Human Learning and Memory

What is memory

The foundation of all cognitive processes, it is a process of storing, coding and retrieving information we pick up from our sensory processors.

Memory is fundamentally _______ not ________. What does this mean?

Memory is fundamentally constructive not reproductive. This means that memory is an accurate “recording” of events that happened, but they aren’t always trusted as they can’t capture the full picture and insert our own biases and interpretations.

Verbal memory

Memory for words and language

The 3 key uses of memory:

1. Recording (of memory trace or engram)

2. Storage facility

3. Processing

• Acquisition (Time1)

• Encoding (T2)

• Retrieval (T3)

Prospective memory

Remembering to do things (going to a meeting, turning of the lights on your car, etc.)

Reductionism:

The view that assumes that all scientific explanations could aim to be based on a lower level of analysis:

• Social psychology in terms of cognitive psychology

• Cognitive psychology in terms of physiology

• Physiology in terms of biochemistry

• Chemistry in terms of physics

Herman Ebbignhaus (1850-1909) and what did he show/invent

• A German philosopher who was the first person to study memory experimentally/in a lab, using anecdotal observations.

• He overturned psychophysics

• Conducted intensive experiments on himself over the course of 2 years and showed that its possible to plot systematic relationships between the conditions of learning and the amount learned

• Invented the nonsense syllable— consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) non-word, he learned lists of word and nonsense syllables (verbal learning)

• Studied it repetitively and then would try to re-write the 16 CVC list right after done, and once he repeated it all correctly multiple times, he would then say he mastered it— Presentation rate controlled (time of day, room conditions, etc.), and Varied retention interval (varied study durations to see how durable memory is)

Psychophysics

An attempt to systematically map out the relationship between physical stimuli, such as brightness and loudness, onto their perceived magnitude (psychophysical properties could be how many syllables, how many words, etc)

Associationism

A theory that the mind is composed of elements, usually referred to as sensations and idea, which are organized by means of various associations

The basic rules of associationism

• Continguity: Things that appear closer together in time are more likely to be associated together

• Contingency: Cause and effect- If A causes B, A probably precedes B

• Similarity: 2 things that are similar/alike to eachother are more likely to be associated with eachother 

• Frequency: 2 things are more likely to be associated the more often they are together

• Contrast

The Forgetting Curve: Who came up with it and what is it?

Ebbinghaus’s most significant contribution

• He showed that forgetting over time is indexed by reduced savings during relearning

• Usually people forget most during the first 3 years , and then it kind of settles

Mass versus distributed practice session theory

Distributed practice yields significantly better long-term memory retention and skill acquisition than massed practice (cramming)

Gestalt Psychology (Gestalt movement

German approach beginning in the 1930s

• Attempt to use perceptual principles to understand memory and reasoning

• Attempting to apply ideas developed in the study of perception to the understanding of human memory

• The whole is different from the sum of its parts (memory is more than the individual features themselves) — Memory influenced by the configuration of elements and context

• Emphasize importance of internal representations rather than observable stimuli and responses, and to stress the active role of the rememberer

• With Nazi persecution, many Gestalt psychologists moved to north america and across europe

Anti-reductionist approach:

Acknowledged the importance of understanding the components of thought: Internal representation

Isomorphism of mental representation

Mental representation of things is also really grounded in some physical properties (memories often isomorphic based on our ideas of the world and physical properties)

Schemas

• Proposed by Bartlett to explain how our knowledge of the world is structured and influences the way in which new information is stored and recalled… How does prior knowledge influence memory?

• Schemas studied how people formed internal representations and how folk tales influenced how people remember and interpret things

• Rejected the learning of meaningless material as an appropriate way to study memory— Used folk tales from other cultures

• This approach emphasized the study of the memory errors that people made, explaining them in terms of the participants’ cultural assumptions about the world

Models (Kenneth Craik, 1940s)

A method of expressing a theory more precisely, allowing predictions to be made and tested

• Models developed with analog computers (before the digital computer times) and applying his computer based theoretical model to the practical problem of g*n-aiming in tanks

• His information-processing approach was very influential for the future

• Became known as cognitive psychology

Studying memory based on Structural Features

• Questions about duration (How long does memory last?)

• Questions about content (What kind of information is being stored?)

• Questions about capacity (What is the capacity of your memory system?)

Studying memory based on Processing Features

• Is there any evidence thaty short term memory has different memory features than long term memory?)

• Questions about strategies (Are there any memory strategies?)

• Questions about speed (How quickly you can retrieve information)

• Questions about the nature of memory failure/loss 

Studying memory focusing on understanding the conditions at the time of T1, T2, T3

Nature of the TBI (To Be remembered Item)

• Ex. Are pictures remembered better than words, nouns better than verbs, etc.

Duration of the stimulus presentations 

Time between TBI and need for recall effect memory performance

Studying memory based on Quality of the product

Speed, accuracy, nature of errors

Sensory memory

 Information held in primary sensory pathways, some of it in brief short-term memory, only some will be encoded and reach long-term

Short term memory characteristics

Very brief memories, have a specific short duration of lasting approximately 20-30 seconds

Working memory

What you can do with the information held in your brain when performing complete tasks (what you can “keep in mind”)

• stores and manipulates the information facilitating cognitive operations (reasoning, learning and comprehension) 

Long term memory

A system of systems assumed to underpin the capacity to store information over long periods of time

Squire model of LTM

Multi-component model of different aspects of LTM

Iconic memory

Applied to the brief storage of visual information (example, if we didn’t have iconic memory, it would lead us to miss information every time we blink– visual memory)

• Highly accurate sensory record fot a short period of time

• Not the same as photographic memory

• Estimates from < 0.5 second to several seconds

Masking

A process by which the perception or storage of a stimulus is influenced by events occurring immediately before presentation (forward masking) or after (backwards masking)

Haptic memory

Short term sensory memory that retains the physical feeling of touch, pressure, texture, weight for approximately 2 seconds

Echoic memory

Brief storage of auditory sensory information

Spatial memory

Records and retrieves information needed to navigate environments, recall the location of objects, and orient yourself in space

Implicit/nondeclarative memory

Retrieval of information from long-term memory through performance rather than explicit conscious recall or recognition

Priming

The process whereby presentation of an item influences the processing of a subsequent item, either making it easier to process (positive priming), or more difficult to (negative priming)

Explicit/declarative memory

Memory that is open to intentional retrieval (like remembering personal events or facts)

Episodic memory

system that aids in recollecting specific personal events

Semantic memory

A system that is assumed to store accumulative knowledge or facts of the world

Procedural memory

Type of implicit, long term memory that allows you to perform motor and cognitive skills automatically without conscious awareness or much thought

Flashbulb memory

Vivid, long lasting memory from a surprising/shocking event, with personal as well as objective details

Tip of the Tongue phenomenon (William James)

A temporary memory failure when you cannot retrieve a familiar word or name even though you feel certain you know it

Classical conditioning (Pavlov)

Pavlov’s conditioned response (Classical Conditioning): Early behaviorist who recognized that animals can recognize supper time (salivary response) by the sound of a bell.. They have therefore ingrained it in their memory that bell = food (Early behaviorist study)

• Can be translated in some matter to humans

Instrumental conditioning (Thorndike)

Modifies volitional learning: have a sense of control… “I feel like I can do it or not do it” in response to stimuli (NOT free will). 

Volional responses: conscious actions that an individual chooses and controls rather than executing as a reflex or automatic habit

Law of effect

A behaviour with a positive outcome is more likely to be repeated, a behaviour with a bad outcome is less likely

• AKA our actions influence the probability of whether or not that action will happen again

Assosionist/Explored associations (Tolman)

Mental maps (representations): Studied on rats in a maze, how long it takes them to encode/form mental representation of the maze to learn the dead ends to get to the food 

• One group of rats rewarded every time 

• Another group never had any food (just wandered around, end of maze didn’t mean anything to them)

• Another group for the first 10 days there was no food, but on day 11 they were given food and it gave the end of the maze meaning, before the end of the maze was just another dead end to them 

Early Neuroscience efforts: What was Lashley looking for?

Search for the engram

• Lashley progressively removed larger and larger parts of the rats brains, from different locations to see the outcome on a prior learned task (prior task was learning a brain, then took small part to see effect)

• Memory affected more by the amount of brain tissue removed, not the location

Paired associate learning (Mary Calkins, 1894)

• How long it takes you to associate words with words that normally wouldn’t be associated with

• A-B-C-D paradigm: Bird-Fancy ; Table-arrow

• A-B-A-D paradigm: Bird-Fancy ; Bird-arrow

• A-B-A-B paradigm: (synonyms) Bird-Fancy ; Bird-Dressy

• A-B-AB paradigm (recombinations): Bird-Fancy ; Table-Fancy

Donald Hebb (Canada’s most famous neurosciencist)

First to coin the word neuropsychology, early neuroscience efforts, his theories in his book have guided most of what we know about biopsychology (father of biopsychology)

Hebbian Learning (Hebbian plasticity)

“Neurons that fire together, wire together”

• Signal reverberation in collections of cell assemblies followed by a change in neural interconnections

Cognitive revolution

• The beginning of thought/memory being a valid subject for study

• The computer metaphor: How the stimulus reaches different part of the brain is compared to how computer is made and how it gives output

What is the Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two

• human memory capacity is 5-9 pieces of information(average 7)

• Limited capacity of memory

• Organization aids memory

How information gets passed along: An information-processing approach to memory

WEIRD Populations

Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic

• What much of psychology is based on

• More interest now in moving beyond WEIRD populations and into more “practical aspects of memory,” including a more diverse population to see their generality

  
  
  

Sensory Memory-Partial report Procedure (George Sperling)

1. Short visual presentation of material 

2. Variable delay inbetween 

3. Tone cueing for the line to be remembered: Report as many letters as you can on one of the lines

4. Log Response: Can report on average 3-6 items

• But claim to see more

Primary Visual Pathways

Both eyes send information to both hemispheres, but we can select which hemisphere it goes to because both eyes have left and right visual fields

1. Lateral geniculate nucleus is the first place where info from the left visual field (left eye) is shared with the right visual field (right eye)

2. Then travels through optic radiation and land in the primary visual cortex

3. Further going to central nervous system and we process what we just saw

Masking effects-storage

Storage occurring at series of stages in the process of perception some outside the brain— early in the pathway

• Letters

• Bright flash of light (Same eye for disruption– prior to the thalamus) 

• Pattern (Either eye will produce disruption– after the thalamus)

Recognition Buffer (Sperling)

We can read letters off a peripheral store at a rate of approx 1 letter/10 milliseconds into this more durable store

• Connecting words in a sentence

• Function of sensory memory

• Info that is being read off to the retina 

• Some then to a more durable short-term store 

• Helps give us a coherent representation of the world

How can STM be lost? (4)

• Trace decay: Trace grows weaker in the passage of time

• Biological encoding: Neural death, new synapses, active/motivated forgetting

• Interference: Retrieval disrupted by other related memory traces

• Contextual fluctuations: previously relevant contextual cues can change over time (competition and cue overload)

Infantile amnesia

Not being able to remember memories from a very young age, so there aren’t any conscious memories before a certain age

Modal Model of memory

1. Input from the environment

2. Sensory registers (Naptic, Echoic, Iconic)

3. Short term store encodes, decides its significance, and if none it could just end here and not go to LTM store

4. Long term memory (permanent memory store)

The Decay theory

If a memory is not used it decays/rusts away

• If file is not important, it gradually gets pushed to the back of the cabinet

Proactive interference

Previously stored information could impact/get in the way of new information (Knowing english gets in the way of learning french pronunciation and spelling)

Free recall

A method whereby participants are presented with a sequence of items which they are subsequently required to recall in any order they wish (Freely)

Recency effect

Tendancy to remember the last few items in a list

Primacy effect

A tendency for the first few items in a sequence to be better recalled than the following items, but less likely for difficult to name items

Long-term recency

A tendency for the last few items to be well recalled under the conditions of long-term memory

Digit span

The maximum number of sequentially presented digits that can reliably be recalled in the correct order (like phone #s)

• limited to 6 to 7 digits

Chunking

The process of combining a number of items into a single chunk, typically on the basis of long-term memory (capactiy can be better if able to comprehensively chunk info together)

• Chunking info is easier when its in a meaningful unit (being able to pronounce it, can be said as a word)

Model of STM: Verbal Short-Term Memory

• Temporary storage of speech-like information

• Encoding based on sound, not word meaning/relation, so it could be much faster

Articulatory rehearsal process

Verbal memory traces can be refreshed by subvocal rehearsal, saying the items to yourself, which depends on a vocal or subvocal articulatory process

•  (refreshes traces)

The phonological similarity effect

A tendency for immediate serial recall of verbal material to be reduced, when the items are similar in sound (demontration that letter span is reduced for similar sounding items or with a particular subject)

• Ex/ most of the words start with m (similarity)

• Ex/ In the same subject/category: big, wide, large, high, tall

Articulatory suppression

A technique for disrupting verbal rehearsal by requiring participants to continuously repeat a spoken item

Word length effect

• A tendency for verbal memory span to decrease when longer words are used. (longer the word, the memory performance drops)

Models of STM: Visio-Spatial STM

Seeing something visually is usually very related to the space its in (binging the object to the space its in)

• Memory of precise location usually declines rather quickly

Method of change detection

Very briefly shows an object, then shows another image with only one element of last picture changed, then goes back to initial image and simply asks if anything changed

• Longer recall intervals, lower chance of memory trace remaining

Retention Interval CONSONANT Trigrams (Brown Peterson paradigm):

Gave individuals lists of TBR items that were 3 consonants, and to see the true retention of STM, they gave you something else to focus on, like counting backwards by 3s, so they couldn’t focus on the TBR item

Searching STM using parallel search

We can access info from all systems at once —- Its all laid out

Searching STM using Serial Self-Terminating search

Take the probe an compare it to the first item, second, then third in memory set to see what item matches what you’re looking for and terminal your search

Serial Exhaustive Search

Go down the lust and compare it to first, second, then third item then dont make a decision if it was there until you go through them all

Sternberg Task

List of digits to be remembered, varying from 1 to 6 items long, randomized

• After last item in list presented, followed immediately by a probe item (if list was 2, 7, and probe given after was 3, you have to say if probe “3” was in list or not)

• And he also measured how long it took you to respond

• Dependent measure: Yes/No, Correct?, time taken to respond

Implications of the Atkinson-Shiffrin Model

The longer something stays in STM (rehearsal), the more likely it is to be transferred to LTM, but rehearsal alone is not enough to know if t will be transferred to LTM

Confabulation

Accounts for the attentional control of action

The multicomponent model has what 3 components

The phonological loop: holding speech-based items

Visio-spatial sketchpad: visual/spatial encoding of items

Central executive: What the whole system is controlled by, an attentional limited system that selects and manipulates material in the subsystems

Ex. The visual image of your house relies on the sketchpad, maybe then you counted the windows using the phonological loop

Episodic buffer

A component of the Baddeley and Hitch model of working memory that assumes a multidimensional code/store, that is accessible to conscious awareness and allowing the various subcomponents of working memory to interact with long-term memory

Spatial working memory

System involved in temporarily retaining information regarding spatial location

Aphantasia vs Hyperphantasia

Aphantasia: Some people appear to remember but deny any accompanying visual imagery (1%)

• less detailed autobiographical memories

• used memories less in future planning

Hyperphantasia: Visual imagery equivalent in vividness to perception (3%)

Is aphantasia genetic

Yes there is a tendency for it to run in families