Long-term Memory Flashcards
What is long term memory?
Any information that is stored longer than 20 seconds
-Representations of personal experiences, facts, skills, emotions, and rules
Does long term memory have a duration or capacity?
Nope, no limits, and stores it for entire lifetime
How do we know that Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory aren’t the same thing?
The Serial Position Curve.
- different parts of the brain are activated when thinking of things that happened a long time ago than vs. now
- We find double dissociations in brain damage. Someone can lack short term memory functioning while still retaining long term, and vice versa
What is the Serial Position Curve?
Long list of words to remember, we see primacy and recency effect. If we wait 5 mins, recency effect will drop but you will still remember the first words
What is Consolidation?
Process of transforming fragile memories into more permanent memories
Muller and Pilzeckers test to show consolidation
gave two groups list of nonsyllables to remember. Group 1 learned List one and list two right after. Group two learned the lists with a gap in between.
Second group did better because the gap allowed time for consolidation
What is synaptic consolidation and who studied it?
Consolidation that happens at the level of the synapse, through this the connection between two neurons gets stronger. Activity at synapse causes chemical reactions
-Donald Hebb
Long term potentiation: enhanced firing of neurons that happens with repeated stimulation. When they fire at same time, strengthens connections between neurons, enhances responding
What is systems consolidation?
Consolidation at the level of networks of neurons. Takes longer than synaptic consolidation
What type of models fall under systems consolidation?
Standard model- remembering something involves multiple brain areas- depends on the hippocampus
Multiple trace model- hippocampus is involved in retrieving episodic memories specifically
Reactivation: in order to recall a memory, need to reactivate these brain areas. Hippocampus oversees this and is the director
Are synaptic and systems consolidation two separate things?
No, they are two things happening simultaneously at different levels
What is reconsolidation?
Process in which act of retrieving a memory makes it fragile again, weakens the memory, so then you have to do process of consolidation all over again
Is reconsolidation bad or good?
Good because events change and we learn new things, so we may need to alter our memory of things to adapt to our knew knowledge
Who coined the terms explicit and implicit memory and what are they?
Endel Tulving
Explicit: conscious recollection (declarative)
Implicit: unconscious recollection (non-declarative)
Within explicit memory, what two types of memory are there?
Semantic: facts, general information, meaning
Episodic: any event that you yourself have personally experienced
What is involved in implicit memory?
Procedural memory: memory for any action or cognitive skill
Classical Conditioning: change in behaviour as result of pairing neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus
Priming
What is Priming?
- Happens in implicit memory (without awareness)
- change in performance with a stimulus as a result of recent experience with the same or related stimuli
Priming Examples
“He it hides finds instantly” -told to make a sentence with this
One group is given rude words to make sentence
Other group is given polite words
Measure time it took for participant to interrupt researcher –> those who saw rude words, interrupted faster
One group is given words associated with being old
Other group young.
Group with old words took longer to walk to elevator after
More hostile and racist after seeing faces of African Americans
More likely to hire someone after holding a hot beverage rather than a cold one
What is the “levels of processing theory”?
Memory depends on the depth of processing, how information is encoded, not on the structure of memory-no distinction between short and long term in this theory of memory
-Deeper processing results in better encoding and retrieval than shallow processing
Levels of processing test by Craik and Tulving
Give someone a word, push key if:
1) All uppercase letters
2) Rhymes with ____
3) Fits into a given sentence
- -> Fitting the word into a sentence is deeper processing because have to know meaning of the word,
- deep processing takes longer
Two characteristics of levels processing theory?
1) Elaboration
- Maintenance rehearsal: simple repetition without consideration of meaning, helps to maintain info but is not effective in transferring to LTM
- Elaborative rehearsal: meaning based, make connections between item and something you know. This transfers to LTM better
2) Distinctiveness- making something more unique helps you remember it
Real life examples of levels of processing
1) Academically successful students more likely to pick a word to fill in blank that is related to rest of sentence
2) As we age, we forget people’s names but we remember the significance of that person (because that was deeper processing)
3) As we age we repeat stories a lot, but the significance of the story remains
Three ways you can use Levels of Processing
1) Reworking: put info into your own words
2) Method of loci: remember visual places then put information in those specific places (house map studying)
3) Imagery: create image of something you want to remember
Problems with Levels of Processing theory
- Confounding variable: when you process something deeply, you are working harder and putting more time into it.. maybe this is why you remember it better
- No definition of depth
What is autobiographical memory?
memory for the events of one’s life
What types of autobiographical memories are there?
Episodic and Semantic
-Recent memories usually episodic, further back you go, more memories are semantic
Multidimensional- contains facts, emotions, sensory info
What are usually autobiographical memories?
- Personal milestones
- Transitional points in life
- Emotional events
What is the reminiscence bump?
Memory bump: most of our memories come out of when we were between age 10-30
Why do most of our memories fall between age 10-30
Because this is when our sense of identity is formed, our life scripts occur in this time, and many of events during this time are unique