Week 9 LTM & Autobiographical Memory

Question 1

What is prospective vs. retrospective memory?

Answer 1

Prospective memory = remembering to do things in the future

Retrospective memory = remembering things from the past

Question 2

What are the two forms of declarative memory?

Answer 2

Semantic memory (knowledge)
Episodic memory (personal)

Question 3

What are the two forms of non-declarative memory?

Answer 3

Procedural memory = sequence of actions in a task
Associative memory = relationship between different things

Question 4

What type of memory did HM loss and retain?

Answer 4

H.M lost LTM declarative memory (couldn’t remember new people or tasks he had learnt), but retained his non-declarative memory (improved in mirror drawing task, using LTM procedural memory)

Question 5

What are the 2 reasons why there is a murky difference between semantic and episodic memory?

Answer 5

1. Semantic memory (memory of general knowledge) may arise from repeated episodic memories (ie. playing chess with parent makes you understand the rules of the game)
2. Memories could be both semantic and episodic at the same time (you remember the time you learnt about the capital of Australia)

Question 6

What are the 3 main stages of forming memories?

Answer 6

1. Encoding = getting information into brain
2. Maintenance through rehearsal = keeping things in memory = failure can occur in delays in time, or interference from other information
3. Retrieval = retrieving memory from the LTM through recall or recognition

Question 7

What’s the difference between recall and recognition in memory retrieval?

Answer 7

1. Recall = recalling something with no specific clues or possible options
2. Recognition = you are given multiple possible options of what the answer may be (multiple choice)

Question 8

Levels of difficulty enhance the encoding of information into memory. What are 3 examples of low, medium and high levels of processing?

Answer 8

1. Easy = visual/graphemic processing “Is it in capital letters?”
2. Medium = phonetic processing “Does it rhyme with —”
3. Hard = semantic/elaborate semantic processing “Does it belong to this category / does it fit in this sentence?”

Question 9

Why is [elaborate] semantic level the most effective at encoding information?

Answer 9

The deeper the level of processing at encoding, the more connections made between new material and existing memory.

Semantic is the hardest because it asks participants to recognise and understand the meaning and linguistic appropriateness of the word.

Question 10

How does the self-referential effect help deeper levels of memory encoding?

Answer 10

When information is related to oneself, people spontaneously engage in deeper levels of processing that promotes memory.

Question 11

How does lack of prior context inhibit memory?

Answer 11

Context and comprehension allows people to form a scaffold of being able to contextualise and comprehend the information.

Participants who are not given any context/topic about information presented to them do not have as enhanced memory as those given prior contextual information.

As a result, recall of the information is higher in those who were presented with the topic beforehand.

Question 12

What is the generation effect in memory encoding?

Answer 12

When people generate a response to a cue, they are more likely to remember the association compared to when a response is generated for them. Having to think of a response/synonym yourself is engaging at a deeper level of processing compared to being given the answer to remember.

Question 13

How is the generation effect tested?

Answer 13

Generation condition = generate a synonym with rapid starting with “f”
Ie. Non-geeration condition = remember these two synonyms “rapid” and “fast”

Question 14

What is the spacing effect in memory encoding? (Ebbinghaus vowel strings)

Answer 14

Memory is enhanced when learning information is distributed rather than crammed together

If study sessions are crammed, one is less likely to attend to each presentation / unique aspects of learning material

When learning is spaced, the context of the stimulus being processed is able to change to a richer degree, across multiple learning experiments and additional retrieval routes

Question 15

How does the location and context of the information improve memory?

Answer 15

Memory performance is enhanced when the study conditions are in the same context as the text conditions (scuba-diving study, Godden & Bradley, 1975).

Studying in one room only means there is a level of context specific to that room, multiple studying environments may be better.

Question 16

What does chunking show about memory?

Answer 16

Miller (1965) people can remember 7(-+2) items of information in isolated units

Chunking these units of information allows people to remember more than 7 units of information, especially if the information is socially or historically relevant like dates

Question 17

What is the serial position effect in memory? Primacy & recency)

Answer 17

The tendency to remember stuff at the first and most recent exposure, better than the intermediate part of the time span.

Question 18

How to use serial position effect for optimising study?

Answer 18

If you study stuff in an order, you may not remember the stuff in the middle as much, you could mix up the order of content studied to overcome the serial position effect in memory.

Question 19

What is the DRM Paradigm effect?

Answer 19

1. Involve s presentation of semantically related words to encode
2. After a recall test with familiar and new related ‘lures’, participants often recall hearing the semantically related foil from the test even when it was not present

Question 20

What does the DRM test say about object categorisation in memory?

Answer 20

1. Shows brains ability to group semantically related words together into categorises, reflecting chunking ability to enhance memory
2. Semantic networks are activated when presented with a series of semantically related words, as the foil word is congruent with the others, it is falsely assumed to have belonged to the initial set of words

Question 21

What are some real life examples of the DRM effect?

Answer 21

False memories - (Loftus, 1998) found that when asked about an event that was never presented, 64% of participants recalled details of the event because it was congruent with previous events they were shown,

The semantic similarity of the drug bust situation became linked in their memory as something that happened

Question 22

What factors affect the retrieval of autobiographical memory?

Answer 22

Suggestive questioning/language (Loftus & Palmer, 1974)

1. Mean speed estimate was estimated to be higher when asked
   Indicates that the type of the verb indicate different levels of speed, (ie. smashed vs. collided), which were correlated with participants’ perception of the speed of the cars.
2. Participants who had received the question with the more violent verbs (smashed/hit) were more likely to report broken glass compared to the control condition.
3. Inserting false objects in memory through suggestion (Loftus, 1975)
   Watched a video of car accident without a barn. Given either leading question including presence of barn or control question led to people thinking there was a barn

Question 23

Why is memory so susceptible to leading questions? (inserting false memories)

Answer 23

Memory is iterative = more susceptible to current sources of information that interfere with original memory. The original memory is updated with each recall

1. Inserting idea of a barn creates a memory trace of what a barn looks like
2. After video of car: memory trace of the white sports can is also formed
3. When Asked about barn and sports car: memory trace of barn and car are retrieved at the same time, giving the perception that both were present

Question 24

What are 3 implications for fallible memory on eyewitness testimony?

Answer 24

1. Confidence is not the best parameter for evaluating the veracity of someone’s memory
2. The emotional response is not the best parameter, if they believe something they will act genuinely and authentically, they will report it as so
3. Signal Detection theory = false alarms as well as misses occur in memory

Question 25

How can we tell what is a false memory? (2)

Answer 25

1. Implement more open-ended unbiased questions in police interrogations to avoid suggestive/leading events
2. Minimise the interviews influence and let the interviewee generate as much of the content as possible

(avoid 90s therapists convincing people they have trauma)