Psych GRE: Memory

What are the three stages of memory?

1. sensory memory

2. short-term memory

3. long-term memory

What is the function of sensory memory?

Sensory memory is a buffer between what is a buffer between what is in the world and what we actually take into our minds. This information is held for less than a second before it is lost or transferred to short-term memory

What are common properties of sensory memory?

-very short duration

-connects memory to perception

-includes echoic and iconic memory

What did George Sperling study?

iconic memory

iconic memory

This is the idea that we have partial photographic memory within our sensory memory. We can see images of letters or numbers and recall them from the image in our brain, but they usually fade too quickly to remember very many. This is called partial report.

What term did Ulric Neisser coin in the field of visual memory?

icon

An icon is a fleeting visual memory that lasts only about half a second.

If you see a picture, then immediately see another one, you will have weakened memory of the first picture. What is this phenomenon called?

backward masking

The closer the second stimulus is to the first, the better it will "mask" the first. This is also the case when listening to and remembering sounds.

How does the "rubber pencil" optical illusion work?

Since icons are stored in your sensory memory, the image of the pencil is any of its states remains with you as the pencil moves.

The pencil moves quickly enough that you are constantly generating new iconic memories, making the pencil appear rubbery.

What is echoic memory?

Like iconic memory, echoic memory holds an exact copy of a sound in our sensory memory for a few seconds

If you are watching a movie and your roommate asks you to take out the trash, which are you more likely to pay attention to/remember and why?

The movie will likely be remembered due to selective attention.

Selective attention allows us to encode into short or long term memory the things that are important to us at the time they enter our sensory memory.

What is the most common example of selective memory? Why do we have selective memory?

The "cocktail party effect" highlights that a person can attend to one salient message (like their own name) and tune out others.

Another example is that we remember things that conform to our own beliefs and forget the things that don't.

People must selectively attend to stimuli because they only have so much capacity.

What kind of memory is used when you say a number over and over (rehearsal) before you dial it into your phone?

Short-term memory is used, and lasts in your brain for roughly 10-30 seconds.

Information in short-term memory is lost due to interference.

What is the type of rehearsal that allows short-term memories to transfer to long-term memory?

elaborative rehearsal

What is the difference between maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal?

Maintenance rehearsal is simply repeating the stimulus again and again in order to remember it. While maintenance rehearsal is good for rote memorization, elaborative rehearsal organizes the stimulus into something meaningful so that it is processed deeply and remembered better.

Wo what does George Miller's finding regarding "the magical number seven, plus or minus two" refer?

This phrase refers to the idea of chunking, which states that we can recall roughly seven chunks of information from our short-term memory, plus or minus two chunks.

If we can only hold seven chunks of information in our short-term memory, does that mean we can't remember a list of more than seven words?

No. Bits of information, like words or letters, can be chunked together. This is why we can remember words with more than seven or so letters: the letters are combined into one chunk (the full word).

If we want to remember a list of more than seven words, we can arrange them into fewer than seven categories or chunks.

Since short-term memory is believed to be more auditory than visual, how are stimuli encoded?

phonologically

What are the types of interference?

proactive interference and retroactive interference

If you learn a song one way and then are asked to sing it differently later, you may have difficulty remembering the new way as you keep remembering the old way instead. What kind of interference is this?

proactive interference

Your original memory of how the song is sung is inhibiting your ability to remember the newer memories of the song.

If your favorite sports team gets newly designed jerseys, you may forget what the old jerseys looked like over time. What kind of interference is occurring?

retroactive interference

New information entering your memory clouds the old memories, inhibiting their recall.

What kind of memory is used when remembering your own phone number?

Long-term memory, which can last for days, weeks, years, or life. Very little gets transferred from your short-term to your long-term memory.

What are the three measures of memory retention?

1. recall

2. recognition

3. savings (or relearning)

What is recognition?

Recognition is the easiest form of memory retention measurement, since all it requires is someone remembering that they have been exposed to the stimulus before.

What is recall and what are its two types?

In memory tasks, recall is when a participant must restate something learned previously.

1. Free recall is when the subject is not cued with anything like a word stem or a subject grouping.

2. Cued recall is when a specific stimulus must be restated, like a fill in the blank question on an exam.

How does savings test long-term memory?

If you learn something, like a language, and then don't use it, some of it will be forgotten. If you study the same language again, it will take less time to learn than it did originally. Savings assesses how much was left in your long-term memory between the first and second time the language was learned.

What principle says that you should take a test in the same seat you were in when you learned the material for the test in order to remember it better?

the encoding-specificity principle

What are the three types of long-term memory?

1. episodic memory

2. semantic memory

3. procedural memory

What kind of memory is used when riding a bike?

Procedural memory is the part of long-term memory that remembers how to perform an action.

What makes episodic memory different than semantic memory?

Episodic memory involves the self, like remembering your first kiss or other episodes form your life.

Semantic memory does not involve the self, but rather facts, like directions from your home to school.

What kind of memory is used when remembering a fact?

declarative memory

Which of the following predictions is reasonable based on Baddeley and Hitch's theory of working memory?

If two tasks using the same component are done concurrently, performance will be impaired on one or both

Which memory store is believed to have the largest capacity?

The long-term store

When asked to name all of the states in the US, Steven mentally pictures a map and starts naming states from west to east. Steven's strategy is useful during the process of

retrieval

The fact that Laura still knows how to ride a bicycle even though she has not ridden one in 10 years best exemplifies which of the following types of memory?

procedural

Which of the following is a memory store that is highly sensitive to masking stimuli presented within 200-300 milliseconds of the presentation of an array of letters?

sensory memory

Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues ask students to talk about various events that have occurred in their lives, including one that never occurred. If the students have trouble remembering, the researchers provide cues. They record whether the students remember the events that never occurred and how confident the students are in these false memories. Which of the following best describes the findings?

about 25% of the students remember the false event, and many are quite confident in it

What kind of memory accounts for the fact that you know how to tie your shoes, even though you can't remember when you learned it?

implicit memories are unconscious, and sometimes you don't even know you have those memories

What is an explicit memory? What two types of memory make up explicit memory?

A memory one can intentionally, consciously recall.

Episodic Memory and Semantic Memory make this up

If an individual can remember events from before the onset of amnesia (but not after), what kind of amnesia does he have?

Anterograde amnesia, which prevents patients form making new autobiographical memories, but allows them to recall memories from before the onset of amnesia.

Sometimes anterograde amnesia may be the result of a brain injury; sometimes it is a precursor of dementia

Conrad found that subjects had a fairly high error rate when asked to recall groups of 6 letters, even when the letters were always drawn from a 10 letter pool that remained in view throughout the study. The error rate was found to be related to

the sounds of the letters involved

Conrad found that letters that sounded similar were most likely to be confused with one another. This lent support to the idea that the rehearsal that takes place in short term memory has an acoustic component.

The method of loci is an example of

a mnemonic

this method is a classic mnemonic or memory toll that involves associating terms with locations one is already familiar with

Which of the following visual display tasks requires the longest amount of time for processing and recall?

Recalling a probe stimulus which was part of a previous 10 number display

Free recall requires more depth of processing than reporting if a probe was previously presented or correctly locating a probe in a string of numbers.

We also recall and process faces more quickly than numbers.

Which of the following is the best way to present a tone in order to enhance memory of quickly vanishing letters on a tachistoscopic display?

one second after the letters have vanished from the screen

A tone that occurs 1 second after a letter vanished from a tachistoscopic display would enhance memory of the letters since they would still be in sensory memory at that time.

Jeff made a list of classic movies he wanted to see, in no particular order.

When asked to reconstruct the list, he successfully listed all the detective movies, then all the comedies, and then all the Westerns. This is an example of

clustering

Clustering is the term used to describe this technique. It refers to the enhanced recall associated with grouping terms into semantically linked clusters.

Which of the following is an example the brief storage of events at the sensory level?

iconic memory

Iconic and echoic memory refer to the brief storage of events at the sensory level prior to encoding to a deeper level.