PSY1022 WEEK 9 COG 1 Flashcards
MEMORY
Retention of information over time.
PARADOX OF MEMORY
Our memories are surprisingly good in some situations and surprisingly poor in others.
MEMORY ILLUSION
False but subjectively compelling memory.
- byproducts of our brain’s generally adaptive tendency to go beyond the information available to it.
ACTIVELY RECONSTRUCT MEMORIES
Don’t passively reproduce.
Patching together what we remember with best hunches, etc.
OBSERVER MEMORY
A memory in which we see ourselves as an outside observer would.
- Asians more likely than Europeans.
FIELD MEMORY
A memory in which we the world through our visual field.
- Europeans more likely than Asians.
THREE SYSTEMS OF MEMORY
- Sensory
- Short-term
- Long-term
SENSORY MEMORY
Brief storage of perceptual information before it is passed to short-term memory.
ICONIC MEMORY
Visual sensory memory.
- lasts for about one second.
EIDETIC MEMORY
Photographic memory.
- might be unusually long persistence of the iconic image.
ECHOIC MEMORY
Sensory memory for hearing.
- five to ten seconds.
- some evidence of eidetic memory for hearing
SHORT-TERM MEMORY
Memory system that retains information for limited durations.
- sometimes called working memory.
- 5 to 20 seconds.
- errors tend to be acoustic (sound)
DECAY
Fading of information from memory over time.
INTERFERENCE
Loss of information from memory because of competition from additional incoming information.
RETROACTIVE INTERFERENCE
Interference with retention of old information due to acquisition of new information.
eg. learning a new language, can replace the old one.
PROACTIVE INTERFERENCE
Interference with acquisition of new information due to previous learning of information.
- for similar things
MAGIC NUMBER
The span of short-term memory. Seven +/- two pieces of information.
- George Miller.
CHUNKING
Organizing information into meaningful groupings; allowing us to extend the span of short-term memory.
REHEARSAL
Repeating stimuli to retain them in short-term memory.
MAINTENANCE REHEARSAL
Repeating stimuli in their original form to retain them in short-term memory.
ELABORATIVE REHEARSAL
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
LEVELS-OF-PROCESSING
Depth of transforming information, which influences how easily we remember it.
- deeper = better
- but not falsifiable.
LONG-TERM MEMORY
Relatively enduring (from minutes to years) retention of information stored regarding our facts, experiences, and skills. - errors tend to be semantic (meaning)
PERMASTORE
Type of long-term memory that appears to be permanent.
PRIMACY EFFECT
Tendency to remember words at the beginning of a list especially well.
RECENCY EFFECT
Tendency to remember words at the end of a list especially well.
SERIAL POSITION CURVE
Graph depicting both primacy and recency effects on people’s ability to recall items on a list.
- U shaped.
SEMANTIC MEMORY
Our knowledge about facts of the world.
- more left cortex
EXPLICIT MEMORY
Memories we recall intentionally and of which we have conscious awareness.
- semantic and episodic both examples of this.
EPISODIC MEMORY
Recollection of events in our lives.
- more right cortex
IMPLICIT MEMORY
Memories we don’t deliberately remember or reflect on consciously.
- includes procedural and priming
- conditioning and habituation
PROCEDURAL MEMORY
Memory for how to do things, including motor skills and habits.
- riding a bike, opening a bottle.
PRIMING
Our ability to identify a stimulus more easily or more quickly after we’ve encountered similar stimuli.
- implicit because no deliberate effort.
ENCODING
Process of getting information into our memory banks.
- needs attention
- memory failures often failure of encoding.
MNEUMONIC
A learning aid, strategy, or device that enhances recall.
- pegword
- method of loci
- keyword
SCHEMA
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
RETRIEVAL CUES
Hint that makes it easier for us to recall information.
RECALL
Generating previously remembered information.
- harder than recognition
RECOGNITION
Selecting previously remembered information from an array of options.
- easier than recall
RELEARNING
Reacquiring knowledge that we’d previously learned but largely forgotten over time.
DISTRIBUTED VERSUS MASSED PRACTICE
Studying information in small increments over time (distributed) versus in large increments over a brief amount of time (massed).
- Hermann Ebbinghaus.
TIP OF THE TONGUE (TOT) PHENOMENON
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%)
ENCODING SPECIFICITY
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
CONTEXT DEPENDENT LEARNING
Superior retrieval of memories when the external context of the original memories matches the retrieval context.
- test on scuba divers, above and below water.
STATE-DEPENDENT LEARNING
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.
LEVELS OF SHORT TERM MEMORY
Visual - most shallow
Phonological - middle
Semantic - deepest
NEXT-IN-LINE EFFECT
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.
CLIVE WEARING
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.
