Chapter 7-9: Long Term Memory and Storage Flashcards
Spreading activation theory of long term memory
that idea that memory is represented by related nodes, and each node represents a memory association. thinking about one node activates a related node.
The ___ the association BETWEEN TWO OBJECTS in LTM the ___ the node, and thus the ___ the activation
The closer the association the closer the node and the stronger the activation.
How long must the object be in memory for it to be considered encoded in LONG TERM MEMORY
30s
in the spreading activation thoeyr, memories are represented as
nodes
connections laid down in working memory establishe ___ ___ in the lTM.
retrieval paths.
At the neuronal level, memories are represented by ___ ___ and ___ of __ ___
neural networks and PATTERNS of NEURONAL FIRING
the strength of “activation” in the spreading activation theory is dependent on:
the strength of connection and response patterns.
__ __ ___ occurs when 2 neurons continually fire together, creating a stronger connection between neurons
long term potentiaion
In LTP, structural changes in neurons occur at the __
synapse
Explain the Lexical Decision Task. What type of memory does this test? what conditions elicit the longest reaction times?
in this task, the person is given pairs of words and non words and asked if they are actually both “real words”. Some words in the list actually “go together” in a meaninful way, like “bread + butter” being a pair.
Researchers measure the reaction time of participants when they are determining whether the two pairs on the list are real words.
The longest reaction time is when a real word is paired with a non word
The shortest reaction time is when two real words GO TOGTHER.
During the lexical decision task, researchers found out that words that “go together” elicited the fasted reaction times when asked “are both these words real words?”
In terms of spreading activation theory, why is this the case?
due to the fact that the wo words that go togehter are LOCATED closely together in terms of nodes.
That means the onnection is closer and the NEURONAL ACTIVATION/PATHWAY is FASTER.
Explicit memory is aka
declarative memory (concious recollection)
two types of explicit memory
semantic: general knowledge and facts
episodic memory: autobiographical time stamped personal experiences.
Implicit memory is
procedural memory; like motor memory or muscle memory
Implicit memory can be tested using implicit ___ tasks. Explain this task.
implicit PRIMING TASKS.
You are given a list of words with no explicit instruction to remember the word (ex/ given random words)
Then you give the person a surprise recall test; and you get very poor results
later, you are given a word stem completion task; fill in the blanks
the people will fill the blanks in with the words that they were primed with but couldn’t recall.
THIS IS SUBCONCIOUS, they couldn’t recall it during the surprise recall test.
Implicit memory provides a sense of ____ which can alter perception.
Explain a scenario experiment where this was tested.
familitarity
During an experiment, participants were given a series of sentences and asked to judge the level of interest of the information.
Later, they were given a list of sentences and asked to judge truthfulness
Some sentences were factual while others were not. but some of the sentences were included from the previous task.
If it sounded familiar, people are more likely to say its true
we give a bias of ___ ___ to familiar facts.
we give a bias of ASSUMED TRUTHFULNESS to familiar facts
familiarity is associated with ___ memory
implicit memory
Explain the Famous Names task. What does this test? Explain why the outcomes were the way they were
Source memory(episodic) vs familiarity
During this task, a person is presented with a list of names and the list contains both famous and non famous names.
5 minutes later, they were asked whether or not certain names were on the list. People were accurate with BOTH famous
a few HOURS later, they were asked the same question but people were only accurate with FAMOUS names, and NOT the nonfamous names.
they were able to recall famous names because they came with a sense of FAMILIARITY. The could not fully access their SOURCE memory
Knowledge Network:
things we know are organized into __and ___ organized from ___ to ___
things we know are organized into CATEGORIES and CONCEPTS organized from GENERAL to SPECIFIC
in our knowledge network,categories are defined by different ____
concepts.
ex/ fish category are defined by water, gills, swims (concepts)
in our knowledge network, concepts are:
typical representations and features that apply to a specific object.
membership in a categeory is ___-__-___.
ALL OR NONE: all members are equal.
ex/ bird category; there is not one type of bird that is more “birdish” than another breed.
in sentence verification tasks, members of a cateogry that are “good” examples of that category have ___ reaction times than members of a category with ___ value
in sentence verification tasks, members of a cateogry that are “good” examples of that category have FASTER reaction times than members of a category with LOW value
ex/ people will respond faster to “eagle is a bird” vs “ostrich is a bird”
Explaining atypical members of a category can be explained using:
Prototypes and exemplars
you compare your atypical member to an exemplar, which is a good example of a category member (ex/ robyn)
of you compare your atypical member to a PROTOTYPE; average knowledge of a category (a typical member has wings, can fly etc).
Explain Ebbinghaus’s experiment and what he found out
Ebbinghaus learned and memorized nonsense syllables to study his long term memory
He saw this his ability to recall the syllables decayed over time, but they dcayed the most rapidly over the first hour.
There fore, he postulated that most info is forgotten very rapidly initially, and then what is left after the “initial” memory loss is retained for a long time.
