M1 - Memory Flashcards
Episodic Memory
Memory of ones personal life experiences - the what, where, when
Semantic Memory
Memory of concepts, ideas or facts - remembering that Paris is the capital of France
Autobiographical Memory
Memory of ones personal history
Emotional Memory
Memory associated with emotions
Encoding
The conversion of information to a form the brain can use
Storage
The creation of a trace for this information in the nervous system
Retrieval
An attempt to recover a memory trace
Hermann Ebbinghaus
First person to scientifically investigate memory, he did so using nonsense syllables to eliminate the possibility of elaborative encoding but this was heavily scrutinised as real life memory isn’t nonsense
Forgetting curve
A curve that shows how people forget items overtime
Peterson and Peterson (1959) study
Memory decays within 20 seconds if rehearsal is prevented
Miller (1956) study
Came up with the idea that we can remember 7 +/- 2 items at a time
Problems with the unitary model of memory
We can remember things for a lifetime, but we can also forget things in the short term so it cant be unitary or we would remember everything
Levels of explanation
Biological, Individual, Social, Cultural
Sensory Memory
Memory that is stored in the sensory system for between 0.3 and 3 seconds - the step before STM
H.M.
Had his medial temporal lobe removed
