Memory II: Episodic memory Flashcards
What is episodic memory?
Memory of personal experiences that can be explicitly stated, consisting of autobiographical events and their context (what, when, who, where and why)
What is mental time travel also known as?
Chronesthesia
What is chronesthesia?
Capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future
What is reminiscence bump?
Superior memory for events that occurred in adolescence and early adulthood
What are flashbulb memories?
Emotionally significant or shocking
Explain photographic memory
Very little evidence until recently
Exceedingly rare but some individuals display SAM and HSAM.
What is SAM?
Superior autobiographical memory (SAM)
What is HSAM?
Highly superior autobiographical memory
Describe Parker, Cahill and McGaugh case study of AJ
Near perfect recall of events in her own life and historical events when given dates by the researchers - checked against her diaries.
Remembering dominates her life - non-stop, automatic, and uncontrollable
What did Leport et al 2012 find?
Identified 10 additional individuals with SAM
Perform at the same level as AJ for autobiographical memories but performed same as control on standard memory tasks
Performed MRI’s on all subjects - size and shape of temporal lobe (episodic memory) and caudate nucleus/basal ganglia (habits) differed
Who is Jill Price?
First person to have received a diagnosis of hyperthymesia - HSAM
Feels like she is living two lives at once - the past and the present simultaneously
Emotions associated with previous upsetting situations - with perfect recall of events
How is memory measured
Direct memory tests and indirect memory tests
Describe direct memory tests
Instructed encoding (participants instructed to memorise information) –> explicit retrieval (participants instructed to retrieve the information they memorised
What are indirect memory tests?
Incidental encoding (participants think about the information but are not instructed to memorise it) –> implicit retrieval (during testing, they are asked to complete an activity seemingly unrelated to memory
What is recall?
Generate information from memory through open ended exam questions, digit recall tasks
What is free recall?
Recall as many items as possible
What is serial recall?
Recall items in order of their presentation
What is cued recall?
Recall items with help of a cue ie. recall all odd digits first, then all even digits
What is the DV when using recall tasks?
Proportion of correctly recalled items
What is recognition in terms of direct memory tasks?
Verify whether information presented (‘probe’) matches memory through MCQ exam questions, word recognition tasks
What is the DV in recognition tasks?
Difference between correctly verified probes (hits) and wrongly accepted probes (false alarms)
Explain indirect memory tasks?
Uses two seemingly unrelated tasks
DV is the proportion of unintentionally but correctly retrieved items
Describe levels of processing in association with encoding effects
Craik and Tulving - 1975
Structural - is the word in capital letters
Phonemic - does the word rhyme
Category - is the word a type of fish
Encoding effects - deeper processing at encoding can aid memory
What is the spaced effect?
Massed practice - single, lengthy, study period
Distributed practice - multiple, short, study periods
Memory is generally better after distributed than after massed practice. The longer the spacing is, the better the memory is
What is the serial position effect?
Information encoded first (primacy) or last (recency) is recalled best
What are the two encoding-retrieval interactions?
Encoding specificity and transfer-appropriate processing
What is encoding specificity?
Matching context at encoding and retrieval aids episodic memory
What study supports encoding specificity?
Godden and Baddeley’s 1975 diver study
When encoded and retrieved in matching conditions (underwater, above water), retrieval best
What is transfer appropriate processing?
Matching processing at encoding and retrieval aids episodic memory
