L1 (week 7) - Memory Flashcards
What is declarative and non-declarative memory?
Declarative memory, also known as explicit memory, involves the conscious recall of facts and events.
Non-declarative or implicit memory involves unconscious recall and influences our behavior without awareness.
What is episodic memory?
A type of long-term declarative memory that involves conscious recollection of events.
What is semantic memory?
A type of long-term declarative factual memory involving the capacity to recall facts.
What is procedural memory?
Long-term non-declarative memory of information necessary to perform learned skills e.g. riding a bike
What are the stages of remembering?
Encoding > storage > retrieval
What did Murdock’s 1962 study on free recall identify?
The serial position effect.
What are the main concepts of the serial position effect?
Primacy effect: recalling the first few items in a list better than those in the middle.
Recency effect: recalling the last items in a list better than those at the start and the middle.
How did Glanzer & Cunitz 1966 study differ from Murdock’s and what did they find?
They introduced a delay when participants were asked to recall items in a list, this removed recency effect supporting evidence of a temporary mental store.
What is amnesia?
A severe loss of explicit memory (semantic and episodic) but a relatively intact short term memory recall.
What are the 2 main types of amnesia?
Retrograde amnesia: Being unable to recall memories from your past.
Anterograde amnesia: Being unable to make new memories but being able to recall most things from before the amnesia began.
What are the key features of the Modal model coined by Atkinson & Shiffrin in 1968?
Sensory store, short-term store, long-term store.
What is the capacity, coding and retention for each of the key features of the modal model?
Sensory store:
Capacity = small
Coding = Copy of input
Retention = up to 2 seconds
Short-term store (STS):
Capacity = small
Coding = Phonological, visual & semantic
Retention = up to 30 seconds
Long-term store (LTS):
Capacity = unknown limit
Coding = Semantic, auditory and visual
Retention = minutes to years.
What was the key feature about short term memory identified in Baddeley & Hitch’s 1974 study?
That short term memory could be separated into 3 interacting systems known as working memory;
Visuospatial sketchpad
Central executive
Phonological loop
What does the Visuospatial sketchpad do?
Stores a small amount of information based on visual and spatial characteristics.
What does the Central Executive do?
A system that helps to control and co-ordinate
mental activities.
What does the Phonological loop do?
Stores a small amount of
information in a speech-based
form.
Which study provided evidence for ‘Phonological Loop’ and what were it’s findings?
Conrad, 1964 found that people most confused similar sounding letters (e.g. B, P and M, N) when asked to recall them. This supports the idea that short-term storage for visually presented words uses a temporary acoustic code.
What did Della Sala et al’s 1999 study of the Visuospatial sketchpad reveal?
That spatial and visual information is (at least partially) stored separately.
What 3 functions did Miyake et al’s 2000 study provide strong supporting evidence for regarding the Central executive?
Shifting: Shifting back and forth between multiple tasks.
Updating: Updating and monitoring of working memory.
Inhibition: inhibit dominant, automatic or prepotent.
What did Craik & Tulving test and find in their 1975 study on Levels of processing?
They tested participants recall ability in regards to structural (capital letters), Phonemic (rhyme) and sentence (asking if the word would fit in a given sentence) processing.
They found that the participants were able to recall words when a deeper level of semantic memory was activated (sentence processing), and recalled less of the words at a shallow level of semantic requirement (Capital letters).
What is the Encoding specificity principle coined by Thomson & Tulving in 1970?
The principle that our memories are heavily associated to their encoding context/environment e.g. when detectives have victims retrace their steps to see if it ‘jogs their memory’.
Define the 3 types of recall tasks
Serial recall: Recalling items in the exact order you were shown them.
Free recall: Recalling items in any order.
Cued or paired associates recall: When you are shown items in pairs and are given one half of the pair and asked to recall the other.
What is Hypermnesia?
A Process of retrieving memories that initially appear to have been forgotten.
What is the PDP model?
Parallel distributed-processing puts forward that the key to knowledge representation lies in connections between nodes.
What are nodes in PDP context?
Neuron-like computational unit.
What is priming effect?
When a node is activated by a connection with another node (a prime).
What is metacognition?
Our ability to think about how we think (analyse our own mental processes).
