Memory (6) Flashcards
absentmindedness
The inattentive or shallow encoding of events.
amnesia
A deficit in long-term memory—resulting from disease, brain injury, or psychological trauma—in which the individual loses the ability to retrieve vast quantities of information.
anterograde amnesia
A condition in which people lose the ability to form new memories.
blocking
The temporary inability to remember something.
chunking
Organizing information into meaningful units to make it easier to remember.
consolidation
The gradual process of memory storage in the brain.
cryptomnesia
A type of misattribution that occurs when people think they have come up with a new idea yet have retrieved a stored idea and failed to attribute the idea to its proper source.
encoding
The process by which the perception of a stimulus or event gets transformed into a memory.
encoding specificity principle
The idea that any stimulus that is encoded along with an experience can later trigger a memory of the experience.
episodic memory
Memory for one’s past experiences that are identified by a time and place.
explicit memory
Memory that is consciously retrieved.
flashbulb memories
Vivid episodic memories for the circumstances in which people first learned of a surprising and consequential or emotionally arousing event.
implicit memory
Memory that is expressed through responses, actions, or reactions.
long-term memory
The storage of information that lasts from minutes to forever.
long-term potentiation (LTP)
Strengthening of a synaptic connection, making the postsynaptic neurons more easily activated by presynaptic neurons.
memory
The ability to store and retrieve information.
memory bias
The changing of memories over time so that they become consistent with current beliefs or attitudes.
mnemonics
Learning aids or strategies that improve recall through the use of retrieval cues.
persistence
The continual recurrence of unwanted memories.
priming
A facilitation in the response to a stimulus due to recent experience with that stimulus or a related stimulus.
proactive interference
Interference that occurs when prior information inhibits the ability to remember new information.
procedural memory
A type of implicit memory that involves skills and habits.
prospective memory
Remembering to do something at some future time.
reconsolidation
The re-storage of memory after retrieval.
retrieval cue
Any stimulus that promotes memory recall.
retrieval-induced forgetting
Impairment of the ability to recall an item in the future after retrieving a related item from long-term memory.
retroactive interference
Interference that occurs when new information inhibits the ability to remember old information.
retrograde amnesia
A condition in which people lose past memories, such as memories for events, facts, people, or even personal information.
schemas
Cognitive structures in long-term memory that help us perceive, organize, and understand information.
semantic memory
Memory for facts independent of personal experience.
sensory memory
A memory system that very briefly stores sensory information in close to its original sensory form.
serial position effect
The finding that the ability to recall items from a list depends on the order of presentation, such that items presented early or late in the list are remembered better than those in the middle.
source amnesia
A type of misattribution that occurs when people have a memory for an event but cannot remember where they encountered the information.
source misattribution
Memory distortion that occurs when people misremember the time, place, person, or circumstances involved with a memory.
suggestibility
The development of biased memories from misleading information.
working memory
A limited-capacity cognitive system that temporarily stores and manipulates information for current use.
