Forgetting Flashcards
Episodic memory and location
Autobiographical events and periods - involve contextual info and time stamps, also emotions and subjective experience - semantic and non-automatic memory
Stored in the hippocampus
Semantic memory and location
Facts, rules, concepts etc - begin as episodic as due to personal experience - then loses association to said events and generalised to become semantic - thought some people remember when and where they learned. Non-automatic memory
Stored in the temporal lobe
Procedural memory and location
Muscle memory, motor skills through practice and automatic, unavailable for conscious inspection so hard to explain or think about leading to failure - resistance to forgetting
Stored in cerebellum
LTM eval
+ Most amnesia patients unable to store new episodic and/or semantic but procedural unaffected
+ Ecological validity e.g when you think about riding a bike you often fall off
+ fMRI used when asking participants to recall different info, and brain activity is seen with corresponding memory area - episodic hippocampus, semantic temporal lobe, procedural cerebellum
+ Clive wearing has viral infection damaging hippocampus so no episodic memory, no new semantic memories (as they start episodic) but procedural memory intact (piano)
- LTM research only on specific patients so isolated individual info - inappropriate to generalise to whole population
- Hard to research as must wait for patient availability
Forgetting
Loss of ability to recall or recognise something previously learned
Interference and types
Two memories conflict/ confuse with each other
Retroactive is when newer memory disrupts older
Proactive is when older memory disrupts newer
i.e prefix refers to the position of memory that is lost
Interference factors
More likely when material is similar due to response competition
Less likely when gap between learning
Interference eval
+ Keppel and Underwood (1962) consonant trigram with different time interval counting and early trigrams interfered with later trigrams - proactive interference
+ Mcgeoch and mcdonald gave word list until 100% accuracy then given new lists of either synonyms or not, then asked original list and recall reduced esp after synonyms - retroactive interference and response competition
+ Practical applications e.g dont revise similar topics at same time
- Experiments lack ecological validity/ mundane realism
- Loss of info only temporary so not a true explanation of forgetting as info not overwritten and still in LTM
- Retrieval failure as a better explanation - link to Godden and Baddeley (1975) divers who learned word lists either dry land or underwater and recalled better in the same environment as learning
Retrieval failure
Forgetting due to absence of retrieval cues i.e metadata like location and state - seems like forgotten but just cant access
Some linked in meaningful way like acronyms like STM but some are coded but not meaningful
Context cues - location/ environment
State cues - emotional/ physical state
Retrieval failure eval
+ Abernethy (1940) tested recall with combos of familiar/ unfamiliar teachers and rooms - best recall was in familiar room and familiar teacher i.e context clues
+ Godden and Baddeley(1975) tested diver word lists on either dry land or underwater - best recall in same environment
+ Darley et al (1973) people hid money in a warehouse while under cannabis more likely to find it while high again - state cue
+ Practical applications such as revising in the same room as an exam
- Baddeley (1997) argued in real life often cues not a big deal - most exams are in different locations and more stressful than revision but you can still remember
- Memory not actually lost from LTM you just cant access it
- Interference could be argued as better
