Memory Unit 7 Flashcards
Information Processing Model
- Encode- get info into our memory system/process
- Store- Keeping the info around
- Retrieve- using/looking at the info
Encoding (Dual Track)
Types:
- Automatic processing
- Effortful processing
Automatic Processing
- Don’t need to do work to process
- Ex: Spacial relationships, time (sequences), frequency (things that repeat), well-learned information (language, numbers)
- Whenever you look at language or numbers, you automatically read them
Effortful Processing
-Rehearsal: conscious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or encode it for storage
Types: Rote/ maintenance (repeat verbatim), elaborative (elaborate on info)
Ebbinghaus
- studied nonsense syllables
- Retention curve and forgetting curve
- As rehearsal increases, relearning time decreases (negative correlation)
Cramming/Massed practice
- Bad
- Speedy short-term learning/ feelings of confidence
- Does not yield long-term recall
Spacing Effect
- Good
- Distributed study time leads to better long-term recall
Testing effect
-Enhanced memory after retrieving, rather than simply rereading, information
Imagery/Mnemonic Devices
- Improve memory marginally
- Imagery: mental pictures; powerful aid to effortful processing
- Mnemonic device: learning technique that aids memory retention
- Acronyms
- Method of location (loci)
Types of Effortful processing
- Depends on how we process information
- Types:
- Shallow encoding/processing
- Deep encoding/ processing
Crack and Tulving
- Looked at differences between types of processing
- The way you encode information would change your ability to recall info at a later date
- Set up an experiment where they could control the way a person processed information
- Used semantic (best- deep), acoustic( 2nd best somewhat shallow), and visual (3rd best-shallow) processing
- If we can encode based on what something means, yields the best recall at later date
Serial Position Effect
- Tendency to recall items at the beginning and end of a list better than the items in the middle
- Position things one after another
Primacy Effect
- Tendency to recall items at the beginning of list
- Nothing else has crowded our memory system- full attention
Recently Effect
- Tendency to recall items at the end of a list
- Freshest in our mind
- Haven’t had time to leave memory yet
Rehearsal
-Autoencode repetition of remembering things (frequency)
Semantic distinctiveness
- Words or items that are different in meaning we notice
- Ex: artichoke in the list of sleep-related words
Constructed memory
- Encode based on meaning/gist
- Details get lost–> false memories form
Atkinson and Shiffrin
- How we encode, store, and retrieve
- Model of memory, different ways and places memory is stored
- External event–> sensory –(encoding [attention needed])-> STM/Working memory–encoding-> LTM
- When info goes from LTM to STM/WM, we are retrieving
Sensory Memory
- Immediate, very brief recording of sensory info in the memory system
- Entry point for raw info from the senses
- Types: Iconic and Acoustic/ echoic
- Recording in sensory registers–> lost forever or sent to STM/WM (have to be paying attention)
Iconic
- Studied by Sperling
- We do have this very brief recording of visual info- 1 to 2 seconds
- Showed participants letters flashed on a screen (millisecond)
- Played a different tone that corresponds with a row- people can remember the row if tone happened within a few seconds
Acoustic/ Echoic
- Very brief sound memory (3 to 4 seconds) that can occur even if attention is elsewhere
- Communication is sound-based
- Therefore lasts more than iconic
Sensory-> STM/WM
- Attention
- Need to move info from sensory to STM/MN
Short-Term Memory
- Activated memory that holds a few items briefly before the information is stored or forgotten
- Holding area- work to keep it there (rehearsal)
- Ex: remembering phone #s until you don’t need it anymore
Working Memory
- Updated understanding of STM stage
- Involves conscious, active processing of incoming info, and of info retrieved from LTM
Active Stage
- Lots of stuff going into WM
- Sending info to the LTM but retrieving it from there as well (how we encode info/ make connections)
- Bi-directional flow
Capacity of STM/WM
- Approximately 7 items
- How we cluster info can increase/decrease this
Chunking
- Taking individual units and grouping them into larger units
- Can help if more into STM/WM
Long Term Memory
- Limitless
- Relatively permanent storehouse of memory
- Building meaning to encode it property for LTM
- Types: Explicit and Implicit
Where is memory stored?
- Everywhere
- Lashley
- Taught rats how to navigate mazes so that they remembered it, then removed parts of the brain
- Whatever part he removed, it affected memory
- What mattered was how much of the brain was removed–> neural connections are affected
Explicit vs Implicit
- 2 track storage
- Also called Declarative vs. Nondeclarative
- Easily expressed vs experienced
- Recall on command, easily verbalized vs. more body based, actions
- Use different brain structures
Explicit Memory
- Types: Episodic and Semantic
- Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and declare
Episodic memory
- Autobiographical memory
- Personally experienced events
- replaying/ recalling events
Semantic memory
- Acquired knowledge: facts, figures, knowledge
- Information
Brain Structures for Explicit Memory
- Frontal lobes- working memory
- Hippocampus- processes explicit memory for storage
- During REM/ deep sleep
- Located in the temporal lobe
Implicit Memory
-Retention independent of conscious recollection
Types: procedural, emotional
Procedural memory
- Muscle memory
- How to do something (autopilot)
- Ride a bike
- Speak
- Basal Ganglia: motor coordination
- Active during formation of procedural memory
Emotional memory
- Classically conditioned responses
- Feelings triggered by seeing/experiencing something you have experienced before
- Pride in seeing a flag
- Seeing a test and getting anxiety
- Cerebellum: active during emotional memory
Infantile Amnesia
- Conscious memory of 1st 3 years is blank
- Implicit memory started working before explicit memory
- Cannot recall because hippocampus isn’t fully functioning until age 3
Stress hormones
- Set the chemical basis for new memories
- Signal that something has happened
- Sears memory into brain
- Tells the Amygdala to activate memory traces, disrupts other memory formations occurring at the time
- Ex: cannot learn if stressed, new info is overshadowed
Flashbulb Memory
- A clear memory of an emotionally significant moment
- Everything is being captured
- 9/11
Is our recall perfect?
- No
- Every time you open an old memory, you open it up to misinformation
Kandel
- Discovered Long-Term potentiation
- An increase in a cell’s firing potential after a brief, rapid stimulation
- Believed to be a neural a basis for learning and memory
Retrieval
-Types: Recall and Recognition
Recall
-Retrieve information learned earlier, as on a fill-in-the blank test
Recognition
-Identify items preciously learned, as on a multiple choice test
Recall vs Recognition
- Over time, recall fades while recognition remains
- Prospective memory decreases (things you have to do - u forget)
Harry Bahrick
- Studied memory of high school classmates 25 years after graduation
- Bad recall–> couldn’t think of all classmates names
- 90% recognition
- used pictures of the people or a list of names
Retrieval cues
- Memory triggers- access points of memory
- Ways of accessing memory
- The more retrieval cues you have, the more of a chance you have at accessing a memory
- Learning info in only one way makes it difficult to access info: learn in multiple ways
Context Effects
- Being in context of learning can help
- Godden and Baddeley
- Scuba divers listen to words in two settings, recalled the words better when they were in the same context they learned them in
- Ex: retracing steps can trigger memory
- Why police the witnesses back to the scene of the crime
- Can be problematic because they can created a newly flawed memory
- Why police the witnesses back to the scene of the crime
State-dependent memory
- What we learn in a certain physiological state can be more easily recalled when in that same state again
- Internal vs external physiological state can help if in the same state when recalling
Mood Congruent Memory
- Type of state-dependent memory
- Tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with ones current good or bad mood
- Ex: depressed people have difficultly thinking good thoughts because bad mood triggers more bad thoughts
Memory
-The persistent of learning over time through the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information
Parallel processing
- The processing of many aspects of a problem simultaneously
- The brain’s natural mode of information processing for many functions
- Contrasts with the step-by-step (serial) processing of most computers and of conscious problem solving
Shallow processing
-Encoding on a basic level based on the structure or appearance of words
Deep Processing
- Encoding semantically, based on the meaning of the words
- Tends to yield the best recall
Hippocampus
- A neural center located in the limbic system
- Helps process explicit memories for storage
Relearning
-A measure of memory that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material again
Priming
-The activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in memory
Why do we forget?
- Encoding failure
- Storage decay
- Retrieval failure
Elderly Brains
- Less active in encoding
- May explain age-related memory decline
Selective Attention
- Attending to one thing, and disregarding other things (do not properly encode)
- Leads to encoding failure
- Much of forgetting is due to improper encoding
Forgetting Curve (Storage Decay)
- Ebbinghaus
- Studied more nonsense syllables
- Measured how much he retained after varying intervals
- Forgetting –> initially rapid, then levels off with time
- Stuff that remains you will hang on to for a long time
Bahrick and the Forgetting Curve (Storage Decay)
- Forgetting curve for Spanish
- 3 years out of school, a lot had been forgotten
- 25+ years later, forgetting hand’t increased
- Hang on to forever the things that remain
Causes of storage decay?
- Possible physical memory traces start to decay
- Especially connections we do not use
Retrieval Failure
- Info is there, but we cannot access it
- Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
- Memory can be recalled with retrieval cues
- Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
Interference
- Learning info may disrupt recall of info
- Two types: Proactive and Retroactive
Proactive Interference
- Old info disrupts new info (difficult to remember new stuff)
- Ex: cannot remember new locker combination, but can remember last year’s
Retroactive Interference
- New info replaces the old (new learning disrupts recall of old info)
- Ex: cannot remember last year’s locker combination
Anterograde Amnesia
-An inability to form new memories
Retrograde Amnesia
-An inability to retrieve information from one’s past
Repression
-In psychoanalytic theory, the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories
Misinformation
-Incorporating misleading information into one’s memory of an event
Source Amnesia
- Attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, or imagined
- Also called misattribution
- Along with misinformation effect, is at the heart of many false memories
Deja Vu
- That eerie sense that “I’ve experienced this before”
- Cues from the current situation may unconsciously trigger retrieval of an earlier experience
Loftus and Palmer
- Eyewitness testimony
- film of traffic accident followed by emotionally loaded questions
- If they said that the cars “smashed into each other” more people would say they saw glass in the video, when no glass was there
- If they said the cars “hit” each other, less people said they saw glass in the video
Poole and Lindsay
- Mr. Science
- Came to preschool
- Read a book about preschoolers having a day with Mr. Science
- Did some real experiments
- 40%: recalled doing the events that they read in the book
False Convictions
-79% of 200 people exonerated by DNA evidence were convicted on faulty eyewitness accounts
Digitally altered images skew memory
- People who are shown photoshopped images mixed in with actual images of their child remember doing the false events
- Ex: showed picture of you and your family in a hot air balloon when you never went on one together, you think that that actually happened
Imagination Inflation
- simply imagining an event can create a false memory
- mundane tasks
- Picking up a stapler and breaking a window
- traumatic childhood event (25%)
- needing stiches
- mundane tasks
- By imagining something happened, we can acquire false memories
Patient HM
- Henry Molaison
- Severe seizure disorder
- Had hippocampus removed
- Could not remember anything that happened after his surgery (anterograde amnesia)
- Couldn’t form new explicit memories
- Studied by Milner
- He could improve on the star-tracking task, but had not recall of having done the task before (emphasizes dual-track storage)
