Lecture 5: Long-Term Memory Flashcards
What is retrograde amnesia?
- memory loss for events prior to trauma
- recovery usually happens with older memories being retrieved first
What is anterograde amnesia?
- memory loss for events after trauma
- recovery is generally not possible
Describe the case of H.M.
- patient with seizures starting at the age of 10
- seizures worsened and became intractable so at 27 had surgery
- bilateral removal of medial temporal lobe
- intelligence, language, personality, and memory for past events relatively intact
- lost all ability to form new explicit memories but demonstrated normal implicit learning
What could H.M. remember?
PRIMING
- word completion tasks
- incomplete pictures
PROCEDURAL TASKS
- memory for action
- mirror tracing
- tower of Hannoi
What was Tulving and Pearlstone’s memory experiment and what did the results suggest?
- subjects presented with a pair of words and had to memorize only one of the pair
- first showed a list of words and asked to recognize which ones they had to memorize
- next given an incidental memory task, presenting the first of the pair and asked to remember the second
- people RECALLED more words than they RECOGNIZED
- suggests that rather than decay, forgetting is an inability to access information
i. e. the encoding is off
What is the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve?
- shows how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it
- showed that while forgetting does occur rapidly over time, at some point some of the information is stored in LTM and is there indefinitely
What types of rehearsal are there?
- MAINTENANCE
- keep information active in short-term memory - ELABORATIVE
- links information from short-term memory with that already in long-term memory
What was the experiment performed by Craik & Lockhart that researched encoding to long-term memory?
- participants saw pairs of words and had to answer if they had the same font, if they rhymed, or if the words had similar meaning
- when given a surprise quiz on these word pairs later, participants more easily remembered the word pairs in which they had to analyze meaning
> elaboration technique
What is the isolation effect?
- one item is so unique it sticks out in the memory
- different from all other memories in long-term memory
- one cue tells us exactly where to find the information
(also called the von Restorff effect)
How can long-term memory be improved?
- Engage in deep processing (add meaning to meaningless lists)
- Organize (e.g. categories or hierarchies)
- Make it personally relevant
- Generate the information yourself (Slameka & Graf, 1978)
- Use imagery
- Use interactive images
Why does forgetting occur for long-term memory?
- retrieval failures highly related to encoding
- information is available but not accessible
What is evidence for retrieval failure from LTM?
- Feeling of knowing
- Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
- Cued vs. uncued recall
What was Tulving & Thomson’s experiment and what was its relevance to memory processing?
PHASE 1 - target words presented with context words
PHASE 2 - recognition task
PHASE 3 - cued recall task using context words from Phase 1
- subjects recalled more words than they recognized
- concluded encoding specificity principle is an important factor in memory retrieval
What is the encoding specificity principle?
Learning (i.e. memory) is better when the context at encoding matches the context at retrieval
- Context dependent learning (ESP)
- State-dependent learning
What is declarative memory?
- explicit
- memories we know we have, retrieved and reflected on consciously
- facts (semantic) and events (episodic)
What are examples of explicit memory tasks?
- serial recall
- free recall
- cued recall
What are examples of implicit memory tasks?
- priming
- procedural tasks
- incidental
What is non-declarative memory?
- implicit
- memories in our subconscious,
- skills and habits, priming, simple classical conditioning, nonassociative learning
What is a mnemonic?
- active strategic learning device or method
What is the advantage of mnemonics?
- material is practiced repeatedly
- material is integrated into existing memory framework
- provides a way to retrieve material
What is the method of loci technique?
- envision a place you know intimately and can “search” procedurally
- place the items that you want to remember in this memory location
What is the peg word mnemonic?
- a prememorized set of words serves as a sequence of mental “pegs” onto which the to-be-remembered material can be “hung”
- relies on rhyming words + mental pictures
What three principles allow mnemonics to work so well?
- Structure for acquiring the information.
- Associations with visual images/rhymes/etc. and rehearsal creates durable and distinctive memories.
- Gives cues for recall.
What is metamemory?
- knowledge about one’s own memory, how it works or fails to work
- memory involves both monitoring (knowing how well we’re doing) and self-regulation (finding ways to improve memory)
What was Rundus’s memory experiment and what were the results?
- Rundus had people learn 20-item word lists
- compared the number of times the words were rehearsed aloud v. likelihood they were remembered
- found that people tend to remember front and back end of list (i.e. primacy and recency effect)
> former because it was repeated more often
> latter because it was recall from short-term memory
Describe the relearning task.
- Original learning: Learn list items to some accuracy criterion (i.e. get at least 35/40 words)
- Delay
- Learn the list a second time
- measuring how many times relearning had to occur a second time
i. e. measuring the “savings”
What is the self-reference effect?
- memory better for information that you relate to yourself
What is the generation effect?
- information you generate or create yourself is better remembered than information provided for you
- more likely to occur with free recall
What is the enactment effect?
- memory is better if you did it yourself as compared to watching someone else do it
What was Bower et. al’s memory experiment and what did it show about long-term memory?
Condition 1: Organized trees of words with list headers
Condition 2: Disorganized trees, headers had nothing to do with presented items
Higher accuracy in Condition 1 (near 100%) compared to Condition 2.
- shows that the structur of information as stored in memory (i.e. the organization) mattered to recall
What is the dual-coding hypothesis?
- non-abstract words can be encoded into the memory twice: once verbally and once visually
What was Thorndike’s theory of forgetting?
- decay theory
- memories fall under law of disuse (memories are strengthened if repeated and weakened if not)
What is the problem with decay theory of forgetting?
- time doesn’t cause forgetting but all the things that happen between learning and recall (i.e. interference)
- some things people just never seem to forget
What is memory consolidation?
- more permanent establishment of memories in neural architecture
What is the part-set cuing effect?
- people remember less if you give part of a memory set than if you just let them recall it by themselves
- theorized that it disrupts the retrieval plan that’s normally used
What is the HERA model?
Hemispheric Encoding/Retrieval Assymmetry model
- different parts of the brain are involved in different types of memory processing
- Left frontal lobe more likely to be involved in retrieval of semantic memories and encoding of episodic memories
- Right frontal lobe is more likely to be involved in the retrieval of episodic memories
What is rehearsal?
- deliberate recycling or practicing of information in the short-term store
