PSYC248 Exam 2 Vocab

massed practice

studying repeatedly with little or no time passing between study sessions

distributed practice (spaced learning)

studying repeatedly with time intervals between study sessions

testing effect

testing is most effective when retrieval is difficult, which also occurs at the longest lags (interacts with distributed practice)

reduced processing hypothesis

used to suggest why distributed practice is an effective strategy - people pay less attention to recently encountered things and thus do not process them as well as something seen longer ago

encoding variability

used to suggest why distributed practice is an effective strategy - you will tend to remember something better if you encode it in a variety of different ways (eg, in different environments)

reminding

used to suggest why distributed practice is an effective strategy - retrieving items is beneficial for memory → a larger gap between items creates more effort at retrieval, so the benefit is greater

explicit tests

instructions to remember, effort to retrieve, “direct” tests (eg, free recall, cued recall, recognition)

implicit tests

measure effect of past experience on present, no instructions to remember, “indirect” tests (eg, stem completion, fragment completion, lexical decision)

lexical decision

response time to decide if the stimulus is a word or a non-word, after being or not being primed

metamemory

people’s awareness and understanding of their own learning and memory processes

test-enhancing learning

the tendency for a period of study to promote much greater learning when that study follows a retrieval test of the studied material…a new item is initially tested after a short delay to ensure that it is recallable → as the item becomes better learned, the practice-test interval is gradually extended

nonsense syllables

pronounceable but meaningless consonant-vowel-consonant items designed to study learning without the complicating factor of meaning (eg, wax, cal, biz, loj)

total time hypothesis

the proposal that the amount learned is a simple function of the amount of time spent on the learning task

deliberate practice

the engagement (with full concentration) in a training activity that is designed to improve a particular aspect of performance, including immediate feedback, opportunities for graduate refinement over repetitions, and problem solving

schemas

developed by frederick bartlett → long-term structured knowledge used to make sense of new material and subsequently store and recall it

elaborative rehearsal/processing

method of memorization which involves connecting information you already know with new information to expand on what needs to be remembered (eg, making up a story about the words you see in a list)

rote/maintenance rehearsal

repeatedly rehearsing an item on the same level (eg, repeating a phone number to yourself before you write it down)

levels of processing framework

information can be processed on a variety of levels, from the most basic (visual form), to phonology (sounds), to the deepest level (semantic meaning)

dual-coding hypothesis

items that are easy to visualize are encoded as images and words, and are therefore easier to retrieve

transfer-appropriate processing

proposal that retention is best when the mode of encoding and mode of retrieval are the same

incidental learning

learning situation in which the learner is unaware that a test will occur

intentional learning

learning when the learner knows that there will be a test of retention

mere exposure effect

repeated exposure to a stimulus increases perceptual fluency (the ease with which a stimulus can be processed)

distinctiveness

items that are unusual are also easy to remember from long-term memory (Von Restorff effect)

retrieval

the process of getting information back out of long-term memory (job is to use cues to find a target memory)

cues

pieces of information that are associated with a memory

target memory

the particular memory you are trying to retrieve

pattern completion

retrieving features in a memory that were not cued

tip-of-the-tongue states

occurs when we know information but cannot successfully retrieve it

reconstructive memory

an active and inferential process of retrieval whereby gaps in memory are filled-in based on prior experience, logic, and goals - during this process, memories are susceptible to being reconstructed incorrectly

source monitoring/misattribution error

when we do not correctly remember the source of a memory

cryptomnesia

when we believe that we generated something that is actually a memory with a forgotten source

context cues

retrieval cues that specify aspects of the conditions under which a desired target was encoded

environmental context

refers to the spatial and temporal conditions under which a memory was made

incidental context

the ability to retrieve a memory not necessarily because you are trying to, but because the context of the present situation matches the context of the past memory

context-dependent memory

the finding that memory benefits when the spatio-temporal, mood, physiological, or cognitive context at retrieval matches that present at encoding

state-dependent memory

changes in physiological state that can act as context (eg, induced by drugs like alcohol or caffeine or other physiological processes like exercise/heartrate)

mood-dependent memory

a form of context-dependent effect whereby what is encoded in a given mood, whether positive, negative or neutral, is best recalled in that mood (regardless of mood of event itself); affects neutral memories

mood-congruent memory

bias in the recall of memories such that negative mood makes negative context memories more readily available than positive, and vice versa; does not affect the recall of neutral memories

recall

actually drawing items out of memory and reporting them

recognition

saying whether or not you have seen an item before

signal detection theory

some items in memory are more active than others - active memories will seem more familiar, but different people have different thresholds at which they say an item was seen before

hit: correctly identifying an old item

miss: identifying an old item as new

false alarm: identifying a new item as old

correct rejection: correctly identifying a new item

spreading activation

the appropriate node in semantic memory is activated when we see, hear, or think about a concept. activation then spreads rapidly to other concepts, with greater activation for concepts closely related semantically than those weakly related.

encoding specificity principle

the more similar the cues available at retrieval are to the conditions present at encoding, the more effective the cues will be

retrieval mode

the cognitive set, or frame of mind, that orients a person towards the act of retrieval, ensuring that stimuli are interpreted as retrieval cues

incidental forgetting

memory failures occurring without the intention to forget

motivated forgetting

occurs when people purposefully engage in processes/behaviors that intentionally diminish a memory’s accessibility

availability

whether or not an item is in the memory store

accessibility

whether the memory can be retrieved, given that it is stored

consolidation

process by which a memory is hardened or made more robust over time due to an association just learned

trace decay

the gradual weakening of memories resulting from the mere passage of time

interference

arises whenever the cue that is used to access a target becomes associated with other memories

contextual fluctuation

mismatches between the retrieval and encoding contexts encourages forgetting - incidental context shifts over time

retroactive interference

the tendency for newer memories to interfere with the retrieval of older memories

proactive interference

the tendency for older memories to interfere with retrieval of more recent experiences

retrieval-induced forgetting

the tendency for the retrieval of some target items from long-term memory to impair the later ability to recall other items related to those targets

inhibition

a general term applied to mechanisms that suppress other activities

forgetting curve

the logarithmic decline in memory retention as a function of time elapsed, first described by Ebbinghaus

directed forgetting

the tendency for an instruction to forget recently experienced items to induce memory impairment for those items

item-method directed forgetting

• a participant receives a series of items to remember

• after each item, an instruction appears indicating whether they should either continue to remember it or to forget it, because they will no longer be held responsible for it

• after the list ends, participants are tested on all of the to-be-remembered and to-be forgotten words

• interestingly, recall for to-be-forgotten words is substantially impaired, relative to to-be-remembered items

list-method directed forgetting

presents the instruction to forget only after half of the list (often 10–20 items) has been studied, and usually as a surprise

• typically, deception is employed, in which the experimenter tells the participant that the list they just studied was for “practice,” and that the real list is about to be presented

• other times, the experimenter may pretend that the participant had received the wrong list, which they should “forget about.”

• Following this instruction, participants receive a second list. A final test is then given, quite often for both lists, but sometimes only for the first list. Participants are asked to disregard the earlier instruction to forget, and to remember as much as they can

• Performance in this forget group is contrasted with a remember group who follows the same procedure, except that the instruction after the first list simply reminds people that they should continue remembering the first list.

• Two findings are consistently observed

• 1. when participants believe that they can forget the first list, they often do much better at recalling the second list on the final test

• 2. compared to the remember group, proactive interference causes better recall of the first list

selective rehearsal

items that receive a “remember” instruction are encoded more deeply

encoding suppression

encoding is stopped for items that receive a “forget” instruction

retrieval inhibition hypothesis

suggesting that first-list items are temporarily inhibited in response to the instruction to forget and can be reactivated by subsequent presentations of the to-be-forgotten items

cognitive control

the ability to activate wanted thoughts and prevent unwanted thoughts from distracting us

think/no think paradigm

a procedure designed to study the ability to volitionally suppress retrieval of a memory when confronted with reminders

• mimics those times in life when we stumble on a reminder to an experience that we would prefer not to think about, prompting the desire to put the unwelcome memory out of mind

direct suppression

directly prevent the unwanted thought from being retrieved

thought substitution

think of something different instead of the unwanted thought

spontaneous recovery

the re-emergence of a previously extinguished conditioned response after a delay; similarly - forgotten declarative memories have been observed to recover over time

hypermnesia

the improvement of memory over time after repeated testing

reminiscence

remembering items that were unrecallable in past sessions without additional relearning

cue reinstatement

• unwanted memories may be brought back by cues

• cause us to experience unintended forms of reminding and show power of cues to reinstate painful or unwanted memories