

• Hierarchical structure (participants get 65% correct response rate vs scrambled 19% correct) but not always possible
• Coherent stories (creates chunks & links them together so fewer items are left out but too demanding & not every word can be semantically linked)
• Visual imagery (imagining items interacting some way; not necessarily plausible ways)

Question 26

Describe Mandler’s experiment on Intention to learn:

Answer 26

Participants were given stack of cards with one word on each:
Group 1) Told to memorize them
Group 2) Categorize them in a meaningful way
Group 3) Memorize & categorize & warned about upcoming recall test
Group 4) arrange words in columns

Results: First 3 groups did similarly well despite 1 & 2 not knowing about test. Group 4 did worst. So processing is what matters not your desire to remember.

Question 27

Describe Ericsson & Chase’s student SF:

Answer 27

• SF practiced hearing & repeating digit sequences for 1 hour per day
• Performance improved as he worked out a way of encoding digits based on running times (e.g 4-3-8 as 4 mins 38 secs)
• Encoding was hierarchical & spatial

Question 28

What is Long term working memory by Ericsson?

Answer 28

Development of structures in LT memory used for active but temporary storage (e.g mental calculators with imaginary abacus)

Question 29

What is the difference between LTWM & multicomponent WM system?

Answer 29

LTWM:
-Captures a class of situations in which expert LT knowledge is used to help perform specific cognitive tasks
-Has no fixed capacity & reflects many different mechanisms based on different processes in the brain
MCWMS:
-Is a unified cognitive system with limited capacity comprised of more than one component that are not equally used

Question 30

Describe Oliver & Ericsson’s experiment on seriation:

Answer 30

• Seriation means placing items in serial order
• Plays a role in both STM & LTM
• Expert Shakespear actors were tested on line recall by using 1-4 probes (words) which led to a perfect recall for their 4-word sequences and fairly well in 1-word ones.
• Accurate recall could not have been due to primacy cue so it must have been seriation

Question 31

What is the Hebb effect?

Answer 31

• Proposed by Donald Hebb
• Shows that digit sequences that were repeated every 3 trials show a gradual improvement in recall unlike nonrepeated sequences
• Repeated presentation leads to implicit chunks with subsequences based on the primacy process
• The effect occurs even with there’re long gaps in between repetitions (participants did not detect repetition)
• Phonological similarity & articulatory suppression did not influence it
• Suggests that it involves a LT component, even when learning pairs of nonwords.
• Associated with the hippocampus, temporal lobes & insula (all areas associated with LT learning)

Question 32

What did Earhard discover about using seriation as a strategy?

Answer 32

• Serial recall makes it easier for you to recall everything (e.g pilots doing instrument checks in a particular order)
• Free recall is easier to conjure but might miss some items during retrieval

Question 33

Patients with damage to their hippocampus may still be able to recognize certain items/events provided that their ——– and —– are intact

Answer 33

Rhinal & perirhinal cortex

Question 34

Vargha Khadem has discovered evidence that clashes with what widely held assumption about semantic memory?

Answer 34

• Discovered Jon who has a hippocampus half the normal size due to anoxia
• Has above-average intelligence & excellent semantic memory
• Despite the belief that semantic memory depends on episodic memory which depends on the hippocampus

Question 35

What was Brewer’s experiment on episodic memory?

Answer 35

• 48 photographs of scenes required to be categorized as indoors or outdoors followed by an unexpected recall test where old & new scenes were mixed
• Participants had to decide which scenes they had already seen
• FUP questions were asked about whether they could “remember” or if it was “familiar” and the final category was “forgotten”
• Activation in the right frontal lobe and hippocampal areas were associated with “remembered” but not with the other two
• Suggests that those brain areas are linked with episodic memory

Question 36

Describe study of London taxi drivers by Maguire et al.

Answer 36

• MRI scan suggests that the posterior region of hippocampus larger in more experienced taxi drivers while other hippocampus areas were smaller (brain structure modification due to navigation)
• Driving simulator test while under PET scan showed that use of geographical knowledge & working out novel routes activated the hippocampus
• Greater grey matter volume in the mid-posterior hippocampal area but less in anterior for taxi drivers in comparison to bus drivers
• Taxi drivers performed better at landmark recognition & distance judgements but bus drivers excelled more on viso-spatial learning (copying figure & producing it after a delay)