Memory: Chapter 1

What is memory?

What are the three stages of memory processing?

Encoding, Storing, Retrieving

What is encoding? What is it’s function?

Entering information; determining how information is processed and stored

What is storing? What is it’s function?

Holding information; maintaining the encoded information over time

What is retrieving? What is it’s function?

Finding information; locating and accessing stored information when needed

What are the 2 types of sensory memory?

Iconic & Echoic

What is sensory memory?

the briefest form of storage, representing the environment as it happens in real time

What is iconic memory?

Brief storage of visual information (visual traces)

What is echoic memory?

Brief storage of auditory information (auditory traces)

Describe what the recency advantage is in echoic memory

People are more likely to remember auditory information presented at the end of a sequence, with fewer errors occurring at the end than in the middle

Describe the Sperling Experiments (1960). What did they find?

Participants were trained to associate tones (high, medium, and low) with specific rows of letter (top for high, medium for middle, and low for bottom). When the tone was played immediately after a brief visual presentation, participants could identify the letters in the corresponding row, showing they are encoding the entire array but are quickly forgetting what they have encoded. They only remember what they need or are able to. When recall is tested immediately, it should provide as estimate of the total capacity of the memory store, with the falloff in performance as the tone is delayed representing the loss of information.

What is masking?

Perception and/or storage of a stimulus that is influenced by events occurring immediately before/after presentation

What is forward masking?

The mask is presented BEFORE the stimulus

What is backward masking?

The mask is presented AFTER the stimulus

What is brightness masking? Where does this occur? (Turvey, 1973).

Occurs at the peripheral retinal level; most effective when the mask is bright or close in time to the stimulus. Only works if the mask and stimulus are in the same eye.

What is pattern masking? What does it suggest about visual processing? (Turvey, 1973)

Occurs when targets are followed by a mask comprising broadly similar features to the target (e.x., jumbled fragments of letters). This mask operates even when the target is presented to one eye and the mask to the other.

This suggests that it influences a later stage of visual processing that occurs after information from the two eyes has been combined into a single percept. It is relatively insensitive to brightness and subjectively feels as if a clear image has been disrupted before the information could adequately be read off from it

What is short-term memory (STM)?

The temporary storage of small amounts of material over brief delays (seconds). This is often verbal and aided by rehearsal.

What is working memory (WM)? What is it limited in?

A “mental workspace” used for the temporary maintenance and manipulation of information during complex tasks (e.g., remembering instructions while performing a task). It links perception, awareness, and action, BUT is limited in capacity

What is long-term memory (LTM)?

The ability to store information over long periods of time

What are the two types of LTM?

Explicit (declarative) & Implicit (nondeclarative)

What is explicit memory (declarative memory)?

Memories that we intentionally remember

What are the two types of explicit memory?

Episodic & Semantic

What is episodic memory? What did Tulving (2002) refer to this as?

Memory of specific events of “episodes” (e.g., the first time you rode a bus. Tulving referred to this as “Mental Time Travel".

What type of people typically struggle with episodic memory?

People with amnesia

What is semantic memory?

General knowledge of the world (e.g., knowing that school buses are typically yellow).

What is implicit (nondeclarative) memory?

Retrieval expressed through performance rather than conscious recall

What is conditioning?

Pairing a neutral stimulus with a response (e.g., Pavlov’s dog experiment, or air-puff blink conditioning)

What are skills?

Motor skills and task performance (e.g., directing a choir)

What is priming? Define the 2 subtypes of priming.

Priming: When the presentation of one item influences the processing of a subsequent item

• Positive Priming: Facilitates processing (e.g., reading “doctor” makes it easier to process the word “nurse”)

• Negative Priming: Presenting something close to the stimulus that’s going to interfere with your ability to process that stimulus

What is psychophysics?

Systematically maps physical stimuli onto perceived magnitude (effective for brightness/loudness, difficult for memory).

Define behaviorists

Focused on conditioning and the stimulus-response relationship

Who is Herman Ebbinghaus? Why is his 1885 research so important?

Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist. He was the first to demonstrate memory loss over time by showing that it was indeed possible to plot systematic relationships between conditions of learning and the amount learned. (the forgetting curve)

Ebbinghaus verbal learning approach: Using meaningless three-letter combinations (such as ZOF or WID) in a consonant-vowel-consonant format) to test pure memory

What is the verbal learning approach (1930s-1960s)

An approach to study memory focused on associations between stimuli and responses using lists of nonsense words.

What is Gestalt Psychology (1950s)?

George Mandler and Endel Tulving emphasized internal representations and the learner’s active organization of material, rather than just observable stimuli.

Who is Frederic Bartlett (1932). What did he propose?

Bartlett was focused on “effort after meaning” using complex, real world material like folk tales.

He proposed schemas, internal structures of world knowledge that influence how new information is stored and retrieved. Memory errors are often he result of these schemas (ex., if we have very different experiences of the world, we may have different schemas)

What is the nature of explanation (1943)

Kenneth Craik proposed using the computer as an analogy for human behavior. Said models = a way to express a theory precisely allowing predictions to be tested

What is perception and communication (1958)

Donald Broadbent applied Craik’s ideas to practical problems during the war (where people’s memory was affecting by things that they were experiencing)

Who is Clive Wearing? Why is his case so influential?

Clive Wearing suffered a brain infection from a herpes simplex virus that broke through his brain barrier and causes encephalitis (an inflammation of the brain). He was densely amnesic and appeared to be unable to store information for periods longer than a couple of seconds although he could remember (vaguely) important events in his life such as directing and conducting a major performance. The fact that Clive’s musical memory and skills were unimpaired suggested that memory is NOT a simple system.

What is the Modal Model (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968)

The environment has different stimuli that enters out senses.

1. Environmental Input: Stimuli enter the senses

2. Sensory Memory: Brief, real-time storage

3. Short-term Memory: Sensory memory is encoded into a short-term space

4. Long-term memory: Information is encoded for long-term retrieval

What is bidrectional flow?

The things that you know about your world can affect the things you pay attention to. This can affect what goes into your memory and how you process it

What is connectionism?

The framework that suggests that semantic memory is NOT a localized symbolic representation but is represented in the strength of connections between interconnected processing units.

EX: the connection between “bird” and “canary” is much stronger than the connection between “canary” and “computer”

What are large language models (LLMs)? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Massive input of natural language in models that act as artificial neural networks. They use human feedback and reinforcement learning to align future output to human preferences

Advantages: STM is better because there is more capacity to hold more information

Disadvantages: It picks up on human preferences and issues. “Hallucinations” are plausible but false outputs (similar confabulations in patients with frontal lobe damage)

Describe predictability in memory and AI. What does it help facilitate?

Predictable language patterns are easier to remember than non-predictable (“themileak” is easier to recall than “jwnosgpzq” because the spelling for the first follows the rules of the english language).

Predictable word pairs and sentence endings facilitate memory and processing