Lecture 14 Episodic Memory

Question 1

In-class demonstration of sentence memory and data

Answer 1

• In class demonstration:
  ○ Sentences listed that conveyed ideas (newspapers, jelly, couch, etc.)
  ○ When given a list of sentences that convey ideas, people are more confident that they had already heard a sentence if it has more ideas in it than others, even when the whole list was new sentences with the same ideas
  ○ People are not remembering verbatim, they are remembering the ideas (the gist)

Question 2

Syntactic Information

Answer 2

Grammatical structures; remembered worse than semantic information

Question 2

Semantic Information

Answer 2

Meaning; remembered better than syntactic information

Question 2

Galileo Story (Sachs)

Answer 2

○ Have people read a story about Galileo, then ask them if certain sentences were in the story, the sentence/test given was either:
○ Identical sentence
○ Semantic difference in sentence
○ Syntactic difference
○ Word order difference
○ Accuracy was high when just read, and goes down after more syllables have been read, however semantic memory stays high

Question 3

Central vs. peripheral information

Answer 3

Central information is remembered more than peripheral

Question 4

Rating importance experiment

Answer 4

○ Asked a separate group what ideas they remembered
○ Then asked people what they remembered and they remembered the most important ideas (a subconscious process). Children extract central info implicitly

Question 5

Laundry Example

Answer 5

○ People read an ambiguous paragraph either with no title, with a title before reading, or with a title after reading
○ People remember ~2.8 ideas w/o title
○ People remember ~5.8 ideas w/ title
- People remember ~2.7 ideas w/o title

Question 6

Balloons Example

Answer 6

○ People read a paragraph that does not make much sense there are five conditions people are given:
○ Text alone, once- 3.6
○ Text alone, twice- 3.8
○ Picture shown for context after text- 3.6
○ Partial illustration before text- 4
○ Suitable illustration before text- 8
○ Only the coherent illustration shown before the text helped

Question 7

War of the Ghosts

Answer 7

• British students read a Native American myth, and subsequently trying to recall
  ○ Memory was distorted to fit own knowledge
  ○ Remembering “boats” instead of canoes, or fishing instead of hunting seals

Question 7

Constructive memory

Answer 7

We construct things in our memory, rather than “recording a video” and replaying it

Question 8

Schema

Answer 8

Generalized conceptual knowledge used in understanding, tells us what to expect and also what unstated information we can infer. They can influence what we remember about certain things based on what we expect

Question 8

Scripts/Event Schema

Answer 8

Organized collected knowledge about an event and the order of what happens during it (goes to restaurant, sits down, orders, eats, pays bill)
○ People agree on what is in script
○ Recall things in order
○ Faster reading
○ Recall script items that were not in story

Question 9

Scene Schema

Answer 9

Schema for what you would see in a place (office, library, etc.)
○ Many people remember a chair and desk in an academic office, despite not looking at them much. Memory is worse w/o strong expectations (people will not remember a rug in an office for example)
○ Some people remembered seeing books on the shelves

Question 10

Story Schema

Answer 10

TV show example
○ Exposition, complication, resolution (beginning, middle, end)