Cognitive Psych Chapter 5

What is Long Term Memory

a high capacity storage system that contains your memories for experiences and information

how long can your long term memory last

a few minutes to decades

what are the subtypes of long term memory

episodic, semantic, procedural

what is episodic memory

your personal memories

what is semantic memory

organized knowledge about the world — facts and meaning

what is procedural memory

how to do something — riding a bike

what two things occur when your form a long term memory?

encoding and retrieval

what is encoding

when you process information and represent it in your memory

what is retrieval

when you locate infomration in your memory and access it

are encoding retrieval two separate processes?

NO!

what did Craik and Lockhart argue in their very infamous article? what was their approach called?

they proposed the levels-of-processing-approach which argues that deep, meaningful processing leads to more accurate recall

what is their approach also called

the depth of processing approach

what does the levels-of-processing-approach also propose in terms of recalling info?

it predicts that you’ll be more likely to recall something when you consider its meaning, and less likely to recall something when you consider its physical or sound characteristsics

deep levels of processing is created because of what two things?

distincivness and elaboration

what is distinctiveness

when you form/memorize a stimulus that is different from your other memories

what is elaboration

when you process something in terms of meaning and interconnected concepts

how did Craik and Tulving’s study contribute to this concept? (what was the study)

they asked participants to read sentences and decide whether thr words that followed were approapriate to the sentences. they varied from simple sentences to more elaborate/specific sentences.

what were the results

while both sentences required a level of semantic processing, the more elaborate/detail sentences produced much higher recall

what is the self reference effect?

you’ll be more likely to recall/remember information if you relate that information to yourself

how does TB Roger’s study contribute to this concept? (what was the study)

he asked participants to process each english word according to the specified instruction. they processed words according to their visual, acoustic, semantic, and self reference characteristics

what were the results

the poorest recall was tied to physical and acoustic characteristics. (shallow processing)

Recall was better if tied to semantic characteristics.

Recall was the highest when tied to self reference

what did symons and Johnson’s meta analysis reveal about self reference

people are more likely to recall items using self reference, rather than any other processing methods

why is this the case? what does self reference encourage?

it encourages people to consider how their personal traits are connected with one another and to rehearse it more often if its related to yourself

what is the encoding-specificity principle

it states that recall is better if the context during retrival is similar to the context during coding. when the contexts don’t match, you’re more likely to forget the item

what three items are similar to encoding-specifity?

context dependent memory

transfer appropriate processing

reinstatement of context

what did marian and faucey’s study reveal about encoding specifity

they tested people in chile on their recall in whether it varied in language. two stories were presented in english and two were presented in spanish; but the participants had to sometimes answer questions in the opposite language

what were the results?

if the story was presented in the same language as the questions, the participants were much more likely to answer the questions correctly