Types of retrieval Flashcards
Define retrospective memory.
Remembering the past.
What is prospective memory?
Remembering to do things in the future.
What is one of the commonest everyday uses of memory?
Remembering to do things, i.e. prospective memory.
What is one of the commonest reasons to complain about having a poor memory?
Forgetting to do things. However, prospective memory doesn’t appear to behave like other aspects of memory.
Give an example of how prospective memory does not appear to behave like other aspects of memory.
Maylor (1990) found that prospective memory performance was not predicted by any of the traditional memory tasks.
What did Maylor (1990) do?
Asked 222 elderly participants to telephone the lab once a day at a specified time for a week.
What traditional (retrospective) memory tasks did Maylor (1990) use?
Digit span, 30 item free recall list, list learning task, and semantic memory (vocab test).
What technique did Maylor (1990) find produced the best prospective memory performance?
Using the conjunction of phoning with a regularly occurring event - 0.11/5 errors.
What technique did Maylor (1990) find produced good prospective memory performance?
Using external cues, for example setting an alarm (0.3/5 errors).
What technique did Maylor (1990) find produced most of the failures in prospective memory performance?
Using internal cues - just trying to remember.
What does prospective memory require, and what is it enhanced by?
Retrieving an intention at the appropriate time - like retrospective memory, it is enhanced by good retrieval cues.
What do recent theories of prospective memory do?
Separate it into different components (e.g. Graf and Utti, 2001).
What do recent theories of prospective memory suggest about performance of the elderly?
It may only be impaired in laboratory prospective tasks, e.g. Henry et al. (2004).
When performing a recognition task, what two types of feelings can we have?
- recollective experience - remembering when the item was experienced before.
- familiarity - knowing the object has been seen before.
What did Tulving (1985) state?
That we have two types of consciousness, autonoetic (self, own role) and noetic (just information). These are reflected in the phenomenon of the remember-know distinction, which in turn is represented as episodic and semantic memory.