Memory Flashcards
What are the two opposing view of memory ?
1) Memory is like a storehouse or libary in which knowledge is deposited and preserved.
2) Memory is a process of reconstructing or generating ideas and knowledge to be in close correspondence to the original event (nothing is being stored).
What is the paired-associate learning paradigm (Mary Calkins)?
Ppt are shown a colour patch with a number. After several colour-number pairs, she would only show the colour patch and ask pot for the number.
—> found several effects such as the vividness effect (more vivid colours are better remembered) and the frequency effect (pairs that were shown more often are better remembered).
Why was Mary Calkins paired-associate learning paradigm important?
She created a paradigm that produced reproducable data and that was used on participants (at that time researchers were testing themselves due to the focus on introspection and the ability of psychophysics to address higher-level cognition).
How did Hermann Ebbinghaus contribute to early memory research?
He tested himself using nonsense syllables (CVC-consonant-vowel-consonant) and committed these to memory under various conditions. He varies the number of CVCs, the retention interval between the final CVC and the recall phase, the spacing between repetitions and so on.
He recorded the learning curve of memory using the method of saving.
He was also the first to describe the primacy and recency effect.
How did Plato’s and Aristotle’s opinion differ?
Plato assumed that a person is born with all the knowledge and that experience with the world simply reminds them of what they already know. Plato assumed that memory is the recollection of that knowledge.
Aristotle assumed that the reality is in the world and that through interacting with the world, knowledge is gained. This newly acquired knowledge relates to the relationships among different objects and ideas in nature. This relates back to the Laws of association: contiguity (in time and space), similarity, and contrast.
What did the empiricists (Locke, Hume, Berkeley) assume?
The empiricists argues that all knowledge comes from experience.
What did the atomists assume?
The atomists believed that knowledge can be broken down into very simple or elementary ideas.
(Behaviourists focused on the atoms of behaviour; connectionists and associationist perspectives added that the process of learning involves connecting simple ideas to complex ideas->through this process, new knowledge is generated).
What did the important early researcher of memory Alfred Binet from the intelligence game find?
Alfred Binet discovered the serial position effect, the acoustic inference effect, and spent much time looking into memory for meaningful material, such as sentences and prose.
What did the early researcher of memory Bartlett find?
Bartlett was interested in how information was remembered and transmitted in every day life. He developed a paradigm in which a number of people had to retell a story. He called this method of serial reproduction. Bartlett noticed that the story told by the 10th person differed greatly from the story told to the 1st person. In particular, changes that occur can be classified as flattening, sharpening, and rationalisation.
—>after the story is heard, the mind is changing the content to have it make sense for the person. This is then reproduced for the next person, who then adds it’s own changes and so on. According to Bartlett, memory is not like putting things in and out a box. Instead, learning involves USING EXISTING KNOWLEDGE to make sense of the world and remembering is (re-) constructing the original memory using the world knowledge. Using Plato’s wax tablet as a metaphor, this means that the tablet itself is changing the imprint.
Flattening- the person omits parts of the story that are atypical or not very common.
Sharpening- the person exaggerates typical aspects of a story such as something that fits in a Schema.
Rationalisation- the person rationalises the story to make sense when the story is a bit odd; they may add content to make the Story comprehensible.
