Cognitive Psychology - Lecture 2

Question 1

What is memory?

Answer 1

• Memory is the capacity to retain and retrieve skills and knowledge
• Three critical phases for memory:
  1. Encoding: receiving, processing, and combining information
  2. Storage: retention of encoded representations over periods of time
  3. Retrieval: active recall of stored information

Question 2

Multi-store model (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968)

Answer 2

Sensory input -> Sensory memory -> Short-term memory -> Long-term memory

Question 3

What are the types of memory?

Answer 3

1. Sensory memory
2. Short-term memory (STM)
3. Working memory
   Long-term memory (LTM)

Question 4

Sensory memory

Answer 4

• very brief, <1 second
• Closely tied to the sensory systems
• when paying attention, information transferred into short-term memory

Question 5

Types of sensory memory

Answer 5

• Iconic memory: images and visual information -> mental pictures
• Echoic memory: auditory information
• Haptic memory: touch
• Other: taste

Question 6

Short-term memory

Answer 6

• a process that can hold a limited amount of information
• limited duration and capacity
• if no attention, information is forgotten
• if intentionally repeating or rehearing, information remains longer
• short-term memory is NOT a single storage system, it deals with multiple types of information -> working memory

Question 7

Working memory

Answer 7

• actively retains and manipulates multiple pieces of information from different sources
• 20-30 seconds
• rehearsing can help

Question 8

Memory span

Answer 8

• part of IQ test

- increasing with child develop and decreasing with ageing

Question 9

Chunking

Answer 9

• breaking down information into meaningful units or larger units
• efficiently chunking
• > remember more

Question 10

Long-term memory

Answer 10

• the process of storing almost unlimited amounts of information over long periods of time
• transferring information from STM/working memory to long-term memory by paying attention, repeating or rehearsing it

Question 11

Memory retrieval

Answer 11

• the process of remembering information stored in long-term memory
• recognition: whether the information has been seen or learned before
• recall: the information must be retrieved from memory

Question 12

Forget

Answer 12

• the memory is no longer available or cannot be retrieved

- normal forgetting help retain and use important information

Question 13

Blocking

Answer 13

tip-of-the-tounge phenomenon (brown & mcneill, 1966)

Question 14

Absentmindedness

Answer 14

Shallow encoding

pay no attention

Question 15

Amnesia

Answer 15

inability to retrieve information from long-term memory

Question 16

Persistence

Answer 16

Unwanted remembering

Question 17

Causes of forgetting

Answer 17

Decay - forgetting due to a gradual loss of the substrate of memory (Hardt et al., 2013) = STM

Interference - proactive interference: old information inhibits the ability to remember new information
Retroactive interference: new information inhibits the ability to remember old information = LTM