Cognition U1: Long term memory

What is LTM?

A long-term store of highly processed, intricately processed information.

Declarative vs. non-declarative memory?

Declarative (explicit): semantic, episodic, autobiographical. Non-declarative (implicit): procedures and associations.

Semantic memory?

General knowledge about the world, concepts, language, etc.

Episodic memory?

Memory of personal experiences at specific places and times.

Autobiographical memory?

Combination of personal semantic and episodic memories.

Procedural memory?

Memory for routines, actions, tasks, and skills (e.g., over-learned actions, language processes).

Noetic vs. autonoetic awareness?

Noetic: consciousness accompanying thinking/knowing about the world (semantic). Autonoetic: awareness of subjective time (episodic).

Nondeclarative memory and cognitive resources?

It consumes cognitive resources differently than declarative memory, and can aid processing of experimental tasks.

Levels of processing model (Craik & Lockhart, 1972)?

A unitary store model: depth of processing (not just repetition) determines long-term storage; STM is highly activated LTM.

Three levels of processing?

Physical (shallow), phonological (intermediate), semantic (deep).

SHARK example questions?

Physical: Is it in capital letters? Phonological: Does it rhyme with 'park'? Semantic: Is it a type of fish?

Craik & Tulving (1975): method?

Judgments about stimuli, followed by a recognition task.

Craik & Tulving: results?

Recognition: shallow lowest (~.35), phonological middle (~.55), semantic highest (~.80). Depth of processing helps determine what gets stored in LTM.

Encoding specificity (Tulving, 1979)?

Retrieval depends on overlap between info available at retrieval and info in the memory trace.

Godden & Baddeley (1975)?

Divers learned word lists on land or underwater; recall was best when the testing environment matched the learning environment.

Marian & Kaushanskaya (2007)?

Bilingual Mandarin–English speakers; language of the questions affected what was recalled (not accuracy). Language is a code with associations that influence retrieval.

Jonides et al. (2008): brain-injury evidence for multistore?

Parietal/temporal injury: phonological-loop difficulty, no LTM deficit. Medial-temporal lobe (hippocampus) injury: LTM deficits but not STM deficits.

Jonides et al.: imaging evidence for unitary store?

Lots of overlap in brain areas for STM and LTM: frontal, parietal, and medial-temporal lobes.

Caveat to the imaging overlap?

STM tasks with longer intervals show MTL involvement, like LTM tasks; overlap could be due to the task.

What is binding?

Establishing relationships/connections between stimuli or aspects of stimuli (e.g., event details to time and place in episodic memory).

Ranganath & D'Esposito (2001)?

Hippocampus active during maintenance of novel faces over a 7-second delay; face memory requires feature binding, so MTL supports binding regardless of timescale.

Cowan's (2008) framework?

Modern unitary store: activated portion of LTM (decay and feature interference) with a focus of attention (chunk capacity limits), controlled by central executive/attention control processes.

Cowan: sources of individual differences?

The central executive (attention control) processes and the focus of attention's capacity.