Memory Processes - Cognition Flashcards
Attention
Involves focusing awareness on a narrowed range of stimuli or events
Selective listening
Listening for when your name is called or hearing something from someone else, not the person you’re talking to
Cocktail party effect
Ability to selectively attend to one voice among many
Selective viewing
When you’re focused on one thing and don’t see another (unseen gorilla)
Automatic processing
Unconscious coding of incidental information, such as space, fine and frequency or well learned info like work meanings
LITTLE OR NO EFFORT REQUIRED
Effortful processing
Encoding that requires attention and conscious processing
Rehearsal
The conscious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to encode it for storage
Overlearning
Refers to continued rehearsal of material after you first appear to have mastered it
Spacing effect
The tendency for distributed study or practice to have better results than cramming
Serial position effect (primacy and recency)
Our tendency to recall best the first and last items in a list
(Primacy and recency effect)
Self-reference effect
Involves deciding how or whether info is personally relevant
**We remember info better if we relate it to ourselves
Elaboration
Process of thinking about an item of info and tie it mentally back to other information in memory to help encode it long-term
Imagery
Mental pictures, powerful aid to effortful processing, especially when semantic encoding is used too
Dual-coding theory
Memory is enhanced by forming semantic and visual codes
Chunking
Organizing items into familiar meaningful units/lists
Often occurs automatically
Hierarchies
Involves processing info not only in chunks but also in hierarchies composed of a few broad concepts divided and subdivided
Ex. Outlines
Storage
Involves maintaining encoded information in memory over time
Schema
Mental concept of framework used to organize and interpret information
Schema
Mental concept of framework used to organize and interpret information
Semantic networks
Consists of nodes representing concepts joined together by pathways that link related concepts
Long-term potentiation (LTP)
An increase in a synapse’s firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation
Connectionist or
Parallel distributed processing models (PDP)
Assume that cognitive processes depend on patterns of activation in highly interconnected computational networks that resemble neural networks
Retrieval
Involves recovering info from memory stores
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
The temporary inability to remember something you know accompanied by a feeling that it’s just out of reach
> Retrieval failure
Retrieval cues
Stimuli that help gain access to memories
Priming
The activation, often unconsiously, of particular associations in memory
Ex. Rabbit triggers hate
Context effects
Helps to put yourself back in the context where you experienced something
Ex. Test in a classroom you learned in
State-dependent memory
What we learn in one state is sometimes more easily recalled when we are again in that state
Ex. When you’re drunk you forget something and when you’re drunk you remember it
Mood congruent memory
The tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one’s current good or bad mood
Mood
> Bias our memories
Influence how we interpret other people’s behaviors
Has an effect on retrieval
Encoding
Involves forming a memory code
