Memory & Intelligence

Question 1

What is known as the “mental glue” that binds one moment to the next?

Answer 1

Memory

Question 2

What’s memory?

Answer 2

The process of using information that was obtained in the past in order to generate some cognitive function in the present

Question 3

Memory is any cognitive process that involves what 3 fundamental components (memory processing stages)?

Answer 3

• Encoding
• Storage
• Retrieval

Question 4

What’s encoding?

Answer 4

• The initial processing of information by the nervous system -> process of inputting info into memory
• Creating separate memory traces to represent experiences
• This may be in the form of a short-term transduction of a physical stimulus into a neural code or a structural change in the brain that encodes a fact or event about the world
• This process is the necessary predecessor of storage and retrieval -> if something isn’t encoded in the nervous system, it can never be remembered
• Here, a memory trace is formed as a hippocampal-cortical activity pattern
• Encoding is when information from the short term is transformed into the long term

Question 5

What’s storage?

Answer 5

• The retention of information in the nervous system beyond initial processing (retention of encoded information or encoded memory traces)
• Encoded information by the nervous system remains encoded in some form for a longer duration than immediate processing
• Here, via consolidation, a memory is transformed into a stable cortical pattern

Question 6

What’s retrieval?

Answer 6

• The access and use of stored information by the nervous system for some cognitive purpose
• A memory is recovered when a cue activates part of a stored memory trace
• That memory trace then enters conscious experience
• Here, part of a memory trace is activated by a cue that triggers pattern completion
• When LTM retrieves info from STM or WM

Question 7

What happens if any of the links in the chain of memory (encoding, storage, retrieval) is broken?

Answer 7

Memory can’t function

Question 8

What’s analogous to human memory?

Answer 8

Computer memory

Question 9

Why are human memory and computer memory analogous?

Answer 9

• Both human and computer memory require the same basic elements to function: a means of encoding, storing and retrieving information
• Like human memory, a failure at any stage of this process will lead to a memory “loss”

Question 10

What is one of the most important recent advances with regard to the emergence of a highly computer-connected human society?

Answer 10

The development of powerful search engines that enable successful (human-driven) retrieval of information from the “memory” of the internet

Question 11

Describe how encoding, storage and retrieval can be used when describing to a friend that you saw a mutual acquaintance at an event last week

Answer 11

• This requires initial encoding at the event, where your brain processed the light and images entering via your eyes’ retinas. This allows you to see your surroundings and mutual acquaintance
• This visual processing by the brain leads to a cascade of storage activities involving multiple cortical and subcortical brain regions that can store the information for both short and longer-term durations
• Finally, retrieval of that stored memory allows you to describe the event, activating your language and motor areas in order to produce the speech you use to tell your friend what you saw

Question 12

What are 2 basic dimensions of memory that we can measure with behavioral research?

Answer 12

1. We can measure how much information a memory system can hold (its capacity)
2. We can measure how long information remains in memory (its duration)
   - Considering and contrasting these 2 dimensions across different conditions has been sufficient for investigators to draw firm conclusions that there are different kinds of memory that exist in the human brain

Question 13

What’s the memory’s capacity?

Answer 13

• A measure of how much information a memory system can hold
• Some types of memory appear to have much higher capacity than others
• Ex: there’s a very limited amount of numbers or letters that you can hear & repeat verbatim -> a task that requires short-term memory (no such limit for the amount of more general info you can retain in long term memory)

Question 14

What’s the memory’s duration?

Answer 14

• A measure of how long information can be held in memory
• Some types of information are very quickly lost from memory while other information may be retained for a lifetime

Question 15

What’s one of the most important and influential concepts in the history of cognitive psychology?

Answer 15

The idea that memory isn’t one kind of function but that instead there are different types of memory

Question 16

Who was the first person to formally articulate the idea that there may be 2 kinds of memory stores and what were those 2 kinds of memory stores?

Answer 16

• William James
• One for information related to the current task or environment
• One for longer-term storage
• However, these were based on casual observation rather than experimental research

Question 17

What was the first substantial theoretical model of memory that attempted to account for experimental data?

Answer 17

Atkinson & Shiffrin’s (1968) multi-store/modal model of memory

Question 18

Describe Atkinson & Shiffrin’s (1968) multi-store/modal model of memory

Answer 18

• An influential model of human memory that posited 3 distinct memory stores: sensory, short-term, long-term
• All of these different memory stores work in conjunction with one another during everyday cognition
• This model proposed that each of these memory stores have their own duration and capacity
• The modal model was created in a new era of computer science
• It likens our processing of information to encoding and storing information into a computer
• AKA information processing model

Question 19

What’s the first stage in the modal model of memory?

Answer 19

Sensory memory

Question 20

What’s sensory memory?

Answer 20

• 1st and “temporary” stage in the modal model of memory
• Holds information before it can be processed
• Has a high capacity and short duration
• It briefly stores the info just encoded by the sensory organs
• The purpose of this form of memory is simply to hold the information in place before it can be selected, via attention, for further processing
• Only a fraction of the information stored in sensory memory ends up being selected by attention and passed along to short-term memory (STM)
• Under some conditions, sensory memory may actually be directly observed in action (ex: persistence of vision phenomena)
• Duration ~1 second
• Important for when we have to make quick decisions about what’s in our environment

Question 21

What’s short-term memory (STM)?

Answer 21

• 2nd stage of the modal model of memory
• Serves to hold processed information for rehearsal or to produce a behavior
• Has a much smaller capacity than sensory memory (magical number seven plus or minus two”) but a considerably longer duration (approx. 15-30 secs)
• Unlike sensory memory, STM is capable of producing a behavioral output, such as repeating a phone number someone has just told you or responding to a recall task
• STM has the capacity for reactivating information stored within it through a process called maintenance rehearsal
• Involves the prefrontal cortex
• Attended information moves from sensory to short term memory

Question 22

What’s maintenance rehearsal?

Answer 22

• The mental repetition of information in short-term memory that allows information to be regenerated in order to prolong its duration
• This process essentially reactivates the initial encoding
• Once information is rehearsed, it can restart the clock on the duration of the memory
• A technique for encoding information in long-term memory (LTM)
• Without any distractions, people are able to engage in maintenance rehearsal
• If you have absolutely nothing else to do, information can theoretically persist in STM for as long as you can keep rehearsing. However, in the real world, this isn’t possible
• Some research has found that such repetition can lead to a modest bump in retention in LTM
• However, simple repetition isn’t as effective as techniques in which we go beyond the simple repetition of the info in STM and consider the meaning of the info

Question 23

What’s long-term memory (LTM)?

Answer 23

• The final stage of the modal model of memory
• Serves as cold? storage of information for retrieval into short-term memory
• Because of the nature of how LTM is encoded, there’s no agreed-upon method for measuring its capacity, but it’s clear that only a small fraction of STM is encoded as LTM
• LTM comprises anything that’s remembered from beyond roughly 15-30 secs (duration of STM) up to a lifetime
• We know that at least some memories can last a lifetime but that many decay over time as well
• The duration and capacity of LTM have no quantified limit
• Theoretically LTM is infinite -> lifetime memory and no known capacity limit
• The lack of duration and capacity limits of LTM doesn’t mean that all of the information in STM makes its way to and is retained for a long period in LTM -> most of the info we encounter in our lives doesn’t seem to be stored in LTM, at least not for very long
• According to the modal model, STM items gradually transfer to LTM
• Unlike STM, LTM doesn’t seem to depend on continuous activation of the original activation used to encode the stored info

Question 24

There’s evidence that after the initial transduction of sensory information, it’s retained within our nervous system for how long?

Answer 24

A brief period of around 250 ms

Question 25

What’s the persistence of vision phenomenon?

Answer 25

• The retention of an image of an object or event for a brief period of time after it’s no longer present
• Here you can directly see information that entered your eyes moments ago
• Ex: when an object moves really fast and it looks spread out over space

Question 26

What’s an early example of the persistence of vision?

Answer 26

• A 19th Century toy called the thaumatrope
• A disk with different drawings on each side and when the disk was spun quickly, it would lead to the illusion of seeing both images at the same time

Question 27

Describe Sperling’s (1960) experiments on sensory memory

Answer 27

• He conducted a series of well-known experiments on sensory memory in which participants were presented with stimuli consisting of 3 rows of 4 letters (12 letters total) -> the display flashed for .05 seconds
• There was a whole-report condition and a partial-report condition

Question 28

Describe the whole-report condition of Sperling’s experiments on sensory memory

Answer 28

• In the whole-report condition, participants were flashed a grid of letters for a duration of .05 ms and were asked to report as many of the letters from the whole display as they could after the beep sound
• He found that participants typically reported the letters from one of the rows, suggesting that whichever row they happened to be paying attention to was available to report
• This ability to report the letters, a behavioral output, depends on those items making their way into STM
• This indicated that approx. 25% of the overall grid could be retained in STM (~4 items)

Question 29

Describe the partial-report condition of Sperling’s experiments on sensory memory

Answer 29

• In the partial-report condition, participants were given instructions to report only one specific row of letters in the grid based on the presentation of an auditory tone whose pitch indicated which row participants had to report (within .01 - 1 second, a high/medium/low tone signals which row to report)
• On critical trials, they were only provided with this tone after the letter array had flashed -> meaning that by the time participants were told which row to report, the stimulus was already gone
• In this condition, participants were shown a grid of letters for .05 seconds
• Participants had to rely on their memory of the grid to report a specific row

Question 30

Describe the findings for the partial-report condition of Sperling’s experiments on sensory memory

Answer 30

• He found that if the tone was presented very soon after the letter grid had disappeared (ex: 100 ms), participants were often able to report 75-80% of the letters in the row that was indicated
• This suggests participants could actually attend to that line of letters and call it into STM, even though the physical stimulus was no longer present
• He concluded that much more than 25% of the letter grid was still present in sensory memory and that, during that time, the participants could decide which of the rows to pay attention to in order to bring them into STM and report them
• He also found that as he increased the delay between when the grid disappeared and when the tone was presented, the capability to accurately report a specific row of letters decreased
• By the time the delay was 1 second, participants were no longer able to use the tone usefully and they only reported whichever row they happened to have been attending to
• Here the grid was no longer available in sensory memory and performance was equivalent to the whole-report condition (accuracy of approx. 25% of the grid)
• This study tells us that the sensory memory capacity is quite large, people could remember or recall a lot of info from sensory memory but only for a short period of time

Question 31

What did Sperling’s experiments on sensory memory suggest about the duration of sensory memory?

Answer 31

That the duration of sensory memory is approx. 1 second

Question 32

Describe the process of forgetting with sensory memories

Answer 32

Like other kind of memory, “forgetting” takes place over time, with better memory immediately after stimulus presentation and gradually fading away until nothing is left after a second

Question 33

What’s iconic memory?

Answer 33

• The visual form of sensory memory in which much of the visual input can be stored for a short period
• Sperling referred to this high-capacity/short-duration form of visual memory as iconic memory, based on the fact that the memory is something like a photographic image or icon

Question 34

What’s echoic memory?

Answer 34

• An auditory form of sensory memory in which much of the auditory input can be stored
• Sound-byte held for ~ 3 seconds
• Important for distinguishing between when 1 person is speaking and when another is speaking

Question 35

STM only holds information that has been selected by what for processing?

Answer 35

• Attention
• Attended information moves from sensory to short term memory

Question 36

How many items can STM hold in the auditory domain?

Answer 36

• It’s generally agreed that it can hold an average of 7 items
• Limited capacity: magical number 7 plus or minus two”
• Ex: remembering a list of names or numbers

Question 37

How many items can STM hold in the visual domain?

Answer 37

It’s agreed (not unanimously) that it can hold around 4 items

Question 38

How did Miller (1956) describe the surprisingly stable capacity of auditory STM?

Answer 38

• He presented participants with lists of letters, numbers or words and asked them to repeat the items in order
• He found that the average capacity to repeat the items without any errors was 7
• He also found that some people had capacities of as few as 5 items and as high as 9 items
• Miller referred to this capacity limit as “the magical number 7 plus or minus 2”

Question 39

Research suggests that when we read things for memorization, the information gets turned into what?

Answer 39

An auditory code

Question 40

Is auditory STM memory capacity fixed in someone’s brain or does it change throughout someone’s life?

Answer 40

• Research has shown that a person’s memory capacity remains stable across multiple tests & even over many years and thus appears to be a fixed feature of a person’s brain
• Miller’s idea of “the magical number 7 plus or minus 2”
• The plus or minus 2 represents the fact that some people have stable capacities that are higher than others and “magical number 7” is the average

Question 41

What’s the difference between “low capacity” and “high capacity” individuals for auditory STM memories?

Answer 41

• “Low capacity” individuals are only able to reliably repeat 5 items
• “High capacity” individuals are able to reliably report up to 9 items

Question 42

What did Miller note measuring capacity in terms of digits or letters (what he called “bits”) doesn’t account for?

Answer 42

He stated that it doesn’t capture the real capacity limits of STM

Question 43

What’s a chunk?

Answer 43

• Any combination of letters, numbers, or sounds that constitute a meaningful whole
• Grouping items together in a meaningful way so more information to be represented at one time
• It appears that what we can remember in STM are meaningful groups of information, what Miller referred to as a chunk
• The capacity to chunk information into larger units depends on engaging long-term memory, where patterns of previously encountered items (i.e. chunks) are stored
• Once a combination of items is matched to memory, it no longer needs to be represented as separate items but as a single chunk
• Chunking increases with knowledge

Question 44

Describe how measures of visual short-term memory (VSTM) use a change-detection task

Answer 44

• First, participants are shown a screen with several objects, such as colored squares
• This screen disappears and a new one is shown, which may be identical to the original or have some property changed
• When the number of items in the set is less than 4, performance is nearly perfect but after 4 items, it begins to decline rapidly with number of items in the set
• Using this kind of task, researchers have concluded that VSTM has a capacity of 3-5 items

Question 45

Describe visual stimuli chunking

Answer 45

• Some research has provided support for a kind of visual chunking, similar to that which takes place for auditory stimuli
• In the case of visual stimuli, people can remember 4 visual objects, even if each object has multiple features, such as a shape, a color and an orientation

Question 46

Describe how Luck and Vogel (1997) tested visual memory

Answer 46

• They used a paradigm reminiscent of change blindness, where Ps had to identify which square changed colors, in order to test visual memory
• They found that once the number of objects increased to greater than 5, memory performance rapidly dropped off

Question 47

Describe Inoue and Matsuzawa’s (2007) study on VSTM

Answer 47

• They provided chimpanzees and human participants with 5 digits that appeared on a screen from 210 ms up to 650 ms
• After that wait period, the digits disappeared and were replaced by blank squares
• The subject was tasked with touching the squares to reveal the digits in numerical order
• They found that on average, most humans’ memory performance for the 5 digits decreased when the presentation time dipped below 400 ms
• However, some chimpanzees were able to still store the 5 digits with only 200 ms exposure to the numbers

Question 48

The ability to chunk information can sometimes give the appearance of what

Answer 48

A super-memory

Question 49

What are mnemonists?

Answer 49

• People who are capable of memorizing long strings of letters or numbers
• Mnemonists aren’t thought to be skilled due to an enhanced memory capacity but rather due to a skilled ability to form large chunks
• Many mnemonists report that they don’t have an extraordinary memory, some even report having a bad memory in their everyday lives, but they employ memorization tricks that allow them to create consistently larger chunks

Question 50

Describe Chase and Simon’s (1973) chess memorization study

Answer 50

• They aimed to examine the effect of expertise in the visual domain, comparing chess experts and novices’ ability to memorize configurations of chess pieces on a chess board
• They found that chess experts were able to remember the positions of ~16 pieces while the novices could only remember ~4 (consistent with standard VSTM)
• This doesn’t mean that chess players have larger VSTM capacity
• The effect of expertise was only found to apply when the chess pieces consisted of real configurations that could occur in a chess game
• When the pieces were placed randomly in a configuration that could never occur, experts were no better than novices at recalling the configuration
• This suggests that experts’ greater capabilities in the first case likely depended on combining certain configurations of pieces together into meaningful chunks
• Experts use knowledge of moves to ‘chunk’ pieces together

Question 51

What did Chase and Simon (1973) demonstrate through their chess memorization study?

Answer 51

They demonstrated that attaching meaning to the information facilitates the storage of information

Question 52

Describe the Brown-Peterson task

Answer 52

• Consists of an STM task in which participants were told, on each experimental trial, to memorize 3 letters (i.e. a trigram)
• However, immediately after the presentation of the 3 letters, the participants were presented with a 2-digit number and had to begin counting backwards by 3’s out loud, a task that was intended to prevent rehearsal of the trigram
• After a certain duration of counting backward, participants had to report their memory of the trigram
• They found that, under these conditions, the memory of the trigram began to fade after a few seconds and by 15-18 seconds, participants showed little to no memory of the original trigram

Question 53

What did the Brown-Peterson task results lead Peterson and Peterson to conclude?

Answer 53

• That the duration of STM, in the absence of rehearsal, is ~15 secs
• They attributed their findings to decay and not interference, based on the fact that participants weren’t asked to remember anything else besides the letters on each trial

Question 54

What are the 2 hypothetical explanations for why memory fades with time?

Answer 54

• Decay models
• Interference
• Some researchers have argued that there’s no decay at all in the absence of interference

Question 55

Describe the decay models hypothetical explanation for why memory fades with time

Answer 55

• According to decay models, forgetting occurs simply because of the passage of time -> info will just fade away
• According to this view, memory may be thought of like a leaky bucket in which information trickles out

Question 56

Describe the interference hypothetical explanation for why memory fades with time

Answer 56

• Where new information that comes into memory serves to displace older information
• Forgetting from interfering information

Question 57

What are the 2 types of interference?

Answer 57

• Proactive interference
• Retroactive interference

Question 58

What’s proactive interference?

Answer 58

• ‘Forward in time’
• A phenomenon in which information encoded at an earlier point in time interferes with the ability to recall information encoded at a later time
• Learned information causes you to forget something that you learn in the future
• Previously learned material interferes with new information
• Ex: trouble learning a new phone number

Question 59

What’s retroactive interference?

Answer 59

• ‘Backward in time’
• A phenomenon in which information encoded at a later point in time interferes with the ability to recall information encoded at an earlier time
• Newer information causes you to forget something from the past
• Newly learned info interferes with old info
• Ex: trouble remembering your old phone number

Question 60

How has the reanalysis by Keppel and Underwood (1962) argued that interference may be at play in the Brown-Peterson task?

Answer 60

• First, the counting task requires a participant to remember each previous number, which could generate retroactive interference of the original trigram
• Also, there might be interference from long-term memory, specifically as participants performed multiple trials over the course of the experiment, it’s possible that some of the letters from previous trials could interfere (proactively) with the current trial
• They also found that in the first few trials, participants remembered the trigram for up to 15 secs with relatively high accuracy. Only on later trials, after the participants had seen many previous trigrams, did the decay over time begin to appear. Suggesting that both interference and decay are at work in the loss of memory in STM

Question 61

Describe Lewandowsky et al. (2004) study on the decay and interference theories of memory

Answer 61

• They had participants report remembered sequences of letters by responding on a computer keyboard
• They had participants type the sequence at varying speeds, so they could measure the effect of time on recall
• As they performed this memory task, they had to repeat an irrelevant word out loud, a technique called articulatory suppression
• They found that there was no effect of speed at which participants had to repeat the letters on their recall of the items
• They concluded that the passage of time alone, without interference, doesn’t cause decay in STM

Question 62

What’s articulatory suppression?

Answer 62

A technique used in verbal memory experiments, designed to block rehearsal without causing interference in STM, in which the participant repeats a task-irrelevant utterance out loud while trying to maintain other verbal items in memory

Question 63

Describe Baddeley’s (1974) working memory (WM) model

Answer 63

• In this model, STM is an active workspace where information could be mentally manipulated based on the current task
• This model proposed that STM isn’t a single unitary store but consists of 3 connected but distinct sub-units
• A critical aspect of WM is that it differentiates between visual and auditory stores -> this division is based on experimental research that suggests that these different modalities really are stored in terms of distinct sensory codes (there’s data that show that auditory memory really does seem to be encoded in terms of auditory properties)
• In the WM model, the visual and auditory buffers are separate from each other and therefore don’t interfere with one another
• WM has a limited capacity and duration
• Where incoming information can relate to prior knowledge and be manipulated
• Where information enters consciousness and awareness
• Critical for LTM formation

Question 64

What’s the visuo-spatial sketchpad?

Answer 64

• The visual component of the working-memory model that both holds visual information and allows for active manipulation and analysis of that information (manipulation -> ex: mentally rotating a remembered subject)
• Comprised of the visual cache and the inner scribe
• Related to visual semantics

Question 65

What’s the phonological loop?

Answer 65

• The auditory (or verbal) component of the working-memory model in which information can be repeated/rehearsed
• Similar to the original conception of STM
• Comprised of phonological store and articulatory control loop
• Related to language

Question 66

What’s the central executive?

Answer 66

• AKA gatekeeper
• Manages and maintains
• Component of the working-memory model that determines what information makes it into memory and toggles between the visual and auditory memory stores
• Component that’s completely novel to the WM model

Question 67

Describe Conrad (1964) study on “acoustic confusions”

Answer 67

• He found that when people had to memorize a list of letters, they had more difficulty doing so when the letters sounded more similar to one another (ex: “c”, “t”, “v”, “b”) than when they didn’t (ex: “c”, “s”, “r”, “m”, “l”)
• He referred to these errors as “acoustic confusion”

Question 68

Describe Brooks’ (1968) experiment on auditory-memory tasks and visual-memory tasks

Answer 68

• On each trial, participants had to either do an auditory-memory task or a visual-memory task
• The auditory-memory task consisted of hearing a sentence
• On auditory trials, participants had to then report whether each word in the sentence was a noun or not, in the order in which it appeared
• On visual trials, they had to mentally move along the vertices of the block letter and report whether each one was an “extreme” or not, meaning whether it was a point on an outside or inside corner of the letter
• Brooks employed 2 different ways of responding to these tasks
• In the verbal task, participants could verbally respond “yes” or “no” and in the visual task they would point to a “Y” or a “N” on a computer screen

Question 69

Describe Brooks’ (1968) findings for his experiment on auditory-memory tasks and visual-memory tasks

Answer 69

• He found that people did better on the task when they had to respond in a different modality than what they had to remember
• Ex: if they were doing the auditory-memory task, they performed better if they used the visual pointing task and vice-versa for the visual memory task
• These results suggest that visual and auditory memory are processed separately from one another and that they don’t interfere with one another, at least not as much as same-modality information does
• His experiment illustrates how subjects completed memory tasks primarily taxing either the phonological loop or visuo-spatial sketchpad and then used either an auditory or visual mode to respond

Question 70

The central executive in the working memory model plays what 2 roles?

Answer 70

1. Coordinating between the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad
2. Determining what information makes it into STM in the 1st place

Question 71

Recent research has suggested that individual differences in STM capacity (i.e. the fact that some people can remember more items than others) may be due to what?

Answer 71

To differences in the ability to filter out irrelevant information from memory

Question 72

Describe Vogel et al. (2005) study on memory capacity

Answer 72

• They gave participants a standard STM task
• Based on the participants’ performance, the researchers divided people into categories of high or low memory capacity
• Both groups then performed a specialized visual STM task
• On all trials, participants were first shown a cue to indicate which items would be relevant to remember
• On standard trials, participants only had to remember the left or right side of the memory display
• Once that slide disappeared, a test display soon appeared and participants were required to indicate whether the relevant items had changed from the memory display
• On some trials, they also presented blue rectangles along with the red ones; participants were told to ignore these and only remember the red rectangles
• After the delay period, when participants would have been trying to hold the information in memory, Vogel et al. used an EEG to measure an electrical event-related potential (ERP) response known to be active during STM activation
• They then compared the ERP responses of the high and low-capacity memory participants

Question 73

Describe the findings for Vogel et al. (2005) study on memory capacity

Answer 73

• They found that the ERP response was similar for the 2 groups of participants when only the red rectangles were present
• However, when the blue distractor rectangles were present, low-capacity individuals showed a stronger ERP response than high-capacity individuals
• They suggested that this means that low-capacity individuals couldn’t successfully filter out the blue rectangles, even though they weren’t relevant to the task
• This suggests that these individuals’ central executive may not be as effective as those with higher capacity

Question 74

What did Vogel et al. (2005) findings for their study on memory capacity suggest?

Answer 74

Their findings suggested that a critical role of the central executive is to make sure irrelevant and unwanted information doesn’t enter into memory because it could interfere with the information the system actually wants to retain

Question 75

Some researchers believe that deficits in memory associated with aging may be due to what?

Answer 75

• To an inability to filter out unwanted information from the working memory
• Hence, age-related memory decline may be due to a decline in the central executive rather than the memory stores themselves

Question 76

Describe examples of phenomena that challenged the idea that the visual and auditory memory components are completely separate from each other and other system such as LTM

Answer 76

• People can remember many more items when they form a coherent story, a phenomenon related to Miller’s “chunking”
• This indicates that the phonological loop must somehow interact with LTM
• Also, conscious experience appears to bind together different modalities
• Ex: we remember a person speaking with a given voice

Question 77

What component to his WM model did Baddley add, following the several lines of research that challenged the idea that the visual and auditory memory components are completely separate from each other and other system such as LTM

Answer 77

Based on these and several other considerations, he updated his WM model with a new component called the episodic buffer

Question 78

What’s the episodic buffer?

Answer 78

• A component proposed as a revision to the original WM model that can combine information from across different sources including the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad as well as long-term memory (integrates info from STM and LTM)
• This component is seen as a separate, time-limited, memory store that can combine information from across different sources
• The buffer is controlled by the central executive and is assumed to lead to conscious awareness of time-based, multi-sensory memories
• Related to episodic LTM

Question 79

Differences in working-memory capacity may be predictive of (& more controversially causally related to) what?

Answer 79

• Other measures of cognition including general intelligence
• Conway (2003) reviewed research on measures of general intelligence and found that they were strongly correlated

Question 80

What have people linked the correlation between working-memory capacity and general intelligence to?

Answer 80

Some have suggested that this is likely due to developmental factors and children with greater memory spans may be able to increase other areas of cognition

Question 81

Describe the study by Li & Geary (2017) on the linking of the correlation between working-memory capacity and general intelligence to developmental factors

Answer 81

• They presented evidence for this for the visuo-spatial working memory capacity
• They found that 1st graders’ skills in completing tasks dependent on visual working memory were predictive of their mathematical abilities in 5th grade

Question 82

Describe the findings of Kali (2007) on the linking of the correlation between working-memory capacity and general intelligence to developmental factors

Answer 82

They found that assessments of memory span administered to children at an early age can predict other measures of reasoning ability later in life

Question 83

Give examples of findings on the relationship between working memory capacity and general reasoning and intelligence

Answer 83

• Gui et al. (2018) found that short-term musical training can lead to selective improvements in WM ability in young children
• Training to play an instrument for 6 weeks has been shown to improve working memory capacity for maintaining digits

Question 84

What’s the “brain training” industry?

Answer 84

• Such training often consists of repeated participation in increasingly difficult WM tasks with the idea that if people can increase their WM capacity, this may enhance other areas of cognition as well
• While it’s clear that performance on specific WM tasks improves with training, the evidence is much more unclear as to whether there’s an effect on any other measure of memory or general intelligence
• To date, the evidence suggests that a “buyer beware” approach is warranted

Question 85

Describe what the working memory looks like at the neural level and what brain areas are linked to it

Answer 85

• It consists of the initial perceptual encoding of information continuing on for as long as the information is being actively remembered
• Working memory happens all over the brain
• Ex: visual working memory engages visual regions of the brain, such as the occipital lobe, while auditory working memory engages auditory areas, such as the temporal lobe
• There’s no one place we can point to in the brain that’s responsible for working memory
• While working memory clearly involves modality-specific regions, the frontal lobes seem to play a particularly important part

Question 86

Describe Funahashi et al. (1989) study on the brain mechanisms involved in working-memory

Answer 86

• They identified a neuron in the pre-frontal cortex that responded when a square was presented somewhere in the visual field
• They presented this square to the monkey and then made it disappear, followed by a delay period
• After the delay period was over, they gave the monkey a cue to move its eyes to where the square had previously been (requiring that the monkey hold the location in memory)
• They found that the neuron that had responded to the original presentation of the square went into overdrive during the delay period when the monkey had to remember its location
• However, if the monkey wasn’t given the memory task, this response disappeared

Question 87

Describe Schon et al. (2008) study on the brain mechanisms involved in working-memory

Answer 87

• They used a delayed-match-to-sample task in human subjects
• Using fMRI, they found increased activity in the prefrontal cortex during the delay phase, suggesting an important role of the frontal cortex in short-term/working memory

Question 88

What the delayed-match-to-sample task?

Answer 88

• Task designed to test visual short-term memory
• Participants are shown an image, followed by a delay and then a second image and are tasked with determining whether the 2 images are the same or different

Question 89

Describe Moore et al. (2012) findings for their study on the brain mechanisms involved in working-memory

Answer 89

• They found that when regions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are damaged, patients show impairment on tasks similar to the delayed matching tasks, adding more direct evidence for the role of this brain region in short-term/working memory
• Because the frontal lobes are typically associated with executive functions, it’s possible that this area is the site of the central executive, which serves as the “master” over the other cortical areas as they retain perceptual information

Question 90

What did Stephen Hawking define intelligence as?

Answer 90

As the ability to adapt to change

Question 91

How did Albert Einstein explain intelligence?

Answer 91

“The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination”

Question 92

What’s intelligence?

Answer 92

• The ability to generalize memories (Memory); flexibly use knowledge (Concepts) to solve new problems (Problem solving)
• Ex: I know how to fold a burrito, but how do I swaddle a baby? -> apply burrito folding techniques to swaddling
• Applying the knowledge from other lessons to solve new things
• Thinking and reasoning abilities beyond algorithms

Question 93

What are the main characteristics of intelligence?

Answer 93

Intelligence relates to efficient and appropriate reasoning:
- Learning from experience
- Adapting to the environment
- Acting purposefully

It varies across individuals
- IQ tests have been designed to measure general intelligence differences
- Other factors underlie differences on these tests aside from “intelligence”

Question 94

What’s ChatGPT?

Answer 94

• Form of AI
• ChaptGPT solves ambiguous decision-making and reasoning tasks similarly to humans
• ChatGPT uses machine learning to produce content and interact with individuals
• ChaGPT is a set of algorithms that you feed a bunch of words to and it’ll determine what comes next

Question 95

What problem-solving error does chatGPT fall for, just like humans?

Answer 95

• The conjunction fallacy
• Study where they gave ChatGPT a bunch of decision-making problems and asked it to solve them
• Gave it the Linda problem which highlights the conjunction fallacy
  Ex: 1.Linda is a bank teller.
  2.Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
• ChatGPT just like humans engaged in the conjunction fallacy when trying to solve the Linda problem

Question 96

What can artificial intelligence do?

Answer 96

• Automated tasks
• Routine activities
• Create content (ex: create Bizarre songs and co-create movies with AI)

Question 97

What can artificial intelligence not do?

Answer 97

• Editing: avoid repetition in content
• Write accurate news articles (provides ‘fake news’)
• Can’t provide opinions or advice
• Can’t create original puzzles

Question 98

What’s psychometrics?

Answer 98

The study of psychological assessment

Question 99

How do we measure intelligence?

Answer 99

With a standard test

Question 100

What are the characteristics of a standard test?

Answer 100

• Standardization: test scores are compared to pre-tested ‘standardization’ or
  ‘norm’ groups. A person’s score on some test is calculated by comparing it to a group of people who took the test before
• Normal distribution or curve: a symmetrical bell-shaped curve that describes test score distribution. The scores on these tests are thought to follow a normal distribution

Question 101

Describe IQ tests scores

Answer 101

• IQ scores are said to be normally distributed across the population
• IQ tests tend to be overused
• Average score of 100
• SD = 15
• Within 1 SD of the mean, IQ scores between 85 and 115 (68% of people)
• Within 2 SD of the mean, IQ scores between 70 and 130 (95% of people)
• The top 2% = scores above 130
• Bottom 2% = scores below 70
• Top 0.1% = scores above 145
• Below 0.1% = scores below 55

Question 102

What’s the reliability of IQ test scores?

Answer 102

• IQ scores have high test-retest reliability
• Scores are the same across testing
• Evidence: Score at age 6 correlates with scores at age 18

Question 103

What’s reliability?

Answer 103

A consistency in scores from one assessment to the other (across instances of testing)

Question 104

What’s test-retest reliability?

Answer 104

When you can retake an assessment at different times and get the scores

Question 105

What’s the validity of IQ test scores?

Answer 105

• IQ scores should have predictive validity if they predict performance on something requiring intelligence
• These tests predict something that requires intelligence (academic achievements and job performance)
• Correlations of 0.5 with job performance
• But what is considered intelligence will vary across context and culture (IQ tests might not be valid everywhere in the world)

Question 106

What’s validity?

Answer 106

The test is measuring what it is intended to measure

Question 107

Who and what marked the start of intelligence testing?

Answer 107

• Francis Galton (1822 to 1911)
• Developed intelligence tests, where he looked at reaction times speed
• He was really interested in differences in individuals and their ability to complete cognitive tasks
• His purpose was questionable
• Founded the eugenics movement
• Racially-motivated view of how to
  “improve” society
• A dark start to intelligence testing

Question 108

Describe Alfred Binet’s contribution to intelligence testing

Answer 108

• Developed a test in response to a request from the French government
• Purpose to identify children that needed special education in school
• Binet viewed intelligence as important for: practical life, adapting to circumstances, judging and reasoning well
• Binet thought his test only measured academic output and not intelligence

Question 109

Describe the Simon-Binet test

Answer 109

• 30 questions of increasing difficulty (easy
  -> hard)
• Easy items: Follow a light beam
• Difficult items: Describe abstract words (could only be answered by children who had superior intelligence)
• Some questionable items (had to judge how attractive certain faces were)
• Standardization: a child’s mental age was calculated by comparing the score /30 to the score of a group of children the same chronological age
• This test was too complex

Question 110

Describe the Stanford-Binet test

Answer 110

• Based on the Simon-Binet test
• He adapted this test to the American culture and the American school curriculum
• Turmin saw intelligence as the ability to identify concepts and grasp the significance of these concepts
• The questions progressively got more difficult to tap into adult intelligence
• Ex: Item for a 4yr old
  “Repeat the following numbers: 3 6 7”
• Ex: Item for an adult
  “Describe the difference between misery and poverty”
• Used IQ RATIO scores: (Mental Age (MA) / Chronological Age (CA)) x 100
• If MA > CA, ability is above average of peers (gifted)
• If MA < CA, ability is below average of peers (delayed)
• This test used the IQ RATIO test which gave rise to the IQ score

Question 111

Describe Wechsler Tests

Answer 111

• People began to question if the tests presented before accurately measured intelligence
• Weschler developed a test with separate intelligence scales for children and adults and separate scales to measure different types of intelligence
• Wechsler intelligence scale for children (WISC) and Wechsler adult intelligence scale (WAIS)
• He stated that we can’t use the same test to measure both adults and children
• He thought there were differences in verbal and performance tests in intelligence
• With each of these tests, he developed sub-scales to test for intelligence

Question 112

Describe the breakdown of Wechsler Tests

Answer 112

There’s a Full-scale IQ (FSIQ) that’s broken down into 2 subunits: Verbal IQ (VIQ) and Performance IQ (PIQ)

Question 113

Describe what kind of tasks are given with Weschler’s Verbal IQ test

Answer 113

• Similarities task: explain what 2 words have in common
• Vocabulary task: define words

Question 114

Describe what kind of tasks are given with Weschler’s Performance IQ test

Answer 114

• Measures non-verbal intelligence
• Picture completion task: determine what is missing from a picture
• Picture arrangement task: organize pictures in a logical order

Question 115

Describe Raven’s progressive matrices

Answer 115

• Ps are shown patterns with a missing section and asked to determine the missing piece from a set of options
• Non-verbal assessment
• Relatively free from linguistic influences and thus free from cultural biases

Question 116

What’s an issue with Wechsler’s Tests?

Answer 116

Problem with Wechsler’s scales and more particularly the verbal scale is that they are heavily culturally biased due to linguistic influences

Question 117

What does working memory (WM) capacity share at least half of its statistical variance with?

Answer 117

• “General intelligence”
• Meaning that if you give a test of intelligence and a test of working memory, they’ll be highly correlated
• Hence, WM can predict intelligent behaviors, including reasoning and adaptability
• WM can also predict job and academic performance/intelligence
• Some researchers think intelligence is simply working memory

Question 118

Describe the relationship between genetics and IQ scores

Answer 118

• Some have found that genetics is a strong predictor of intelligence
• Studies conducted on the similarities of fraternal or identical twins raised in the same or different environment in IQ scores
• Identical twins raised in the same environment have more similar IQ scores
• This is evidence that some aspect of these scores is related to genetics
• Shared genetics is a better predictor of IQ correlations among twins than the environment

Question 119

What are factors about IQ scores that are important to keep in mind?

Answer 119

• These are helpful to identify children who need help but can be used to exclude marginalized communities
• There are factors that can affect performance (ex: socioeconomics, gender, culture)

Question 120

What are some factors that can affect performance on IQ tests?

Answer 120

• Socioeconomics
• Gender differences in self-estimated intelligence (people who identify as male have higher estimates of IQ as opposed to those who identify as female)
• Culture: Familiarity with task and stimuli can affect performance
• There’s a consequence when you take these tests on how you feel about taking these tests

Question 121

What’s the Flynn effect?

Answer 121

• Explains IQ variations
• This effect highlights that there has been a steady rise in IQ scores
• Ex: Americans’ IQ scores increased 3 points per decade over 100 years
• Have people gotten smarter or is there an aspect in the environment that are affecting these shifts?

Question 122

What’s are some explanations for why the Flynn effect occurs?

Answer 122

Education:
- As time goes on, there’s an increase in schooling and opportunities
- As schooling and opportunities increase, there’s an increase in IQ tests scores
Complexity:
- Over time, more focus on abstract thinking and critical thinking, especially in wealthier countries
Health:
- There’s a greater focus on health, which improves brain function and enhances IQ test scores
- A healthier diet and/or lifestyle leads to better brain health
- If you use diets and exercise, this can improve neuronal functioning in the brain which affects cognition and ultimately affects IQ scores

Question 123

What are the main opposing views for theories of intelligence?

Answer 123

• Seeing intelligence as a single entity (what’s driving IQ tests)
• Seeing intelligence as many things (ex: savant syndrome)

Question 124

Describe Spearman’s two factor theory

Answer 124

• Found that all early tests of cognitive abilities correlated with one another
• Suggested that higher correlations are driven by a common reliance on a single factor
• This is general intelligence (g)
• Suggests that we have a general intelligence and specific abilities
• General Intelligence (g) varies across people but is stable within a person -> genetic basis
• Specific abilities (s) are performance on tasks and are affected by education and environment, and vary within a person (ex: like school subjects)
• Specific abilities can vary across a person and across individuals -> not stable like g
• g is related to genetics, S is related to education or opportunity

Question 125

What’s the Cattell and Horn Theory

Answer 125

Posits that there are 2 forms of intelligence: fluid intelligence (similar to Spearman’s g) and crystallized intelligence (similar to Spearman’s s)

Question 126

Describe the fluid intelligence of the Cattell and Horn theory

Answer 126

• Similar to Spearman’s g
• The capacity to acquire new knowledge and engage in flexible thinking
• Considered to be important for all forms of intelligence
• Tests of reasoning
• Genetic basis
• Affected by age (gets worse with age)

Question 127

Describe the crystallized intelligence of the Cattell and Horn theory

Answer 127

• Similar to Spearman’s s
• Knowledge and learning that has been acquired throughout the lifetime
• Stored information
• Vocabulary, math
• Affected by personality, education, culture
• Motivated learning
• Gets stable as we get older

Question 128

What’s the Savant Syndrome?

Answer 128

• A person who is otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific ability
• Ex: artistic skills or mathematical ability
• Can be congenital or acquired (new skills after brain injury)
• Suggests there are different forms of intelligence, supported by different cognitive processes

Question 129

What are acquired savants?

Answer 129

• People who acquire specific skills from brain injury
• Ex: Case of Tony Cicoria -> after being struck by lightening, a man developed exceptional piano skills or case of Orlando Serell -> ability to perform calendar calculations
• To compensate for damage, other areas of the brain will be ‘rewired’, which induces savant-like capabilities
• Researchers think acquired savants are due to neuroplasticity

Question 130

What does Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences demonstrate?

Answer 130

This theory suggests that everyone has certain strengths and weaknesses in their intelligence

Question 131

What’s Sternberg’s theory of intelligence?

Answer 131

• A process view that states that intelligence is not a system or structure
• Intelligence is the capacity to automatize information processes and use them in appropriate settings
• This can vary
• Includes his Triarchic theory of intelligence

Question 132

What are Sternberg’s intellectual components?

Answer 132

1. Meta-component: Higher order processes for planning and decision making. Making decisions about how to solve a problem and about what we wanna do in a certain situation
2. Performance component: Processes for executing a task
3. Knowledge acquisition component: Processes to learn and store new information
   - These components are thought to be universal and that you can incorporate these with different forms of intelligence

Question 133

What are the types of intelligence in Sternberg’s Triarchic theory of intelligence?

Answer 133

• Analytic intelligence
• Practical intelligence
• Creative intelligence

Question 134

What’s Sternberg’s analytic intelligence?

Answer 134

• Mental steps or “components” used to solve problems
• Analytics is related to Spearman’s “g”
• People with analytic intelligence are good at solving problems

Question 135

What’s Sternberg’s practical intelligence?

Answer 135

• Ability to read and adapt to the contexts of everyday life
• The ability to apply information to daily ambiguous situations
• Emphasizes contextual information
• People with this intelligence are able to adjust information to fit the context
• Ex: delivery persons who can intelligently navigate routes when
  there are road-blocks

Question 136

What’s Sternberg’s creative intelligence?

Answer 136

• Use of experience in ways that foster insight
• The ability to think in new ways and apply information flexibly
• Emphasizes experiential information
• Linked to insight problem solving
  -> since this form of intelligence involves seeing things in new ways
• Often people that are high in this form of intelligence can lead to higher links between things
• Stresses novelty

Question 137

What’s the link between emotion and thinking?

Answer 137

• Emotion affects how we process information and think
• We use thinking for our ability to see and manage our emotions
• A positive mood leads to broad thinking
• A positive mood promotes a general “assimilative thinking” style, and leads to greater susceptibility to misinformation
• A negative mood promotes specific “focused thinking” style, and lowers susceptibility to misinformation
• Global processing leads to happier moods

Question 138

Describe how a different moods affect our thinking

Answer 138

• When in a positive mood, people think about information in a more broad way
• In a study by Forgas et al. (2005) people were given misleading and non misleading information in various moods
• A positive mood promotes a general “assimilative thinking” style, and leads to greater susceptibility to misinformation
• This suggests that our positive mood will increase our tendency to make false recognitions of misleading information
• A negative mood promotes specific “focused thinking” style, and lowers susceptibility to misinformation

Question 139

Describe the effect of global vs local processing on our moods

Answer 139

• Study by Chen et al. (2019) where people had to focus on an image, either the full image or just a local area
• They tried to engage in global-broad processing or global-focal processing
• They then had people rate how happy they felt
• Global processing led to happier moods (people rated they were happier in this condition)

Question 140

What’s considered to be the final destination of our memory system?

Answer 140

• Long-term memory
• It’s also the final stage in the modal model of memory

Question 141

How much of the information we process reaches our long-term memory?

Answer 141

• Only a minority
• But what does may be retained indefinitely

Question 142

An important process of memory, as suggested by the modal model of memory is what?

Answer 142

• Retrieval
• We need to be able to access information in long-term memory for several daily processes
• Ex: when planning for your evening or the next day -> the ability to do this depends on you accessing previous memories from your long-term stores

Question 143

Once the duration of STM has passed, what happens to the auditory information that was stored in the short-term phonological loop?

Answer 143

You can no longer access it

Question 144

What’s a fundamental distinction between STM & LTM?

Answer 144

• While STM retains the specific physical details of the sensory stimulus first used to encode the information, LTM typically retains the abstracted semantic information without specific physical details
• This isn’t always the case, as sometimes LTM does retain more specific details
• Ex: we may recall the words of a song or a poem verbatim
• However, for the most part, what’s stored for the really long-term is the more abstract meaning, not these kinds of details

Question 145

Why does LTM not always simply retain abstracted semantic information?

Answer 145

Because sometimes, certain memorable and oft-repeated details can be stored in long-term memory

Question 146

What suggests that STM & LTM may be distinct memory systems, as proposed in the modal model of memory?

Answer 146

• The behavioral differences between them
• This possibility is supported by neuropsychological data as well as from patients with amnesia

Question 147

What’s amnesia?

Answer 147

Severely impaired long-term memory capacities, typically due to trauma or brain damage

Question 148

The character Dory from Finding Nemo accurately demonstrates what?

Answer 148

The difficulties experienced by some amnesiacs in encoding new memories

Question 149

What are the 2 forms of amnesia?

Answer 149

• Retrograde amnesia
• Anterograde amnesia

Question 150

What’s retrograde amnesia?

Answer 150

• Form of amnesia that’s common following a traumatic brain injury, in which the events leading up to the incident are often forgotten and the memories formed before the trauma of brain damage are lost
• The affected person has difficulty remembering information from before the onset of amnesia

Question 151

What’s anterograde amnesia?

Answer 151

• A form of amnesia in which memories formed after the trauma of brain damage are lost
• After the onset of anterograde amnesia, the affected person has difficulty remembering any new information that they encounter
• However, they may not have compromised memory from before the onset of amnesia
• Ex: case of HM

Question 152

Describe the case of Henry Gustav Molaison (HM)

Answer 152

• He was a patient with a severe case of anterograde amnesia
• He suffered brain trauma at a young age from falling off his bike which led him to experience severe seizures throughout his life which affected his ability to function in daily life
• To treat HM’s seizures, doctors decided to remove most of HM’s hippocampus and a number of other nearby brain regions from which the seizures were determined to originate
• HM recovered from the surgery and no longer experienced severe seizures
• His intelligence and cognition were also quite functional (ex: he knew who he was and was able to discuss facts from his past and general knowledge about the world leading up to his surgery)
• However, he seemed unable to form any new long-term memories (ex: shortly after events took place in his life, HM had no idea that they had transpired)

Question 153

Describe what HM was capable of doing despite his anterograde amnesia

Answer 153

• While his LTM was severely compromised, his STM appears to have been intact -> he’s been reported as maintaining info in his mind for up to 15 secs
• As long as his attention was fixed on the task, he could respond to the information meaningfully
• He could repeat a list of words in order or remember the sentence that someone spoke to him in order to reply to it meaningfully
• He was able to learn new procedural tasks

Question 154

Describe the case of Clive Wearing

Answer 154

• He was a concert pianist and musicologist who suffered damage to his hippocampus due to a rare herpes simplex virus infection that led to encephalitis
• He suffered from some retrograde amnesia and was unable to remember the names of his children (though he recalled he had children) or many of the events of his life from before the onset of his disease
• However, he did still remember quite a bit from his earlier life such as language, knew his wife, how to play the piano, & basic facts about the world & the proper way to behave in it
• His anterograde amnesia was as profound as HM’s -> he was unable to form new LTMs and often spoke as if he had been waking up from a long black void without any experiences at all for many years
• Like HM, Clive’s STM appears to be largely intact -> he can remember events that took place in the past 10-15 secs and is able to respond meaningfully to them
• However, after the info has left STM , it slips into the void that he seems to be somewhat aware of, never to be recalled
• He was living primarily in his STM, forgetting much of the recent past and unable to encode the present info
• His memory was impaired, not other cognitive functions

Question 155

What’s the gold standard of neuropsychological evidence for different mechanisms?

Answer 155

• The double dissociation
• Where each function can be shown to be preserved while the other is compromised

Question 156

Describe the case of patient K.F.

Answer 156

• Sustained brain damage from a motorcycle accident
• Was able to form new LTMs about events he encountered but has an STM capacity of only 2-3 items, which places him well outside he normal range
• Researchers found that K.F. and another patient had overlapped damage in the left hemisphere near regions of the parietal lobe that contribute to verbal processes
• A more pervasive form of K.F.’s condition may be found in Alzheimer’s disease

Question 157

What has dissociation from the various memory loss/amnesiac patients shown (ex: H.M., C.W., K.F.)?

Answer 157

That damage to the hippocampus will give rise to difficulties recalling or encoding information into long-term memory while preserving short-term memory but damage to other cortical regions involved in short, or working, memory processing will selectively damage short-term memory processes while preserving long-term memory functioning

Question 158

Describe the memory of patients with Alzheimer’s disease

Answer 158

• While most people associate Alzheimer’s with long term memory loss, such as the inability to remember people or places encountered across a lifetime, in its early stages, the disease may manifest in the form of impaired short-term memory capabilities & neuropsychologists will sometimes use short-term memory tasks as a tool in diagnosing the onset of the disease
• Patients with Alzheimer’s perform worse at the delayed-match-to-sample task and show markedly less connectivity between the prefrontal lobe and the hippocampal regions than control groups

Question 159

What makes info in STM more likely to enter into LTM?

Answer 159

The longer the info is retained in STM via rehearsal, the likelier it is that it’ll enter into LTM

Question 160

What’s elaborative rehearsal?

Answer 160

• A technique for storing information in LTM that involves elaborating on the meaning of the information
• This type of rehearsal has consistently been found to lead to greater encoding in LTM

Question 161

Which type of rehearsal has consistently been found to lead to greater encoding in LTM?

Answer 161

Elaborative rehearsal

Question 162

Evidence that repetition may lead to LTM encoding comes from what?

Answer 162

From the serial position effect

Question 163

What’s the serial position effect?

Answer 163

An effect in memory studies using recall of long words lists in which words at the beginning and end of the list are remembered better than those in the middle of the list

Question 164

Describe Murdock’s (1962) findings for his study on the serial position effect

Answer 164

Murdock observed that participants had better performance for info presented to them earlier, & also later right before they were asked to recall all of the information

Question 165

What’s the primacy effect?

Answer 165

• A phenomenon in the serial position effect in which words at the beginning of the list are better remembered
• Attributed to LTM (Rehearsal -> LTM)

Question 166

What’s the recency effect?

Answer 166

• A phenomenon in the serial position effect in which words at the end of the list are better remembered
• Words that come late in a sequence are still likely to be in STM at the time the participant is asked to repeat them, but those in the middle of the list aren’t
• Attributed to STM
• If the study-recall delay duration > 30s, this effect is eliminated

Question 167

Describe how Glantzer & Kunitz (1966) tested the recency effect

Answer 167

• They tested this by simply providing participants with a list of words but making them wait for 30 secs before recalling the words
• Counting backward by 3 for that 30 secs caused the recency effect to disappear
• They found that by preventing the storage of info in working memory, the recency effect is diminished

Question 168

How have researchers tried to explain the primacy effect?

Answer 168

• They proposed that words at the beginning of the sequence have a chance to be rehearsed because there’s sufficient time
• This rehearsal allows these words to be stored in LTM
• In this case, repetition may be contributing to storage in LTM

Question 169

How is repetition viewed with regards to forming memories?

Answer 169

• It’s generally viewed as an ineffective way and that the memory remains robust to forgetting
• People often engage in repetition and the info is soon forgotten

Question 170

What’s the level of processing theory?

Answer 170

• Proposed by Craik & Tulving (1972)
• A theory of LTM encoding that holds that depth of meaning during processing determines how likely an item is to be recalled
• This theory holds the idea that elaborating on something by considering its meaning more fully and deeply led to better encoding in LTM
• In a number of experiments, they found that the more deeply people had processed a word, the better they remembered it

Question 171

Describe the experiment by Craik & Tulving on the level of processing theory

Answer 171

• They presented people with a list of words, one at a time
• For each word, they asked them a single yes/no question
• There were 3 categories of words: Case (upper/lowercase of word), rhyming, sentence completion
• After participants had completed these questions, they were given an unexpected free-recall task in which they had to try to remember as many of the words they had responded to as possible

Question 172

Describe the findings of the experiment by Craik & Tulving on the level of processing theory

Answer 172

• They found that participants had the best performance in this task in the sentence condition
• They suggested that this good performance was due to the fact that participants had to process the meaning of the word to answer the questions associated with it
• In the rhyming condition, the meaning of the word didn’t have to be processed, but the sound of it did
• They argued that this was an inferior, less deep, form of processing compared to the meaning of the word
• In the case condition, participants only had to process the size of the letters without having to even read the word
• They argued that this would require the least, or most shallow, processing of all 3 conditions
• They also found that when the answer to the question was yes, subjects remembered the words better
• They proposed that this was because participants processed the meaning and sound more deeply when they matched the question

Question 173

What’s the free-recall task?

Answer 173

A type of memory task in which the experimental subject must simply remember as many items as they can from a memorized list without any cues or prompts

Question 174

According to the levels of processing theory, what’s the important factor in determining what information is remembered in LTM?

Answer 174

• It’s how deeply it was processed initially
• The strength of a memory depends on the depth of processing when encoding
• Meaning that all the focus is on the encoding stage of memory

Question 175

Even if some information is stored in your brain, it’s not truly remembered until what?

Answer 175

Until it can be retrieved from memory to produce a behavioral response

Question 176

What are memory retrieval cues?

Answer 176

• Efforts to generate retrieval cues that can help you recover your memory
• Ex: trying to remember a thought by imagining yourself in the same place where you were when you first had the thought
• Using mnemonic devices and imagery can improve your memory
• Creating structures using techniques like chunking helps to both organize the information for encoding and further organize it to cue retrieval

Question 177

What’s a mnemonic device?

Answer 177

• A memory short-cut or technique used to help improve your memory
• Organizational strategies that help encode to-be-remembered information
• Often involves deep processing and chunking
• Types of mnemonics:
• Naming mnemonic: “ROY G. BIV” for the colors of the rainbow
• Story mnemonic: Create a story out of a list of words
• Method of Loci: Associate pieces of information with a location or a visual image

Question 178

In a challenge to the levels of processing theory, Morris (1977) presented what kind of research?

Answer 178

He presented research that suggested that retrieval can sometimes be the critical factor in what’s remembered, sometimes even more important than the depth of initial processing

Question 179

Describe Morris (1977) study that challenged the levels of processing theory

Answer 179

• He presented experimental subjects with words using the rhyme and sentence conditions employed by Craik and Tulving (1972) & tested their ability to remember the words in a free-recall task
• He also included a cued-recall test
• Consistent with C & T (1972) he found that participants performed best on the free-recall task for items that had been deeply processed
• He also found that participants showed increased memory for shallow processed words if the test matched the learning phase
• He found that participants performed better in the cued-recall task when they had encoded words based on rhyming
• He found that the level of processing wasn’t consistently helpful

Question 180

What overall conclusion did Morris (1977) make about his findings on his study that challenged the levels of processing theory

Answer 180

He called the effect of participants performing better in the cued-recall task when they had encoded words based on rhyming -> transfer-appropriate processing

Question 181

What’s transfer-appropriate processing?

Answer 181

• The idea that how well information is remembered depends not only on how it was initially encoded, but also on how well some later memory cue matches the way it was encoded
• An account for which info is remembered in LTM that emphasizes a match in form between when the info is initially encoded and when it’s retrieved
  Ex: if words were encoded based on their sounds, then a cue to their sound led to better retrieval than when the word was encoded based on its meaning

Question 182

How does transfer-appropriate processing provide insight on Craik and Tulving’s finding that “yes” response words were remembered more accurately than “no” response words?

Answer 182

This may be attributable to the fact that subjects were able to use the original questions as cues to retrieve the remembered list

Question 183

Describe Tulving and Pearlstone (1966) study on memory retrieval cues

Answer 183

• They had subjects learn lists of words that were members of different categories, such as examples of birds or furniture
• They then compared performance in a free-recall test without any cues to when subjects were given the category labels as cues
• Results: when participants had no cues, they only remembered 40% of the words, while with the cues they remembered 75%

Question 184

Just about any _____ that was present during the encoding of information can facilitate later memory

Answer 184

Condition

Question 185

What’s encoding specificity?

Answer 185

• Idea of Endel Tulving
• A principle in LTM retrieval in which a match in condition between encoding and retrieval facilitates recall
• Memory retrieval is better when there is overlap with encoding context
• Context can act as a retrieval cue
• Context can be: internal state (e.g., mood) and external environment (e.g., room)

Question 186

Describe Godden and Baddeley (1975) study on encoding specificity

Answer 186

• They had people study a list of words either when they were underwater wearing a scubagear, or when they were standing on land
• He then tested their ability to recall the list of words, again either underwater or on land
• 1/2 of the subjects had to do the recall task when the study and test conditions were congruent/matched
• Ex: if subjects initially studied the list on land, they did the recall test on land & if they initially studied the list underwater, they were tested underwater
• The other 1/2 of subjects had study and test conditions that were incongruent/mismatched
• Ex: if they studied the list on land, they were tested underwater and if they studied underwater, they were tested on land

Question 187

Describe Godden and Baddeley (1975) findings for their study on encoding specificity

Answer 187

• They found that performance wasn’t greatly affected by whether the subjects encoded or recalled the info on land or on water
• What did matter was whether the study & test conditions matched
• They found that being in the same environment as when they learned the list of words helped them remember them later on (context-dependent memory)

Question 188

What’s context-dependent memory?

Answer 188

• A memory benefit when the external conditions (such as location or background noise) match between encoding and retrieval
• When testing and learning match

Question 189

What’s state-dependent memory?

Answer 189

• A memory benefit when the internal conditions (such as mood) match between encoding and retrieval
• Research supports that when our internal states or moods are congruent, we additionally have improved memory
• Ex: when participants were put into a happy or sad mood (using emotion-inducing videos or a suggestive process), people performed the memory task better when the conditions matched between the initial encoding and the later test of memory

Question 190

At its most basic level, the brain encodes what?

Answer 190

• Associations between experiences of the world
• In many cases, these associations are meaningful, such as the schemas that allow us to infer what kind of objects are likely to be in a certain environment
• This allows us to make useful guesses such as assuming what objects are present in the kitchen or living room even without seeing them
• To do this, the brain has to encode associations between those environments and the objects within them

Question 191

What’s an issue that may arise with encoding associations in our memory (ex: context or state-dependent)?

Answer 191

• The brain may not have a means of distinguishing between meaningful and incident associations
• Ex: if certain words are present when you’re underwater, this leads to these experiences being encoded as well (even if this is an incidental association)
• Your brain may not have a way to filter out these “meaningless” associations -> instead, it encodes and uses them

Question 192

What are some of the important factors that have been empirically demonstrated to have a significant effect on whether the info is successfully retained and recalled from LTM?

Answer 192

• The important role of elaboration and organization on later retrieval
• The spacing effect
• The testing effect

Question 193

What’s the spacing effect?

Answer 193

• A benefit in LTM when information is repeated over spaced out intervals
• States that memory is better when the same amount of learning is spread out over time
• When people are exposed to repeated info over multiple spaced-out periods, this is more effective in later recall than when the info is repeated over a short time period
• Ex: when studying for an exam, it’s best to study the info multiple times in a spaced-out fashion rather than cramming an all-nighter

Question 194

Describe Gepeda et al. (2008) findings on the spacing effect

Answer 194

• In a large-scale study, they found that the best spacing interval to use depends on when the info will need to be retrieved
• In particular, they found that it’s best to space info around 10-20% of the interval at which it’ll need to be later retrieved
• Ex: if you’re taking an exam in a week, it makes sense to space study sessions with about a day between them. If you’re taking it in a month, then 3-5 days spacing will be more effective

Question 195

What’s the testing effect?

Answer 195

• A LTM benefit that occurs when people retrieve info on their own rather than observing it passively -> this makes them remember it better
• This is likely because each time you have to recall info, it forces you to re-engage with it more actively

Question 196

Memory is far more ____ than people often realize

Answer 196

Deeply rooted

Question 197

What’s explicit/declarative memory?

Answer 197

• Memory for all info that can be verbally reported (includes semantic and episodic memory)
• The kind of memory where “we know what we know”
• Involves a conscious recollection

Question 198

What are the 2 subcategories of explicit memory?

Answer 198

• Episodic memory
• Semantic memory

Question 199

What’s episodic memory?

Answer 199

• Memory of events that have happened directly to us that can be recalled in a sequence as they occurred with sensory imagery
• Phenomenon called “mental time travel”
• This kind of memory is sometimes called “autobiographical” because it includes a first person type of experience
• Encoding and recollecting information about specific events and episodes
• You have to remember the context of the memory (recalling an event/episode)
• Retrieve encoding context (what, where and when)
• Ex: remembering halloween episode of the office
• Dependent on the hippocampus

Question 200

What’s semantic memory?

Answer 200

• A form of explicit/declarative memory in which the info is recalled as a set of facts and general information without mental time travel (no retrieval of context of learning)
• When explicit memory only consists of information, without the ability to recall sensory details of an experience
• In this case, the info is something you simply know without having the experience of mental time travel
• Ex: the meaning of words, your address, someone’s name
• Ex: remembering that Michael Scott is the office manager

Question 201

Most of the things we know consist of what kind of memory?

Answer 201

• Semantic, not episodic memory
• Ex: imagine that at your 6th bday party, your parents provided you with a fruit tart instead of a cake. You would remember that episodic event; however, you may have most likely had a general idea, or representation, of what childhood birthday parties typically contain (ex: balloons, cake, hats, & friends)
• This general semantic memory is formed from all your personal experiences, movies, or stories you’ve heard
• Over our lifetime, we learn a great deal during our interaction with the world and the people and objects within it, but you may have little to no memory of the experience that led to the learning. You likely only recall the experience itself

Question 202

Many memories begin as ____ & then transform to ____ over time

Answer 202

• Episodic
• Semantic memory
• But there’s evidence that episodic and semantic memory are distinct from one another

Question 203

Describe the case of patient K.C.

Answer 203

• K.C. suffered damage to his hippocampus and surrounding areas in a motorcycle accident
• He had no episodic memory and wasn’t able to mentally relive previous episodes of his life
• Despite this, some of his semantic memory appears to have been intact to the point that he could learn new info such as the fact that he had a brother who had died

Question 204

Describe the patient that De Renzi et al. (1987) discussed, who had the reverse condition of patient K.C.

Answer 204

• After suffering from encephalitis causing inflammation of the brain, the patient had an intact episodic memory and could create and remember events in her life with a sense of mental time travel
• However, she showed severe deficits in semantic memory, such as the meaning of words and the identities of famous people or events in history

Question 205

Describe the study by Levine et al. (2004) on the brain areas associated with episodic and semantic memory

Answer 205

• They had participants record themselves describing basic facts about the world (ex: the capital of Russia is Moscow) as well as describing events from their own lives
• Later, the researchers recorded brain activity using fMRI as the participants listened to the different recordings
• They found a different network was activated when participants listened to the 2 different types of recordings
• When they heard the basic facts (presumably triggering semantic memory), the primary areas that became active were those in frontal and parietal lobes
• These are regions that engage in executive function and decision making
• When they listened to the events from their lives (presumably triggering episodic memory), a diff network was engaged including the occipital and temporal lobes
• These are areas that are involved in encoding sensory information
• Hence, episodic memory depends on the reactivation of the same brain regions that were first engaged in encoding the experience while semantic memory depends on more abstracted representations

Question 206

What’s implicit memory?

Answer 206

• Non-declarative and non-conscious
• A form of LTM in which the individual doesn’t have explicit awareness of knowing the info but where the info has indirect effects on behaviour
• This concerns info that’s encoded, stored & retrieved
• This retrieval isn’t in the form of info about which you’re consciously aware (that would be declarative) but rather in terms of indirect effects on behaviour

Question 207

What’s one of the most familiar forms of implicit memory called?

Answer 207

Procedural memory

Question 208

What’s procedural memory?

Answer 208

• A form of implicit memory that consists of knowledge of how to perform a task
• Memories for action
• This form of memory consists of learned abilities to perform some automatic behavioural actions such as walking, swimming, or riding a bike
• However, people can’t access what they’ve learned in terms of something they can verbalize
• Rather, the body knows what to do based on the brain having encoded a pattern of movements
• It’s particularly immune to forgetting compared to other types of memory
• The durability of procedural memory extends to people who are the most prone to forgetting -> those with amnesia

Question 209

Which form of memory is particularly immune to forgetting compared to other types of memory?

Answer 209

Procedural memory

Question 210

What type of memory does prejudice belong to?

Answer 210

Implicit memory

Question 211

What’s prejudice?

Answer 211

An inclination to automatically (& possibly unconsciously) judge something or someone negatively or positively based on past experiences, even when those previous experiences are outside of conscious awareness
- While it’s often seen in a negative light, there’s evidence that prejudice is highly pervasive across many people with regard to certain groups of people

Question 212

What’s the Implicit Association Task (IAT)?

Answer 212

• Greenwald and colleagues (1998) developed it
• It’s an online test that has been proposed as being able to detect underlying biases that people may have towards certain groups of people
• It uses a technique in which participants must make decisions, as quickly as they can, about whether certain words belong to one category or another as well as whether certain names or words pertain to a certain group of people or another
• Typical results of the IAT are that people often take longer to produce the correct responses when the same response pertains to categories that conflict according to certain societal biases vs. when they are consistent
• Ex: if a participant is using a left button press to designate a word as belonging to the science category, they may be found to take longer to use that same response to designate a name as female compared with male
• This is interpreted to indicate that the participant has a preconception that science is more suitable to males than females
• This result has been found across many different typical stereotypical attributes of certain groups and attributes
• While the meaning of these results is debated, some believe this suggests many people carry prejudicial attitudes towards certain groups of people, even when people aren’t aware they may carry such prejudices
• These results demonstrate that certain associations, although implicit, are pervasive and can influence behavior

Question 213

Is implicit bias always negative?

Answer 213

• While prejudice is perhaps the most commonly discussed form of implicit memory relating to pre-judging people or things, implicit bias doesn’t need to be negative
• In some cases, people may be more likely to judge someone or something favorably based on some implicit bias as well -> ex: familiarity effect

Question 214

What’s the familiarity effect?

Answer 214

• A phenomenon in which people will tend to rate something that they have encountered before more favourably than something completely unfamiliar
• Perfect & Askew (1994) found that participants rated magazine ads more favorably when they had previously seen them, even when they didn’t remember having seen them

Question 215

What’s the propaganda effect?

Answer 215

• A phenomenon in which people will tend to rate statements that they’ve heard before as being more likely to be true than those they haven’t heard before
• Begg et al. (1992) found that people who were presented with statements they had heard before were more likely to rate them as true compared with statements they had never heard
• This was true even if they had previously been told the original statements were untrue
• It appears Ps forgot they had heard the statements before, but retained a sense of familiarity that led them to judge them more positively

Question 216

List the different types of implicit memory

Answer 216

• Procedural memory
• Prejudice
• Conditioning/priming

Question 217

What’s conditioning/priming?

Answer 217

• A form of implicit memory
• Refers to more stable and long-term learned associations
• Over a lifetime, we learn to associate certain kinds of objects with certain physiological responses and sometime we may not be aware of these associations but they’ll guide our behaviour
• Ex: phobias may occur due to an early negative experience with a type of object -> while the experience may be forgotten, the fear may not
• In the same way the rat in the fear chamber associates stimuli with a fear response, we can form fear in response to environmental stimuli
• Certain flavors or smells may be associated with positive experiences (ex: comfort and nourishment) or negative experiences (ex: sickness). This may lead to a strong liking or disliking of these stimuli even when the original associations are long forgotten

Question 218

Which part of the brain is associated with conditioning?

Answer 218

• This type of memory appears to be dependent on areas outside of the hippocampus but still within the limbic system
• Support for the amygdala in implicit fear conditioning comes from case studies

Question 219

Where is the amygdala located in the brain?

Answer 219

A pair of almond-shaped nuclei located in the 2 temporal lobes

Question 220

Describe the case of patient S.M.

Answer 220

• S.M. had an unusual genetic disorder which resulted in bilateral amygdala damage
• Researchers believe that because of this she experiences an absence of fear
• Ex: they have tried to induce fear in S.M. by exposing her to stimuli that typically increases fear in others and recorded her internal rating of fear and uneasiness
• S.M. was exposed to live snakes and spiders, was brought to a haunted house and was exposed to movie clips meant to induce fear
• Throughout the study, the researchers recorded formal and informal ratings of fear
• S.M. told the researchers that she didn’t care for snakes, however, on a scale of 0-10 for level of fear, S.M. never rose above 2 while holding snakes for several mins
• The researchers informally reported her adventurousness at a haunted house which was rated one of the scariest locations in America and formally reported her fear level remaining at 0 throughout the attraction
• Other researchers have also demonstrated that S.M. struggles to easily recognize fear in others’ facial expressions

Question 221

____ memory tends to be less susceptible to forgetting than ____ memory

Answer 221

• Implicit
• Explicit

Question 222

Describe the study that showed how H.M. was able to learn new procedural tasks

Answer 222

• A team of researchers trained H.M. to do a mirror-drawing task, which consists of copying a picture when you can only see a reflection of your hands and what you’re drawing in a mirror
• This task requires learning a new mapping between your actions and the resulting image
• H.M., who had never performed this task before, was introduced to it over multiple sessions
• The researchers found that H.M.’s performance improved over repeated sessions, even though he had no memory he had ever done the task before

Question 223

Learning is based on what?

Answer 223

More stable changes taking place within various brain structures

Question 224

What are the 2 primary sites that participate in the long-term storage of info leading to learning (consolidation)?

Answer 224

• Synaptic consolidation
• Systems consolidation

Question 225

What’s memory consolidation?

Answer 225

• Experiences are encoded and then consolidated into a long-term memory trace
• The formation of stable cortical representations of memories
• The process of making memories durable, & in some cases, permanent

Question 226

What’s synaptic consolidation?

Answer 226

• Changes at the synapses between neurons that lead to long-term storage of memories
• This process takes place at the synapses, the space between neurons where the neurotransmitters pass from one neuron to another in order to alter its rate of action potentials
• Because all of the info encoded in the brain ultimately depends on these synaptic connections, changes to these connections changes the info in the brain
• The most common type of change at the synapse is called long-term potentiation (LTP)

Question 227

What’s long-term potentiation (LTP)?

Answer 227

• A form of synaptic consolidation in which a receiving neuron becomes more likely to fire in response to the stimulation of a sending neuron
• More likely to fire overtime based on the same number of incoming neurotransmitters
• Possible outcomes for this: the sending neuron releases more neurotransmitters OR the receiving neuron develops more receptor sites for the neurotransmitters to bind with
• The structural changes in LTP can actually happen quite quickly, over the course of minutes & can lead to a relatively stable change in the brain that can store LTM from hours to as long as months
• Overtime, LTP may increase the neurotransmitters or receptors making the receiving neuron fire more frequently whenever the stimulus that causes the sending neuron to fire is present
• While LTP can store memories for a long time, it’s not as durable as systems consolidation

Question 228

What’s systems consolidation?

Answer 228

• A process of making LTMs more durable based on connections between cortical areas
• Thought to be orchestrated by the hippocampus
• This consolidation depends on more permanent changes that take place by laying down new connections between neurons in the cortex
• It relies on the activity of the hippocampus working together with the cortex
• Whatever its mechanism, it can lead to permanent memories that last a lifetime
• However, this process is much slower than synaptic consolidation, taking place over days, weeks, or even years
• As time goes on, memories that are consolidated in this way tend to become more and more stable

Question 229

What’s the role of the hippocampus in LTM?

Answer 229

• Source of debate
• Some researchers have proposed that the hippocampus initially stores memories and then “moves” them to the cortex as a more permanent form of memory
• Alternatively, some have argued that memory isn’t stored in the hippocampus at all but that its role is to coordinate storage in the cortex

Question 230

What’s a proposed mechanism of the hippocampus in consolidating memory?

Answer 230

Hippocampal replay

Question 231

What’s hippocampal replay?

Answer 231

• A phenomenon that has been observed in the hippocampus of multiple animal species in which a sequence of brain activity that has been observed during behavioral activity, such as exploring a maze, is repeated or “replayed” after the initial encoding event
• The sequence during replay is typically faster than the initial activity but has the same temporal order and may represent some form of episodic memory (although without the verbal component it is hard to say whether a rodent is experiencing mental time travel)
• Some researchers have proposed that this replay is essential in systems consolidation

Question 232

Describe the procedure of hippocampal replay

Answer 232

1. First, we have the existing connections in a naive brain that has not yet encoded some association
2. During encoding, 2 (or more) cortical regions are co-activated, an event that is recorded by the hippocampus
   Ex: an encoding of the association between the bell and the food in Pavlov’s dog example
3. During replay, the co-activation activity is regenerated by the hippocampus, reinforcing the connectivity between the cortical regions
4. After consolidation, mature connections are in place between the cortical regions and the hippocampus is no longer needed in order for the co-activation to occur

Question 233

What’s evidence that as time goes on, memories that are systematically consolidated tend to become more and more stable?

Answer 233

• This can be seen in cases in which someone receives trauma to the brain (ex: due to a car accident)
• In such cases, the victim of the accident will often suffer from retrograde amnesia whose severity is worse depending on how close to the accident it occurred
• This happens because if the hippocampus sustains damage or disruption, then the events happening immediately before have a chance to be consolidated
• Those events that took place a bit longer ago received some consolidation, while those that took place a long time ago might be permanently consolidated and no longer dependent on hippocampal activity
• The fact that we can see some effect on memories that go back months or years suggests that these memories continue to be consolidated for a long time

Question 234

Pattern consolidation, pattern completion and pattern separation correspond to which memory processing stages?

Answer 234

• Pattern separation = encoding
• Pattern consolidation = storage
• Pattern completion = retrieval

Question 235

At what memory processing stages is the pattern of a memory separated into multiple parts and then built back together?

Answer 235

• Pattern separation = at encoding
• Pattern completion (built back together = retrieval

Question 236

What kind of memory includes implicit and explicit memory?

Answer 236

Long-term memory

Question 237

What’s haptic memory important for?

Answer 237

Important for gripping and grasping objects

Question 238

Describe evidence of there being separate short term memory stores

Answer 238

• Neuroimaging studies:
  Different areas of the brain are active for visual and verbal STM tasks
• Double dissociation in neuropsychological cases
• Patient ELD has problems recalling visual-spatial but not verbal material in the short term
• Patient PV has problems recalling verbal but not visual material in the short term

Question 239

Describe Ebbinghaus and his study on encoding memories

Answer 239

• One of the first people to mentally investigate how we retained information
• Tested how encoded nonsense syllables were retained and forgotten from memory over time (ex: HES, VRA, MAG, ZOF)
• He created over 2000 cards of nonsense syllables
• He learned and relearned sets of the syllables under strict testing conditions
• He read the syllables without any inflection
• Read them at a consistently fast pace: 2.5 items/second
• Did nothing else while running these experiments
• Used non-sense syllables to avoid prior knowledge affecting his results

Question 240

Describe Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve

Answer 240

• A plot of rates of forgetting the syllables overtime
• It slows down overtime
• This demonstrated that forgetting is exponential -> memory loss is largest early on and slows down

Question 241

What are the different levels that memories can be processed?

Answer 241

• Shallow processing: focus on sensory information
  Ex: looking at words and highlighting them
• Deep processing: integrate
  higher-level knowledge (things we know)
  Ex: linking information together
• Memory is stronger with deep processing

Question 242

Describe the findings of Mazri & Viggiano (2010) study on deep and shallow encoding of faces

Answer 242

• Task 1: upright/inverted
• Task 2: actor/politician
• Found that people recognized faces more and had slower reaction times in the deep encoding condition than the shallow encoding condition
• Inverted faces aren’t processed as well

Question 243

Describe the Method of Loci

Answer 243

• AKA mind palace
• Type of mnemonic
• Associate pieces of information with a location or a visual image
• Anything that’s viceral or shocking for mnemonics helps with remembering them

Question 244

Describe the study by Dresler et al. (2017) on using the ‘Method of Loci’ in non-experts

Answer 244

• 3 participant groups
• Mnemonic training group
• Active control group
• Passive control group
• Memory assessed with word lists at:
• 20 minutes, 24 hour and 4 months
• Measured the change in the number of words remembered at these timepoints
• Only the group who used the method of loci were able to remember the most words from the list
• From scanning the brain, there were different neural connections for people who use to method of loci

Question 245

Is there a difference in the structure of the brain between memory experts and non-experts?

Answer 245

• No
• It’s really about forming different connections in the brain

Question 246

What are tricks for improved memory with studying?

Answer 246

• Review your work regularly at shorter sessions (spacing effect)
• Focus on important material at the beginning and end of sessions (primacy and recency effects)
• Link what you are learning to what you know (depth of processing)

Question 247

What are the different brain areas associated with the different components of the working memory model?

Answer 247

• Central Executive -> prefrontal cortex
• Episodic Buffer -> parietal lobe
• Phonological loop -> Broca’s & Wernicke’s areas
• Visuo-spatial sketch-pad -> occipital lobe
• Attention controller ->ACC

Question 248

Give an example of how working memory components work together

Answer 248

Ex: How many windows are in your house?
* Episodic buffer – access information from LTM
* Visuospatial sketchpad – imagine the layout
* Phonological loop - count the number of windows
* Central executive - guide the process

Question 249

Give an example of an experiment testing the self-reference effect of deep encoding

Answer 249

1. Do these adjectives describe you? Happy, Talkative
2. Are these common words? Happy, Talkative
   * The first condition led to better memory

Question 250

Give an example of an experiment testing the generation effect of deep encoding

Answer 250

1. Read these pairs: king – crown; horse - saddle
2. Generate the word: K___g – crown; H___e-saddle
   * The second led to better memory

Question 251

Which type of memory task leads to the formation of more lasting memories?

Answer 251

Self-reference task

Question 252

Describe the study by Goodim et al. (1969) on state-dependent learning, and more specifically, alcohol dependent learning

Answer 252

• 2 groups of participants were asked to code and study sentences and images when they were sober and 2 groups when they were drunk
• 1 of the 2 groups tested sober was then recalling when drunk
• 1 of the 2 groups tested drunk was then recalling when sober
• The learning was stronger when sober than when drunk
• People in the same state as when they were first encoding the memory recalled more than those in a mismatched group

Question 253

Where can we find evidence of the link between episodic memory and the hippocampus?

Answer 253

• In children with hippocampal damage
• They would test the childrens’ episodic memory by getting them to copy images and then copy them with different delays after being exposed to them
• At a delay, the children couldn’t recall the images well
• Their episodic memory impairment: can’t copy images after a delay
• Semantic memory preservation: normal factual knowledge
• Shows that episodic is dependent on the hippocampus

Question 254

What kind of impairment do people with semantic dementia demonstrate?

Answer 254

• This form of dementia is related to alzheimer’s disease
• Relatively spared at episodic memory tasks
• Impaired at word naming and picture matching tasks
• Impaired at any task that requires them to recall general information or facts

Question 255

Describe the case of patient KC

Answer 255

• Famous case of amnesia
• Has impaired episodic memory but can still access some semantic memories
• Patient KC can answer semantic questions about his past but can’t tell you anything about specific episodes

Question 256

What are the 3 different forms of consciousness found in LTM?

Answer 256

• Anoetic Consciousness
• Noetic Consciousness
• Autonoetic Consciousness

Question 257

What’s the intermediary between semantic memory and episodic memory?

Answer 257

• Personal semantics
• Form of semantic memory
• Consist of autobiographical facts (ex: my brother’s name is Nicholas) and repeated events (ex: I brought my brother to school every day)
• Neuropsychological patterns: autobiographical facts = similar to GS and repeated events = similar to EM

Question 258

What’s evidence for the fact that episodic and semantic memory might lie on a continuum rather than be separate systems?

Answer 258

That recent fMRI studies have shown significant neural overlap between semantic and episodic memories

Question 259

What can blur the lines of retrieval?

Answer 259

• Semantic knowledge can affect the ability to retrieve detailed instances (can override access to specific details)
• Ex: sculptures of bikes indicating that people are forgetting a lot of important details of a bike

Question 260

Describe the reappearance hypothesis for episodic memory

Answer 260

• An episodic memory trace is recalled the same way at each retrieval
• It is reproduced, not reconstructed
• This is based on clinical observations that recurrent memories are unchanged
  from the original event in cases like PTSD
• Maybe we have memories in the brain that are fixed and can’t change and are usually highly emotional in nature -> this could explain PTSD

Question 261

What are flashbulb memories?

Answer 261

• Vivid memories of significant events that are: emotionally arousing or shocking public events and that retrieve specific details about the time and place when hearing about the event
• The reappearance hypothesis suggests that these are imprinted in the mind
• Ex: when Donald Trump was elected for presidency
• Flashbulb memories are not recurrent recordings of events
• Flashbulb memory retrieval changes over time and are not resistant to memory distortion, even though memory feels strong for these events (distinction between subjective and objective memory)
• They accept the theory that memories are reconstructed

Question 262

What’s memory re-consolidation?

Answer 262

• When a trace representation becomes activated, it becomes de-stable
• Once the memory case is fragile, open or unstable when opening it, you have to reconsolidate that memory
• Cortical connections can be strengthened and modified during this time, which alters how the memory trace is reconsolidated
• Retrieval changes a memory trace
• Re-consolidation window is about an hour long

Question 263

What’s memory reconstruction?

Answer 263

• Reconstructing memories at retrieval opens them up to distortion
• We may infer the way things “must have been” in a recalled memory based on our schemas (interplay with semantic memory)
• We may include new and false information in the underlying memory trace
• Reconstructing memories is helpful -> helps us imagine future events

Question 264

How do schemas distort memories and provide an example

Answer 264

• Schemas organize and categorize information, provide expectations about how things should occur
• Bartlett’s (1932) The War of Ghosts experiments
• Participants read an unfamiliar Native American folk story
• Content: young men hunting seals in a river with unfamiliar
  supernatural details
• Didn’t match Western folk story structure (schema)
• Examined how the story changed with repeated retrievals
• Participants remembered a simplified version of the story and it became more conventional with repeated retrievals
• Engaged in assimilation: changing new, learned information to match our schemas
• Omissions and alterations to match Western schema
• Excluded uncommon details; “a black thing rushed out of his mouth”
• Changed uncommon activities to conventional activities, according to their schemas: Hunting seals became fishing

Question 265

Describe Miller and Gazzaniga (1998) study on how schemas can lead to false memories

Answer 265

• Ps had to study scenes associated with schema- consistent items removed
  (ex: classroom without a chalkboard)
• Were given auditory word recognition test for items
  from the scenes & others not in the image but reflecting the schemas:
• Studied items: “Desks”
• Schema-related lures: “Chalkboard”
• Non-schema-related items: “Ball”
• People falsely identified the lure words onto the list, because these lures activate semantic memory
• Illustrates the influence semantic memory (expectations) on episodic memory

Question 266

What leads to false memories?

Answer 266

1. A familiar feeling can lead to incorrect associations
2. Details can be added to memories during retrieval
3. During memory construction, information could be added through suggestion

Question 267

What leads to the misattribution effect?

Answer 267

• Retrieving familiar information from the wrong source (place)
• A failure in source monitoring (not remembering the where or when accurately)
• Misattributing something to the wrong location or event

Question 268

What leads to the misinformation effect?

Answer 268

• Leading questions can cause false memory formation
• Ex: participants viewed a simulated car crash and after, asked:
• “how fast were the cars going when they CONTACTED each other?”
• “how fast were the cars going when they SMASHED into each other?”
• CONCLUSION: how a question is framed can affect how information is remembered
• How you frame your question can affect how people retrieve or what they retrieve from their memory

Question 269

Describe implanting memories

Answer 269

• Participants recalled childhood experiences recounted by their parents over 3 experimental sessions
• A false memory was added to the list of experiences by the experimenter (ex: an overnight stay in a hospital)
• 20% of people had a false memory of this event by the end of the third session

Question 270

What are the virtues of reconstructive memory?

Answer 270

• The same processes that help us construct the past help us imagine the future and plan for our lives
• These are processes of the hippocampal episodic memory system
• There’s overlap between the neural activity of remembering a past event and thinking about future experiences

Question 271

In which of these do we remember information better: context or state-dependent learning?

Answer 271

Context-dependent learning