Chapter 8 Flashcards
What are direct tests?
Tests that ask people to retrieve their past.
-Require context as a cue and vary in the number of cues given, the amount to be retrieved and in the involvement of retrieval strategies
What is a context?
Context refers to the circumstances under which a stimulus has been encoded.
- Memory is intentionally & unintentionally influenced by context.
- For intentional retrieval–> must isolate part of the past we wish to recollect (e.g did you take out the trash? Isolate trash-taking to only the night before)
- Spatio-temporal context of the event is one of the cues that must be retrieved when you’re trying to recollect the event
- Mood context–> emotional state when the event took place
- Physiological context–> pharmacological/physical state when the event took place
- Cognitive context–> collection of concepts one has thought about in temporal vicinity of the event
Cued Vs. Free recall as direct memory tests:
Free recall—> mimics daily life because we must produce a lot of info in no particular order and so it relies on the context the most and must be retrieved without overt cues. We must also use strategies for generating answers in the same order
- this test is sensitive to one’s skills at organizing info at encoding + selecting strategies at retrieval
- Cues recall—> provides additional cues, focuses on particular items in memory (e.g associate of a previously studied word provided as a cue)
- this test is intended to mimic situations when are recalling items in response to a cue
- doesn’t rely as heavily on retrieval strategies -requires context as a cue
- Easier than free recall
What are recognition tests?
Easiest types of direct tests because they simply require a decision
- e.g eyewitness testimony: being able to recognize someone from a lineup
- can be accomplished by reliving heavily on context
What are indirect memory tests?
Indirect tests measure the influence of experience without asking the person to recall the past
-these measures eliminate any scent that participants are memorizing or retrieving things
Cryptomnesia—> person believes that they are creating something new but they are actually recalling similar work they’ve encountered
-we are frequently influenced by our experiences without being aware of it (e.g being able to solve anagram puzzle by filling in “pomegranate” if you’ve read about it that day)
What are different types of indirect tests?
Lexical decision task—> receive words and no words and would decide quickly whether the letter string was an English word
Perceptual identification task—> receive briefly presented words (30 ms) covered by a visual mask (row of Xs) to make it difficult to see. They must say the word they saw
Word fragment/word stem completion tests—> (p-m-gr-n-t vs po—-) people would
List the first word that comes to mind that fits the letters
for all of these tasks, people are better at doing task for previously viewed words than new words
- changing perceptual modalities between study and test (e.g hearing words at encoding to visual rest) reduces benefits
- these tests are mostly perceptually driven (focus on perceptual qualities of the stimulus)
- the ones that are conceptually driven (focus on the influence of experience on conceptual tasks) e.g generating as many members for each animal category; you’ll put a buzzard in the birds if you’ve seen it in the textbook
Direct vs indirect tests:
Direct tests—> provide cues that initiate a retrieval process that accesses a remnant of experience perhaps through spreading activation
Indirect tests—> do not require recall or the last so context is not used intentionally as a cue. Only directly presented cues (e.g letters or the word or fragments or the picture) are used consciously.
-indirect tests also differ in the content and neural locus or the traces which they access
Define repetition priming
Case in which past experience influences us unconsciously. A form of indirect test/influence
- it is mainly a neocortical phenomenon as opposed to a hippocampus one so it’s not identical to processes underlying episodic memory
- associated with reduced neural activity in the brain region that responds to the stimulus—> repetition suppression
Repetition suppression—>Reflects increased efficiency of neural Processing that arises from persisting perceptual traces in sensory cortex
How is explicit and implicit memory in amnesiacs different?
Impaired performance in explicit tests, normal performance in implicit tests
-explicit memory is impaired but implicit memory is intact
What is context dependent memory?
The match of the current context to the one we’re retrieving
Baddley & Golden experiment exploring context-dependent memory effects:
- training deep-sea divers
- divers listened to 40 unrelated words either on the beach or under water and tested either in the same environment or in an alternative one
- material learned underwater was best recalled underwater and the ones on land best recalled on land
What are the broad conclusions that smith and vela drew about context dependent memory?
1) people need to pay some attention to the physical environment during encoding; more inward attention during encoding reduces incidental context effects
2) context effects grow in size as a delay between encoding and retrieval increases (being flooded with memories when stepping back to childhood home)
3) mere mental reinstatement of context reduces context-dependent memory effects (try to remember experience encoded in a vastly different context by imagining elements of that environment in which encoding took place)
What is state dependent memory?
A form of context-dependent memory whereby the learner’s internal environment is changed (e.g drugs, alcohol)
- heavy drinkers who hide money etc. Can’t remember where it is when sober but they remember again when drunk
- Therefore, what is learned drunk better recalled drunk
- State dependency is only observed when Memory is tested by recall and disappears when recognition testing is used
- Why? Because when access is made easy by presenting an item for recognition, searching becomes unnecessary
Describe miles and hardman study that proves state dependent memory effects occur from changes in physiological states that occur naturally:
- participants had to learn a list of auditorily presenter words while resting on a bicycle or while peddling to raise the heart rate
- then asked to free recall the words while at rest or while cycling as before
- people who got to recall the words in the same cardiovascular state (both resting or both cycling) recalled words 20% better than the shifter state group
- therefor, aspects of our physiological state get encoded incidentally we part of the episodic experience so the recreation of that state helps retrieval
What is mood congruent/dependent memory?
Greater ease in recalling events that have an emotional tone that matches the current mood of the person
- Easier to recall happy memories when in a happy mood and sad memories when in a sad mood
- Velten technique—> a happy or sad mood is induced by encouraging participants to ponder sets of sad or happy statements. While sad, harder to evoke positive memories.
- When upset with someone, biased to recall unpleasant memories about them even if positive memories are also available for retrieval
What is recognition memory?
- presents the intact stimulus and requires a judgment
- recognition tests require discrimination between stimuli that a person experienced in a particular context and the ones they didn’t
- The test includes both old and new items
- Some of the “yes” responses to old items will reflect guessing (e.g in police lineups) and guessing is generally an issue and its rate can vary depending on people’s biases
What is the dual process theory of recognition?
You can recognize something by recalling the particulars of the experience—> recollection
you can make a judgement based on how familiar a stimulus seems—> familiarity based recognition
-one can have a very high degree of familiarity for a stimulus but still feel as though their recognition is incomplete
Both of the above processes contribute to recognition
Compare the familiarity process with recollection
- familiarity process is fast, automatic, perception of the memory’s strength without the recall of particulars
- the recollection process is slow, more attention-demanding and more like a cued recall process.
It involves generating info about the context of experiencing the stimulus
- Is more sensitive to disruption by distraction (harder time recalling if you’re distracted than finding things familiar)
- People with diminished attention or with damage to prefrontal correct show deficits in recollection, but intact sense of familiarity for recently seen stimuli
What is the remember/know procedure?
Asks people to make judgements about why they feel they recognize the item
- whether it is in the Basis of remembering ( conscious recollection) or knowing (items seems familiar in the absence of memory for the event)
- “Remember” responses measure recollection
- “Know” responses measure familiarity based recognition
What is the process dissociation procedure (PDP)?
Rely on people’s ability to prove that they can recollect details of the conditions under which they encountered an item
-participants study visually presented a list of words followed by an auditory list of words
-one group told to say “yes”
If they remember test item in either the seen or heard list (inclusion condition)
- another group told to only say “yes” if they remember test item from the auditory list (exclusion condition)
- to measure familiarity and subtract it out, People’s errors in the exclusion condition is used. Whenever they accidentally say “yes” to the item that was visually presented, it means that the item is familiar but they can’t remember which list it comes from, so they can’t be using recollection.
- Recollection is estimated by subtracting these errors from the overall recognition rate of items from the visual list in the inclusion condition
- This isolates the contributions of recollection and familiarity within a recognition task
What are the distinct structures that support familiarity and recollection in the brain?
Recollection—> hippocampus
- When people claim to recollect seeing a word in an earlier study phase by giving the “remember” response, they show significantly greater hippocampal activation than the “know” response
- Those who have impaired recollection have a more pleasant demeanour and don’t hold grudges
Familiarity—>perirhinal cortex which is adjacent to the hippocampus
-Case of Jon whose perirhinal cortex was largely spared from damage which accounts for his intact sense of familiarity
What is source monitoring? What is a source misattribution error?
-Source monitoring—>
The process of examining contextual origins of a memory in order to determine whether it was encoded from a particular source
In order to do this, we need to exploit regularities in the info we receive from different sources
It requires controlled processes mediated by the prefrontal cortex
-Source misattribution error—>
people are not always careful about monitoring where their recollections come from —> make mistakes because they let their guard down (e.g in casual conversations)
If you ask someone to form a mental image of a word, they are more likely to mistakenly claim that they have seen a picture of the object—> people mistake imagined detailed for perceptual experience
This causes delusions in which people can’t distinguish imagining from real occurrences
