Memory Flashcards
What is autobiographical memory?
The memory for the events of one’s life
What is consolidation?
Occurs after encoding believed to stabilize memory traces
What is the cue overload principle?
The more memories associated to a particular retrieval cue, the less effective the cue will be in retrieval of any one memory
What is distinctiveness?
Unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events
What is encoding?
The initial experience of perceiving and learning events
What is the encoding specificity principle?
A retrieval cue will be effective to the extent that information encoded from the cue overlaps or matches information in the engram or memory trace
What are engrams?
The change in the nervous system representing an event; also, memory trace
What is episodic memory?
Memory for events in a particular time and place
What is flashbulb memory?
Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and usually emotional) event
What are memory traces?
A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event
What is the misinformation effect?
When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as having been part of the original event
What are mnemonic devices?
A strategy for remembering large amounts of information, usually involving imaging events occurring on a journey or with some other set of memorized cues
What is recoding?
The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered
What is retrieval?
The process of accessing stored information
What is retroactive interference?
The phenomenon whereby events that occur after some particular event of interest will usually cause forgetting the original event
What is semantic memory?
The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have
What is storage?
The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and retrieval; the persistence of memory over time
What is sensory memory?
-Environmental information is registered
-Large capacity for information
-The duration is 1/4 to 3 seconds
What is the function of sensory?
Very briefly store sensory impressions so they overlap slightly with one another
What is the purpose of sensory memory?
Helps us perceive the world as continuous, rather than as a series of disconnected visual images or disjointed sounds
What is auditory sensory information?
Sometimes referred to as echoic memory, meaning a brief memory that is like an echo
Duration: 3 to 4 seconds
What is visual sensory information?
Sometimes referred as iconic memory
-It is the brief memory of an image, or icon
-Duration: Approximately 1/4 to 1/2 of a second
What is short-term memory?
-New information is transferred from a sensory memory
-Old information is retrieved from long-term memory
-Limited capacity for information
What is the duration of short-term memory?
Approximately 20 seconds
-Can be retrained longer through maintenance rehearsal
-Information loss may be due to decay or interference from new or competing information
What is proactive interference?
Previously learned material interferences with the new information
Ex: friend gets a new phone number you have difficulty learning the new number
What is retroactive interference?
The learning of new information interferences with recalling older information
Ex: you favorite musician releases a new song, you learn the words, afterwards you can’t remember the words of another song
What is maintenance rehearsal?
Increasing the amount you can remember in your mind
What is elaborate rehearsal?
Putting information into your words
What is chunking?
Separating lists of information into smaller groups
What is explicit memory (declarative memory)?
Memory with conscious recall
What is implicit memory (nondeclarative memory)?
Memory without conscious recall
What is episodic memory?
Events that you have experienced
What is semantic memory?
General knowledge and facts
What is procedural memory?
Motor skills, actions
What is autobiographical memory?
Memory of life events, the story of who you are
What are context effects?
The tendency to remember information more easily when the retrieval occurs in the same physical setting in which you originally learned the information
What is mood congruence?
Recall bias, if you are sad you tend to remember information that is sad
What is state-dependence?
If you are studied while drinking coffee, take the exams on coffee
What is tip-of-the-tongue?
Involved the sensation knowing that specific information is stored in long-term memory but being unable to retrieve it
What is the decay theory?
When a new memory is formed, it creates a distinct structural or chemical change in the brain, memory traces fade away over time as a matter of normal brain processes
What are challenges to the decay theory?
Some research has shown that information can be remembered decades after it was originally learned
What is absentmindedness?
Lapse in attention that results in memory failure
What is prospective memory failure?
when we form an intention to do something later, become engaged with various other tasks, and lose focus on the thing we originally intended to do.
What is memory misattribution?
Assigning a recollection of an idea to the wrong source
What is source memory?
Subtype of memory for when, where, and how memory was acquired
What is false recognition?
A feeling of familiarity about something that hasn’t been encountered before (Deja Vu)
What are causes of deja vu?
-When enough features in the current situations trigger situation trigger the sensation of matching features already contained in a previous feature
-Can be related to an encoding failure “Inattentional blindness”
-May occur when brain dysfunction is triggered by temporal lobe disruptions
What is Inattentional blindness?
The failure to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object
What is suggestibility?
Tendency to incorporate misleading information from an external source into personal feelings
What is false memory?
Created for actions that would have been consistent with a script
Feels real; often accompanied by all the emotional impact of a real memory
What is stage 1?
Environmental stimuli, sensory organs detect stimuli
What is stage 2?
Sensory memory, information initially sent to sensory memory, if attention is not directed to this information, it decays very fast
What is stage 3?
Short-term memory, if attention is directed to the information it is transferred to short-term memory, at this stage, information is active and available in seconds
What is stage 4?
Long-term memory, if information is rehearsed enough, it is transferred into long-term storage, at this point memories become permanent
What are HM and AJ?
HM couldn’t form new memories after having his hippocampus removed to help him stop from having seizures
AJ remembered everything like an autobiography
What is the Desse-Roediger-McDermott Procedure?
People have a false memory because the other words on the list were related to them
What is the recency effect?
Tendency to recall the last item
What is the con-restorff effect?
Easily recall an item that is qualitatively different or stands out from the other items
What happens when an newer memory interferes with an older memory?
Retroactive interference
What is necessary to move information from sensory memory to short-term memory?
Attention
What is rephrasing information in your own words an example of?
Elaborate rehearsal
