Week 1

Question 1

Types of Long-Term Memory

Answer 1

Explicit (Conscious):
- Episodic
- Semantic

Implicit (Non-Conscious)
- Procedural
- Priming
- Conditioning

Question 2

Procedural Memory

Answer 2

Skill Memory: Memory for actions

perform procedures without being consciously aware of how to do them

People who cannot form new LTMs can still learn new skills (e.g., HM)

Question 3

Mirror Drawing

Answer 3

Figure that you have to trace while looking into a mirror so everything is flipped

as it is done over and over again, you get better at it

Same thing as the next day, the third day better

skill acquisition

Question 4

Donald Hebb

Answer 4

Canada’s Best Known Psychologist
The Organization of Behaviour (1949)
Father of neuropsychology and neural networks
interested in all aspects of
learning

Question 5

Priming

Answer 5

Presentation of priming stimulus change’s a person’s response to a test stimulus

Repetition Priming:

Test stimulus the same or similar to the priming stimulus

Called implicit memory because procedures usually
discourage trying to remember the initial stimulus

Performance is often similar whether the person
remembers or not the original presentation of priming stimuli

Question 6

Priming in Everyday Experience (Perfect and Askew 1994)

Answer 6

Incidental group examined magazine articles to determine what factors make them appealing and readable

There were also 25 adverts (to be ignored) facing the leading page of each of the articles

After asked to rate 50 adverts (25 new + 25 old) and indicate which ones they recognized

Incidental group only recognized 11 per cent of the old ads

Gave higher ratings to old ads on appeal, eye-
catchingness, distinctiveness, and memorability

Question 7

Cont.

Answer 7

Even though they didn’t consciously remember the previous exposure to the ad, this exposure increased their liking to the ad

Rating changed accordingly based on new ad vs. old ad

Previous exposure nonetheless was encoded into LTM and effected interpretation again when the ad was seen again

Question 8

Priming in Everyday Experience

Answer 8

Similar to Propaganda effect: more likely to rate statements read or heard before as being true

Even when initially told it was false or didn’t believe it

Involves implicit memory because it can occur when
people are not aware of previously seeing or hearing statement

More likely to be true if it was heard repeatedly

Trump analogy: said something over and over again, expecting it to be true

Question 9

Classical Conditioning

Answer 9

Pavlov - food (salvation) with dog paired with bell

Dog salivated to the ringing of the bell eventually

Feeling anxious while driving on certain road as previously was given a ticket on that road

Question 10

Operant Conditioning

Answer 10

Things that are considered rewards that increase behavior

Punishments decrease the likelihood

Reward could also be removal of negative experiences
E.g., people with animals getting shocked and behavior stops when shocked, behavior is changed as animal doesn’t want shock

Skinner box: rat in box with lever and lever dropped food, associated lever with food

Pigeons got food every 15 seconds and they started being weird because they assumed that their actions gave them food even though this wasn’t true

Question 11

Superstitions

Answer 11

May be used to cope with anxiety

Students kept head down when prof was talking and when prof went to one side of room, students put head up

Prof started to lecture at one side of room eventually
This things unconciously effect our behavior

Question 12

Explicit Long-Term Memories

Answer 12

Endell tolbin make the first distinction

Episodic is like mental time travel, you can essentially relive that memory

Semantic is thinking about general facts, there is no need to go back to any situation to know these details, they just come to you

Capacity, essentially infinite (estimation is 10 billion facts)

Billions of neurons that can be connected in many ways

Question 13

Characterizing Memories

Answer 13

Transfer: How is information copied into the store?

Capacity: How much information can the store hold?

Forgetting: How does information get lost from the store?

Representation: What is the format of information in the store?

Retrieval: How is information recovered from the store?

Question 14

Rehearsal

Answer 14

Rehearsal: a set of techniques/strategies for encoding information into LTM

2 types of rehearsal:

Maintenences: Tries to maintain info for short period of time (phone number); Recycling; keeps info alive in WM

Elaboration: the goal is to remember by repeating to self, thinking of ways to remember it; promotes info to LTM

Question 15

Hellyer (1962)

Answer 15

Used the Peterson and Peterson (1959) paradigm

The twist was that participants were allowed to repeat the trigram to themselves either 1, 2, 4, or 8 times before starting the distraction task.

More repetitions displayed an increase in performance for the memory test

At 8 times, distraction test basically had no effect

Distraction test wanted to wipe out LTM and STM

This experiment displayed that STM was no longer in the question and LTM is not effected by this test

Recall happens when things get into LTM

Question 16

Rundus (1971)

Answer 16

Gave people lists of words anc encouraged people to say out loud what they were doing and majority of people did rehearsals

Taped these sessions

Asked them to recall the list of items

Primacy portion involved first words were remembered

Middle items were the most forgotten

Last items were recalled quite well

Looked at relationship between rehearsals and performance

High number of rehearsals = high accuracy of items

remembered (primacy and arthroscopy)

Did not carry at the end

Recency is involved with STM

Sometimes 6th item was rehearsed more than first item

Found that things only rehearsed once were low in ability to be recalled

Linear trend, higher rehearsals = higher correctance

Question 17

Craig & Lockhart (1972)

Answer 17

U of T

1972: Gus Craik & Bob Lockhart proposed a processing framework for memory rather than simply a store

highly influential view of “levels of processing”

Idea here was that memory may be more than just a storage

We may doing more things with memory
Things to do with stimuli

Question 18

Levels of Processing

Answer 18

Memory depends on how information is encoded

Depth of processing

Shallow processing:
- little attention to meaning
- focus in physical features
- poor memory

Deep Processing
- close attention to meaning
- better memory

Question 19

Craik & Tulving (1975)

Answer 19

Got participants to do various types of trials

Participants had to answer questions that came on screen (upper or lowercase font)

Other trials asked if stimulus rhymed with question

Argued that first question was based on structural features

Rhyme required phonemic

Sentence one needed semantic level (deeper level)

Question 20

Results

Answer 20

regardless performance increased when you went from structural to semantic

Argued that this is strong evidence that depth of processing stimulus influences how well you can remember it

Criticism: time taken for response changes, strutural was quicker than semantic

Exposure of stimulus was important aspect

Question 21

Macleod (1976)

Answer 21

Is it time spent processing the item?

Had bilinguals decide if word was English/French vs. living/non-living (4 groups)

It took .92, .82, .92 and 1.42 s to make the respective decisions

Accuracy on subsequent (surprise) memory test was 37%, 38%, 48%, and 48%

Time doesn’t seem to be the important factor, but rather it seems to be the depth of processing

Question 22

Macleod Cont.

Answer 22

Tested if it is time spent processing item or depth of item the important thing

This was a low level of processing to identify english or french

Depth of living or not would be a higher depth prophecy

Time was just less than a second

Living decision was the same as english or french in one action

Surprise memory test: semantic memory was at 48% and english was at 37%

The depth was the more important thing

Question 23

Criticisms of Levels

Answer 23

circularity = there is no independent measure of depth in the framework (Nelson, 1977; Baddeley, 1978)

context effects – sometimes produce opposite the predicted results (e.g., the transfer-appropriate processing to be discussed)

Largely people looked at performance and assumed that one conditions as deeper in the level of processing

Depends on test that is being done, will effect results
Will not be perfect

Question 24

Value of Levels

Answer 24

Places emphasis on processes

Introduced a technique - incidental learning - for studying encoding processes

Moved emphasis from passive to memory depends on the processing that is performed on particular test

Introduced a new form of memory test - test of memory was more hidden from observer, incidental learning

Engaging in daily activities and randomly having to remember something

Sometimes you are required to remember that material

Idea is more you do with stimulus, the better you remember it

Better remembrance when item is generated to person (told to remember the world “apple”)
E.g., people who took notes by hand compared to notes typed on computer

Laptop people almost transcribed lecture, hand people are not quick enough so they have to try to summarize

Argued that people on laptop are transcribing and keeping info at low level of processing and hand people are trying to summarize it and are thinking of it at a semantic level

Question 25

Representation

Answer 25

Jenkins & Russel (1952); Bousfield (1953)

Random words to be learnt by free recall

People recalled recent items first

Clusters occurred (e.g., chairs, couches, tables)

Argued that there is some kind of organizational principle which tends to be semantic

Things were piled in a room and participant went to every pile and tried rememberin things from there

Question 26

Kintsch & Bushchke (1969)

Answer 26

Looked at peoples performance and where they made errors

Things that were semantically related to another

When people made errors at the end, they were sound alike errors

End of list are stored in STM which is predominantly encoded acoustically so this makes sense; errors were due to WM

Beginning errors were items were rearrangements of semantics so it was a semantic confusion (LTM, auditory)

Argued that LTM is encoded in meaning and WM/STM is encoded in sound

Question 27

Nelson & Rothbart (1972)

Answer 27

24 “paired associates” learned until perfection, forget for a 4-week retention interval, return for relearning forgotten pairs

Identical, Control, Acoustic

We don’t try to remember things in exact situation but the jist

Meaning associated with it

LTM evidence is not only semantics but there is always roon for acoustical

They forgot a bunch of pairs after a month

The researchers created a new list

Either paried it again or repaired with a new item or repaired with something similar to acoustics but it was different item

Something was still there with old experience that allowed them to learn this again (ebbinghuas notion of savings)

Question 28

Results

Answer 28

Found performance was low for control items

Identical: performance went up 70%

Acoustic: depends if acoustic info was somewhat in LTM, performance was at about 50%

Suggests that even though meaning is stored in LTM, acoustic may be stored as well

Question 29

Kolers (1975)

Answer 29

People showed advantage of reading same material in same orientation

Savings were held even a year later

Benefit to the original stuff they read before

Visual representation allowed them to remember better when they experienced it again

Visual info is there in LTM but it is not the predominant

Semantic is general, but there is some visual and auditory

Question 30

Interference

Answer 30

Is interference responsible for loss in memory

Question 31

Jenkins & Dallenbach (1924)

Answer 31

Participants required to remember list of items and were made to go to sleep or stay awake

If RI is critical to LTM, then sleeping immediately after learning should help memory

Learnt ebbinghuas type nonsense syllables

Sleep gave benefits in remembering information

People did worse staying awake

But longer sleep still worsened performance

Question 32

Results

Answer 32

Retroactive interference plays a role

Sleep helped reduce information after knowing the letters

Question 33

Yaroush, Sullivan, Ekstrand (1971)

Answer 33

No REM sleep meant no dreaming so no extra information displayed

REM sleep is crucial in memory retention

Less things that interfere with memory, the better the performance

Question 34

Benton Underwood

Answer 34

Developer with Leo Postman of the interference theory of forgetting

emphasized role of proactive interference (PI) in LTM

Theory looked at how interference affected memory - proactive interference

Compared his studies to 1800s Ebbinghaus and his results were way worse

BUT ebbinhaus was his patient and he learnt a lot more with himself

Question 35

Proactive Interference

Answer 35

Repetition made it harder to remember the new list

More lists exposed to, the worse performance had gotten

Some evidence for pro and retroactive interference

Question 36

Loss of Information from LTM

Answer 36

Both RI and PI seem to play a role

Material in LTM but for some reason, cannot be retrieved

This is called retrieval failure

Some argue there may be a role for decay

Question 37

Retrieval from LTM

Answer 37

Vast amounts of info to search

At 1 ms per memory and 10 billion memories, it would take 58 days to retrieve a given memory

LTM may be “content addressable” to optimize access and speed

Cannot access memory in parallel

This is like a serial like search

We have some kind of organize system which clusters things together

LTM has a system which allows to have a retrieval cue which leads to the access of a certain part of LTM

Question 38

Context Dependency

Answer 38

Emphasizes the match between encoding (study) and retrieval (test)
* Encoding Specificity
* State-Dependent Learning
* Transfer-Appropriate Processing

Degree to which the way you study and test and the strength of the match

Question 39

Endel Tulving

Answer 39

U of T

best known memory researcher in the world
* some of his key ideas:
* semantic/episodic
* subjective organization
* encoding specificity

Organization doesn’t always have to be based on semantics

E.g., saying cat after table, you will be able to remember it even if list was shuffled (subjective organization)

Question 40

Tulving & Thomson (1973)

Answer 40

Encoding Specificity Principle: the idea that the way in which information is encoded determines the optimal way to retrieve that information
* The better the match the more likely you will be able to retrieve it

You want to make the test and study as similar as possible

Question 41

Godden & Baddeley (1975)

Answer 41

Had 4 groups of deep sea divers that learned a list of words:
* Group 1: Studied on Land/Tested on Land
* Group 2: Studied on Land/Tested 20 feet underwater
* Group 3: Studied 20 feet underwater/ Tested 20 feet underwater
* Group 4: Studied 20 feet underwater/ Tested on Land

Question 42

Results

Answer 42

land group did better than underwater group in testing

Argued that environment and stress levels impacted this perhaps

Underwater group that tested underwater did better than studied underwater and tested on land

The other two groups performed around the same

This proved that people did better when their settings were as similar as possible

E.g., studying in quiet environment and testing in quiet environment would help in better grades

Match environments that you are in

Question 43

Eich & Metcalfe (1989)

Answer 43

State-Depending Learning: Learning is associated with a particular internal state
* Better memory if person’s mood at encoding matches mood during retrieval

Looked at internal state instead and how it influenced performance

Happy situations or sad situations

Filled questionnaire to confirm mood and then were told to study a list of words

When test state matched study state, they did better

Sad and sad and happy and happy did better than other groups

Question 44

Morris et al. (1977)

Answer 44

Transfer-appropriate processing:
- Memory task results improve if the type of processing used during encoding is the same as the type during retrieval

Question 45

Results

Answer 45

People engaged in rhyming test

When told to encode, one group of participants were asked to answer questions about the rhymes

Both groups were put into rhyming test

People were better when their encoding was similar to their retrieval (rhyming encoding and rhyming test)

This task, keeps it at acoustic level so the meaning encoding should be the better performance task

This suggests that sometimes this may not be the case

You will learn better if you space out studying

You learn things more while producing the results (told to remember fruit with letter a… apple)

Question 46

Bransford & Johnson (1973)

Answer 46

Title or picture provided context to help understand the passage

Title or picture only helped if given before the passage

Participants required to try to remember a written passage

Context given ahead of time could really help but only if it is given ahead of time

This helps you organize the information and put it in its place

Question 47

Izawa (1970)

Answer 47

Is it better to study more?

80% for 3 tests and 90% for 1 test 5 study

Question 48

Karpicke & Roediger (2008)

Answer 48

study-and-test experiment with word pairs

Group 1: studied and tested all words/sessions (81%)

Group 2: studied only words missed in the previous test; tested on all words (81%)

Group 3: studied all words; tested only on words missed in previous tests (36%)

Question 49

Factors that Lead to Better Memory

Answer 49

• Levels of Processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972)
• Distributed Practice (Ebbinghaus, 1885)
• Generation effect
• Organizing to-be-remembered information
• Retrieval practice

Question 50

Other Factors

Answer 50

Make images that incorporate things help people do better

Imagery group did better for boat-tree

Being a group can be beneficial

Helping answer other questions and being able to relate to others