Human Memory Flashcards
Acronym
A made up word where each letter represents a word to be remembered
ie. Roy G. Biv for the colours of the rainbow
Acrostic
A poem where every line begins with a letter to represent a word to be remembered
ie. Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge for music notes
Amygdala
Critical component to the creation of memories of learned fears
Anterograde Amnesia
Inability to create new long term memories
Attention
Focusing in on specific events or stimuli
Chunk
Familiar stimuli being stored as a familiar unit
Clustering
Tendency to remember related items in groups
Conceptual Hierarchy
Classifications of things
ie. Dogs > Breeds
Connectionist Models
- Resemble semantic networks
- Specific bits of information is represented by a specific pattern of activation in the network
- Information lies in the strength of connections
- Same as PDP
Consolidation
- The act of encoding information from the short-term memory to the long-term memory
- Happens in the hippocampus
Context Cues
Retrieval cues based on the context that an event was encoding during
ie. Remembering what you did when you got out of bed by imagining your morning
Decay Theory
A theory that states memories are lost due to the passing of time
Declarative Memory System
Contains factual information
ie. grammar, faces, dog breeds
Destination Memory
Remembering who you told information to
Distributed Practice
Spreading study time across multiple sessions
Dual-Coding Theory
- Created by Allan Pavio
- States that encoding a visual image as well as verbal information assists in retrieval because two codes are better than one
Elaboration
Relating information to other information while encoding
ie. “you have a dog? I have a dog!”
Encoding Specificity Principle
States that successful retrieval depends on how much the retrieval cues match up with the memory code
Episodic Memory System
Contains events or information that is personal to you and is normally dated
ie. Christmas of 2007 was when Tessie came around
Explicit Memory
Retention that occurs intentionally
ie. making sure to remember your dogs favourite snacks
Flashbulb Memories
Unusually vivid memories of a big event
ie. Knowing where you were and what you were doing when you heard about 9/11
Forgetting Curve
- Created by Hermann Ebbinghaus
- A graph showing the rate at which people tend to forget information
Hindsight Bias
The tendency to reconstruct our view on an event after knowing how it ends
ie. saying “I knew it all along” when you find out your dog ate your cookies
Hippocampus
Critical in consolidation and long-term memory
Implicit Memory
Unintentional retention
ie. remembering what your dog looks like
Interference Theory
States that competition from other stimuli could affect the encoding of information
Keyword Method
Assigning a concrete word to a concept
ie. Garden for Gordon, the newbie at work who wears green everyday
Level-of-Processing Theory
- States the deeper the processing, the stronger the memory code
- Shallow processing (structure), intermediate processing (phonemic) and deep processing (semantic)
Link Method
Putting objects to be remembered together in a mental image
ie. you need to remember dog food and a brush, so you remember your dog eating while you brush him
Long-Term Memory
Unlimited storage system where memories are held over time
Long-Term Potentiation
Long-term increase in strength of nerve impulses along specific pathways