PSY1022 WEEK 9 COG 1

Question 1

MEMORY

Answer 1

Retention of information over time.

Question 2

PARADOX OF MEMORY

Answer 2

Our memories are surprisingly good in some situations and surprisingly poor in others.

Question 3

MEMORY ILLUSION

Answer 3

False but subjectively compelling memory.

- byproducts of our brain’s generally adaptive tendency to go beyond the information available to it.

Question 4

ACTIVELY RECONSTRUCT MEMORIES

Answer 4

Don’t passively reproduce.

Patching together what we remember with best hunches, etc.

Question 5

OBSERVER MEMORY

Answer 5

A memory in which we see ourselves as an outside observer would.
- Asians more likely than Europeans.

Question 6

FIELD MEMORY

Answer 6

A memory in which we the world through our visual field.

- Europeans more likely than Asians.

Question 7

THREE SYSTEMS OF MEMORY

Answer 7

• Sensory
• Short-term
• Long-term

Question 8

SENSORY MEMORY

Answer 8

Brief storage of perceptual information before it is passed to short-term memory.

Question 9

ICONIC MEMORY

Answer 9

Visual sensory memory.

- lasts for about one second.

Question 10

EIDETIC MEMORY

Answer 10

Photographic memory.

- might be unusually long persistence of the iconic image.

Question 11

ECHOIC MEMORY

Answer 11

Sensory memory for hearing.

• five to ten seconds.
• some evidence of eidetic memory for hearing

Question 12

SHORT-TERM MEMORY

Answer 12

Memory system that retains information for limited durations.

• sometimes called working memory.
• 5 to 20 seconds.
• errors tend to be acoustic (sound)

Question 13

DECAY

Answer 13

Fading of information from memory over time.

Question 14

INTERFERENCE

Answer 14

Loss of information from memory because of competition from additional incoming information.

Question 15

RETROACTIVE INTERFERENCE

Answer 15

Interference with retention of old information due to acquisition of new information.
eg. learning a new language, can replace the old one.

Question 16

PROACTIVE INTERFERENCE

Answer 16

Interference with acquisition of new information due to previous learning of information.
- for similar things

Question 17

MAGIC NUMBER

Answer 17

The span of short-term memory. Seven +/- two pieces of information.
- George Miller.

Question 18

CHUNKING

Answer 18

Organizing information into meaningful groupings; allowing us to extend the span of short-term memory.

Question 19

REHEARSAL

Answer 19

Repeating stimuli to retain them in short-term memory.

Question 20

MAINTENANCE REHEARSAL

Answer 20

Repeating stimuli in their original form to retain them in short-term memory.

Question 21

ELABORATIVE REHEARSAL

Answer 21

Linking stimuli to each other in a meaningful way to improve retention of information in short-term memory.

• eg. “dog-shoe” imagining a dog with a shoe on.
• better than maintenance rehearsal, which is consistent with levels-of-processing model

Question 22

LEVELS-OF-PROCESSING

Answer 22

Depth of transforming information, which influences how easily we remember it.

• deeper = better
• but not falsifiable.

Question 23

LONG-TERM MEMORY

Answer 23

Relatively enduring (from minutes to years) retention of information stored regarding our facts, experiences, and skills. 
- errors tend to be semantic (meaning)

Question 24

PERMASTORE

Answer 24

Type of long-term memory that appears to be permanent.

Question 25

PRIMACY EFFECT

Answer 25

Tendency to remember words at the beginning of a list especially well.

Question 26

RECENCY EFFECT

Answer 26

Tendency to remember words at the end of a list especially well.

Question 27

SERIAL POSITION CURVE

Answer 27

Graph depicting both primacy and recency effects on people’s ability to recall items on a list.
- U shaped.

Question 28

SEMANTIC MEMORY

Answer 28

Our knowledge about facts of the world.

- more left cortex

Question 29

EXPLICIT MEMORY

Answer 29

Memories we recall intentionally and of which we have conscious awareness.
- semantic and episodic both examples of this.

Question 30

EPISODIC MEMORY

Answer 30

Recollection of events in our lives.

- more right cortex

Question 31

IMPLICIT MEMORY

Answer 31

Memories we don’t deliberately remember or reflect on consciously.

• includes procedural and priming
• conditioning and habituation

Question 32

PROCEDURAL MEMORY

Answer 32

Memory for how to do things, including motor skills and habits.
- riding a bike, opening a bottle.

Question 33

PRIMING

Answer 33

Our ability to identify a stimulus more easily or more quickly after we’ve encountered similar stimuli.
- implicit because no deliberate effort.

Question 34

ENCODING

Answer 34

Process of getting information into our memory banks.

• needs attention
• memory failures often failure of encoding.

Question 35

MNEUMONIC

Answer 35

A learning aid, strategy, or device that enhances recall.

• pegword
• method of loci
• keyword

Question 36

SCHEMA

Answer 36

Organised knowledge structure or mental model that we’ve stored in memory.

• eg. eating in a new restaurant, know what to expect because have schema for eating in restaurants in general.
• but can produce memory illusions.
• sometimes called script

Question 37

RETRIEVAL CUES

Answer 37

Hint that makes it easier for us to recall information.

Question 38

RECALL

Answer 38

Generating previously remembered information.

- harder than recognition

Question 39

RECOGNITION

Answer 39

Selecting previously remembered information from an array of options.
- easier than recall

Question 40

RELEARNING

Answer 40

Reacquiring knowledge that we’d previously learned but largely forgotten over time.

Question 41

DISTRIBUTED VERSUS MASSED PRACTICE

Answer 41

Studying information in small increments over time (distributed) versus in large increments over a brief amount of time (massed).
- Hermann Ebbinghaus.

Question 42

TIP OF THE TONGUE (TOT) PHENOMENON

Answer 42

When we are sure we know the answer to a question, but can’t come up with it.

• problem of retrieval.
• prompts help
• 50% resolved in 1 minute
• people can guess first letter (50%) or number of syllables (50-80%)

Question 43

ENCODING SPECIFICITY

Answer 43

Phenomenon of remembering something better when the conditions under which we retrieve the information are similar to the conditions under which we encoded it.

• context-dependent learning
• state-dependent learning

Question 44

CONTEXT DEPENDENT LEARNING

Answer 44

Superior retrieval of memories when the external context of the original memories matches the retrieval context.
- test on scuba divers, above and below water.

Question 45

STATE-DEPENDENT LEARNING

Answer 45

Superior retrieval of memories when the organism is in the same physiological or psychological state as it was during the encoding.
- can extend to mood-dependent learning and retrospective bias.

Question 46

LEVELS OF SHORT TERM MEMORY

Answer 46

Visual - most shallow
Phonological - middle
Semantic - deepest

Question 47

NEXT-IN-LINE EFFECT

Answer 47

That a person in a group has diminished recall for the words of others who spoke immediately before or after this person.
Lack of attention = not encoded.

Question 48

CLIVE WEARING

Answer 48

Composer. Damaged hippocampus. Can’t make new memories. Memories only last 7-20 seconds.
But still has some implicit memories, such as how to play the piano and conduct a choir.