Cognition 21081 Flashcards
What is the Total Time Hypothesis?
The amount learned is a function of the time spent learning
What did Ebbinghaus study
The rate of learning and forgetting
What is the method and result of Ebbinghaus’ experiment on the total time hypothesis?
Method
-Studied lists of 16 syllables, learnt a new list everyday. 24 hours later he recorded how much more time he needed to relearn the list.
Results
- Learning linearly related to the amount of study.
What is the Method and result of the London taxi driver experiment relating to practice and brain plasticity (Maguire)?
Method
- compared the brain volume of taxi drivers in relation to healthy controls
Results
- The posterior hippocampus of the taxi drivers was consistently larger
- related to practice and increased brain plasticity
What is the method and Result of the Study by Draganski about new learning and brain plasticity?
Method
- Medical Students scanned at 3 intervals; Before, during and after intensive exams.
Results
- increase in gray matter volume in the parietal cortex and in the posterior hippocampus
What is the expansions normalization hypothesis?
It is referring to plasticity changes due to practice.
Some structural changes may be selected (related to learning a task) and others dropped.
These changes are assumed to be part of the process that optimises learning, but the structural changes are not perpetual (never ending).
How does repetition lead to/hinder learning? Why?
- Simple repetition with no attempt to organise the material might not lead to learning.
- Especially if information is complex and is not perceived as useful.
- This is because memory and attention are very selective - even after extensive practice/exposure, information not registered as important won’t be remembered (seems logical).
How does distributed practice lead to/ hinder learning?
-Distributed practice causes faster improvement rates of learning and less forgetting.
-Issues include that it takes longer and people may feel less efficient
What is the method and results of the experiment surrounding distributed practice (Melton)?
Method
- List of words (one at a time), some presented once and some twice.
- those that were presented twice appeared after variable lags (from 0-40 Interveining words)
- also varied the duration of the presentation of each word (1.3s, 2.3s, 4.3s)
RESULTS:
- Benefits to memory occur when the space between presentations was increased.
What is the lag effect?
Benefits of repeated study increases as the lag between study occasions increases.
What is the method and results of the experiment into the testing effect (Karpicke and Roediger)? What effects were they researching?
Swahili
Researching the testing effect/Generation effect.
Method:
- assigned groups to learn Swahili-English word pairs over the course of a week:
. G1 (ST) Word pairs repeatedly studied and tested.
. G2 (SnTn) After successful recall, the word was not studies or tested further.
. G3 (STn) After successful recall, the word was not tested but continued to be studied.
. G4 (SnT) After successful recall, the word was not studied but continued to be tested.
Results
- Those who were in the continuous testing group retained the information SIGNIFICANTLY better than those who did not have a continuous test.
- Retrieving answers leads to greater retention!!!
What is Landauer and Bjork’s Expanding Retrieval Method?
A combination of the Spacing effect and the Testing effect when learning is the most effective way of retaining information.
(Spaced presentation enhances memory, successfully generating items strengthens memory - combination is killer).
What is the effect of Motivation on learning?
Motivation to learn may make learning more efficient in both automatic and strategic ways.
Automatic : (external or internal motives prior to exposure to stimuli improves memory)
Strategic : (people use deeper and more elaborate memorization strategies for high value items)
What is a type of internal motivation and how does it affect learning?
Curiosity has a major effect on successful encoding, not just for the item triggering curiosity but for other incidentally presented stimuli.
Curiosity creates a powerful state that favours encoding of new information
What is Hebbian Learning?
Learning that involves the strengthening of connections of co-active neurons.
What is LTP (study) and how is it in favour of Hebbian Learning?
-Bliss and Lomo stimulated axonal pathways which led to lasting increases in the electrical potentials generated in post-synaptic neurons (LTP)
- LTP strongly represented in the hippocampus and surrounding regions associated with long term memory.
How it is in favour of Hebbian learning:
- Neurons repeatedly excited in synchrony causes the chemistry of the synapse between the neurons to change.
Therefore, each one becomes more likely to have action potentials when the other does.
Who came up with the two types of declarative memory? What are they?
Endel Tulving:
Episodic memory
Semantic memory
What is Episodic memory?
Memory for specific events located at a specific point in time.
- ‘mental time travel’
- Backward to relive earlier episodes
- forward to anticipate and plan future events
What is Semantic memory?
Memory for facts - the basis of knowledge.
- NO mental time travel
- short delay: information is recalled in episodes
- long delay: the same information is integrated into semantic memory
What is the study by Spiers, Maguire and Brugess which shows how episodic and semantic memory differ?
Outline the relationship between the brain regions and types of memory that they found.
-Studies 147 cases of amnesia
- There was a substantial or even dramatic loss of episodic memory
- Semantic memory effects were more variable and generally smaller
- Damage to the Hippocampus and MTL affects episodic memory far more than semantic memory
(MTL = medial temporal lobe).
What did Clark and Maguire suggest about Hippocampal amnesia on the effect of semantic memory?
It may affect aquisition of new semantic memories more, than the retrieval of old (remote) semantic memories.
What did studies of Semantic Dementia Patients suggests about episodic and semantic memory?
- They had severe loss of concept knowledge (semantic) but intact episodic memories and cognitive abilities.
- Damage to anterior frontal (more of a semantic deficit) and anterior temporal lobes (both episodic and semantic at deficit) caused different extremities in memory loss.
What can be concluded about semantic and episodic memories and how they interact? (3)
- They’re independent systems in terms of their neural structure
- Many long-term memories consist of a mixture of episodic and semantic aspects - they’re not independently acquired (you learn lessons and knowledge from episodes)
- They dynamically interact and affect each other.
Who pioneered the study of complex materials as a way to study memory and what is it?
-Barlett
-Provided Participants with drawings or folk tales
-Examined recall errors
-Giving meaning to studied materials is a better way to organize thought and eventually memory
- He stressed participants effort after meaning.
What is a schema?
- A structured representation of knowledge about the world, events, people or actions
- Can be used to make sense of new material, to store and later recall on them
- Are influenced/determined by social and cultural factors
Outline Bower, Black and Turner’s study into cultural schemas in a restaurant.
- Asked the question: “what actions do you expect to take place in a restaurant”
- 73% of respondents reported common events such as ‘looking at the menu’ or eating
- 48% also included culturally alternative actions such as “discuss the menu” or “leave a tip”.
- Suggests that culture influences schemas
Outline the “war of the ghosts” study and what it showed.
- People were told Native American folk tales who weren’t familiar with them.
- People committed many errors and distortions when they were asked to recall these
- In their recalls, they made the story more coherent and omitted details
- These distortions were more consistent with their own semantic knowledge
- Shows that schemas affect the way we process new information
What is Bransford and Johnson’s study on schemas affecting memory? What was the result?
- Participants read a passage, in the absense of a title.
- They recalled around 2.8 different units
- Those who were supplied with a title recalled 5.8 different units
RESULTS:
- Previous schematic knowledge, prompted by the title, is beneficial for later recall as it helps comprehension of the passage and organisation of its elements
How did Sulin and Dooling study the role of Schemas on short term and long term memory?
METHOD:
- Presented a story about a dictator that was either unknown ‘Gerald Martin’ or known ‘Adolf Hitler’.
- Participants were then asked sentences- some had been in the story and some hadn’t
- They were asked to recall if it had been mentioned in the story
RESULTS:
- Short delay (5mins)- no difference between the groups
- Long delay (1week)- Participant who read about Hitler were more likely to incorrectly agree with the test sentence “He hated the Jews…”. (This wasn’t in the story, but everyone knows Hitler didn’t rate jews).
CONCLUSION:
- Schematic knowledge may affect memory especially at longer intervals
How did Carmichael et al test the role of meaning on memory?
METHOD:
- Presented Participants with ambiguous figures
- Separated the participants into 2 groups where different labels were given to the ambiguous figure
RESULTS:
- When asked to recreate the symbols from memory, the picture they submitted was more consistent with the label that was attached to the figure rather than the ambiguous figure itself
CONCLUSION:
- Schemas influenced the drawing reproduction way more than the stimulus presented.
How did Bower et al test the role of meaning on memory?
story
METHODS:
- Participants were presented with a group of abstract images.
- Some participants were given an imaginary story assigned to the images.
- Some only given the image.
RESULTS:
- Recall was better for those that had a story paired with the image.
- The meaning therefore enhanced the memory and encoding
Outline the study by Jenkins and Russell into grouping and memory
METHODS:
- Presented with a list of words
- Asked to remember the list
- Then asked to recall the list
RESULTS:
- Related words within the list tended to be recalled as a cluster
- P’s organised the words based on their schemas, ignoring the uninformative sequence, instead using meaning to infer the memory of the items
What can we conclude about meaning and how it influences memory?
When Participants are given the opportunity to organise information in a meaningful way, memory performance is improved.
Meaning increases our ability to remember. (In comparison to no meaning)
What is Paivio’s Dual-coding hypothesis?
More imageable words (e.g. concrete nouns) are more memorable than abstract concepts.
How are abstract concepts and concrete nouns encoded differently? What hypothesis is this related to?
Paivio’s dual-coding hypothesis.
Concrete nouns can be encoded through 2 routes:
- Visual appearance
- Verbal meaning
Abstract concepts can be encoded through 1 route:
- Verbal meaning
- Shows that the more encoding routes we have, the higher the chance of successful recall
What is Craik and Lockhart’s Levels of processing Theory?
- There are multiple dimensions that we take into account when it comes to memory and how we remember.
- They are organised in a hierarchy based on the power they hold to enhance recall:
- Visual (least powerful)
- Phonological/ (acoustic)
- Semantic (most powerful)
(power in terms of how well they are encoded into LTM)
How did Craik and Tulving study the levels of processing (LOP)?
METHOD:
Words were studied and participants were asked to make 3 judgements (via yes/no answers):
- Visual processing (“is TABLE in upper case?”)
- Phonological (“does DOG rhyme with LOG?’)
- Semantic (““does FIELD fit in the sentence: ‘The horse lived in a _”)
- Then presented with words and asked whether it had previously been studied (Y/N)
RESULTS:
- There was a linear increase in recall based on the different dimensions - deeper processing led to better recognition.
Outline evidence for deeper level encoding as a better way for increasing memory. (3)
- Replicated in numerous studies
- Affects both recognition and recall (was this word shown to you earlier/recall words shown earlier)
- Increases memory in incidental memory tests (not told about incoming test).
What are the limitations of the levels of processing theory?
- Difficult to define and measure ‘deeper processing’.
- Levels of processing (features) are not processed in a serial order but occur simultaneously when processing new information.
- Deeper is not always more memorable
What theory tries to answer the levels of processing theory?
Transfer-appropriate processing
What does Transfer-Appropriate Processing theory suggest and what’s an example of a study?
Memory retrieval is best when the cues available at testing are similar to those available at encoding.
STUDY:
- Participants were shown pictures of objects to study.
- Then tested using the same pictures or just the words that the picture is of.
RESULTS:
- Memory is better if format is the same at encoding as at testing.
What Study by Morris, Bransford and Franks supports the transfer-appropriate processing (TAP) theory?
METHOD:
- Participants were asked to make phonological or semantic judgements about words.
- They were not told that they would be tested later (incidental learning).
Test:
- Standard recognition test for the encoded words.
- Rhyming recognition test for the encoded words (was there a word that rhymed with ‘bar’?
RESULTS:
- Standard recognition test: higher memory for semantic encoding (same results as LOP).
- Rhyming recognition test: phonological led to better performance.
CONCLUSION:
- Learning more efficient when tested the same was as learnt.
Why is deeper coding better for memory recall?
Deeper coding allows elaborate rehearsal to take effect and interact with better encoding.
It’s been found that elaborate rehearsal (linking the object to other material) enhances delayed long-term learning more than maintenance rehearsal (repeating it mentally to encode it) does.
What did Bower suggest about hierarchical organisation and memory?
Recall is better when words are organised than when presented in a scrambled order.
What does Tulving say about memory and subjective organisation? (2 + explanation)
Memory is benefitted by subjective organisation:
- Chunking together separate words for recall, even if those word weren’t encoded together enhances recall.
Items are often chunked together if they:
- are linked to a common associate (ball, boot, goal - linked to football)
- come from the same semantic category (e.g. profession)
- form a logical hierarchical structure or matrix.
Outline the study by Mandler conducted on intention to learn.
METHOD:
- Deck of cards with a word on each
- 4 different groups asked to do one of the following:
1) learn the words.
2) Sort the cards by meaning.
3) Sort the card by meaning and knowing they would be tested.
4) Arrange the words into columns.
RESULTS:
- Sorting by meaning with or without knowledge of being tested later produced similar recall
- Worse recall in the 4th group
CONCLUSIONS:
- Attention to the material and organising them meaningfully is more important.
- Intention has minimal effect, while level of processing matters more.
Summarise the factors that aid encoding. (4)
Creating connections (via different levels of processing: imagery, meaning)
Organisation (recall by groups, presentation in organised way)
LOP/TAP (deeper processing, similar encoding - retrieval procedures)
Active creation (generate, test)
What is Collins and Quallian’s (1969) Hierarchical Network Model?
- Semantic memory is organised into a series of hierarchical networks, organised by nodes.
- Major concepts are represented as nodes.
- Properties/features are associated with each concept.
Look at week 3 powerpoint - it’s organised as a flowchart that get’s more specific as you work down nodes (e.g. Animal -> Bird -> Canary).
What is Cognitive economy?
Hierarchical network theory
More general properties are stored higher up in the hierarchical network in order to minimise redundancy, as you get more specific, so do the properties.
This avoids having repetitive features:
- Subordinate categories do not need to repeat and redefine what is higher up in the chain.
If confused, look at week 3 PowerPoint for a great image that explains this
Outline support for the hierarchical network model in the form of the Sentence Verification Task.
METHODS:
- State a series of sentences relating to an object e.g. ‘a canary can sing’ and a ‘canary has skin’.
- Participants asked to respond as quickly as possible whether the statement was true or false.
RESULTS:
- Reaction time increased as distance from the specific ‘canary’ node increased. (‘It is yellow’ reacted to quicker than ‘It has skin’)
CONCLUSIONS:
- Unless information is directly linked/stored with a concept in semantic memory, we infer the answer from properties of higher nodes.
-Therefore, making more inferences slows verification.
What are some issues with the study into the hierarchical network model?
Familiarity:
- The experiences from the world that we have knowledge about before we do the task impacts our ability in said task.
- ‘A canary has skin’ is not a familiar sentence (who tf asks this?)
- When controlled reduces the hierarchical distance effect.
Typicality:
- How typical the concepts are for the subordinate category?
- Verification is faster for more representative member categories independent of hierarchical/semantic distance.
E.g., (a penguin is a bird, a canary is a bird).
What is Collins and Loftus’s Spreading Activation Model? (4)
Semantic memory is organised by semantic relatedness/distance.
The length of links between concepts indicates the degree of semantic relatedness.
Activity at one node causes activation at other nodes via links.
Spreading activation decreases as it gets further away from the original point of activation.
What is the Semantic Priming task (McNamara), and how does it support the Spreading Activation Model?
When presenting one stimulus that is semantically related makes subsequent processing more efficient.
Reaction time is faster for similar prime words than dissimilar ones:
- The Prime word when similar to the target word, leads to more activation spread though one short link.
- The prime word, when dissimilar to the target word, leads to less activation spread through lengthier link via extra node.
CONCLUSION:
- Semantic links and distance determine the strength and speed of activation spread from one concept to the other
What is the Deese-Roediger-McDermott Paradigm and how does it support the Spreading Activating Model?
METHODS:
- Participants study list of related words - some which have an underlying common concept (that is not presented).
- Then, presented with the list of words, containing some new words as well as the underlying concept word.
RESULTS:
- When tested, participants are more likely to accept the concept word as a studied word than the unrelated words because the activation is spread from the presented words to the related concept word.
Evaluate the Spreading Activation Model compared to the hierarchical network model.
The spreading activation model is more flexible than the hierarchical network model.
Pros of flexibility:
- The spreading activation model can account for more empirical findings.
Cons of flexibility:
- The flexibility also reduces the specificity of the model’s predictions
- More difficult to test
What is the Situated Simulation Theory?
Concepts are processed in different settings and their processing is influenced by the current context/setting.
Concepts incorporate perceptual properties (what are key features we can perceive about this concept?) and motor- or action- related properties (what actionable goals are related to this concept?).
E.g. Activated aspects of ‘bicycle’ concept reflect current goals associated with a bicycle:
- Do you want to buy a bike for your kid?
- Do you look at a bike seat and think about the comfort of it?
What is Hauk et al’s support for the Situated Simulation Theory - and what question does this study aim to answer?
Does access to concepts involve motor systems?
- Brain areas activated by action words are adjacent to and partly overlapp with activations produces by corresponding movement
- Words such as lick, pick, and kick activate parts of the motor cortex
- Great overlap with areas activated when people make the relevent tongue, finger, and foot movements.
What is Miller et al’s support for the Situated Simulation Theory - and what question does this study aim to answer?
Does the involvement of motor system facilitate access to concepts?
- Present a word type such as ‘kick/sprint’ the response is faster if related to that motion (such as moving a foot instead of hands)
- Whereas, ‘knead or sprint’ would induce a slower response for foot movements and a faster one for hand.
RESULTS:
- Understanding of action verbs required activation of the motor areas used to carry out the named action.
- Pre-activation of the concepts makes the action itself more efficient
What is the Situated Simulation Theory? Evaluate it. (3 limitations)
- Processing of concepts depends on the situation and the perceptual and/or motor processes in a given task.
Limitations
- How variable are concepts across situations?
- Concepts= stable core + context-dependent elements
- Are these properites secondary - after concept meaning has been accessed?
What is the Grandmother Cell Hypothesis? What does evidence suggest?
Semantic memories are represented in the brain as whole objects.
- Each object/concept has its own node or neuron
- E.g. There is a special neuron representing your grandmother
- Types of nodes are grouped together (e.g. all living things).
Most evident suggests that this is not the case.
What is the Feature-based Approach? What does evidence suggest?
Different kinds of information about a given object are stored in separate brain regions (stored specifically and together).
- E.g. Visual information is stored in one part of the brain, while the auditory linked with that object is stored in another.
- This view is becoming increasingly popular.
What is the Hub-and-Spoke model?
A hybrid model of semantic memory
Hub:
- Modality-independent conceptual representations.
- General properties of concepts are represented here, thought to be the anterior temporal lobe.
Spokes:
- Modality-specific brain areas.
- Sensory and motor processing.
- Represented in the cortical areas, depending on their domain.
What is Ishibashi et al’s support for the Hub-and-Spoke model- the tDCS study?
METHOD:
- Participants were presented with either tool functioning questions e.g. ‘scissors are used for cutting’. Or tool manipulating questions e.g. ‘Pliers are gripped by the handles’.
- In both cases, asked to state whether they are true or not as quick as possible.
RESULTS:
- When tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation) was applied to the IPL (inferior parietal lobe) region of the brain, tool manipulation task was enhanced.
- When tDCS was applied to the ATL (anterior temporal lobe) region of the brain, there was increased performance in both tool function and tool manipulation.
How does Neuropsychological Evidence support the Hub-and-Spoke model?
- People with semantic dementia (ATL atrophy) have general semantic deficits e.g. naming objects, sorting objects into categories etc.
- People with category-specific deficits have greater difficulty identifying/naming living than non-living objects but are able to name pictures of non-living things.
- This highlights the fact that the hub and the spoke are dissociable. As the anterior temporal lobe is the general core that is affected and the individual cortical regions are category specific.
Evaluate the Hub-and-Spoke model. (1 + 4 limitations)
- Increasing evidence that concepts are organised in hub (core) and spokes (modality specific)
Limitations
- The role of anterior temporal lobe may be more complex.
- Does familiarity with concepts affect their organisation in the hub?
- How many ‘spokes’?
- How is information integrated between the spokes and the hub?
What is Retrieval? What is its aim?
- A progression from one or more retrieval cues to a target trace through associative connections
- The aim is to make the target available
What is a Target Memory Trace?
The particular memory that we are searching for.
What are retrieval cues?
Bit of information about the target memory that guide the search.
What are associations?
Bonds that link together items in memory - they vary in strength.
What is meant by ‘Activation Level’ at Retrieval?
The internal state of a memory, reflecting its level of excitement - it determines the accessibility of the item.
- Increases when something related to the memory is encountered
- Persists for some time.
What is spreading activation at retrieval? Outline key info about it.
The automatic transmission of energy from one memory to related items via associations, which is proportional to the strength of connections.
- Strength of association may vary, depending on how well something is associated. Memories are more accessible when there is a stronger association.
What is pattern completion? Outline a partial cue in relation to it.
The process by which spreading activation from a set of cues leads to the reinstatement of a memory.
- Pattern completion is regarded as a hippocampal mechanism
- A partial cue may reinstate other components of the pattern in order to form the whole event.
What is attention to cues as a factor determining retrieval success?
- Reduced attention to a cue impairs its ability to guide retrieval
- Dividing attention task shows this as during retrieval there is a reduction of memory performance is the secondary task is related to the primary task and demands a lot of attention
What are the 7 factors that determine retrieval success
- attention to cues
- relevance of cues
- cue target strength
- number of cues
- target strength
- retrieval stratergy
- retrieval mode
Outline Fernandes and Moscivitch’s Dividing attention task and explain what evidence this provides for attention to cues?
- Asked participants to recall a list of words after a study situation where the words were learnt.
- At the same time they were asked ot make judgements related to other items that were visually presented.
- The items were presented in three forms: Words, pictures and numbers
- Found that completing the secondary task resulted in reduced performance in the primary task (30-50%)
- Performance loss was larger when the secondary task was presented as words.
What is relevance of cues as a factor of retrieval success?
- Retrieval cues are most effective when they are strongly related to the target.
- Encoding specificity principle suggests that retrieval of cues are most useful if they’re present at encoding, encoded with the target and similar to the original cue available at encoding
- Having the right cues enhances retrieval.
What is cue-target associative strength as a factor of retrieval success?
- Retrieval success depends on the strength of cue-target association
- Determined by the length of time and attention spent encoding the relationship
- Encoding the cue and the target seperately is unhelpful.
What is Number of cues as a factor of retrieval success?
- Access to additional, relevant cues facilitates retrieval
- Dual coding/ cueing multiple routes to a target can provide a super-additive recall benefit
- Elaborative encoding maximises the number of retrieval routes
What is a study done by Rubin and Wallace into Number of cues (dual-cuing)?
- Participants were given different cues in order to access a memory.
- When presented with the cue ‘mythical being’, there was a 14% success of retrieval of the target word ‘ghost’
- When presented with the cue ‘Post’, retrieval success was 19%.
- However, when the two words were presented together, this increased the probability of reporting the target word to 97%
What is strength of target memory as a factor for retrieval?
- Weakly encoded targets are more difficult to retrieve.
- The targets start at a lower activation level and require a greater boost in activation to be retrieved.
- Explains the word frequency effect on recall: more frequent target words start with higher activation level
How is retrieval success increased? (3)
Retrieval success is increased by:
- The organisation of materials at encoding
- Adopting efficient strategies of memory search
- Adopting a new perspective/ strategy can facilitate recall of different objects previously forgotton
What is Retrieval mode as a factor of retrieval?
- Frame of mind allows interpreting environmental stimuli as episodic memory cues to guide subsequent retrieval
- Herron and Wilding found that having multiple episodic tasks in a row gradually improves performance
- Episodic retrieval implicated different brain regions (prefrontal cortex) than semantic judgements
- It takes time to fully adopt the retrieval mode
What are direct/explicit memory tests?
- Ask people to recall particular experiences (engage explicit memory recovery)
- Require a contextual cue
- Reveal impaired performance in amnesics
- In many cases rely on hippocampus
- Examples:
- Free recall, cued recall, yes/no recognition, forced-choice recognition
What are indirect/implicit memory tests?
- Measure the unconsciuos influence of experience without asking the subject to recall the past
- Involves priming which is a recent experience with a stimulus.- improves performance
- Reveal normal performance in amnetics
- Examples:
- Stem Completion, fragment completion, conceptual fluency
The prompt ‘ name as many birds as you can’ is what type of memory test/ retrieval task and why
Conceptual fluency which is a type of implicit memory test as it is testing your understanding of what a bird is without giving you a direct prompt about a particular species, but just asks you to recite all the birds you know
What are contextual cues?
- Specific conditions under which a stimulus was encoded
- 4 types:
- Spatio-temporal/ environmental, Mood, Physiological, Cognitive
Gooden and Baddeley conducted a study into context-dependent memory and environmental factors using divers, how was this study conducted and what were the results of the study?
-Taught divers word pairs in one of two contexts: Dry land or underwater.
- Tested the memory of the participants by matching the pairs either in the same of different environment.
- Those who studied on dry land and tested on dry land did the best as well as those who srudied underwater and were tested underwater.
What conclusions can be drawn from the Gooden and Baddeley study and the Grant et al study regarding environmental factors on context dependent cues?
- Maximising environment influenced retrieval success. –> reinforces idea that context reinstates the original encoding environment and facillitates retrieval
What is the study conducted by Grant et al on context- dependent memory and environmental factors?
- Participants studies either in a noisy or a quiet environment
- They were then tested either in a noisy or quiet environment
- Memory retrieval was better when the testing condition matched the study condition.
What is State-Dependent Memory?
- Recall depends on the match between the participants’ internal environment as encoding and retrieval
- However state-dependency disappears under recognition tests.
What is Mood-Dependent Memory?
- About the person/person match
- Recall is dependent on the match in mood states between encoding and retrieval
What is Mood-Congruent Memory?
- About the person/ item match
- It’s easier to recall events that have an emotional tone that matched the current mood of the person.
- Depressed individuals are more likely to recall mostly unpleasant memories
How was Signal Detection Theory (SDT) developed
- Developed from auditory perception where a ppts had to detect a tone (signal) presented against background noise and determine if it is easy or hard to detect, uses an outcome matrix to determine the ppts response with ‘hit’, ‘false alarm’, ‘miss’ and ‘correct rejection’.
How was the Signal Detection Theory (SDT) initally conducted (as in what method was used) in order to test recognition memory?
Ppts were asked whether they had encountered a stimulus before:
They had to discriminate between old (studied) or new (non-studied distractors) stimuli
- When presented an old word and claimed it wasold it was a ‘hit’
- When we presented an old word but the ppts claims that its new- ‘miss’
- When we present a new word but ppts claims it as old - ‘false alarm’
- When we present them with a new word and claim as new - ‘correct rejection’
What is the study on Mood- Dependent memory by Eich, Macaulay and Ryan?
- PPts were presented with either pleasant or unpleasant situations by either playing happy or sad music
- Or they presented happy events or negative events of everyday life.
- The participants then studies some material
- 2 Days later, they tested the ppts under the same mood as when they encoded the materials or the opposite mood
- Free recall vastly improved when the mood states matched
What is Cognitive context-dependent memory?
- Retrieval is better if the same cognitive features/ tasks are involved
- Ideas, thoughts and concepts that occupied our attention
- Memory facilitated when cognitive context at encoding matches retrieval.
What is Marian and Neisser’s bilingual study on cognitive context-dependent memory?
- Engaged bilingual ppts in a study where they were interviewed in either Russian or English
- They were asked to recall events from a life period in which they would either be speaking Russian or English
- Memories were easier to access when retrieval takes place in the same language mode as they were encountered.
How is Memory Reconstructive?
- Retrieved memories are not entirely intact
- We have to figure out some aspects of the recalled experience
- There are inferential aspects to memory
What is the Signal Detection Theory (SDT)?
- SDT is used to understand and explore recognition memory decisions
- It is useful to understand how recognition decisions are taken and how to descriminate true memory from guesses.
What are the limitations of SDT?
- SDT cannot account for all recognition memory phenomena
- Word frequency effect: Low frequency words are better recognised (although high frequency words are better recalled).
- SDT incorrectly predicts low-frequenct words should be less familiar
How is recognition memory based on a dual-process?
- Based on two types of memory processes (Mandler)
- Familiarity
A sense of memory without being able to remember contextual information. Described by signal detection. Faster and more automatic - Recollection
Retrieving contextual details about a stimulus- like cued recall. Slower and more attention demanding
What is Tulving’s Remember/Know Procedure for Measuring recognition memory?
- Participants decide whether they remembered the item being presented previously (recollect contextual details and a measure of recollection) or if they Know it was presented previously (seems familiar, measure of familiarity).
