Introduction

Question 1

Patient CW (Wilson, Baddeley & Kapur, 1995)

Answer 1

Clive Wearing
Memory of 7-30 seconds
Illness damaged hippocampus
Capable of playing complex orchestra pieces
Wearing can learn new procedures and even a few facts, not from episodic memory or encoding, but by acquiring new procedural memories through repetition. For example, having watched a certain video recording multiple times on successive days, he never had any memory of ever seeing the video or knowing the content, but he was able to anticipate certain parts of the content without remembering how he learned them.

Question 2

How can memory be measured?

Answer 2

Memory is not directly observable
We have to infer it from changes in behaviour
We can measure it by observing changes/differences
in performance on tasks designed to measure
memory.

Question 3

What are the 4 typical stages of a memory experiment?

Answer 3

Study, manipulation, filler, test

Question 4

Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)

Answer 4

Used himself as a participant
Learned lists of 16 nonsense syllables, to avoid influence of prior knowledge and match stimuli for length
Provided evidence for forgetting curve
Learn list until recall without error, record time taken
Relearn list until recall without error, record time taken
Forgetting initially quite rapid, then becomes ingrained

Question 5

Frederic C Bartlett (1886 –
1969)

Answer 5

Remembering 1932
Importance of meaningfulness in everyday memory
Prior knowledge and expectations influence how we encode, store and retrieve memories
New information interpreted in light of existing schemas (organized mental representations created from past experiences)
Dynamic reconstruction

Question 6

War of the Ghosts (Bartlett, 1932)

Answer 6

English students read Native American folk tale
After delay, they tried to recall it at varying
intervals (repeated reproduction) e.g. 15 mins, 1 week, 6 months
Overall, story became
 Shorter
 More coherent
 More consistent with participants’ own cultural expectations
“Remembering events one has witnessed or experienced
rests on a process of mental construction that tends to build in errors and outright fabrications” (Bartlett, 1932).

Question 7

Information processing approach: Stages of memory

Answer 7

Encoding - Process by which we transform what we perceive, think or feel into an
enduring memory (learning)
Storage - Process of storing and maintaining memory representations over time
Retrieval - Process of bringing to mindinformation previously encoded and stored