memory lecture 5

Question 1

what is repression?

Answer 1

active mechanism to prevent remembering

Question 2

what does Freud suggest repression occurs?

Answer 2

memories which could harm the ego are suppressed to avoid anxiety

Question 3

wilkinson and cargill (1955) repression procedure

Answer 3

participants told they were doing a personality study

listened to a story containing a description of a dream

dream was neutral or contained sexual imagery with oedipal material

Question 4

wilkinson and cargill (1955) repression results

Answer 4

men had worse memory than women for the oedipal material

Question 5

levinger and clark (1961) procedure

Answer 5

task involved neutral or emotional stimulus words

free association task- asked to write the words which first came to mind

assessed galvanic skin responses

Question 6

levinger and clark (1961) results

Answer 6

more likely to remember neutral free associates than emotional free associates

Question 7

parkin, lewinsohn and folkard: enhancing the LTM with arousal

Answer 7

with immediate testing, memory is worse for associates to emotional words

after 7 days, memory for associates to emotional words is better than for neutral words

Question 8

who proposed action decrement theory?

Answer 8

Walker, 1958

Question 9

what is action decrement theory?

Answer 9

memory traces take time to consolidate

physiological arousal increases the time for the trace to consolidate

but may improve long term encoding

Question 10

anderson, wais and gabrielli (2006): retrograde arousal enhancement procedure

Answer 10

shown a neutral picture

interval lasting 4 or 9 seconds

shown an arousing picture

did recognition tests for neutral and arousing stimuli after a week

Question 11

anderson, wais and gabrielli (2006): retrograde arousal enhancement results

Answer 11

more arousing images had better memory

memory for neutral stimuli shortly presented before arousing stimuli is enhanced

Question 12

what did finn and roediger find out about retrograde arousal enhancement?

Answer 12

vocabulary learning enhanced by negative arousal pictures immediately or 2 seconds after successful retrieval

but arousal doesn’t enhance performance when restudying items

Question 13

part list cueing- slamecka (1968) procedure

Answer 13

had to encode 30 rare words, 30 common words and 30 butterfly associates

had to remember the entire list, or given 15 words in context and had to recall the rest

Question 14

part list cueing- slamecka (1968) results

Answer 14

part list impaired the memory

Question 15

anderson, bjork and bjork (1994) retrieval induced forgetting: procedure

Answer 15

had to learn paired associates

encoded category exemplar pairs

practiced retrieval of half the pairs

Question 16

anderson, bjork and bjork (1994) retrieval induced forgetting: results

Answer 16

baseline- unpracticed categories

enhanced- practiced exemplars of practiced categories

impaired- unpracticed exemplars of practiced categories

suggests practicing some things can inhibit others

Question 17

what is list method directed forgetting?

Answer 17

learn the first list
told to forget this list
learn a second list
when people were told to forget things they did

Question 18

what is item method directed forgetting?

Answer 18

items people were told to remember were enhanced compared to items people were told to forget

Question 19

what is the explanation for list method directed forgetting?

Answer 19

genuine inhibition of the first list

retrieval for the second list may impair memory

Question 20

what is the explanation for item method directed forgetting?

Answer 20

use the time to remember the items you are told to remember
so don’t have time to rehearse the items you have forgotten

Question 21

anderson and green, 2001: direct suppression procedure

Answer 21

learnt 40 words
told to think (process the link) or no think (fixate on the cue but prevent the other word from coming to mind)

Question 22

anderson and green, 2001: direct suppression results

Answer 22

performance improved with the repetition of the think trial

performance declined with the repetition of the no-think trial

Question 23

what happens if you suppress an item?

Answer 23

more difficult to generate it in a new context

Question 24

is there evidence for freudian repression?

Answer 24

no-
emotional items are generally well remembered

even neutral items associated with arosual are generally well remembered

Question 25

what is partial active repression?

Answer 25

thinking repeatedly about something means you are more likely to remember it

actively not thinking about something inhibits its retrieval from storage