PSYC 3- Midterm 2 Review

Retrieval

remembering info from LTM

Mnemonic strategies

- techniques to help memorize material such as facts
- often involve imposing meaning on arbitrary info

ex) digit memory enhanced if patterns can be discovered

Keyword Method

form acoustic link and imagery link

ex) remembering trigo is wheat in spanish (imagining a tree of wheat)

- Atkinson & Rough: learning vocab list (keyword method was 88% and control was 28%)

Context dependent memory

Godden & Baddeley (1975)
- tested while on land and some underwater
- match external environment

State dependent memory

Kenealy (1997)
- mood induction experiment
- you're likely to remember events that are similar to memories that match that mood
- match internal state

Encoding

storing new info into LTM

Elaborative rehearsal

Craik and Tulving (1975)
- words appearing in more complex sentences ("the great bird swooped down and carried off the struggling chicken")
- were better remembered than the same words in simple sentences ("she cooked the chicken")

Conclusion:
- elaborative sentences lead to richer retrieval paths (more to help you find that memory)

Depth of Processing

Craik and Tulving
- shallow to deep thinking
- performed an experiment where participants were asked to answer questions regarding a set of words and then were asked to remember what the words were
- manipulating how we encode info

Shallow thinking

Orthographic: processing based on how a word is written

ex) is this word in capital letters?

Between shallow and deep thinking

Phonological: processing based on how the word sounds

ex) does the word rhyme with [word]?

Deep thinking

Semantic: processing based on what the word means

ex) does the word fit in the following sentence...?

Conclusion of depth processing

the depth at which we process a word at encoding affects the likelihood of recall

Depth of processing: another level! (Rogers)

Self-reference: processing based on relationship to learner

ex) does the word describe you?

Bransford & Johnson (1972)

- read ambiguous passage (title: washing clothes)

3 conditions
- passage/no title
- passage/then title
- title/then passage

Results:
- receiving the title after the passage was no better than not receiving the title at all on a recall test
- title/then passage condition: 2x better recall than other conditions
- we have to actively organize info while we encode it

Other mnemonic strategies

- peg-word method
- acronyms
- method of loci

Roediger & Karpicke (2008)

Stimuli: 40 Swahili-English word pairs

Study Period 1:
- study phase: all conditions study all 40 word pairs
- test phase: all conditions tested on all 40 pairs

Subsequent study period:
- once you correctly recall a word during a test phase, what happens depends on what condition you're in

Conclusion:
- repeated studying -> almost no effect on recall
- repeated testing -> large effect on recall

Retrieval cues

Words or other stimuli that help you remember info from LTM

Mantyla (1986)
- study 500 words, generate 3 cues

Results: own cues 91% correct, other cues 55% correct
- retrieval cues are significantly more effective when created by the person whose memory is being tested

Encoding specificity principle

memory is best when the conditions at encoding match the conditions at retrieval

Transfer-appropriate processing

matching the type of cognitive processing at encoding and retrieval = best performance

Morris, Bansford, & Franks (1977)
- study words
- semantic and rhyme studies
- test on rhyming recall had better performance with rhyming encoding and vice versa

Serial position effect

Murdock (1962):
- Present long series of words
- Free recall
- Primacy: better recall for first words in list
- Recency: better recall for final words in list

Explanation for primacy

Early words get more attention
-> more likely to get stored in LTM

Explanation for recency

- Most recent words are still available in working memory
- Recency effect is eliminated if you are distracted prior to recall

Sachs (1967)

- Participants told a story about Galileo
- Delayed after or distracted
- Had to choose which sentence appeared in the story
- Memory much better for meaning of sentences than specific sentence structure

Role of the hippocampus

Responsible for ability to encode new explicit long term memories

H.M Case

had anterograde amnesia (inability to from new long term memories)

Explicit memories

- Long term memories that are consciously recalled and recited
- Episodic memory: memory for experiences, involves mental time travel (ex. college graduation)
- Semantic memory: for facts, does not involve remembering where you learned it (ex. Washington is the first president of the US)

Petrican et. al. (2010)

- Asked older adults about significant public events in their lifetime
- Do they have...
- Personal experience (episodic)
- OR familiar, but can't recollect personal experience (semantic)
- OR couldn't remember event (no memory)

RESULTS:
- as you go further back in time, greater reduction in episodic memory than semantic memory
- Overtime episodic memories tend to lose their episodic details and degrade into semantic knowledge

Implicit memory

long term memories that are recalled without conscious awareness

Memory errors example

- Airplane lost power to two engines
- Crashed into the side of a building in Amsterdam
- 193 people were interviewed 10 months later
- More than half of the participants reported seeing the crash on TV
- However no footage of the crash exists

Memory errors, a hypothesis

- Connections serve as retrieval paths
- Connections can also lead to memory errors
- Shared connections make similar memories less distinguishable
- Intrusion error: error in which other knowledge intruded into memory for event

Roediger & McDermott (1995)

DRM procedure
- Read a list of highly related words (bed, awake, tired, dream, wake snooze)
- Participants recall the central word "sleep" even though it was not on the list

Memory is constructive
- Highly connected

Remembers the gist (super connected to the word "sleep")

Schematic knowledge

- Schema: generalized knowledge structure for processing info
- Can help when remembering an event

Can cause us to make errors: when remembering
- Memories tend to be regularized
- Books are remembered in an academic office
- Video footage of a plane crash is remembered

Barlett (1932)

- Method of serial reproduction
- Similar to a game of telephone where participants are told a story and then they retell it and the next person tells the first person's recollection
- War of the Ghosts: battle between spirit world and physical world

Non- random distortions:
- Some details are lost (proper names)
- Other details are elaborated (e.g a sick mother at home)
- Story becomes compact and reorganized around existing knowledge (in this case fitting British college student's knowledge)

Explanation: not just a weakening of details -> "effort after meaning"
- we don't just passively put info into memory, but actively try to make sense of it

Assimilation to schema (using existing knowledge)
- changes new info to fit into existing schemas
- Remembering: act of construction
- Viewing new things from the lens of things we already know

Source monitoring

Remembering where a memory came from

Jacoby et al. (1989):
- Shown list of non famous names
- Test: mix of famous (mildly famous) and non famous names; which names are famous?
- Immediate test: highly accurate at discriminating
- Delayed test (24 hrs): significant increase in likelihood of misidentifying a non famous name as famous
- Sense of familiarity but don't know where the familiarity is from and misattribute it to that name being a famous person

Misinformation

Incorporating misleading post-event info into memory for an event

Loftus & Palmer (1974)

- Eyewitnesses see an accident and asked to remember details about it

Group A: how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?- 40.8 mph estimation

Group B: how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?
- 34 mph

Group C: how fast were the cars going when they contacted each other?
- 30.8 mph

Verbs create different suggestions about the speed of the cars

False memories being implanted

Loftus and Pickrell (1995):
- Mix of true memories (from interviews with relatives) and a false memory
- Shown to participants repeatedly and asked if they remember them
- (No mention that one might be false)

Many studies with these variants where 31% of participants were scored as having vivid false memories, with some manipulations getting this as high as 58%

Error in eyewitness testimony

Perception and attention
- Weapons focus: attention tends to be focused on weapon
- Stress: less able to shift attention, hyperfocus on one thing

Familiarity- Misidentify familiar people as involved

Suggestion
- Leading questions: which one of these men did it?
- Post identification feedback: positive feedback from officer could transform low confidence recognition to high confidence recognition
- Misinformation effect and misleading post event info

Improving eyewitness testimony

Wixted & Wells (2017): improving procedures

Include only one suspect per lineup
- That way an error is known as an error, rather than putting someone else in prison

Suspect should not stand out in lineup
- If only one person seems plausible, it can highly inflate confidence

Inform witnesses that perpetrator may not be present

Use "blind" lineup administrator

Collect confidence statement as the time of the identification

Three accounts of forgetting

- Decay: memories erode over time
- Interference: other memories interfere with ability to retrieve target memory (confusable connections in memory network)
- Retrieval failure: memory is intact but cannot be accessed

Two kinds of interference

Retroactive interference- new memories interfere with recall of old info

Proactive interference: old memories interfere with recall of new info
- Remembering old gf's name instead of new one

Flashbulb memories

Memories for circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged important events
- 9/11
- Kennedy assasination
- Challenger explosion

- Where you were and what you were doing
- Highly emotional, vivid