Memory Flashcards
What is the definition of learning?
A relatively permanent change in the reaction to a situation - Domjan 1998.
How does Pearce (2008) define learning?
Long lasting change in behaviour as a result of previous experience.
Why is the focus on behavior considered simplistic for humans?
Because it does not encompass the internal representation of relationships between events in the environment.
What is memory?
The mental process of acquiring and retaining info for later retrieval.
What are the three focuses of memory?
Encoding, storage, and retrieval.
What must happen for memory to be retrieved?
It must have been previously stored.
What must happen for memory to be stored?
It must have been previously encoded.
Who conducted the first study of memory and when?
Ebbinghaus conducted the first study of memory in 1885.
What did Ebbinghaus use in his memory studies?
Lists of CVC trigrams (meaningless consonant-vowel-consonant syllables).
What is the forgetting curve?
An exponential loss of information, with the sharpest decline in memory occurring in the first 20 minutes.
What does the Atkinson & Shiffrin model (1968) describe?
The Multi-Store Model (MSM) which includes sensory memory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM).
What is sensory memory?
Stimuli in the environment are detected and initially encoded in sensory memory.
What is the duration of STM?
Thought to be relatively brief, lasting seconds to minutes.
What is the role of rehearsal in STM?
Rehearsal increases the duration of STM and the likelihood that info will be transferred to LTM.
What is the serial position curve?
A phenomenon where people tend to remember the first and last items in a list better than the middle items.
What is the digit span test?
A test of immediate verbal recall from STM where participants repeat back a list of numbers.
What is chunking?
A strategy to fit more information into STM by grouping items together.
Who is Clive Wearing?
A case study of amnesia who struggles to maintain information in STM but can remember some LTM.
What is the role of the central executive in working memory?
It controls attention and processes information from the slave systems.
What is the phonological loop?
A subsystem of working memory that processes verbal information based on sounds.
What is the word length effect?
Recall is poorer for longer words because they are harder to rehearse.
What is boundary extension?
A phenomenon where people draw more of a scene than what was presented, adding details based on prior knowledge.
What are the two types of long-term memory?
Implicit and explicit memory.
What is implicit memory?
Unconscious memory that is hard to verbalize, such as procedural memory for skills.
What is explicit memory?
Conscious memory that can be verbalized, including declarative memories.
What is episodic memory?
Personal memory for events that happened in the past.
What is semantic memory?
Abstract knowledge about the world, such as facts and general knowledge.
What are the three distinct categories of long-term memory (LTM)?
The three distinct categories of LTM are episodic memory, semantic memory, and procedural memory.
What is episodic memory?
Episodic memory is the memory for personal events that happened in the past, allowing us to remember what, where, and when things happened.
What is semantic memory?
Semantic memory is the abstract knowledge about the world, including names of things, people, and places.
What is procedural memory?
Procedural memory is the memory of how to do things.
What did Loftus and Palmer’s 1974 experiment demonstrate about semantic memory?
It demonstrated that the wording of questions can bias eyewitness testimony, affecting the estimated speed of cars in a video based on the verbs used.
What was the finding of Bower et al. (1969) regarding structured hierarchies?
Participants presented with words in structured hierarchies remembered significantly more words than those with randomly inserted words.
What is the Collins and Quillian model of semantic memory?
It is a hierarchically structured model where concepts are stored as nodes connected by pathways, with properties associated with each concept.
What is a major flaw of the original Collins and Quillian model?
It cannot account for typicality effects, where some category members are more typical than others.
What is the spreading activation model?
The revised model of semantic memory where typical category members are connected via shorter links and atypical members via longer links.
What did Meyer and Schveneveldt’s experiment demonstrate?
It showed that activation spreads through connected nodes in memory, leading to faster reaction times for associated words.
What is episodic memory according to Tulving?
Episodic memory is the event engram, requiring the binding of separate presentations into a single unit, with the hippocampus being crucial for this binding.
What did Miller et al. (2020) find regarding hippocampal damage?
Participants with hippocampal damage recalled less episodic detail about events compared to controls, except for childhood memories.
What is the Levels of Processing theory?
It suggests that the strength of memory depends on the depth of processing during encoding, with deeper processing leading to stronger memory traces.
What does Consolidation Theory propose?
It proposes that memory is encoded in the brain as engrams formed through biological changes, with connections between neurons strengthening over time.
What did Jenkins & Dallenbach (1924) find about memory retention?
They found that memory performance was better after sleep than when awake, indicating that activity during the retention interval influences memory.
What are the stages of memory?
Memory processes can be split into three components: encoding, storage, and retrieval.
What is proactive interference?
Proactive interference occurs when previously learned information interferes with the memory of newer information.
What is retroactive interference?
Retroactive interference occurs when newly learned information interferes with the memory of previously learned information.
