Terms Flashcards
Working memory
Our ability to coordinate mental operations with transiently stored information during cognitive activities such as planning a shopping trip or reading a newspaper
Dual-task paradigm
Performing two tasks at the same time where the two tasks interfere with one another if they require access to a common resource and if their combined demands exceed its capacity.
Secondary task
Intended to disrupt access to a specific function such as the articulatory loop.
Primary task
A task that is potentially impeded by the loss of supporting functions that have been allocated to a secondary task.
Binding problem
How do the subsystems within a system interact to ensure that the system as a whole operates in an integrated manner?
Working Self
The concept of the ‘working self’ (Conway and Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) can be thought of as a hierarchy of currently active goals and self-concepts through which experience is encoded and memories constructed.
Lifespan retrieval curve
The ‘lifespan retrieval curve’ illustrates how frequently autobiographical memories are recalled over different periods in someone’s life. The lifespan retrieval curve is characterized by periods of childhood amnesia, the reminiscence bump and recency.
Reminiscence bump
The component of the lifespan retrieval curve when rememberers were aged 10 to 30 years.
Self-defining experiences
Memories from the period of the reminiscence bump help to define identity (Conway, 1996) and, because of this, they endure in memory in a highly accessible form.
General events
General events refer to a variety of autobiographical knowledge structures
Single events (e.g. the day we went to London) Repeated events (e.g. work meetings) Extended events (e.g. a holiday in Spain). ‘Mini-histories' structured around episodic memories of goal attainment in developing skills, knowledge and personal relationships. Experiences of particular significance for the self and act as reference points for other associated general. Other general events may be grouped together because of their emotional similarity
Goal attainment
Memories for the acquisition of skills (e.g. riding a bicycle or driving a car)
Lifetime periods
Lifetime periods, like general events, contain representations of locations, others, activities, feelings and goals common to the period they represent. They effectively encapsulate a period in memory and in so doing may provide ways in which access to autobiographical knowledge can be limited, channelled or directed.
Life story
A life story is some more or less coherent theme or set of themes that characterize, identify and give meaning to a whole life. A life story consists of several life story schema, which associate together selective autobiographical knowledge to define a theme.
Schema
A schema is a memory structure that encapsulates an event such that common parts are fixed, while variable parts occur as ‘slots’. Thus a schema for ‘going to the cinema’ would have predefined common parts (such as queuing for tickets, buying popcorn) and slots for variable parts (which cinema we went to, who I was with, what film we saw).
Partonomic knowledge structures
Partonomic refers to the way that a specific episodic memory is part of a general event, which in turn is part of a lifetime period, which is part of a life schema
Recollective experience
Recollective experience is the sense or experience of the self in the past and is induced by images, feelings and other memory details that come to mind during remembering.
Retrieval mode
In retrieval mode attention, or part thereof, is directed inwards towards internal representations of knowledge, and conscious awareness becomes dominated by these representa tions. As a memory is formed the rememberer’s awareness becomes emotionally influenced by recollective experience and a powerful sense of the self in the past arises.
