Types of Retrieval

Question 1

what is free recall?

Answer 1

” What did you learn in the first memory lecture?”

Question 2

what is cued recall?

Answer 2

“Roediger and ? (1995) did a false memory study”

Question 3

what is recognition?

Answer 3

“Was it Smith/Loftus/McDermott/Ceci?”

Question 4

What is relearning?

Answer 4

“It was McDermott. Who was it?”

Question 5

The Generate-Recognise Theory of Free Recall

(Anderson & Bower, 1972)

Answer 5

• Mnemonic Strategies
  Pegword Method
  Method of Loci
• These are encoding strategies that work because they enable participants to use a specific retrieval strategy
  But…
• The fact that generating candidates from cues helps recall doesn’t necessarily prove that recognition is part of recall. If it was, every item that could be recalled must necessarily be recognised. This is not the case…

Recognition Failure - Tulving and Thomson (1973)

Question 6

Recognition Failure - Tulving and Thomson (1973)

Answer 6

• recall is better than recognition in this task
• many words are recalled that were not recgonised
• Cued Recall task is pretty easy - The low semantic associates form good cues, easily imageable, straightforward task.
• Recognition task is very difficult - All the close semantic associates seem very familiar (similar to Roediger & McDermott, 1995)
  conclusions
• recall can produce better memory than recognition if it provides better retrieval cues
• sometimes the item isn’t the best cue for identifying the context in which it was previously encountered
• the generate-recognise approach may often be used in free recall tasks, but it’s not a complete model of recall.

Question 7

What is the encoding specificity principle (Tulving, 1983)

Answer 7

• memory performance is best when the cues present at test match those that were encoded with the memory at study
• understanding the context in which information is retrieved from memory

Question 8

Remembering Context, Johnson, Taylor & Raye (1977) - Source monitoring

Answer 8

• a lab demonstration that people find it difficult to distinguish between internal and external events in frequency judegements
• paired associate learning
• judge how often item studied and how often tested
• the two are independent

Question 9

what is reality monitoring? - Johnson and Raye (1981)

Answer 9

Memory for the source of information may not be stored, so we may remember the content of internally generated (imagined) events but forget that the source was internal

Question 10

Real and suggested events study Schooler et al., (1986)

Answer 10

• 16 Psychology students given 21 real and 21 misinformed descriptions.
• Classification 59% correct for real memories, 60% for suggested memories.
• Confidence was the main reason for classifications, sensory or geographic information supported real classification, while function and rationalisation supported suggested classifications.
  (geographic and cognitive information particularly misleading)
• Training judges improves discrimination accuracy, but…
  Time blurs the distinction between perceptual and contextual information (Johnson, Foley, Suengas, & Raye, 1988) and repeatedly thinking about events may additionally decrease the differences in memory between real and imagined events. (Suengas & Johnson (1988).

Question 11

Confidence and accuracy relationship

Answer 11

• lab experiments rarely demonstrate convincing relationships between confidence and accuracy e.g. Robinson & Johnson
• Participants watch a film of a crime
• then either have to recall or recognise (4AFC) items for the film in a memory test and rate their confidence in the judgements
  recognition accuracy - 0.29
  recall - 0.53
• correlations low, but significant
• correlations better in recall than in recognition
• ease of retrieval may explain confidence
• this creates a problem with repeated recalls

In real life Confidence-Accuracy correlations may be much higher: Gruenberg & Sykes (1993) - through cf. Brewer & Wells (2006)