PSYC 1010 Exam 3

Both Chapter 6 and 13; in-class notes and homework readings

Memory

an active system that receives information from the senses, puts that information into a usable form, organizes it as it stores it away, and then retrieves the information from storage

Encoding

putting it in

the set of mental operations that people perform on sensory information to convert that information into a form that is usable in the brain's storage systems

rehearsal, organization, elaboration

Storage

keeping it in

holding on to information for some period of time

Retrieval

getting it out

getting the information that is in storage into a form that can be used

Information-processing model

model of memory that assumes the processing of information for memory storage is similar to the way a computer processes memory in a series of three stages

Provides a "big picture" view of how the various memory systems relate to each other

Parallel distributed processing (PDP) model

model of memory in which memory processes are proposed to take place at the same time over a large network of neural connections

Concerns the connections and timing of memory processes

Levels-of-processing model

model of memory that assumes information that is more "deeply processed" will be remembered more efficiently and for a longer period of time

Suggests that a memory's duration depends on the depth to which the information is processed or encoded

Sensory memory

the very first system of memory, in which raw information from the senses is held for a very brief period of time

Iconic sensory memory

visual sensory memory, lasting only for a fraction of a second

Helps the visual system view surroundings as continuous and stable in spite of microsaccadic movements

Microsaccades

the little movements the eyes make to keep vision from adapting to a constant visual stimulus

Sperling’s Iconic Memory Test

• Presented a grid of letters using a machine that allowed very fast presentation

• Subjects could only remember four or five of the letters, no matter how many had been presented

• Sperling believed that was an inaccurate measure of the capacity of iconic memory because the human tendency to read from top to bottom took long enough that the letters on the bottom of the grid may have faded from memory by the time the person had "read" the letters at the top

• Developed the partial report method

  • Showed a grid of letters but immediately sounded a high, medium, or low tone just after the grid was shown

  • Participants were told to report the top row of letters if they heard the high tone, middle row if medium tone, bottom row if low tone

  • Sperling found they could accurately report any of the three rows

    • The entire grid was in iconic memory and available

  • If the tone was delayed, participants could no longer recall letters from the grid

    • The iconic information had completely faded out of sensory memory

Masking

the process of information that has just entered iconic memory being pushed out very quickly by new information

Eidetic imagery

the ability to access a visual sensory memory over a longer period of time

Echoic sensory memory

the brief memory of something a person has heard

e.g. the ‘what?’ phenomenon

Allows the person to remember what someone said just long enough to recognize the meaning of a phrase

Allows people to hold on to incoming auditory info long enough for the lower brain centers to determine whether processing by higher brain centers is needed

capacity = smaller than iconic
duration = longer than iconic

Short-term memory

the memory system in which information is held for brief periods of time while being used

duration = Lasts from about 12 to 30 seconds without rehearsal

capacity = small

Selective attention

the ability to focus on only one stimulus from among all sensory input

e.g. cocktail-party effect

Dr. Broadbent’s “bottleneck” theory

• A kind of "bottleneck" occurs between the processes of sensory memory and short-term memory

• Only a stimulus that is "important" enough will make it past the bottleneck to be consciously analyzed for meaning in STM

Dr. Treisman’s two-stage filtering process

• First stage: incoming stimuli in sensory memory are filtered based on simple physical characteristics

  • Instead of moving to STM or being lost, there is a lessening (attenuation) of the "signal strength" of unselected sensory stimuli

• Second stage: only the stimuli that meet a certain threshold of importance are processed

Working memory

an active system that processes the information in short-term memory (process not storage)

Shift from "how much" and "how long" to "what's happening"

Central executive

provides attentional control for visual and auditory information or the integrated information offered by the episodic buffer

Episodic buffer

links WM to LTM; offers a sense of consciousness; allows us to manipulate or modify our representations

George Miller

• Wanted to know how much information humans can hold in STM at any one time

• Reviewed several memory studies

• Digit-span test

Digit-span test

• A series of numbers is read to participants who are then asked to recall the numbers in order

• Miller reported that the capacity of STM was about seven items or pieces of information (plus or minus two; 5 to 9)

Chunking

the process of reordering or reorganizing information into separate bits of information to make it easier to remember

Maintenance rehearsal

practice of saying some information to be remembered over and over in one's head in order to maintain it in short-term memory

• Information will stay in short-term memory until rehearsal stops

• When rehearsal stops, the memory rapidly decays and is forgotten

not very effective, not very efficient, hard to retrieve

Long-term memory

the system of memory in which all the information is placed to be kept more or less permanently

The third stage of memory

Capacity = seems to be unlimited for all practical purposes

Duration = long term; forever, but not everything

Rote learning

learning by maintenance rehearsal

Not the most efficient way of putting information into LTM because to get the information back out, you have to remember it almost exactly as it went in

Elaborative rehearsal

a way of increasing the number of retrieval cues for information by tying them into exisiting knowledge

A deeper kind of processing than maintenance rehearsal, and so leads to better long-term storage

very effective

Retrieval cues

stimuli that aid in remembering

Nondeclarative (Implicit) LTM

type of long-term memory including memory for skills, habits, procedures, emotional associations, and simple conditioned responses

no “sense” of memory

Anterograde amnesia

loss of memory from the point of injury or illness forward, difficulty remembering anything new

Cannot form new long-term memories, which are most often declarative memories

Declarative (Explicit) LTM

type of long-term memory containing information that is conscious and known

General facts and things that have happened to you personally

has a “sense'“ of memory

Semantic memory

type of declarative memory containing general knowledge

relatively permanent

no time-tag

Episodic memory

type of declarative memory containing personal information not readily available to others —> events you’ve experienced, personal information about you or your life

Tend to be updated and revised more or less constantly

Episodic memories that are especially meaningful are more likely to be kept in LTM

Autobiographical memory

the memory of facts and events related to one's personal life story

both semantic and episodic memories

As children are able to talk about shared memories with adults, they begin to develop their autobiographical memory

Semantic network model

model of memory organization that assumes information is stored in the brain in a connected fashion, with concepts that are related stored physically closer to each other than the concepts that are not as highly related

Encoding specificity

the tendency for memory of any kind of information to be improved if retrieval conditions are similar to the conditions under which the information was encoded

internal or external

Context-dependent learning

the physical surroundings a person is in when they are learning specific information

State-dependent learning

memories formed during a particular physiological or psychological state will be easier to remember while in a similar state

Recall

type of memory retrieval in which the information to be retrieved must be "pulled" from memory with very few external cues
ex) filling in the blanks on a form

Recognition

the ability to match a piece of information or a stimulus to a stored image or fact
ex) word search

“Tip of the tongue” (TOT) phenomenon

When people find themselves struggling for an answer, recall has failed

Solution: forget about it; the brain continues to work on retrieval and sometime later the word or name will just "pop out"

Serial position effect

tendency of information at the beginning and end of a body of information to be remembered more accurately than information in the middle of the body of information

Primacy effect

tendency to remember information at the beginning of a body of information better than the information that follows

the listener has nothing already in STM to interfere with their rehearsal of the first few words

Recency effect

tendency to remember information at the end of a body of information better than the information that precedes it

the last word or two was just heard and is still in STM for easy retrieval with no new words entering to push them out

Testing effect

the fact that long-term memory is increased when students practice retrieving the information to be learned

False positive

Recognition is not always accurate

when a person thinks that they have recognized (or even recalled) something or someone but in fact do not have that something or someone in memory

Just enough similarity between a stimulus that is not already in memory and one that is in memory

Automatic encoding

tendency of certain kinds of information to enter long-term memory with little or no effortful encoding

Flashbulb memory

type of automatic encoding that occurs because an unexpected event has strong emotional associations for the person remembering it

These memories tend to be major positive or negative emotional events

Emotional reactions stimulate the release of hormones that have been shown to enhance the formation of long-term memories

There may also be certain memory-enhancing proteins released during the formation of this kind of memory

High accuracy --> memories of major events

Lower accuracy --> memories of highly stressful events

Constructive processing

referring to the retrieval of memories in which those memories are altered, revised, or influenced by newer information

Memories are "built," or reconstructed, from the pieces stored away during encoding

Hindsight bias

the tendency to falsely believe, through revision of older memories to include newer information, that they could've correctly predicted the outcome of an event

Misinformation effect

the tendency of misleading information presented after an event to alter the memories of the event itself

False-memory syndrome

the creation of inaccurate or false memories through the suggestion or social pressure of others (well-intentioned professionals, hypnosis, drugs)

Two steps before people will be likely to interpret their thoughts and fantasies about false events as true memories

1. The event must be made to seem as plausible

2. Individuals are given information that helps them believe that the event could have happened to them personally

Adaptive forgetting

the idea that being able to suppress information that we no longer need makes it easier to remember what we do need

Curve of forgetting

a graph showing a distinct pattern in which forgetting is very fast within the first hour after learning a list and then tapers off gradually

Created by Hermann Ebbinghaus

Distributed practice

spacing the study of material to be remembered by including breaks between study periods

Produces far better retrieval of information than massed practice

Encoding failure

failure to process information into memory

Memory trace

physical change in the brain that occurs when a memory is formed

physical change = neuron or activity between neurons

traces decay if they are not used

Decay

information that is not brought to attention in sensory memory or continuously rehearsed in STM will fade away

Disuse

decay theory; assuming the memories that are not used will eventually decay and disappear

Interference theory

although most long-term memories may be stored more or less permanently in the brain, those memories are not always accessible to attempted retrieval because other information interferes

Proactive interference

the tendency for older or previously learned material to interfere with the learning (and subsequent retrieval) of new material

Retroactive interference

memory problem that occurs when newer information prevents or interferes with the retrieval of older information

Biological bases of nondeclarative memories

cerebellum, basal ganglia, reflex pathways, and parts of the cortex

Biological bases of memories of fear

amygdala and medial temporal lobe

Memory: hippocampus

involved in encoding and retrieving some implicit memories, especially where some sort of relational association is being learned, or stimulus-reward learning is taking place

Memory: thalamus

where sensory information appears to be temporarily retained for processing and enhancement before heading for the brain's higher cortical areas, hippocampus, or other subcortical areas

Memory: prefrontal cortex

involved in the maintenance for short-term and working memories

responsible for the integration and ongoing rehearsal of items in short-term and working memory that appear to be stored in the inferior temporal cortex, the perisylvian cortex, or the posterior parietal cortex (depending on the type of stimulus that is being remembered)

Biological bases of semantic memory

stored in the association areas of the cortex; storage and retrieval are aided by various brain areas

Biological bases of episodic memory

retrieval sems to be partly a function of the posterior parietal cortex; encoding and retrieval are related to activity in the posterior cingulate cortex

Physical changes in memory

• the number of receptor sites

• the sensitivity of the synapse through repeated stimulation (long-term potentiation)

• the dendrites

  • the proteins within the neurons

Six molecular mechanisms attributed to changes in memory storage and synaptic plasticity

cAMP, PKA, CRE, CREB-1, CREB-2, and CPEB

Consolidation

the changes that take place in the structure and functioning of neurons where a memory is formed

changes = synaptic alterations, changes in neuronal structure, protein synthesis, and more

may take only a few minutes for some memories, but may take years for others

Retrograde amnesia

loss of memory from the point of injury or trauma backward, or loss of memory for the past

The consolidation process, which was busy making the physical changes to allow new memories to be stored, gets disrupted and loses everything that was not already nearly "finished"

Dementia

a neurocognitive disorder, or decline in cognitive functioning, in which severe forgetfulness, mental confusion, and mood swings are the primary symptoms

Alzheimer’s Disease

• Memory loss may be rather mild at first but becomes more severe over time, causing the person to become increasingly more forgetful about everyday tasks

• As the disease progresses and more changes in brain structure and function occur, memory loss gets progressively worse

• Memories of the past seem to begin "erasing" as retrograde amnesia also takes hold

• poor judgment and problem-solving as the hippocampus and mid-temporal lobe areas are now being affected

• The cause is not completely understood

• Some parts of the brain are affected before others

Factors that could reduce risk of dementia

• Childhood education

• Public health policies for all ages groups that promote social, cognitive, and physical activity

• Policies to reduce the risk of hypertension and hearing loss

• Efforts to reduce the risk of serious brain injuries

• Programs to reduce exposure to smoking and air pollution

Infantile amnesia

the inability to retrieve memories from much before age 3

early memories tend to be implicit, which are difficult to bring to the surface

Organizational encoding

encoding information into LTM by adding meaningful structure

gives extra cues, tags, links, things you can use to find that memory again

effective

Schema

mental template/blueprint/outline for how things are or go

take things that you’re experiencing and break then down and put them in a template

Scene schema

for objects in an environment

Event schema

for occurrences in an event

Lost in the mall study

• Loftus & Pickrell

• Tell people they want to study something about childhood memories

  • Can I contact your caregiver?

• Researchers call up the caregiver and ask them one question:

  • I'm doing a study with your child, etc.…Was your child ever lost in a mall?

  • To continue in the study, the caregiver needs to say "no"

• Participants come back and are told about the researcher's conversation with their parent

  • "I want to ask you about the time you were lost in a mall"

  • This never happened to the participant

    • Given verified false story

    • Researcher might give them a couple of hints

      • Age, location, who found them

    • Memory tries to help you; you have no reason to believe it didn't happen if your caregiver said it did

  • Some reported remembering it

    • They know what it's like to be in a mall

    • They know what it's like to be lost

  • Some people added in details

• Our minds can create false memories from related schemas

  • Sometimes it's so close to what actually happens, it doesn't really affect anything

  • Sometimes it can be awkward when someone else disagrees and it starts an argument

• Told the participants that it was all not true

  • Some people persisted that it did happen

Car crash study

• Loftus and Palmer

• People saw the film

  • Car comes up to a stop sign and another car rearends it

• Give the people another task to do for a few minutes

• Ask questions about the film they saw

  • How fast was the car going when it hit/contacted/bumped/crashed into the other car?

    • Independent variable they’re manipulating

    • The words gives off different context for speed

    • People's estimations of speed changes

• Called back in a few weeks to ask more questions

  • Asked about the scene of the accident --> did you see any broken glass?

    • Answers differ based on word used after watching the scene

    • Bumped --> imagine a lesser accident --> there was no glass

    • Crashed --> imagine a high-speed accident --> there was glass

      • Based on the schema of the different kinds of car accidents you have in your brain

Personality

the unique and relatively stable way in which each individual thinks, acts, and feels throughout life

Character

values and judgments made about a person's morals or ethical behavior

Temperament

the biologically innate and enduring characteristics with which each person is born

Psychodynamic perspective

• Sigmund Freud

• Focuses on the role of the unconscious mind in the development of personality

• Heavily focused on biological causes of personality differences

Behavioral perspective

• Based on learning theories

• Focuses on the effect of the environment on behavior

• Includes aspects of social cognitive theory in that interactions with others and personal thought processes also influence learning and personality

Humanistic perspective

• Arose as a reaction against the psychoanalytic and behaviorist perspectives

• Focuses on the role of each person's conscious life experiences and choices in personality development

Trait perspective

• More concerned with the end result (the characteristics themselves)

• Some trait theorists assume that traits are biologically determined, others make no assumption

Freud’s three structures of the mind

1. preconscious

2. conscious

3. unconscious

Freud - preconscious

Containing memories, information, and events of which one can easily become aware

Freud - conscious

One's current awareness

Unconscious

• The real departure for the professionals of Freud's day

• Part of the mind that remains hidden at all times

• Surfaces only in symbolic form in dreams and in some behavior people engage in without knowing why they have done so

• The most important determining factor in human behavior and personality

Freud’s divisions of personality

1. Id

2. Ego

3. Superego

Id

• If it feels good, do it

• Latin for "it"

• Completely unconscious, pleasure-seeking, amoral part of the personality that exists at birth, containing all the basic biological drives (hunger, thirst, self-preservation, sex, etc.)

• Pleasure drive

• How infants fit the picture: demanding, irrational, illogical, impulsive, and in want of their needs to be satisfied immediately

• Pleasure principle

Pleasure drive

the need to seek out pleasurable sensations

Pleasure principle

the desire for immediate gratification of needs with no regard for the consequences