Memory II: Episodic memory

Question 1

What is episodic memory?

Answer 1

Memory of personal experiences that can be explicitly stated, consisting of autobiographical events and their context (what, when, who, where and why)

Question 2

What is mental time travel also known as?

Answer 2

Chronesthesia

Question 3

What is chronesthesia?

Answer 3

Capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future

Question 4

What is reminiscence bump?

Answer 4

Superior memory for events that occurred in adolescence and early adulthood

Question 5

What are flashbulb memories?

Answer 5

Emotionally significant or shocking

Question 6

Explain photographic memory

Answer 6

Very little evidence until recently
Exceedingly rare but some individuals display SAM and HSAM.

Question 7

What is SAM?

Answer 7

Superior autobiographical memory (SAM)

Question 8

What is HSAM?

Answer 8

Highly superior autobiographical memory

Question 9

Describe Parker, Cahill and McGaugh case study of AJ

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What did Leport et al 2012 find?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Who is Jill Price?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

How is memory measured

Answer 12

Direct memory tests and indirect memory tests

Question 13

Describe direct memory tests

Answer 13

Instructed encoding (participants instructed to memorise information) –> explicit retrieval (participants instructed to retrieve the information they memorised

Question 14

What are indirect memory tests?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

What is recall?

Answer 15

Generate information from memory through open ended exam questions, digit recall tasks

Question 16

What is free recall?

Answer 16

Recall as many items as possible

Question 17

What is serial recall?

Answer 17

Recall items in order of their presentation

Question 18

What is cued recall?

Answer 18

Recall items with help of a cue ie. recall all odd digits first, then all even digits

Question 19

What is the DV when using recall tasks?

Answer 19

Proportion of correctly recalled items

Question 20

What is recognition in terms of direct memory tasks?

Answer 20

Verify whether information presented (‘probe’) matches memory through MCQ exam questions, word recognition tasks

Question 21

What is the DV in recognition tasks?

Answer 21

Difference between correctly verified probes (hits) and wrongly accepted probes (false alarms)

Question 22

Explain indirect memory tasks?

Answer 22

Uses two seemingly unrelated tasks
DV is the proportion of unintentionally but correctly retrieved items

Question 23

Describe levels of processing in association with encoding effects

Answer 23

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

Question 24

What is the spaced effect?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

What is the serial position effect?

Answer 25

Information encoded first (primacy) or last (recency) is recalled best

Question 26

What are the two encoding-retrieval interactions?

Answer 26

Encoding specificity and transfer-appropriate processing

Question 27

What is encoding specificity?

Answer 27

Matching context at encoding and retrieval aids episodic memory

Question 28

What study supports encoding specificity?

Answer 28

Godden and Baddeley’s 1975 diver study
When encoded and retrieved in matching conditions (underwater, above water), retrieval best

Question 29

What is transfer appropriate processing?

Answer 29

Matching processing at encoding and retrieval aids episodic memory