Chapter 8: Memory & Information Processing Flashcards
Learning, experience, or information that has been recorded, stored and can be recalled.
Memory
Which ever-so-briefly (less than a second) holds the abundant sensory information—sights, sounds, smells,
and more—that swirls around us.
Sensory register
Holds a limited amount of information, perhaps only four chunks, for a short period of time.
Short-term memory
Believed to be a relatively permanent and seemingly unlimited store of information.
Long-term memory
Process of remembering.
Encoding
Consolidation
Storage
Retrieval
Input information.
Encoding
Stabilizing and organizing the information to facilitate long-term storage.
Consolidation
2 types of consolidation.
Synaptic consolidation
System consolidation
Occurs in the minutes or hours after
initial learning.
Synaptic consolidation
Takes place over a longer period of time.
System consolidation
Holding information in a long-term memory store.
Storage
The process of getting information out when it is needed.
Retrieval
3 types of retrieval.
Recognition memory
Cued recall memory
Recall memory
Recognizing
Recognition memory
A hint or cue helps facilitate memory
retrieval.
Cued recall memory
Requires active retrieval without the aid of cues.
Recall memory
Conscious and active processing of incoming information; mental “scratchpad” that temporarily stores information while actively operating on it.
Working memory
Directs attention and controls the flow of information supervisor of the working-memory system.
Central executive
Briefly holds auditory information such as words or music.
Phonological loop
3 types of short-term memory storage.
Phonological loop
Visual-spatial sketchpad
Episodic buffer
Holds visual information such as
colors and shapes.
Visual-spatial sketchpad
Links auditory and visual information.
Episodic buffer
Occurs unintentionally, automatically, and without awareness.
Implicit memory (nondeclarative memory)
Involves deliberate, effortful recollection of events.
Explicit memory (declarative memory)
Levels of processing in long-term memory.
Shallow processing
Deep processing
Encoding information based on basic
auditory or visual levels.
Shallow processing
Encoding information semantically, based on actual meaning if the word.
Deep processing
Creating new episodic memories.
Hippocampus
Plays a critical role in connecting the
hippocampus to other parts of the brain.
Entorhinal cortex
Involved in forming emotionally charged memories.
Amygdala
Areas of brain involved implicit memory.
Procedural memory - striatum
Areas of brain involved in explicit memory.
Medial temporal lobe of the brain
Use of the information-processing system to achieve a goal or arrive at a decision.
Problem solving
Learning not to respond or decrease of response to a repeated stimulus. (boredom)
Habituation
Early memories are cue-dependent
and context-specific.
Operant conditioning
A-not-B task
Object search
Infants overcoming obstacles to achieve desired goals.
Problem solving
Repeating of items that they are trying to learn and remember.
Rehearsal
Classifying items into meaningful groups.
Organizing
2 types of organizing.
Clustering
Chunking
Actively creating meaningful links
between items to be remembered.
Elaboration
Inability to use or benefit from
the strategies.
Mediation deficiency
Capability to use the strategy that was taught, but unable to produce them on their own.
Production deficiency
Capability to produce a strategy, but unable to benefit from it.
Utilization deficiency
Knowledge of memory and to monitoring and regulating memory processes.
Metamemory
Knowledge of the human mind and of the range of cognitive processes.
Metacognition
An individual’s knowledge of a content area to be learned.
Knowledge base
Episodic memories of personal events.
Autobiographical memory
Few autobiographical memories of events that occurred during the first few years of life.
Childhood (infantile) amnesia
With age, we are increasingly likely to rely on gist or fuzzy memory traces, which are less likely to be forgotten and are more efficient than verbatim memory traces in the sense that they take less space in memory.
Fuzzy-trace theory
Also known as General Event Representations (GERs): sequence of actions related to an event and guide future behaviors in similar settings.
Scripts
Reporting of events witnessed or
experience.
Eyewitness memory
Stated that children progress through broad stages of cognitive growth.
Piaget
Determines what information about a problem children take in and what
rules they then formulate to account for this information.
Rule assessment approach
Development of problemsolving skills is a matter of knowing a variety of strategies.
Overlapping waves theory
Events of great importance to the self will be remembered better than less important events.
Personal significance
An event has been consistently associated with better recall if it is unique.
Distinctiveness
Events associated with either highly
negative or highly positive emotions are recalled better than events that were experienced in the context of more neutral emotions.
Emotional intensity
People recall more information from their teens and 20s from any other
time except the near present.
Reminiscence bump
Stories of our lives that we tell over and over again.
Life script
Participants were taught strategies of
organization, visualization, and association to remember verbal material.
Memory training
Participants were taught strategies
for detecting a pattern in a series of letters or words.
Reasoning training
Participants learned to complete visual search tasks in increasingly less time, and they were trained to divide their attention between two tasks.
Speed training
These participants served as a control
group.
No training
Participants are shown a collection of items and asked to find out, using few questions as possible, which item the experimenter has in mind.
Twenty questions task
Best problem-solving strategy, one that rule out more than one item.
Constraint-seeking questions
Middle-aged adults often outperform young adults.
Real-life or everyday problems
Framework to understand how older adults may cope with and compensate for their diminishing cognitive resources.
Selective optimization with compensation (SOC)
Focus on a limited set of goals and the skills most needed to achieve them.
Selection
Practice those skills to keep them sharp.
Optimization
Develop ways around the need for other skills.
Compensation
