Week 2 Lecture 2 - memory Flashcards
What is episodic memory?
memory for specific events located at at specific moment in time
What is sematic memory?
facts about the world
How are episodic memory and semantic memory functionally different?
they hold different types of information
they hold different experiences
In the case of 147 cases on amnesia, what was found?
- substantial loss of episodic but semantic loss generally smaller
- damage to hippocampus affects episodic more than semantic BUT hippocampal amnesia my affect acquisition of new semantic memories more than retrieval of old ones
What do semantic dementia patients suffer from? Where is the brain damaged?
- severe loss of concept knowledge but intact episodic memory
- damage to anterior frontal and anterior temporal lobes
Are episodic and semantic memories independent?
Yes but many LTM are a mix of episodic and semantic memories
they dynamically interact and affect each other
What was Bartlett’s approach to meaning and schemas?
- recall of complex material
- examined recall errors
- stressed ppts effort after meaning (unlike Ebbinghaus)
What is a Schema?
- structured representations of knowledge
- can be used to make sense of new material
- influenced/determined by social and cultural factors
How might schematic knowledge affect memory?
may affect memory, especially after longer intervals
What does ascribing meaning to stimuli affect?
encoding and storage
How do related words in a list tend to be recalled?
as a cluster/ together
When given the opportunity to organise info in a meaningful way, what is memory guided by?
meaning
What is Paivio’s Dual-coding hypothesis?
more imageable words are more memorable
What can words be encoded in terms of?
visual appearance
verbal meaning
What do multiple encoding routes lead to?
increased rate of successful recall
What level of processing is better for recognition?
deep processing
particularly for “yes” responses
studied with matched RT across tasks observed the same effect
What are some limitations of LOP theory?
difficult to define and measure
LOP not processed serially but simultaneously
deeper not always more memorable
What are the levels in LOP?
visual (structure)
phonological (acoustic)
sematic (meaning)
What is transfer appropriate processing (TAP)
memory retrieval is best when the cues available at testing are similar to those available at encoding
How can the LOP effect be explained in terms of TAP?
deep encoding more similar to the way memory is tested
According to TAP when is learning most efficient?
when tested the same way as learned
Why is deep coding better?
elaborative rehearsal enhances delayed LT learning more than maintenance rehearsal
What is elaborative rehearsal?
linking it to other material
What is maintenance rehearsal?
as something was learned
Is recall better when words are presented in an organised or scattered order?
organised
What type of organisation did Tulving believe that memory benefitted from?
subjective organisation e.g., chunking
When are items chunked together?
if they are:
- linked to a common associate
- come from the same semantic category
- form a logical hierarchical structure or matrix
What is the hierarchical network model?
- semantic memory organised into a series of hierarchical networks
- major concepts represented as nodes
- properties/ features are associated with each concept
What is cognitive economy?
properties are stored higher up to minimise redundancy
How do sentence verification tasks support the hierarchical network model?
unless info is directly linked/stored with a concept in semantic memory, we infer the answer from properties of higher nodes
making more inferences slows verification
What are some problems with the sentence verification tasks?
- familiarity –> not all sentences were familiar
–> when controlled reduces the hierarchical distance effect
typicality –> verification is faster for more representative member categories, independent of hierarchical/semantic distance
What is the spreading activation model?
- semantic memory is organised by semantic relatedness/distance
- length of links indicated the degree of semantic relatedness
- activity at one node causes activation at other nodes via links
- SA decreases as it gets further away from original point of activation
What is some support for the spreading activation model?
- Semantic priming tasks
when presenting 1 stimulus that is semantically related makes subsequent processing more efficient - (Deese–Roediger–McDermott) DRM Paradigm
activation should spread from all presented words to related word
The Spreading Activation model is more flexible, what are some pros and cons of this?
Pros - can account for more empirical findings
Cons - reduces specificity of models predictions
- more difficult to test
What are some limitations of the spreading activation model?
- concept represented by single node = oversimplified
- does each concept have a fixed mental representation?
- no consensus on the most appropriate way to measure semantic distance
What is the Situated Simulation Theory?
- concept are processed in different settings
- processing influenced by current context
- concepts incorporate perceptual properties and motor or action related properties
What are some limitations of the Situated Simulation Theory?
- How variable are concepts across situations?
concepts = stable core and context-dependent elements - are these properties secondary - after concept memory has been accessed?
