Long-Term Memory Flashcards
Serial Position Task
Experiments supporting the modal model:
• Participants hear a long series of words (e.g., 30)
• The position of an item in the presentation list is its serial position
• Task is to repeat back as many words as they can in any order; free-recall
procedure
Primacy effect • With free recall, participants are likely to remember the first few items in the list • Based in long-term memory • During list presentation, the first few items receive the most memory rehearsal and are transferred from WM to LTM
Recency effect • With free recall, participants are likely to remember the last few items in the list • Based in working memory • At the end of list presentation, the last few items are currently in working memory and are often the first items to be reported
Forms of Coding
Visual and auditory encoding in shortand long-term memory • Semantic encoding in short- and longterm memory • Wickens et al. (1976) • Interference was enhanced by the meanings of words
• Semantic encoding in long-term memory
• Recognition memory: identification of a previously encountered
stimulus
• Sachs (1967)
Explicit memory
Explicit Memory refers to facts and experiences that one can consciously know and declare.
Processed in Hippocampus, Facts-general knowledge and personally experienced events
Implicit Memory
•Implicit memory involves learning an action while the individual does not know or declare what she knows
without conscious recall, processed, in part, by cerebellum, skills-motor and cognitive, classical and operant conditioning effects
Mental Time Travel
Episodic involves mental time travel
•No guarantee of accuracy
• Semantic does not involve mental time travel
•General knowledge
• Episodic and semantic show a double dissociation
Repetition Priming
Presentation of one stimulus affects performance on that stimulus when
it is presented again
• Graf and coworkers (1985)
• Texted explicit memory and implicit memory
• Tested three groups
1. Amnesia patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome
2. Patients without amnesia being treated for alcoholism
3. Patients with amnesia who had no history of alcoholism
Priming: influenced subconsciously
Propaganda effect
participants are more likely to rate statements they may have read or heard before as being true, simply because they have been exposed to them before. This effect can occur even when the person is told that the statements are false when they first read or hear them. Propoganda effect involves implicit memory because it can operate even when people are not aware that they have heard or seen the statements before, or they may have even thought they were false when they first heard them.
Anterograde Amnesia
Anterograde amnesia is an inability to remember experiences after
the event that triggered the memory disruption.
Retrograde Amnesia
Retrograde amnesia is an inability to remember events that occurred
before the event that triggered the memory disruption.
Illusion of Truth
Illusion of Truth – an effect of implicit memory in which claims that
are familiar end up seeming more plausible.
•In one study demonstrating an illusion of truth,
participants first read a series of statements and
were told that some of them were false.
• “Gail Logan says that crocodiles sleep with their eyes
open.”
• Later, participants saw the sentences again and had
to judge whether they were true.
• Statements that were heard before – even those
that had been labeled as false – were later judged
to be more credible than sentences never heard
before.
Source Confusion
Source confusion – where a bit of information was learned or where a particular stimulus was last encountered is misremembered. • Eyewitness may select someone from a photo lineup based only on familiarity.
Processing Fluency
Processing fluency may underlie the feeling of
familiarity for stimuli that we have previously
encountered.
Types of memory tests recall recognition paired-associate learning lexical-decision tasks repetition priming word-stem completion
Revealed by direct memory testing, such as recall or recognition.
• Accompanied by the conviction that one is remembering a specific prior episode.
•Implicit memory
• Revealed by indirect memory testing, such as a priming task.
• No realization that one is being influenced by past experiences.
Word-stem:
Another example of repetition priming can be seen with word-stem completion.
• Participants are given a string of letters and are asked to produce a word beginning with this string.
• E.g., “CLA-”; responses: “clam, class, or clatter”
•If participants have encountered one of these
words recently, they are more likely to provide it as a response in this task, even if they do not
consciously remember seeing that word before.
Recognition memory: identification of a previously encountered
stimulus
Lexical-Decision:
For example, the lexical-decision task can be used in such an experiment to demonstrate repetition priming – more efficient processing for repeated presentation of the same stimulus.
• This is observed even if the participant does not remember seeing the item before.
Implicit vs Explicit
Explicit memory
• Revealed by direct memory testing, such as recall or
recognition.
• Accompanied by the conviction that one is remembering a specific prior episode.
- Implicit memory
- Revealed by indirect memory testing, such as a priming task.
- No realization that one is being influenced by past experiences.
Explicit • Episodic • Memory for specific events • Generic • Also called “semantic” memory • Refers to knowledge ‘about” things, with no particular “episode:” you know this is the color blue, but you have no memory of how or when you acquired that piece of information
- Implicit: memory that unconsciously influences behavior
- Memory for something without any awareness that we know it
- Repetition priming
- Procedural memory
- Classical conditioning
Collectively, finding data supporting both
dissociations in two groups of patients would
constitute a double dissociation.
