Memory Flashcards
Memory processes
- Encoding: Information enters (perception, interpretation)
- Storage (consolidation): formation memory traces/representation of an event
- Retrieval: what people call “remembering”
Types of memory
Conscious: declarative, explicit memory
Unconscious: nondeclarative memory (e.g. associative learning (conditioning), procedural memory (tying shoelaces), priming)
Declarative memory:
1. Noetic consciousness (Semantic Memory): the feeling of just knowing
2. Autonoetic consciousness (Episodic Memory): the feeling of remembering,
sense of self, sense of pastness (mental time travel)
Importance of cues
- Successful remembering (recall, cued recall, recognition)
- depends on the interplay between encoding and retrieval
Encoding specificity
- Cue is effective when it is specifically encoded
- During encoding: the more a cue matches circumstances during encoding, the greater the probability of recall
- Environmental details; interpretation (current concerns); (mood)state
- Mood congruency memory: selective encoding or retrieval of information with affective tone matching current affective state (depressed -> recall negative events)
- Mood (state) dependent memory: Increased likelihood of retrieving material that was encoded in particular mood states (manic money hiding)
- Ridout: happy faces less frequently recognized and sad faces more frequently recognized by depressed people (mood-congruent memory)
Transdiagnostic nature of selective memory
- Explicit test: bias in depression, eating disorder, substance disorder; related to
current concerns - Implicit memory: mixed evidence, distinction perceptual/conceptual processing
important? - Transfer appropriate processing: successful remembering depends on the overlap between processes at encoding and test
- Two types: Conceptual (meaning), perceptual (features)
Overgeneral Memory
Mark Williams
- pioneer of the over-generalized memory
Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT): 10 emotional cue words and connect these to memories, cue word “happy” -> specific or categoric (every Tuesday, sever) memory - Overgeneral memory: a relative inability to come up with memories of specific autobiographical events in response to cue words
- Specific memory: personally experienced event, tied to a particular place and time (< 24 hrs)
Does over-general memory cause depression?
- Setting: Hospital, groups: suicidal, general injuries, healthy controls, ATM with positive and negative cue words
- Suicidal group: more inappropriately general for the happy cue words
Third variable problem!
Findings on Overgeneral Autobiographical Memory
- Especially in depression and trauma-related disorders
- Not just an ephiphenomenon of depression
- > prognostic value: OGM at the start of therapy predicts unfavorable outcome, OGM before a stressful event predicts depressed symptoms - People with a past depression more OGM than never depressed
- Associated with impaired social problem solving
Role of memory processes in the persistence of disorders
Self-Memory System Model (Conway)
- Memory is not linear, it is reconstructed
- How autobiographical knowledge base is organized
Why does generative retrieval go wrong? (reason for over general memory)
CaR-FA-X (Williams):
- Capture and Rumination (circles of concern)
- Functional Avoidance (After trauma, for example, do not want to remember, repeating memory avoidance -> over general memory)
- (Poor) executive functioning
Types of retrieval
- Strategic retrieval: active search, slow, effortful, mental resources (↓)
- Associative retrieval: automatic, “Proustian” memory, cue driven memory (↑)
- Memory Experience = spreading of activation through the entire knowledge base
(Freudian) repression vs Functional Avoidance
- Freudian repression: Repression-like assumptions about memory for traumatic experiences, common in clinical theories and practice, engrained in the culture
- Functional avoidance (in CaR-FA-X model):
Persons who have been confronted with trauma or negative events learn that the retrieval of specific memories about these adversities reactivates the associated intense negative emotions, to avoid anticipated reactivation of affect they learn to abort hierarchical memory retrieval at the stage of over general memories
=> becomes a general strategy, does not remain specific to memories about
adversities
Forgetting trauma
Is it possible that someone completely forgets a trauma (trauma is not stored and can not be retrieved)?
-> biological brain factors, was it defined as sexual abuse, brain “old” enough to remember?
Is it possible that access to traumatic memory is blocked?
- Freudian repression (problematic)
functional account: banishing of threatening memories to the subconscious- out of self-protection and without awareness of doing so
Characteristics:
1. Selective forgetting to avoid psychological pain
2. Not under voluntary control
3. Repressed material stays intact
Assumption: Repressed memories cause other symptoms and behaviors
Dissociation: Assumption resemble repression
Problematic reasoning in clinicans
- Belief: indirect signs indicate sexual abuse in childhood, even if someone has no memory of abuse
- Assumption: abuse -> low self-esteem, so client with low self-esteem = abuse? NO, reversed reasoning, multifactorial, risk: confirmation bias (tunnel vision)
Alternative phenomena
- Forgetting-all-along effect (FIA) did disclose trauma earlier in life, but forgot
- Reinterpretation/Re-evaluation
- Avoid talking or thinking about it (conscious suppression)
- No need for a post-hoc Freudian repression explanation
