Lecture 6 Flashcards
What is the evidence for separate short-term and long-term stores
Neurological impairment. Clive Wearing - recognizes his wife and can still play the piano, however he cannot lay down any new memories.
Serial position effects, learning words and recalling them.
Levels of processing - Craik & Lockhart (1972).
Self-reference effect - Rogers, Kuiper & Kirker (1977)
Context dependence - Godden & Baddeley (1975)
How does information get into our long-term memory
What is declarative/explicit memory
Memory you can say… facts/events/experience. Conscious recollection - impaired in amnesiacs
What is non-declarative
Memory for behaviour, doesn’t involve conscious recollection. Preserved in amnesiacs
What is hyperthymensia
When someone has super memory - their minds retain everything they process - this is wrong
What is retrograde amnesia
Problems remembering events prior to the onset of amnesia, usually graded in nature
What is anterograde amnesia
Marked impairment in ability to remember new information learned after the onset of amnesia
What happens with amnesia
Slightly impaired short-term memory. Some preserved learning ability following amnesia’s onset
Name 4 causes of amnesia
Bilateral stroke. Closed head injury. Chronic alcohol abuse leading to a thiamine deficiency and Korsakoff’s syndrome. Bilateral damage to the hippocampus and adjacent regions of the medial temporal lobes
Name 2 types of amnesia
Retrograde amnesia and Anterograde amnesia
What is the primacy effect in terms of serial positions effects
First words learned are remembered = entered the long-term memory
What s the recency effect in terms of serial positions effects
Last words learned are remembered = in short-term memory still so easily recalled
How do you improve your ability to remember things
Depends on how you encode and how you try to retrieve
What did Ebbinghaus suggest about spacing your study
Spacing out your learning is more effective than cramming the night before
Describe the levels of processing theory
Making things meaningful makes them more memorable. Suggested that deeper levels of processing encourage better recall.
Describe the self-reference effect
Make sure material is meaningful to you.
Describe context dependency
Godden & Baddeley (1975), found participants recalled words better when they were in the same context at study and test. Thus you should learn materials in surroundings which are similar to those you will be tested in.
Describe Karpicke (2012) , retrieval-based learning
Suggests that the best way to learn something or recall something is to test yourself and retrieve it. There’s no point cramming revision in before an exam without practice getting it back out again.
Describe the reliability of long term memory
Describe Bartlett’s war of the ghost and the distortions that occured
He was interested in what happens when information is passed from one culture to another. Conventionalisation - canoes become boats. Transformation - changing detail that don’t make sense. Omission - missing out details. Commission - making up new details. Participants were not recalling the story verbatim, but reconstructing the details of the story according to their expectations and pre-existing schemata.
What can Bartlett’s work conclude
Long-term memory is not stored accurately. Memory is reconstructive - we try to make sense of new information we already know, and make an effort after meaning. ‘How does this bit of information make sense in terms of what we already know’. New information can become assimilated with schemas.
What are schemas
General knowledge structure used for understanding - frames or scripts that we can fit new information in.
Why are schemas useful
To help people understand incoming information. Categorise new instances and infer additional attributes & guide interpretation and attention.
Do schemas have to be accurate?
No. Everyone’s schemas are different, so we make inaccurate stereoptypes.
How do schema effect recall?
Anderson & Pichert (1978).
Discuss schemas and distorted memory
Bartlett (1932) - schemas structure our world knowledge and influence memory storage/retrieval.
Discuss weapon focus effect
The presence of a weapon causes eyewitnesses to fail to recall other details - witnesses are less likely to accurately identify a target when a weapon was involved. Probably due to attention being naturally drawn to the weapon at the expense of other aspects of the situation - participants spend more time looking at weapons than a non-weapon substitute
Discuss the influence of anxiety and stress on memory
deffenbacher et al.
McKinnon et al. (2014) study of passengers on a plane that nearly had to ditch into the sea with most details remembered fairly well
Discuss post-event distortion
Expectations, schema and the nature of event can distort what is encoded from the event, how that information is organised. Post-event things can affect how memory is recalled and the accuracy of the recalled information. They can lead people to recall something about the event that never happened.
Name an example of post-event distortion
Leading questions - Loftus
Discuss how when eyewitnesses talk it effect recall
We now that witnesses to a crime often discuss what they have seen with other witnesses. This leads to memory conformity for details
What is memory conformity
The extent to which a witness incorporates other witnesses statements
Discuss the effects of memory conformity in police
Officers who were allowed to confer with each other before writing their statements were more confident in what they remembered than those who don’t.
