Overview and history of memory research Flashcards
Name the three primary definitions of memory
First, memory is the location where information is kept, as in a storehouse or memory store. Second, memory can refer to the thing that holds the contents of experience, as in a memory trace or engram. In this sense, each memory is a different mental representation. Finally, memory is the mental processes used to acquire (learn), store, or retrieve (remember) information.
Define learning
The term learning refers to any change in the potential of people to alter their behavior as a consequence of the experience of regularities in the environment.
What metaphor for memory is very inaccurate and why?
the idea that memory is a muscle. That is, the more you use your memory, the better it will be. In other words, simply memorizing things will make memory better. There is no evidence to support this. Instead, it is not how much you use your memory but how much information you have in it that is important.
How did Plato describe memory (2)
Memory was the bridge between the perceptual world and the rational world of idealised abstractions.
Plato also provided the metaphor of memory as a wax tablet, holding the impressions of experience. This metaphor also conveys the idea that memory quality varies depending on the quality of the wax (the state of the person) and the pattern that is impressed (how well the information is encoded). The better the impression, the easier it is to retrieve it later or to compare it with other impressions. Furthermore, the wax can be altered or erased so that an impression is lost, thus conveying the concept of forgetting.
How did Aristotle describe memory (2)
memories are composed of associations among various stimuli or experiences.
What were Aristotle’s three laws of association
similarity, contrast, and contiguity
memory associations provide links to ideas that are similar in nature, are the opposite on some critical dimension, or occurred near one another in time.
How has the implicit assumption that memory has evolved to capture many major characteristics of the environment and to perform specific tasks affected how we view/ study memory? (3)
Different types of memories capture meaningfully different types of information.
Also, because many species are evolving along similar trajectories, nonhuman animals can sometimes be used to study issues of memory that require more control than is either practically or ethically possible with humans.
In some sense all human behavior has a genetic component . The very existence of our brains in the interiors of our skulls requires that we have brain-building DNA, and all of our thoughts and memories depend on our biologically constructed brain. Any psychological state corresponds to a neural state. Thus, our thoughts and memories have an important genetic component.
Why should we not just view our brain/ mind as inherited characteristic? (2)
our DNA does not cause our brains to have the exact configuration that we have at the moment. This is due to our long history of experiences. Similarly, although our thoughts depend on neural hardware and processes, it does not mean that the most direct way to understand memory is by a detailed understanding of the underlying neuro physiology.
How have the rationalists influenced memory?
the rationalists took the view that the mind is actively involved in the building of ideas. This can be seen in various theories of memory that involve the active construction and reconstruction of memories, such as those found in schema theories
How did Ebbinghaus study memory?
He is best known for his 1885 publication Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. This work conveys detailed studies
of memory, using himself as both experimenter and subject. Ebbinghaus tried to study memory in what he considered as pure a form as possible, in the absence of an influence of prior knowledge. To do this, he devised a test stimulus called the nonsense syllable, which is a consonant– vowel–consonant trigram that has no clear meaning in language. (English includes PER, FER, AIG etc). Ebbinghaus memorized lists of nonsense syllables of various lengths, under various learning conditions, and for various retention intervals before he tested himself. For memory retrieval he would give himself the first nonsense syllable and then try to recall the rest in the list.
Using this approach, he was able to discover a wide range of basic principles of human memory that have withstood the test of time, which are covered next. (although Ebbinghaus discovered these principles using nonsense syllables, these same patterns are observed with all types of information.)
Describe 4 of these basic principles
The learning curve is the idea that there is a period of time for information to be memorized. It can be affected by a number of things, such as the amount of information to be learned.
The forgetting curve is the opposite of the learning curve. The forgetting curve, like the learning curve, is a negatively accelerating function.
There is some knowledge that you’ve had for years and are unlikely to ever forget. This may happen by a process called overlearning, in which people continue to study information after perfect recall has been achieved, insulating the memory against forgetting.
Ebbinghaus found that, after seemingly complete forgetting, subsequent attempts to relearn the information required less effort than the first time. The difference between the amount of effort required on a subsequent and initial learning attempts is called savings.
Describe the learning curve in further detail
The learning curve is a negatively accelerated function in which most of the action occurs early on, with smaller and smaller benefits later on, so the largest amount of information is learned in the first segment. In the second, although more is learned, the gain is not as great as during the first.
How did Ebbinghaus split the practice of memorising?
Ebbinghaus showed that how a person went about learning, in terms of the distribution of practice, influenced how well information was learned. Specifically, memory is better when practice is spread out over time, rather than lumped together—a distinction between what is known as distributed practice and massed practice.
Describe the forgetting curve in further detail
Most of what is forgotten is lost during the initial period. As time goes on, forgetting continues but at a slower pace. The more time that passes, the slower the rate of forgetting.
How did Sir Fredrick Bartlett contribute to memory research?
Bartlett was directly interested in how prior knowledge influenced memory. He found that prior knowledge profoundly influences memory. He suggested that memories are often fragmentary and incomplete. When people are remembering, they are reconstructing the information from the bits that they have along with prior knowledge about similar circumstances.
