Memory and Forgetting Flashcards
1
Q
What is double dissociation of working and long term memory in brain damage?
A
- amnesic syndrome (normal working memory but no/little ability to learn new facts/events (anterograde amnesia): e.g. HM had normal 7 digit memory span but couldn’t learn list of 8, normal recency effect but poor recall of earlier items
- short-term syndrome (selective impairments of working memory): e.g. Warrington and Shallice (1969) KF had poor immediate repetition of short word sequences but able to learn them if presented slowly
2
Q
Declarative versus non-declarative memories?
A
- anterograde amnesia patients have impaired ability to form new memories for events and facts
- can exhibit normal learning rates in acquisition of perceptual, problem-solving, practical skills
- can have impaired procedural (non-declarative) with unimpaired declarative, can be the result of brain damage
3
Q
What are the 2 types and definitions of declarative memories?
A
- episodic (memory for individual autobiographical experiences
- semantic (general and conceptual knowledge)
4
Q
What is the double dissociation between episodic and semantic memory?
A
- amnesic patients tend to have anterograde amnesia for both personal episodes and knowledge
- there’s some (KC or Clive Wearing) who can’t recall any personally experienced events but knowledge on maths, history, music, general is well-preserved
- those with semantic dementia show progressive loss of knowledge on the world, can be combined with autobiographical memory
5
Q
What did research on semantic dementia patients find in regards to episodic memories?
(Adlam et al, 2009)
A
- days 1 and 2 there were tests of semantic memory (object and sound knowledge)
- day 2 tests of memory on recent episodes
- patients had profound impairment when remembering semantic memories compared to control
6
Q
How is forgetting measured?
A
- recall tests: story/events recall, free recall of nameable items list, cued recall, serial recall
- recognition tests: ability to discriminate old from new items
7
Q
How is forgetting orderly?
A
- can be described by a simple mathematical function of the retention interval
- is linear, as time passes more is forgotten
8
Q
What does orderliness of forgetting suggest?
A
- there’s some inevitable decay process
- the process of loss from storage
9
Q
How can retrieval failure cause forgetting?
A
- information may be recalled later with further prompts/cues
- some memories show no loss over time
10
Q
How does longer retention not necessarily increase forgetting?
A
- no forgetting of school classmates over 30 years (Bahrick et al, 1975)
- flashbulb memories
- forgetting of former students is more likely from teachers due to seeing more, forgetting increases with interval
11
Q
How is interference tested against decay theories?
A
- normally retention interval is confounded with the number of other experiences accumulated during it
- to control the interval they alter experiences (more new learning of similar stuff vs less new learning of similar stuff)
- forgetting due to interference then recall should decrease with more exposure to similar stuff
12
Q
How is some forgetting clearly attributable to interference?
A
- participant must learn 10 arbitrary pairings
- learns list 1 then list 2 and given test on one of them
- recall of list 1 was worse when 2 was learned afterwards (retroactive interference)
- recall of 2 was worse when 1 had been learned before (proactive interference)
- retrieval is difficult when other similar material has been learned
13
Q
What factors influence retrieval?
A
- processing at encoding/acquisition
- consolidation after encoding
- interference from other memory traces at retrieval
- similarity of encoding and retrieval contexts
14
Q
What impact does organisation at acquisition have on memory?
A
- deliberate rote rehearsal increases later recall (rote memory is associated with fact or data, little emotion associated with it)
- primacy effect in free recall but mere rote rehearsal is an ineffective learning strategy
- incidental memory experiments show processing the meaning and actively organising the material are effective learning strategies
15
Q
What did Mandler (1967) find in organisation at acquisition?
A
- group 1 and 2 sorted words into 2-7 categories of their devising
- group 1 told to learn words, 2 wasn’t
- no difference in later recall test
- group 3 (placed cards into columns while trying to learn list) remembered less than groups 1 and 2
- organising the material produces effective acquisition, not effort to learn by itself
16
Q
What did Craik and Tulving (1975) find when looking at depth of processing at acquisition?
A
- showed series of unrelated words and gave 1 of 3 orienting tasks (upper/lower case, rhyme with…, fit in sentence)
- found they recognised more words when they had to fit word into sentence
- processing the meaning is better than processing surface form
17
Q
How do mnemonics demonstrate the power of appropriate elaboration at acquisition?
A
- learning a rhyme for sequence learning, rhyme item relates to the position of something in the sequence
- method of loci: memorising route of familiar building, at each point in the route an idea of something to mention is linked to image
18
Q
Why do mnemonics help recall?
A
- learning forms associations, retrieval activates the associations
- bind ideas to pre-established framework that organises them
- imagery encourages formation of rich nexus of associations between hook and concept attached to it
- forces exhaustive retrieval attempts
19
Q
What occurs in consolidation phase 1?
A
- after traumatic brain injury or ECT often retrograde memory loss for many minutes
- disruption of process of consolidation of memory trace in hippocampal/media temporal cortex system
- consolidation of novel traces suffers interference from further traces (sleep improves memory for material learned in last few hours, alcohol/barbiturates impair learning but improve it for material learned just before)
20
Q
What occurs in consolidation phase 2?
A
- over long timescale, recent LTM traces are more vulnerable to hippocampal damage
- amnesic patients with damage to hippocampus/medial temporal cortex show gradient of retrograde amnesia over years
- re-activation of traces makes them more robust, stored elsewhere in cortex and no longer dependent on hippocampus
21
Q
What is associative interference at retrieval?
A
- interference maximal when same stimulus items are used for each list
- competition between 2 associative links from the same retrieval cue
22
Q
What is the fan effect?
Lewis and Anderson, 1976
A
- retrieval as example of associative interference
- learn 0-4 new facts about each set of famous people
- later true/false RT measured for test statements
23
Q
How are the effects of associative interference mitigated?
A
- the fan effect seems paradoxical
- the facts learnt in the fan effect study were unrelated
- claimed that if facts are thematically related the fan effect is eliminated
- thematic relationship enables learner to form associations between separate facts using pre-existing knowledge schemas (provides multiple retrieval paths)
24
Q
How does reconstruction impact retrieval?
A
- we interpret what we see/hear via learned schemas (knowledge of typical patterns/event sequences)
- when remembering we recover fragmentary association from which we reconstruct the event/fact
- fill in the gaps using general knowledge schemas and fragmented episodic sources
25
Q
What are the effects of context and specificity on retrieval?
A
- information is more easily retrieved if tested in same context it was acquired in
- Godden and Baddeley (1975) found if they learnt and recalled on land it was better retrieved than it was in water, safe effect for other way around
- sensitivity of retrieval to congruence with the internal context at the time of learning is sometimes called state-dependent learning
- similar effects of induced sad and euphoric moods
- encoding-specificity is causal in the maintenance of depression: negative memories are more accessible in the depressed state, their retrieval reinforces the depression
26
Q
Why is it easy to create false memories?
A
- source amnesia is common: retrieval of information coupled with inability to remember it’s sources
- recall is constructive: fragments of actual experience recovered from memory are combined with other information in memory which has lost source
27
Q
What did the Loftus eye-witness testimony experiments find?
A
- mis-information implied by interrogation after event is incorporated into reconstruction of event
- if word smashed was used in questioning they estimated higher speed of the car then words such as collided or hit etc
