lecture 5 - learning and memory

Question 1

memory systems

Answer 1

diagrams in notes

Question 2

short term memory - working memory

Answer 2

image in notes

central executive - dual tasks
episodic buffer - added later on by baddeley - a temporary memory store - between ST and LT memory. easily accessible.

Question 3

long-term memory systems

Answer 3

diagram in notes
explicit memory - tulving - memory that is verbally accessible to us

implicit memory - skill memory automatic eg riding a bike

Question 4

types of LTM

Answer 4

• Explicit/ declarative memory (consciously accessible)
  
  • Episodic Memory
  • Semantic Memory
    Implicit memory (unconscious, difficult to verbalise)

Question 5

Explicit episodic memory

Answer 5

• Episodic Memory: specific events, associated with contextual detail, require reconstruction of event
• Examples include memories of the past (what, where, when?)
  
  • e.g. memory of what you had for breakfast last Tuesday
  • or where you went on holiday in 2015
• Autobiographical (autonoetic consciousness) - recognising part of our own history
  Mental time travel - into future = prospective memory

Question 6

Explicit semantic memory

Answer 6

• Semantic Memory: Facts, concepts, general knowledge
• Examples Snow is white, Thatcher was first female Prime Minister, knowledge of previous lecture
• Do dogs bark?
  
  • May be based on experience of dogs barking (doesn’t have to be, and you don’t have to remember any particular event)
• Do dogs breath air/produce milk?
  Unlikely to be based on specific experiment

evidence that we form knowledge of semantic memories through episodic memories

Question 7

Implicit procedural memory

Answer 7

• Procedural Memory: unconscious, difficult to verbalise how we do them
  
  • Examples include cognitive skills like problem-solving, Soduko, playing chess
  • Perceptual-motor skills like driving, dancing, swimming
  • Perceptual-motor loop: Perception guides motor output which generates perceptual input
    Difficult to teach? Learned via explicit memory processes e.g. learning to drive?

Question 8

implicit and explicit memory tasks - ‘implicit learning’

Answer 8

Serial reaction time
Repeated sequence: 2,1,3,4,3,2,3,2,1,3,4,3,2,3, 2,1,3,4,3,2,3….
Random: 2,1,3,4,3,2,3,1,2,4,2,3,1,2,4,1,4….

People get faster, but they get even faster on the repeated sequence, even though they don’t notice that the sequence is repeated

This can happen even when you only observe someone doing the task (Heyes & Foster, 2002)

Question 9

Learning skillsThe Power Law of Practice (T=BN-α)

Answer 9

Performance improves with
practice, but the trial-to-trial
improvement in performance
decreases with practice
Diminishing return
from practice

T = time taken to complete a given trial. B = time taken to perform the first trial. N = the trial number. α = the rate of change in performance time, with the negative value indicating that time taken decreases at the rate specified by α

Question 10

explicit memory task

Answer 10

learn words and write down all words you can remember

Question 11

Short- and long-term memory influencesSerial position effect - Primacy and Recency effects

Answer 11

When people learn a list
of words they tend to recall
more words from the
beginning (primacy) and
the end (recency) of the list.
Primacy: due to more
Rehearsal of first words
Recency: due to words still
Being in short-term memory

Serial position effect is evidence for short- term versus long-term memory

Atkinson and shiffrin 1968
baddeley and hitch 1977

Question 12

Episodic Memory:Recall c/w recognition

Answer 12

Recall: Retrieval of information from the past
Free recall: Retrieval of information without any cues
Cued recall: Retrieval of information with a cue

Recognition: Identification of an item as encountered before (as old) amongst novel items (distractors)
Single probe
Multiple choice

Question 13

two- stage theory of recall

Answer 13

1 - search and retrieval
2- validation and recognition

Question 14

Why do we forget?

Answer 14

things can go wrong at different stages of memory processing

memory processes -
encoding – consolidation (form memory traces) — retrieval

• Insufficient encoding?
  
  • Not paying attention (Problems with selective attention)
  • Levels of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972):
    ○ Information that we process ‘deeply’ (more meaningful, embedding in semantic network) seems to be better retained that information that is encoded in a shallow, superficial way (eg based on physical attributes)
• Loss of information during consolidation?
  
  • Information does not get stored
  • Patients with amnesic syndrome
• Effect of retrieval information (how we measure dependent variable)
  
  • Recall tests versus recognition tests
    Free versus cued recall tests

Question 15

episodic memory

Answer 15

recall c/w recognition - graph in notes

Recognition is not always easier than recall?
* Recognition failure of recallable words (Muter, 1978)
* Recognition test: lists of names of famous (and not famous) names
○ DOYLE, THOMAS, FRANKLIN…
* Recall test: Cue plus first name
○ Author of Sherlock Holmes stories. Arthur Conan______
* Performance on the recall test better than on the recognition test
recognition not just a more ’sensitive’ test of what’s in memory

Question 16

Recognition - one or two processes?

Answer 16

• Dual process model of recognition (Mandler, 1980, Jacoby 1991)
  
  • Familiarity: Fast process of “knowing” in the absence of contextual detail
  • Recollection: Slower process that involves retrieval of contextual details
• Information may be available even if it isn’t currently accessible (Graf & Mandler, 1984)
  Depending on level of recollection, recognition can be as difficult as recall eg when targets share overlapping features with distractors

Question 17

Neither encoding nor retrieval (morris, bransfork and franks 1977)

Answer 17

• Deep encoding (semantic) task
  
  • “The ______ had a silver engine.”
    ○ TRAIN (y/n?)
• Shallow encoding (rhyming) task
  
  • “______ rhymes with legal.”
    ○ EAGLE (y/n?)
• Recognition tests
  
  • Standard: was this word on the list? TRAIN
    Rhyming: was a word that rhymes with this on the list? REGAL

Question 18

transfer appropriate processing

Answer 18

recognition test -
encoding task- standard and rhyming recognition test

semantic - 84% and 33%
Rhyme - 63% and 49%

Memory isn’t determined by either the type of encoding or the type of retrieval, but by the compatibility between the encoding process/task and the retrieval process/task

How well participants perform depends on overlap between encoding and test condition

Question 19

Episodic remembering and forgetting

Answer 19

Is memory limited?
at any given moment, we seem to only have access to a subset of our past
‘Encoding specificity’
the closer the testing situation is to the learning situation, the better memory is
processing, cues, environment, state…
in principle, we can’t rule out the possibility of remembering, given the right circumstances
Hence if you want to form a memory independent of specific context vary the context in which you learn as much as possible

Question 20

What can go wrong with memory?The occurrence of false memories

Answer 20

Recall of events/information that did not happen

Why should we study false memories?
To assess the validity of eyewitness testimonies
To find out about organisation/ reconstructive nature of memory
To understand clinical conditions/ brain injury

Question 21

the deese- roediger - mcdermott (DRM) paradigm

Answer 21

words on notes

DRM effect with visual scenes - in notes
aka false memory effect

Question 22

key issues

Answer 22

• Different types of ‘memory’ involved in day-to-day activities
• Different ways in which the past impinges on the present
  
  • We can learn things without being aware that we’re learning them (either by doing or by observing)
  • We’re not always aware that we’ve learned something
  • We can know things that we’ve never experienced
  • We can remember things that we thought were forgotten
  • We can misremember things
• It may be that we never truly forget anything
  
  • We are a product of everything that is ever happened
    Memories can be false

Question 23

The role of the hippocampus in episodic memory

Answer 23

Hippocampus is important for encoding and retrieval of episodic memory (Patient HM)

Place cells in hippocampus fire at specific environmental regions and are thought to
form neural representations of episodic information associated with a specific memory

Question 24

memory

Answer 24

• Memory is the process of encoding, storing and retrieving information.
• Encoding refers to the active process of putting stimulus information into a form that can be used by our memory system. The process of maintaining information in memory is called storage and the active processes of locating and using information stored in memory is called retrieval.
• When psychologists refer to the structure of memory, they are referring to two approaches to understanding memory – a literal one and a metaphorical one. Literally, memory may reflect the physiological changes that occur in the brain when an organism learns.
  Metaphorically, memory is viewed as a store or a process made up of systems and subsystems. These divisions may not necessarily have neurological meaning, but they are useful metaphorical shorthand for describing aspects of memory. They are a way of explaining aspects of memory

Question 25

types of memory

Answer 25

Research suggests that we possess at least four forms of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory, working memory and long-term memory (Baddeley, 1996).

Question 26

sensory memory

Answer 26

Sensory memory is memory in which representations of the physical features of a stimulus are stored for a very brief time, perhaps for a second or less. This form of memory is difficult to distinguish from the act of perception. The information contained in sensory memory represents the original stimulus fairly accurately and contains all or most of the information that has just been perceived. For example, sensory memory contains a brief image of a sight we have just seen or a fleeting echo of a sound we have just heard. Normally, we are not aware of sensory memory; no analysis seems to be performed on the information while it remains in this form. The function of sensory memory appears to be to hold information long enough for it to be transferred to the next form of memory, short-term memory.

Under most circumstances, we are not aware of sensory memory. Information we have just perceived remains in sensory memory just long enough to be transferred to short-term memory. For us to become aware of sensory memory, information must be presented very briefly so that we can perceive its after-effects. Although we probably have a sensory memory for each sense modality, research efforts so far have focused on the two most important forms: iconic (visual) and echoic (auditory) memory

Question 27

short-term memory

Answer 27

• Short-term memory (STM) refers to immediate memory for stimuli that have just been perceived. Its capacity is limited in terms of the number of items that it can store and of its duration
  Very few people can repeat 11 numbers. Even with practice, it is difficult to recite more than 7–9 independent pieces of information that you have seen only once. Short-term memory, therefore, has definite limits. However, there are ways to organise new information so that we can remember more than 7–9 items, but in such cases the items can no longer be considered independent.

Question 28

working memory

Answer 28

• Working memory (WM) is similar to short-term memory in that it involves short-term storage of information. But working memory is more than this in that it allows us to manipulate material in short-term memory.
  Remembering material while engaging in a different but related task, for example, illustrates working memory and you will find out more about this in a later section. If you had repeatedly recited 11 numbers until you had memorised them (rehearsal) you could have placed them in long-term memory.

Question 29

long-term memory

Answer 29

• Long-term memory (LTM) refers to information that is represented on a permanent or near-permanent basis. Unlike short-term memory, long-term memory has no known limits and, as its name suggests, is relatively durable. If we stop thinking about something we have just perceived (e.g. something contained in short-term memory), we may not remember the information later.
• However, information in long-term memory need not be continuously rehearsed. We can stop thinking about it until we need the information at a future time. Some researchers have suggested that similar brain areas are activated during STM and LTM and that it is the degree of activation that differs between them (Nee and Jonides, 2013).
• This approach suggests that we do not necessarily have different stores for the seemingly different types of memory information, but that the types reflect different brain states. These models are called two-state models.
• Other studies suggest that STM itself consists of three states (Oberauer, 2002).
• The first involves attention to a single item (focus of attention);
• the second access to additional items which are maintained for future processing (direct access region)
• the third reflects passively available information from LTM. Neuroimaging data suggest that there is evidence for the three-state model. For example, Nee and Jonides (2013) found that in a study of non-verbal material, focus of attention was associated with inferior parietal cortex activation, direct access region with medial temporal lobe and hippocampus, and the left ventrolateral PFC with activated parts of LTM.
  · Some cognitive psychologists argue that no real distinction exists between short-term and long-term memory; instead, they see them as different phases of a continuous process. These psychologists object to the conception of memory as a series of separate units with information flowing from one to the next.
  Memory may be more complex than this model would have us believe, and the next sections explore the nature of sensory memory, short-term memory, working memory, long-term memory and other types of memory process.

diagram in notes figure 8.1

Question 30

iconic memory

Answer 30

· Visual sensory memory, called iconic memory (icon means ‘image’), is a form of sensory memory that briefly holds a visual representation of a scene that has just been perceived.\
· To study this form of memory, Sperling (1960) presented visual stimuli to people by means of a tachistoscope, an apparatus for presenting visual stimuli for extremely brief durations. Sperling flashed a set of nine letters on the screen for 50 milliseconds (ms). He then asked people to recall as many letters as they could, a method known as the whole-report procedure. On average, they could remember only four or five letters, but they insisted that they could see more. However, the image of the letters faded too fast for people to identify them all.
· To determine whether the capacity of iconic memory accounted for this limitation, Sperling used a partial-report procedure. He asked people to name the letters in only one of the three horizontal rows. Depending on whether a high, middle or low tone was sounded, they were to report the letters in the top, middle or bottom line. When the participants were warned beforehand to which line they should attend, they had no difficulty naming all three letters correctly. But then Sperling sounded the tone after he flashed the letters on the screen. The participants had to select the line from the mental image they still had: they had to retrieve the information from iconic memory. With brief delays, they recalled the requested line of letters with perfect accuracy.
· For example, after seeing all nine letters flashed on the screen, they would hear the high tone, direct their attention to the top line of letters in their iconic memory, and ‘read them off’. These results indicated that their iconic memory contained an image of all nine letters.
· Sperling also varied the delay between flashing the nine letters on the screen and sounding the high, medium or low tone. If the delay was longer than 1 second, people could report only around 50 per cent of the letters.
· This result indicated that the image of the visual stimulus fades quickly from iconic memory. It also explained why participants who were asked to report all nine letters failed to report more than four or five. They had to scan their iconic memory, identify each letter and store each letter in short-term memory.
This process took time, and during this time the image of the letters was fading. Although their iconic memory originally contained all nine letters, there was time to recognise and report only four or five before the mental image disappeared.

Question 31

echoic memory

Answer 31

· Auditory sensory memory, called echoic memory, is a form of sensory memory for sounds that have just been perceived. It is necessary for comprehending many sounds, particularly those that constitute speech.
· When we hear a word pronounced, we hear individual sounds, one at a time. We cannot identify the word until we have heard all the sounds, so acoustical information must be stored temporarily until all the sounds have been received.
· For example, if someone says ‘mallet’, we may think of a kind of hammer; but if someone says ‘malice’, we will think of something entirely different.
The first syllable we hear – ‘mal’ – has no meaning by itself in English, so we do not identify it as a word. However, once the last syllable is uttered, we can put the two syllables together and recognise the word. At this point, the word enters short-term memory. Echoic memory holds a representation of the initial sounds until the entire word has been heard; it seems to hold information for about four seconds (Darwin et al, 1972).

Question 32

STM 2

Answer 32

· Short-term memory (STM) has a limited capacity, and most of the information that enters it is subsequently forgotten. Information in sensory memory enters STM, where it may be rehearsed for a while.
· The rehearsal process keeps the information in STM long enough for it to be transferred into long-term memory. After that, a person can stop thinking about the information; it can be recalled later, when it is needed.
· This simple story is actually inaccurate. First of all, information does not simply ‘enter short-term memory’. For example, most people who read the letters and put them in short-term memory have a number of strategies for achieving this.
· Some would have repeated the letters to themselves or would have whispered or moved their lips. We can say the names of these letters because many years ago we learned them. But that knowledge is stored in long-term memory. Thus, when we see some letters, we retrieve information about their names from long-term memory, and then we hear ourselves rehearsing those names (out loud or silently).
· The five letters below contain only visual information, their names came from long-term memory, which means that the information put into STM came from long-term memory.

· At the time of the request, such information is not being furnished through our senses; it is available only from long-term memory. However, that information is not recalled directly from long-term memory. It is first moved into STM and then enters conscious awareness.
· Psychologists have long debated the number of memory stores that we have – some view humans as having a short-term memory store and a long-term memory store (the dual-store model), whereas others argue that the distinction between these two stores is blurred and that we have one flexible memory store that deals with short-term and long-term memory retrieval (single-store model).
Dual-store models were (and are) based on a simple paradigm: participants recall items from a list; if they recall from the end of this list, these items were retrieved from STM; words recalled from the beginning of the list were retrieved from long-term memory.

Question 33

working memory 2

Answer 33

· The fact that short-term memory contains both new information and information retrieved from long-term memory has led some psychologists to prefer the term ‘working memory (WM)’.
· The term ‘working memory’ was first coined by Miller et al (1960) to refer to a memory store for material that required action.
· The term took on a slightly newer and more specific meaning with the publication of Baddley and Hitch’s paper of 1974 in which they proposed that working memory was made up of at least three different components (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 1986).
· Most psychologists will probably agree on what WM is although there is not a formal, universally accepted definition and there are at least ten models of working memory.
· Working memory acts on material we have just perceived and allows us to manipulate this in the short-term. It allows us to keep a new telephone number ‘alive’ in memory long enough to dial it or allows us to perform that multiplication task mentioned in the earlier paragraph.
· In short, it represents our ability to remember what we have just perceived and to think about it in terms of what we already know (Baddeley, 1986; Logie, 1996).
We use it to remember whether any cars are coming up the street after looking left and then right.

Question 34

WM baddeley and hitch

Answer 34

· Originally, Baddeley and Hitch (1974) found that people were able to retain sequences of three verbal items while undertaking other tasks, with no impairment to the performance of either. Retaining up to six items, however, resulted in an impairment in the concurrent task.
This suggested to the authors that there was a very short-term memory system which allowed people to retain very small numbers of items while at the same time allowing them to perform other tasks. If the system is exceeded, then other processes such as mental verbal rehearsal are invoked to help retention.

Question 35

A widely used test of WM is reading span (Daneman and Carpenter, 1980)

Answer 35

· A widely used test of WM is reading span (Daneman and Carpenter, 1980). One version involves asking people to read aloud and verify the truthfulness of sentences while, at the same time, trying to remember the last word of each sentence. This task, like many others of WM, requires a person to maintain some information in memory (storage) while simultaneously manipulating other information (processing).
· Another manipulation task in WM might involve asking the participant to recite from memory a series of five letters forwards, backwards or in alphabetical order.
After a delay, the participant is asked to match the number order of the given letters, according to the mental manipulation (e.g. forwards, backwards or alphabetical). So, if the letters B, M, T, E, I were presented and the participant was asked to alphabetise them, the number 4 (called a digit probe) should elicit the correct answer, M (because M is the fourth letter in the alphabetised string, B, E, I, M, T).

Question 36

stm vs wm

Answer 36

· Although the terms ‘short-term memory’ and ‘working memory’ are sometimes used interchangeably, some psychologists make clear distinctions between them.
· Short-term memory has been referred to as information retained in long-term memory that is called on but not used in a sustained way.
· Working memory involves dual processing and actual manipulation of material in mental space, not simply the storage of material (Miyake, 2001).
· There is evidence that tests of working memory and short-term memory measure different processes (Kail and Hall, 2001).
· Oberauer et al (2018) have listed a number of benchmarks for theories and models of WM: a set of findings that are ‘empirically robust and theoretically incisive’ including:
Performance accuracy declines as the set size increases (the more items there are to remember).
*WM will become slower the greater number of items to be remembered.
*Young adults will reliably recall or recognise no more than 3–5 separate units of information.
*All ‘healthy’ adults will have a span of more than four items in the serial recall of information (this is called memory span – the number of items that can be recalled/recognised on 50 per cent per cent of trials).
*Young adults can hold 3–4 ‘chunks’ of material in WM.
*WM performance declines as the interval between encoding and recall increases and when participants engage in a task during the interval (a filled interval).
*There is little effect on WM when the filler task involves processing no new information (such as repeating the word ‘the’ for 15 seconds).
*WM performance is positively correlated with fluid intelligence.

Question 37

working memory tests

Answer 37

serial recall - the ptp may be presented with a list of words orally or visually (eg TABLE, COLLAR, PASTA, HAMMER, RAQUET) and after the last word is presented, they recall the words in the correct order. the test can also be undertaken with pictures, objects, letters and sounds.

complex span - the material to be remembered is interleaved with distractor tasks (the arithmetic here) : ASPIRIN (3 x 4/5), MORTAR, (6-8x9), BALLOON, (8/2 x7)

running memory span - items such as - MOLAR, CABBAGE, JUMPER, POODLE …. ALOCOVE, TISSUE may be presented sequentially. when the items stop, ptps are required the last n (say, three of five) items determined by the experimenter

N-back - items are presented sequentially, and ptps indicate whether the next stimulus in the sequence in the same or different to that presented a given number of positions previously (N STEPS back) . eg if a Person hears
3 7 4 9 4 6 7
then at number position 5, ptpts might be asked whether this number matches the number presented two steps back (yes) or three steps back (no)

Question 38

components of working memory

Answer 38

Working memory was a model devised in the 1970s and later developed extensively by the British psychologists Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch. They regarded this type of memory as having three components which allowed us to store temporarily verbal material and visuospatial material, and to coordinate the storage of this material. The component which stores verbal material was originally called the articulatory loop, although this term has been superseded by the term phonological loop (Baddeley and Logie, 1992). The component that allows storage of visuospatial material is called the visuospatial scratchpad and the coordinating system is called the central executive.

diagram in notes

Question 39

Phonological working memory

Answer 39

When we see a printed word, we say it out loud or silently. If it is said to ourselves, circuits of neurons that control articulation are activated. Information concerning this activity is communicated within the brain to circuits of neurons in the auditory system, and the word is ‘heard’. Information is then transmitted back to the articulatory system, where the word is silently repeated. The loop continues until the person’s attention turns to something else or until it is replaced with new information.
This articulatory or phonological loop allows the retention of verbal phonetic information (so it acts as a phonological store) and operates like the loop of an audiotape (hence, the name). Lists of long words are remembered more poorly than lists of short words, for example, because there is less room on the loop for lists of long words (so the words ‘encyclopaedia’, ‘constellation’ and ‘antediluvian’ would be more difficult to recall than would the words ‘clock’, ‘parrot’ and ‘daisy’). However, because the loop also allows the rehearsal of information by subvocal articulation (such as subvocally rehearsing a telephone number), the loss of information from the phonological store can be avoided. According to Baddeley et al. (1975), the capacity of the phonological loop is determined by how much material the participant can rehearse in two seconds. (Figure 8.5 illustrates how the phonological loop is represented in the brain.in notes)

Question 40

phonological loop - can be defective under certain circumstances

Answer 40

However, the operation of the loop can be defective under certain circumstances. For example, Salame and Baddeley (1982) found that irrelevant speech played in the background while participants learned visually presented words interfered with the recall of these words, but the length of the words to be remembered had no significant effect on recall. However, the closer the irrelevant speech was to the words to be remembered, the greater the interference, suggesting that there was some interference in learning words while attending to the sound (or phonology) of similar ones. There is also evidence that non-speech-related material can have the same effect: even background noise can disrupt recall of verbal and arithmetical material (Banbury and Berry, 1998)

Question 41

Visuospatial working memory

Answer 41

· Much of the information we process is non-verbal. We recognise objects, perceive their locations and find our way around our environment. We can look at objects, close our eyes and then sketch or describe them. We can do the same with things we saw in the past.
· The visuospatial scratchpad contains visual information either obtained from the immediate environment by means of the sense organs or retrieved from long-term memory.
· An example of the ability to manipulate visual information in working memory comes from a famous experiment by Shepard and Metzler (1971). They presented people with pairs of drawings that could be perceived as three-dimensional constructions made of cubes. The participant’s task was to see whether the shape on the right was identical to the one on the left; some were, and some were not. Even when the shapes were identical, the one on the right was sometimes drawn as if it had been rotated.
· Shepard and Metzler found that people were accurate in judging whether the pairs of shapes were the same or different but took longer to decide when the right-hand shape was rotated.
Participants formed an image of one of the drawings in their heads and rotated it until it was aligned the same way as the other one. If their rotated image coincided with the drawing, they recognised them as having the same shape. If they did not, they recognised them as being different. The data supported what the participants said – the more the shape was rotated, the longer it took for people to rotate the image of one of the shapes in working memory and compare it with the other one.

Question 42

Central executive

Answer 42

The above elements – the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial scratchpad – do not work independently but have to be regulated and supervised, via the central executive subsystem (Baddeley, 1986). This central executive not only allocates mental resources to working memory tasks but also supervises the updating of what is in working memory.

Question 43

How does working memory work?

Answer 43

· Apart from allowing us to do the activities mentioned in the previous sections, working memory is also important for cognitive functions such as reading comprehension, academic ability and mathematics (Ashcraft and Kirk, 2001; Daneman and Hannon, 2001).
· Performance on a working memory span task involving numbers, for example, is a good predictor of spatial task performance (Kane et al, 2001).
· Working memory performance is also a good predictor of reading comprehension or verbal ability if the working memory span tests involve verbal or numerical material (Daneman and Hannon, 2001; Hitch et al, 2001; Shah and Miyake, 1996).
· According to the ‘resource sharing model’ of Daneman and Carpenter (the name given to it by Hitch et al, 2001), a reading span task measures how flexibly we can allocate mental resources to the processing and storage of material.
· In practical terms, if a person is a good reader, reading sentences for their truthfulness uses up very few cognitive resources and, therefore, frees up more ‘cognitive space’ for other activities (in this example, storage of the last word in the sentences).
· If readers are poor, on the other hand, then the opposite pattern is seen and they, therefore, show poor working memory performance (Yuill and Oakhill, 1991).
· Working memory capacity is thought to be one factor which determines good reading comprehension ability, although this view has been challenged; some psychologists argue that working memory deficits occur with language impairment, rather than causing it (Nation and Snowling, 1998, 1999). They note that even poor readers can remember as many one-, two- or three-syllable words as good readers.
· An alternative model of working memory, however, argues that it is our control of attention that leads to successful working memory performance (Engle et al, 1999). What counts is how much information can be stored, and this is determined by attention capacity. Thus, you should be able to predict people’s performance on attention tasks from their working memory reading span tasks and there is some evidence to support this link.
· A final alternative explanation argues that working memory depends on a person’s ability to ignore irrelevant information rather than on their limited capacity to process information (Hasher and Zacks, 1988).
In order to achieve this goal, there must be good inhibition of irrelevant information and a focus on only relevant material. It is a persuasive argument. Performance on working memory tasks depends on, among other factors, the ability to inhibit the interference produced by items encountered in early experimental trials (Lustig et al, 2001). It appears to be one of the keys to successful working memory performance

Question 44

Primacy and recency effects

Answer 44

· When individuals are asked to listen to a long list of words spoken one at a time and then write down as many as they can remember (a free-recall task), most participants will remember the words at the beginning and the end of the list and forget the words in between. This is called the serial position effect. T
he tendency to remember the words at the beginning of the list is called the primacy effect; the tendency to remember words at the end of the list is called the recency effect. Two factors may account for these effects.

Question 45

primary effect

Answer 45

· The primacy effect appears to be due to the fact that words earlier in a list have the opportunity to be rehearsed more than do words in the other parts of a list. This makes good sense; the first words get rehearsed more because, at the experiment’s outset, these are the only words available to rehearse. The rehearsal permits them to be stored in long-term memory. As more and more words on the list are presented, short-term memory becomes fuller so that words that appear later in the list have more competition for rehearsal time. Because the first words on the list are rehearsed the most, they are remembered better.
· As Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) point out, because the words at the end of the list were the last to be heard, they are still available in short-term memory. Thus, when you are asked to write the words on the list, the last few words are still available in short-term memory even though they did not undergo as much rehearsal as words at the beginning of the list.
· A way of testing this would be to create a delay between the presentation of the last stimulus and its recall. Postman and Phillips (1965), for example, inserted a delay of 15 seconds between the last item and recall and had their participants engage in another task.
· The effect was to abolish the recency effect because short-term memory was occupied and was not allowed to rehearse the last items in the list. When the delay involved no intervening activity, and so short-term memory was unoccupied by another task, the recency effect remained intact (Baddeley and Hitch, 1977).
· However, the abolition of both recency and primacy effects seems to depend on the nature of the intervening task. If people are told to count backwards for 20 seconds after the presentation of a word list, primacy and recency effects are still shown (Tzeng, 1973).
· The instructions given to people are also important. If people are instructed to repeat the list in the order they heard the words, the recency effect is abolished (Tulving and Arbuckle, 1963). If they are allowed to recall the list spontaneously, the recency effect remains.
· Recency (and primacy) effects extend beyond the recall of artificial word lists. They have been reported for the recall of parking positions (Pinto and Baddeley, 1991), operas attended over a quarter of a century (Sehulster, 1989), names of American presidents (Roediger and Crowder, 1976; Healy et al, 2000) and hymn verses (Maylor, 2002).
· Baddeley and Hitch (1977) found that when rugby players were asked to recall the teams they played, they named the most recently played teams first and with greater accuracy.
The primacy and recency effects are important because they demonstrate that memory is not a random process.
Information is not just plucked from the environment and stored away randomly in the brain. Instead, the processing of information is much more orderly; it follows predictable patterns and is dependent on the contributions of rehearsal and short-term memory.

Question 46

limits of short-term and working memory

Answer 46

· How long does information remain in short-term or working memory?
· The answer may lie in a classic study by Lloyd and Margaret Peterson (Peterson and Peterson, 1959).
· The experimenters presented participants with a stimulus composed of three consonants, such as JRG. With rehearsal, the participants easily recalled it 30 seconds later. The Petersons then made the task more challenging: they prevented participants from rehearsing.
· After they presented the participants with JRG, they asked them to count backwards by three from a three-digit number they gave them immediately after they had presented the set of consonants.
· For example, they might present participants with JRG, then say, ‘397’. The participants would count out loud, ‘397. . . 394. . . 391. . . 388. . . 385’, and so on until the experimenters signalled them to recall the consonants.
· The accuracy of recall was determined by the length of the interval between presentation of the consonants and when recall was requested.
· When rehearsal was disrupted by backward counting – which prevented individuals from rehearsing information in short-term memory – the consonants remained accessible in memory for only a few seconds.
After a 15–18-second delay between the presentation of the consonants and the recall signal, recall dropped to near zero.

Question 47

What, then, is the capacity of short-term memory?

Answer 47

· Miller (1956), in a famous article entitled ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two’, demonstrated that people could retain, on average, seven pieces of information in their short-term memory: seven numbers, seven letters, seven words or seven tones of a particular pitch.
· If we can remember and think about only seven pieces of information at a time, how can we manage to write novels, design buildings or even carry on simple conversations?
· The answer comes in a particular form of encoding of information that Miller called chunking, a process by which information is simplified by rules which make it easily remembered once the rules are learned.
· A simple demonstration illustrates this phenomenon. Read the 10 numbers printed below and see whether you have any trouble remembering them.
1 3 5 7 9 2 4 6 8 0
· These numbers are easy to retain in short-term memory because we can remember a rule instead of 10 independent numbers.
In this case, the rule concerns odd and even numbers

Question 48

How long does information remain in short-term or working memory?

Answer 48

· The answer may lie in a classic study by Lloyd and Margaret Peterson (Peterson and Peterson, 1959). The experimenters presented participants with a stimulus composed of three consonants, such as JRG. With rehearsal, the participants easily recalled it 30 seconds later.
· The Petersons then made the task more challenging: they prevented participants from rehearsing. After they presented the participants with JRG, they asked them to count backwards by three from a three-digit number they gave them immediately after they had presented the set of consonants.
· For example, they might present participants with JRG, then say, ‘397’. The participants would count out loud, ‘397. . . 394. . . 391. . . 388. . . 385’, and so on until the experimenters signalled them to recall the consonants.
· The accuracy of recall was determined by the length of the interval between presentation of the consonants and when recall was requested
When rehearsal was disrupted by backward counting – which prevented individuals from rehearsing information in short-term memory – the consonants remained accessible in memory for only a few seconds. After a 15–18-second delay between the presentation of the consonants and the recall signal, recall dropped to near zero.

Question 49

What, then, is the capacity of short-term memory?

Answer 49

· Miller (1956), in a famous article entitled ‘The magical number seven, plus or minus two’, demonstrated that people could retain, on average, seven pieces of information in their short-term memory: seven numbers, seven letters, seven words or seven tones of a particular pitch.
· If we can remember and think about only seven pieces of information at a time, how can we manage to write novels, design buildings or even carry on simple conversations?
· The answer comes in a particular form of encoding of information that Miller called chunking, a process by which information is simplified by rules which make it easily remembered once the rules are learned.
· A simple demonstration illustrates this phenomenon. Read the 10 numbers printed below and see whether you have any trouble remembering them.
1 3 5 7 9 2 4 6 8 0
These numbers are easy to retain in short-term memory because we can remember a rule instead of 10 independent numbers. In this case, the rule concerns odd and even numbers

Question 50

loss of information from short-term

Answer 50

· The essence of short-term memory is its transience; hence, its name. Information enters from sensory memory and from long-term memory, is rehearsed, thought about, modified and then leaves. Some of the information controls ongoing behaviour and some of it causes changes in long-term memory, but ultimately, it is lost from short-term memory.
· What causes it to leave? The simplest possibility is that it decays, it fades away. Rehearsal allows us to refresh information indefinitely, thus preventing the decay from eliminating the information.
· However, the most important cause appears to be displacement. Once short-term memory has reached its capacity, either additional information will have to be ignored or some information already in short-term memory will have to be displaced to make room for the new information.
· One of the best examples of displacement of information in short-term memory comes from an experiment conducted by Waugh and Norman (1965). The people in this study heard lists of 16 digits. The last digit, accompanied by a tone, was called the probe digit. When people heard it, they had to think back to the previous occurrence of the same digit and tell the experimenter the digit that followed that one.
· Look at the sequence of numbers listed below. The last one, a 9, was accompanied by a tone, which told the person that it was the probe. If you examine the list, you will see that the earlier occurrence of a 9 was followed by a 4. Thus, the target, or correct, response was 4.
2 6 7 5 1 3 7 2 6 3 9 4 5 8 1 9
· Notice that the 4 is separated from the second 9 by three numbers (5, 8 and 1).
· Waugh and Norman presented many different lists in which the location of the correct response varied. The distance between the target and the probe ranged from one to twelve items.
· The study had two conditions. In one, the lists were presented rapidly, at four digits per second. In the other, they were presented slowly, at only one digit per second. The reason for this manipulation was to determine whether any effects they observed were caused by the mere passage of time rather than by displacement.
· They found that the more items that came between the target and the probe, the less likely it was that the target would be remembered. The critical variable seemed to be the number of items between the target and the probe, not the time that had elapsed
The results indicate that new information displaces old information in short-term memory. But at the longest delays (six or more intervening items), subjects performed more poorly when the items were presented slowly. Perhaps information in short-term memory does decay, but the effect is much less important than displacement.

Question 51

Learning and encoding in long-term memory

Answer 51

· What allows memory to move from short-term to long-term memory?
· Memory involves both active and passive processes. Sometimes, we use deliberate strategies to remember something (encode the information into long-term memory), for example, rehearsing the lines of a poem or memorising famous dates for a history exam.
· At other times, we simply observe and remember without any apparent effort, as when we tell a friend about an interesting experience we had. And memories can be formed even without our being aware of having learned something.
What factors determine whether we can eventually remember an experience?

Question 52

Consolidation hypothesis

Answer 52

· The traditional view of memory is that it consists of a two-stage process (not counting sensory memory).
· Information enters short-term memory from the environment, where it is stored temporarily. If the material is rehearsed long enough, it is transferred into long-term memory.
· This transfer of information from short-term memory into long-term memory has been called consolidation (Hebb, 1949).
· Through rehearsal (e.g. by means of the articulatory loop), the neural activity responding to sensory stimulation can be sustained; and if enough time passes, the activity causes structural changes in the brain.
· These structural changes are more or less permanent and solid (hence, the term ‘consolidation’), and are responsible for long-term memory.
· The consolidation hypothesis makes several assertions about the learning process. It asserts that short-term memory and long-term memory are physiologically different, and few investigators doubt that information that has just been perceived is stored in the brain in a different way from information that was perceived some time ago.
· However, some other features of the original consolidation hypothesis have been challenged.
· First, the hypothesis asserts that all information gets into long-term memory only after passing through short-term memory.
· Secondly, it asserts that the most important factor determining whether a particular piece of information reaches long-term memory is the amount of time it spends in short-term memory.
· After acquiring a new memory, a period of stabilisation (or consolidation) is needed for that memory to be transferred to long-term memory.
· If a treatment such as ECT is provided (for example, to patients with amnesia), this can disrupt the memory, as can requiring a participant to learn additional material after the initial acquisition. Strychnine administration can enhance retention but is only effective if administered near to the time of learning and not after a delay (Lee et al, 2017).
· Reactivation of a memory can lead to a forgetting of that memory if some behavioural interference occurs after this reactivation.
For example, if a person reactivates memory of a learned sequence of finger movements and is then presented with a new finger-tapping exercise to learn, that reactivated memory’s accuracy is reduced (Walker et al, 2003).

Question 53

Levels of processing

Answer 53

· Craik and Lockhart (1972) have pointed out that the act of rehearsal may effectively keep information in short-term memory but does not necessarily result in the establishment of long-term memories. They suggested that people engage in two different types of rehearsal: maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal. Maintenance rehearsal is the rote repetition of verbal information: simply repeating an item over and over. This behaviour serves to maintain the information in short-term memory but does not necessarily result in lasting changes.
In contrast, when people engage in elaborative rehearsal, they think about the information and relate it to what they already know. Elaborative rehearsal involves more than new information. It involves deeper processing: forming associations, attending to the meaning of the information, thinking about that information, and so on. Thus, we elaborate on new information by recollecting related information already in long-term memory. We are more likely to remember information for an examination by processing it deeply or meaningfully; simply rehearsing the material to be tested will not be effective

Question 54

levels of processing - craik and tulving 1975

Answer 54

· Craik and Tulving (1975) gave participants a set of cards, each containing a printed sentence including a missing word, denoted by a blank line, such as ‘The ___ is torn’. After reading the sentence, the participants looked at a word flashed on a screen, then pressed a button as quickly as possible to signify whether the word fitted the sentence. In this example, ‘dress’ will fit, but ‘table’ will not. The sentences varied in complexity. Some were very simple:

She cooked the ____________.
The ____________ is torn.

Others were complex:

The great bird swooped down and carried off the struggling ____________.
The old man hobbled across the room and picked up the valuable ____________.

· The sentences were written so that the same word could be used for either a simple or a complex sentence: ‘She cooked the chicken’ or ‘The great bird swooped down and carried off the struggling chicken’. All participants saw a particular word once, in either a simple or a complex sentence.
· The experimenters made no mention of a memory test, so there was no reason for the participants to try to remember the words. However, after responding to the sentences, they were presented with them again and were asked to recall the words they had used.
The experimenters found that the participants were twice as likely to remember a word if it had previously fitted into a sentence of medium or high complexity than if it had fitted into a simple one. These results suggest that a memory is more effectively established if the item is presented in a rich context – one that is likely to make us think about the item and imagine an action taking place.

Question 55

Craik and Lockhart (1972) suggested that memory is a by-product of perceptual analysis

Answer 55

· Craik and Lockhart (1972) suggested that memory is a by-product of perceptual analysis. A central processor, analogous to the central processing unit of a computer, can analyse sensory information on several different levels. They conceived of the levels as being hierarchically arranged, from shallow (superficial) to deep (complex). A person can control the level of analysis by paying attention to different features of the stimulus. If a person focuses on the superficial sensory characteristics of a stimulus, then these features will be stored in memory. If the person focuses on the meaning of a stimulus and the ways in which it relates to other things the person already knows, then these features will be stored in memory.
· For example, consider the word:
tree

· This word is written in black type, the letters are lower case, the bottom of the stem of the letter ‘t’ curves upwards to the right, and so on. Craik and Lockhart referred to these characteristics as surface features and to the analysis of these features as shallow processing. Maintenance rehearsal is an example of shallow processing.
· In contrast, consider the meaning of the word ‘tree’. You can think about how trees differ from other plants, what varieties of trees you have seen, what kinds of foods and what kinds of wood they provide, and so on. These features refer to a word’s meaning and are called semantic features. Their analysis is called deep processing. Elaborative rehearsal is an example of deep processing.
According to Craik and Lockhart, deep processing generally leads to better retention than does surface processing. A deep approach to learning also improves a student’s performance.

Question 56

Encoding specificity

Answer 56

· Encoding specificity refers to the principle that the way in which we encode information determines our ability to retrieve it later.
· For example, suppose that someone reads you a list of words that you are to recall later. The list contains the word ‘beet’, along with a number of terms related to music, such as ‘melody’, ‘tune’ and ‘jazz’. When asked if the list contained the names of any vegetables, you may report that it did not. Because of the musical context, you encoded ‘beet’ as ‘beat’ and never thought of the tuberous vegetable while you were rehearsing the list (Flexser and Tulving, 1978).
Many experiments have made the point that meaningful elaboration during encoding is helpful and probably necessary for the formation of useful memories

Question 57

Mnemonics and memory aids

Answer 57

· When we can imagine information vividly and concretely, and when it fits into the context of what we already know, it is easy to remember later.
· Mnemonic systems (from the Greek mnemon, meaning ‘memory’; Mnemosyne was the Greek goddess of remembrance) – special techniques or strategies consciously used to improve memory – make use of information already stored in long-term memory to make memorisation an easier task.
· Mnemonic systems do not simplify information but make it more elaborate. More information is stored, not less.
· However, the additional information makes the material easier to recall. Mnemonic systems organise new information into a cohesive whole so that retrieval of part of the information ensures retrieval of the rest of it. Even memory champions utilise mnemonics. Sherlock Holmes, in the Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat rendition of the detective, has his mind palace in which he is able to organise events, people and objects in order to make deductions.
· Simon Reinhard, who won the Extreme Memory Tournament in 2014 and 2016, was able to memorise the order of a pack of playing cards in under 27 seconds and competitors at the event indicated that they used techniques – such as the ones described below – to help them remember (Putnam, 2015).
· Licensed taxi drivers in London – the black-cab drivers – have to possess an incredible memory (and sense of direction). ‘The Knowledge’, the body of data and directions, that they have to learn and memorise is demanding. Potential cabbies have to plan routes containing 26,000 streets within six miles of Charing Cross (the point from which distance to and from London is measured). There are a potential 60, 000 routes within the M25 motorway to memorise. Licensed-drivers-to-be are asked to plan a route based on the shortest distance between two places of interest and name all the streets and turn directions in between (Griesbauer et al, 2022).
· Some of the memorial devices people use to help them learn this information are acronyms, creating short stories, and mnemonics. For example, MEG would represent the streets Melton, Euston and Gower which are interconnected. ‘Little apples grow quickly please’ is a mnemonic for Lyric, Apollo, Gielgud, Queens Palace which is the geographical order of theatres in Shaftesbury Avenue (Giesbauer et al, 2022).
Mnemonics are not only useful for memory champions, they can help the rest of us remember things that we find difficult to encode using normal cognitive processes. One study has recently examined the effect of using mnemonics to remember material as complex as the Australian tax code, with positive results (Smith and Shimeld, 2017).

Question 58

Method of loci

Answer 58

· In Greece before the sixth century BC, few people knew how to write, and those who did had to use cumbersome clay tablets. Consequently, oratory skills and memory for long epic poems (running for several hours) were highly prized, and some people earned their livings by using them. Because people could not carry around several hundred pounds of clay tablets, they had to keep important information in their heads. To do so, the Greeks devised the method of loci, a mnemonic system in which items to be remembered are mentally associated with specific physical locations (locus means ‘place’ in Latin).
· To use the method of loci, would-be memory artists had to memorise the inside of a building. In Greece, they would wander through public buildings, stopping to study and memorise various locations and arranging them in order, usually starting with the door of the building. After memorising the locations, they could make the tour mentally, just as you could make a mental tour of your house to count the rooms. To learn a list of words, they would visualise each word in a particular location in the memorised building and picture the association as vividly as possible.
· For example, for the word ‘love’ they might imagine an embracing couple leaning against a particular column in a hall of the building.
· To recall the list, they would imagine each of the locations in sequence, ‘see’ each word, and say it. To store a speech, they would group the words into concepts and place a ‘note’ for each concept at a particular location in the sequence.
For example, if a person wanted to remember a short shopping list without writing it down and the list consists of five items: cheese, milk, eggs, soy sauce and lettuce, the person might first think of a familiar place, perhaps their house. Next, they would mentally walk through the house, visually placing different items from the list at locations – loci – in the house: a lump of cheese hanging from a coat rack, milk dripping from the kitchen tap, eggs lying in the hallway, a bottle of soy sauce on a dining chair, and a lettuce on the sofa. Then, in the supermarket, the person mentally retraces his or her path through the house and notes what he or she has stored at the different loci

Question 59

Narrative stories

Answer 59

· Another useful aid to memory is to place information into a narrative, in which items to be remembered are linked together by a story.
· Bower and Clark (1969) showed that even inexperienced people can use this method. The investigators asked people to try to learn 12 lists of 10 concrete nouns each. They gave some of the people the following advice
· A good way to learn the list of items is to make up a story relating the items to one another. Specifically, start with the first item and put it in a setting which will allow other items to be added to it. Then, add the other items to the story in the same order as the items appear. Make each story meaningful to yourself. Then, when you are asked to recall the items, you can simply go through your story and pull out the proper items in their correct order.

Here is a typical narrative, described by one of the subjects (list words are italicised):

A lumberjack darted out of the forest, skated around a hedge past a colony of ducks. He tripped on some furniture, tearing his stocking while hastening to the pillow where his mistress lay.

· People in the control group were merely asked to learn the lists and were given the same amount of time as the people in the ‘narrative’ group to study them.
· Both groups could remember a particular list equally well immediately afterwards.
· However, when all the lists had been learned, recall of all 120 words was far superior in the group that had constructed narrative stories.
· Not all information can be easily converted to such a form, however.
· For example, if you were preparing to take an examination on the information in this chapter, figuring out how to encode it into lists would probably take you more time than studying and learning it by more traditional methods.
· The length of time it takes to learn mnemonics depends on the specific mnemonic. You have to remember the specific components of the technique (e.g. learning the peg images) and then practice the mnemonic until it is fairly automatic.
People can memorise a mental palace in an evening, the peg method in a few minutes (Putnam, 2015).

Question 60

explicit memory

Answer 60

· Explicit memory refers to memory for information we were aware of learning.
· A simple example would be our recollection of the 12 times table: this is a task that most of us were instructed to remember explicitly. Recognition and recall of material in explicit memory require active recollection of material that has been studied (McBride and Dosher, 1997).
For example, we might ask participants to recall freely as many words as they can after being presented with a long list of them, or to indicate which stimuli from an array of visual stimuli were previously seen. Under these conditions, participants are explicitly instructed to recall or to recognise.

Question 61

implicit memory

Answer 61

· Implicit memory, however, does not appear to rely on conscious awareness. Instead, it is memory for information that is incidentally or unintentionally learned, and which does not rely on the recognition or recall of any specific learning episode (Schacter, 1987; Cleermans, 1993).
It is sometimes referred to as being synonymous with procedural memory, the memory for knowing how to do things (like riding a bike, operating a computer keyboard or playing a musical instrument) – we acquire memory via performance without consciously encoding that information. There is some question, however, over whether implicit and procedural memory are truly synonymous.

the acquisition of specific behaviours and skills is probably the most important form of implicit memory. Driving a car, turning the pages of a book, playing a musical instrument, dancing, throwing and catching a ball, sliding a chair backwards as we get up from the dinner table are all skills that involve coordination of movements with sensory information received from the environment and from our own moving body parts. We do not need to be able to describe these activities to perform them. We may not be aware of all the movements involved while we are performing them. Implicit memory may have evolved earlier than explicit memory.
Originally, the term implicit learning derived from studies of artificial grammar learning where participants had to deduce a set of grammatical rules governing the construction of sentences comprising non-words (so that the participants are not influenced by semantic knowledge conveyed by the words). Participants were able to work out a set of rules but were unable to describe these rules; they made educated guesses based on stimuli they had previously seen. They had implicitly learned the rules (Reber, 2013).

Question 62

procedural memory

Answer 62

· Procedural memory implies that some conscious effort has been made towards learning a skill such as riding a bike or playing a musical instrument; implicit memory would assume that skills were learned without such conscious effort, which seems highly unlikely. Also, there seems to be little procedural input to performing a stem-completion task (described below), which taps implicit memory. There continues to be debate about the number of memory systems, and whether these memory systems are separate or different forms of the same system.

Question 63

Memory research has demonstrated that if we are repeatedly exposed to stimuli, our memory for them improves. This is especially so when learning is explicit. But what if the learning is implicit?

Answer 63

· For example, how well would you be able to reproduce a very well-known logo, such as the Apple logo, from memory? Try it now before reading on. Get a piece of paper and – without looking it up or looking at an Apple logo if you use an Apple device – try drawing the Apple logo. Once you have done that, come back to this section.
· So, how well did you do? If you didn’t do particularly well, you are in good company. Blake et al. (2015) ran a similar experiment and found that people were poor at drawing the logo and at recognising features of a logo in a forced-choice recognition test.
· A good example of learning without awareness is provided by an experiment conducted by Graf and Mandler (1984). These investigators showed people a list of six-letter words and had some of them engage in a task that involved elaborative processing: they were to think about each word and to decide how much they liked it. Other people were given a task that involved processing superficial features: they were asked to look at the words and decide whether they contained particular letters. Later, their explicit and implicit memories for the words were assessed.
· In both cases the basic task was the same, but the instructions to the subjects were different. People were shown the first three letters of each word. For example, if one of the words had been ‘define’, they would have been shown a card on which was printed ‘def’ (this is called a word-stem-completion task). Several different six-letter words besides define begin with the letters ‘def’, such as ‘deface’, ‘defame’, ‘defeat’, ‘defect’, ‘defend’, ‘defied’ and ‘deform’, so there are several possible responses.
· The experimenters assessed explicit memory by asking people to try to remember the words they had seen previously, using the first three letters as a hint. They assessed implicit memory by asking the people to say the first word that came to mind that started with the three letters on the card.
· Deliberate processing (shallow or deep processing) had a striking effect on the explicit memory task but not on the implicit memory task. When people used the three letters as cues for deliberate retrieval, they were much more successful if they had thought about whether they liked the word than if they simply paid attention to the occurrence of particular letters. However, when people simply said the first word that came to mind, the way they had studied the words had little effect on the number of correct words that ‘popped into their heads’

Question 64

remembering

Answer 64

· Remembering is an automatic process. The word ‘automatic’ means ‘acting by itself’. But this definition implies that no special effort is involved. What is automatic is the retrieval of information from memory in response to the appropriate stimulus. What sometimes requires effort is the attempt to come up with the thoughts (the internal stimuli) that cause the information to be retrieved.
· In psychology experiments, retrieval can be measured in two basic ways: participants either recall material they have learned unprompted (free recall), or they are asked to identify material they had previously seen; this material is presented among stimuli that had not been seen (this is called a recognition memory paradigm).
· The retrieval of implicit memories is automatic: when the appropriate stimulus occurs, it automatically evokes the appropriate response. Explicit memories can be retrieved automatically. Whisper your name to yourself. How did you manage to remember what your name is? How did you retrieve the information needed to move your lips in the proper sequence? Those questions cannot be answered by introspection. The information just leaps out at us when the proper question is asked (or, more generally, when the appropriate stimulus is encountered).
Reading provides a particularly compelling example of the automatic nature of memory retrieval. When an experienced reader looks at a familiar word, the name of the word occurs immediately, and so does the meaning. In fact, it is difficult to look at a word and not think of its name. (Stroop, 1935; MacLeod, 1992).

Question 65

· Most people cannot completely ignore the words and simply name the colours; the tendency to think of the words and pronounce them is difficult to resist. The Stroop effect indicates that even when we try to suppress a well-practised memory, it tends to be retrieved automatically when the appropriate stimulus occurs.
But what about the fact that some memories seem to be difficult to recall?

Answer 65

· For most people, remembering information is effortless and smooth. It is something we do unconsciously and automatically – most of the time. Occasionally, though, our memory of a name or a place or something else fails. The experience is often frustrating because we know that the information is ‘in there somewhere’ but we just cannot seem to get it out. This is known as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
· It was first studied carefully during the 1960s (Brown and McNeill, 1966), and since then we have learned a great deal about it (Jones, 1989; A.S. Brown, 1991). It is a common, if not universal, experience; it can occur about once a week and increases with age; it often involves proper names and knowing the first letter of the word; and is solved during the experience about 50 per cent of the time.
· The active search for stimuli that will evoke the appropriate memory, as exemplified in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, has been called recollection (Baddeley, 1982).
· Recollection may be aided by contextual variables, including physical objects, suggestions or other verbal stimuli. These contextual variables are called retrieval cues. The usefulness of these retrieval cues often depends on encoding specificity. Remember from the previous section that the encoding specificity principle states that information can only be retained if it has been stored and the way in which it is retrieved depends on how it was stored.
One famous example is that of encoding and retrieving material above and under water. Godden and Baddeley (1975) asked skilled scuba divers to learn lists of words either under water or on land. The divers’ ability to recall the lists was later tested in either the same or a different environment. The variable of interest was where subjects learned the list: in or out of the water. When lists were learned under water, they were recalled much better under water than on land, and lists learned on land were recalled better on land than in the water. The context in which information is learned or processed, therefore, influences our ability to recollect that information.

Question 66

Reconstruction - remembering as a creative process

Answer 66

· Much of what we recall from long-term memory may not be an accurate representation of what actually happened previously. One view of memory is that it is a plausible account of what might have happened or even of what we think should have happened. An early experiment by Bartlett drew attention to this possibility. This was Bartlett’s view:

Remembering is not the reexcitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organised past reactions or experience and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. It is thus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentary cases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that it should be so. Source: Bartlett, 1932, p. 213.

Question 67

Bartlett

Answer 67

· Bartlett had people read a story or essay or look at a picture. Then he asked them on several later occasions to retell the prose passage or to draw the picture. Each time, the people ‘remembered’ the original a little differently.
· If the original story had contained peculiar and unexpected sequences of events, people tended to retell it in a more coherent and sensible fashion, as if their memories had been revised to make the information accord more closely with their own conceptions of reality.
· Bartlett concluded that people remember only a few striking details of an experience and that during recall they reconstruct the missing portions in accordance with their own expectations.
Many studies have confirmed Bartlett’s conclusions and have extended his findings to related phenomena.

Question 68

Spiro (1977, 1980)

Answer 68

· Spiro (1977, 1980) found that people will remember even a rather simple story in different ways, according to their own conceptions of reality. Two groups of people read a story about an engaged couple in which the man was opposed to having children. In one version, the woman was upset when she learned his opinion because she wanted to have children. In the other version, the woman also did not want to have children. After reading the story, people were asked to fill out some forms. While collecting the forms, the experimenter either said nothing more about the story or ‘casually mentioned’ that the story was a true one and added one of two different endings: the couple got married and have been happy ever since, or the couple broke up and never saw each other again.
Two days, three weeks or six weeks later, the participants were asked to recall the story they had read. If at least three weeks had elapsed, people who had heard an ending that contradicted the story tended to ‘remember’ information that resolved the conflict. For example, if they had read that the woman was upset to learn that the man did not want children but were later told that the couple was happily married, people were likely to ‘recall’ something that would have resolved the conflict, such as that the couple had decided to adopt a child rather than have one of their own. If people had read that the woman also did not want children but were later told that the couple broke up, then they were likely to ‘remember’ that there was a difficulty with one set of parents. In contrast, people who had heard an ending that was consistent with the story they had read did not remember any extra facts; they did not need them to make sense of the story. For example, if they had heard that the couple disagreed about having a child and later broke up, no new ‘facts’ had to be added.
· People were most confident about details that had not occurred but had been added to make more sense of the story. Thus, a person’s confidence in the accuracy of a particular memory is not necessarily a good indication of whether the event occurred.
· However, some researchers have criticised Bartlett’s findings and some have even argued that Bartlett himself drew conclusions that were not warranted (Ost and Costall, 2002).
· Edwards and Middleton (1987), for example, have argued that the studies reported by Bartlett – these studies reported a form of memory called serial reproduction – did not assess the normal, everyday process of remembering.
· For example, participants in Bartlett’s experiments wrote down alone what they could remember of a story read to them (rather than being retold to them, as you might expect in most everyday contexts).
Others, such as Roediger et al (2000), have argued that the material to be remembered was not particularly ecologically valid. One of the stories to be recalled, The War of the Ghosts, was quite exotic and unusual and not like everyday prose (Wynn and Logie, 1998; Roediger et al, 2000), which made connections between parts of the story difficult to form. Bartlett did use more familiar material and found that participants made the typical reconstruction of the story.

Question 69

wynn and Logies 1998

Answer 69

· In an experiment in which the material to be remembered was relevant, Wynn and Logie (1998) quizzed undergraduates at two-month intervals about an incident at the beginning of the academic year and asked them to recall memories from that time. They found that memories were very resistant to change over time.
However, although the study found that some distinctive memories could be accurately recalled, recent research suggests that memories can be very manipulable to the extent that false information introduced at recall can lead to this false information being incorporated into memory. The context in which memory and acquisition takes place can also influence our recall of events, as the next section shows.

Question 70

how long does memory last

Answer 70

· In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus reported the results of the first experiment to determine the duration of memory. Using himself as a participant, Ebbinghaus memorised 13 nonsense syllables such as ‘dax’, ‘wuj’, ‘lep’ and ‘pib’. He then studied how long it took him to relearn the original list after intervals varying from a few minutes up to 31 days. . Much of what he learned was forgotten very quickly, usually within a day or two. But even after 31 days, he could still recall some of the original information.
Ebbinghaus’s research dealt with remembering nonsense syllables and began a fruitful line of enquiry for psychologists interested in the length of time we can reasonably retain information before we begin to forget. For example, for how long might you remember the important experiences of your childhood? Or the information in this book? Or a well-known public event?

Question 71

How long does memory last? - Schmolck et al (2000)

Answer 71

Schmolck et al (2000) looked at the effect of retention interval – the period between encoding and retrieval – on memory for the O. J. Simpson trial verdict, announced on 3 October 1995. College students were asked how they heard the news about the verdict three days after the result, 15 months later and 32 months later. There was a significant difference between recall at 15 and at 32 months. After 15 months, about 50 per cent of recollections were accurate and only 11 per cent contained major errors; at 32 months, only 29 per cent of the recollections were accurate and 40 per cent contained major distortions. There may be some value to this. There is neuroimaging evidence to suggest that the process of forgetting frees up regions of the brain: the forgetting of material that competes with more important information that we need to remember is associated with a decline in the activation of the PFC, for example (Kuhl et al, 2007).

Question 71

how long does memory last ? - Bahrick et al (1975)

Answer 71

· In a well-known study, Bahrick et al (1975) investigated how much information about their classmates (such as faces or names) graduates would remember 25 years after graduation. Bahrick et al found that the ability to recall classmates’ names and to generate a name from a photo declined over time. The longer the retention interval (RI), the greater the decline. Recognition of faces and names and the matching of names to faces, however, was fairly robust. Ninety per cent of responses were correct over the first 15 years (although accuracy, again, declined when the RI became longer). Bahrick (1984) also reported that retention for Spanish learned at school declined in the first 3–6 years after graduating, stabilised for the next 35 years, and then declined thereafter.
Bahrick argued that the period of stability from 6 to 35 years represents a ‘permastore’; this was a store of knowledge that was resistant to forgetting and which must have been learned deeply. An alternative interpretation, however, was suggested by Neisser (1984). He suggested that individuals have a schematic representation of a ‘knowledge domain’, that is, specific knowledge is not stored in a permanent way, but ways of representing that knowledge allow the retrieval of information. On the basis of this view, conceptual knowledge should be better retained (and retrieved) than would, say, straightforward facts.

Question 72

how long does memory last? - Conway

Answer 72

· Conway and co-workers (Conway et al, 1991; Cohen et al, 1992), measured students’ retention of knowledge of cognitive psychology over 12 years (between 1978 and 1989) and found that memory declined in the first 36 months, then stabilised. However, the recall and recognition of proper names declined more rapidly than did memory for concepts. Why? If you accept Neisser’s position, conceptual information should be better retained because memory is organised in such a way as to facilitate the retention of this type of information.
· Cohen (1990) further suggested that proper names lacked the semantic depth necessary for encoding concepts. Proper names did not need to be represented in abstract form and do not fall within a scheme of knowledge.
· In a follow-up study, Conway et al (1992) found that coursework was a better predictor of retention than was exam performance because the learning for the former was distributed across the term whereas learning for the exam was, arguably, massed (being crammed)
· Conway et al (1997) found the better students seemed to ‘remember’ more of the answers in a multiple-choice examination exam. For research methods courses, the same students ‘knew’ more, indicating that a remember-to-know shift (R–K shift) had occurred. Why, then, did better students not ‘know’ more after their lecture courses? One reason may be that the lecture courses contained more topics and that there was, therefore, greater variability in the types of knowledge domain to be learned (Conway et al, 1997).
· Also, the research methods courses involved a large degree of repetition (as research methods courses do) and problem-solving is integral to the course: these factors might promote the R–K shift.
People’s memory for their grades also declines with time (Bahrick et al, 2008). One to 54 years after graduating, 276 participants were able to recall 3,025 of 3,967 grades. The better students made fewer errors. Of those who recalled their marks incorrectly, 81 per cent inflated the grade.