Memory Storage & Retrieval - 03/04

Memory Encoding

Levels of processing: how we initially encode the information matters a lot!

“Deeper” processing = focusing more on meaning/semantics

Serial positive curve

Memory Storage

Memory Processing —> Automatic vs. Effortful

Automatic —> Implicit Memories (nondeclarative) Without conscious recall

• IMPLICIT — processed in cerebellum and basal ganglia

  • Space, time, frequency (where you ate dinner yesterday)

  • Motor and cognitive skills (riding a bike)

  • Classical conditioning (reaction to dentist’s office)

Effortful —> Explicit Memories (declarative) With conscious recall

• EXPLICIT — processed in hippocampus and frontal lobes

  • Semantic memory - Facts & general knowledge (this module’s concepts)

  • Episodic memory - personally experienced events (family holidays)

Explicit Memories

• Consolidation while we sleep

  • Hippocampus holds the event file

  • Then transfers it to the cortex for storage

Implicit memories

• Things we can use or experience without being able to articulate them

  • Muscle memory

PRIMING - activation of association in memory (typically, unconscious and implicit)

• Cow drinks “milk” example — (cows drink water but we associate milk with cows and after fast processing of things beforehand, we unconsciously say yes)

Amygdala & Flashbulb memories

• The amygdala boosts memory processing during emotional or stressful times

Flashbulb memories: a vivid memory of an emotionally significant moment or event

• We “think” they stay highly accurate… but they are subject to forgetting just like any other memory

Severe anterograde amnesia Case Study (shows memory storage has different subcomponents)

Case studies show selective deficits of one type of memory and not another

• HM and Clive Wearing both had hippocampal damage, severe anterograde amnesia (remember past but can’t remember it in the future

  • Had trouble transferring working memory to long-term memory

  • Could do a working memory task almost normally, but would not remember he had done it after a break

  • Implicit memory seemed intact

• SAA patients can still have relatively intact procedural learning

  • Stores in their implicit memory

Memory Retrieval

Encoding specificity principle

• The more closely the retrieval cues match encoding cues, the better the information will be remembered

  • Overlap of operations at encoding & retrieval determine retrieval success

• Context-dependent memory

  • Includes the external environment as well as our internal environment

    • Such as studying underwater and testing better while underwater and studying on land and testing better while on land

• State-dependent memory

  • (state-dependent; mood-congruent memory)

    • Such as studying while sober and testing better while sober and studying while drunk and testing better while drunk

Human memory & Foregtting

Not like a video recorder

• Information undergoes systematic changes as it is processed

• We reconstruct the past - it is more like an artist’s rendering than a faithful objective representation

• Forgetting can be good and bad

  • Ex. People who can remember every single thing they have ever experienced (good and bad (like trauma))

• If a memory makes it to Long-term memory storage, it may not be lost — but inaccessible without the proper cue

FORGETTING is adaptive!