MEMORY 3

Why is there no possible objective measure for depth of processing?

“Depth” is a fuzzy concept and effort and time are not reliable proxies for operationalizing it. Such measures lead to circular reasoning in levels of processing experiments. As such, the levels of processing is criticized for this aspect.

Meaning in encoding has shown to only be important in what kinds of tests?

Explicit tests, as the levels of processing effect, along with the “yes” response advantage seen in recognition, has only been seen for explicit testing. No more priming after deep encoding can be seen compared to shallow encoding. As such, the levels of processing is criticized for this aspect.

The generation effect is seen only during what kinds of tests?

Explicit tests.

In a Jacoby and Dallas study examining the effects of generation across recognition tests (explicit) and perceptual ID tests (implicit), what advantages of generation and reading did they see?

An advantage of generating was seen for recognition tasks and an advantage of reading was seen for perceptual ID tasks.

Elaborative Encoding

Encoding that involves a degree of elaboration, such as through the integration of information with knowledge or properties that make information “stand out” or meaningful, to assist in the dedication of information to memory.

Integration

The process of linking new information to pre-existing knowledge, such as schemas, events, etc. It is the process that drives elaborative encoding

Baker/Baker Paradox

States that if two people are each asked to remember a word in separate semantic contexts, such as the word “baker” (capitalized name and profession), more general and meaningful contexts (such as with the profession of baker) are likely to be remembered more. It demonstrates the benefits seen with elaborative encoding.

Elaborative Rehearsal

Rehearsal where items are not simply kept in mind but are processed more deeply or elaborately. It has been said to contribute to the advantage of deeper processing in producing better memory through the production of many elaborate memory traces.

Maintenance Rehearsal

Rehearsal where items are kept in mind but not processed more deeply.

Encoding-Retrieval Interactions

Interactions where memory is determined by the degree to which encoding and retrieval conditions overlap. The efficiency of a certain encoding strategy can vary depending on whether the encoding conditions can be found during testing.

What do encoding-retrieval interactions assume about semantic processing, in the context of levels of processing?

It does not always lead to better memory, as such an effect depends on the conditions that may be present during retrieval. Information that has been subject to shallow processing can even be remembered efficiently if overlap between encoding and retrieval conditions is implemented.

Context-Dependent Memory

The finding that memory benefits when spatiotemporal, mood, physiological, or cognitive context at retrieval matches that at encoding. When encoded context is reinstated at the time of retrieval, it serves as powerful cues for memory.

In a study on state dependent memory, participants studied sober or drunk and were given a test either sober or drunk. What did they find?

Less mistakes during testing were found for people who studied and tested under the same conditions (sober studying, sober testing, and vice versa). It demonstrates state-dependent memory. 

In a study consisting of 21 quasi-experiments consisting of testing between different contexts, what could explain their finding that exam averages stayed mostly the same between testing in similar or different contexts?

Learning, such as studying and reading, takes place in multiple other contexts, educational practices are mostly effective when they encourage the decontextualization of knowledge, the utilization of weak context manipulations, and how environmental cues were weaker to recognize compared to the cues found in the testing material.

Encoding Specificity Principle

Coined by Tulving. States that the retrieval of an event or a certain aspect of it depends on the interaction between the properties of the encoded event and the properties of the retrieval information. What is stored in memory determines what retrieval cues may be effective in providing access to what is stored.

In an encoding specificity study that presented either inverted or normal text during encoding or retrieval, what was found?

Better memory was found overall when inverted text was present during encoding and better memory was found when words were of the same form (inverted during encoding and inverted during retrieval and vice versa) during encoding and retrieval.

Transfer Appropriate Processing

States that memory will be best when the type of processing carried out at encoding is also engaged at test. It is very similar to encoding specificity, except its focus is on memory processes. 

Incidental Learning

Learning where the learner is unaware that retention testing will occur.

Intentional Learning

Learning where the learner knows that there will be testing on retention.

In levels of processing studies, what type of learning has seen to have the advantage?

Incidental learning.

For what reason did Endel Tulving devise the term “episodic memory?”

To reinstate the separate nature of episodic and semantic memory.

Frederic Bartlett

A British philosopher known for his forays into experimental psychology.

How did Bartlett’s focus of study contrast with that of Ebbinghaus’?

Bartlett’s focus of study involved the examination of participant error in order to reveal aspects about the encoding and storage of meaningful material in memory, while Ebbinghaus’ studied how information gradually accumulates over successive instances of learning using meaningless information.

According to Bartlett, schema-driven error, where participants use schematic information to inaccurately reorganize episodic memory, will be greater at what length of retention intervals?

Longer than shorter retention intervals because schematic information lasts longer than mere detailed information. This reflects Bartlett’s focus on how learning occurs within the context of existing knowledge.

Effort After Meaning

The notion proposed by Bartlett that people tend to seek meaning in experiences, which in turn play a major role in how their memories work

Dual-Coding Hypothesis

Proposed by Paivio. States that highly imageable words will be more easier to learn because they can be encoded based on their verbal meaning and visual appearance. It originates from evidence that along with meaningful associations, a word could be remembered well if it evoked an image.

Subjective Organization

A strategy in which the organization of unstructured material, often in distinguishable categories or chunks, enhances learning. It promotes the dedication in memory of the ways in which items fit together as an organized topic. Subjective organization tends to lead to better memory than the learning of disorganized material.

Event Segmentation Theory

States that while witnessing the natural environment, people develop a working event model, which summarizes what is happening in the current moment through the organization of episodic events as discrete chunks, which is further informed by schemas and prior knowledge. Systematic prediction error occurs when circumstances change and we are then unable to predict future events based on the working model.

Memory Consolidation

The process in which information that is only recently dedicated in memory solidifies, becomes more durable over time, and gets integrated into long-term storage. Through this process, events persist after practice or overt rehearsal ends. It involves rapid processes of hippocampal encoding at the cellular level and systematic long-term transfers of information from the hippocampus to other regions. Memory traces will not be consolidated if the process is interrupted. It will be seemingly lost to conscious memory while implicit memory stays intact.

Memory tends to be better after a period of sleep than a period of wakefulness. This was originally interpreted as evidence towards the interference theory of forgetting as opposed to a “decay” theory of forgetting. However, what alternative notion has been suggested?

That sleep is actively involved in memory consolidation.

Passive Theory of Sleep

Derived from the interference theory of forgetting. States that the reduction of memory production and mental activity with sleep results in the decreased presence of interference of old memories with new memories, therefore assisting in better memory.

Active Theory of Sleep

States that active processes occur during sleep that promote memory and lessen forgetting. It is theorized that memory improvement can be attributed to slow wave sleep, which actively promotes consolidation.

How does slow wave sleep facilitate consolidation?

In slow wave sleep, information is “rehearsed”, as recently encoded information is reactivated in the hippocampus during slow wave sleep, therefore supporting consolidation and long-term neocortical storage.

Rasch et al. performed a study on slow wave sleep where participants were exposed to odor cues during location memory learning and sleep, either during waking, REM sleep, or slow wave sleep.What did they find?

Declarative memory for odor tended to improve in general when retrieval cues presented during encoding were re-presented during short wave sleep. It demonstrates the nature of short wave sleep as a rehearsal period. However, memory for motor sequences were not enhanced, as previous research suggests that REM is important for motor learning and emotional processing.

Sleep-Dependent Triage

The finding that sleep improves memory for learned content in a selective way. They favor more salient material, especially important or emotion-laden memories from the previous day while the forgetting of less salient material is facilitated. This has also been observed in studies that found benefits in remembering items that were instructed to be more important than others before sleep.

In a study on sleep by Jenkins and Dallenbach, participants were tasked with recalling syllables after a period of sleep or wakefulness. What did they find?

They found that across increased retention intervals, awake participants tended to recall less syllables, the accuracy of which gradually decreased as the retention interval increased. However, participants who got sleep recalled more syllables, the accuracy of which remained constant as the retention interval increased.

Hippocampus

A part of the brain that allows experiences to become consolidated as explicit long-term memories. It helps bind elements of encoded experiences together and allows for the creation of memories related to different contexts. It is essentially an “index” linking distributed cortical representations through replay between the two units.

Jost’s Law

Assumes that memories vary in strength as a function of time. Therefore, given equal encoding, an older memory, which is more likely to have been fully consolidated. is stronger than recent ones.

Medial Temporal Lobe System

An area in the brain with a central role in forming new explicit memories. It includes the hippocampus. Hippocampal-cortical replay strengthens cortical connections (especially during sleep), resulting in the memory becoming independent of the hippocampus, becoming stabilized in long-term cortical storage.

Amnesia

Total or partial loss of memory, usually resulting from shock, brain injury, illness or psychological disturbance. It has been suggested that amnesia disrupts the ability to associate a specific event/episode with its context from the assumption that learning episodic memories involves binding items with their context. Amnesic individuals are highly susceptible to disruptions in consolidation.

Organic Amnesia

Amnesia caused by shock, brain injury, or illness. Causes can include hypoxic episodes, epilepsy, brain injury, Alzheimer’s disease, etc.

Post-Traumatic Amnesia

Organic amnesia that occurs after concussive head injuries and typically improves after time. It can be characterized by disturbed attention processes and severe impairments in learning capacity. Continuing amnesia for experiences immediately preceding the trauma are characteristic of a lack of early neural consolidation.

Psychogenic Amnesia

Amnesia caused by psychological trauma. Causes can include dissociative disorders, psychologic fugue. This type of amnesia is poorly understood.

Dissociative Fugue

A disorder characterized by sudden losses of autobiographical memory. More distant memories are less likely to be remembered. Temporal perception is often displaced backwards, with the error shrinking with recovery. In the altered state of those with dissociative fugue, they appear to be undisturbed and display normal functioning apart from their memory loss. It is seen in those who have experienced great trauma.

Anterograde Amnesia

Amnesia which impairs the ability to produce new memories starting from the time of trauma. It is usually organic.

Patient H.M.:

Henry Molaison, a patient that underwent surgery in 1953 to have his medial temporal lobes, including the hippocampus, bilaterally removed in order to treat epilepsy. Since then, he has become a case study of anterograde amnesia. He acquired profound anterograde amnesia as a result of his surgery, along with relatively mild retrograde amnesia, as he experienced a loss of memories that were up to 2-3 years old. He could not form new consciously-held long-term memories, such as word lists, faces, items from recall/recognition tasks, etc

What information was patient H.M. able to learn?

Implicit memory tasks, motor learning, mirror drawing tasks, and classical conditioning. He then proceeded to learn a few things explicitly, as he could eventually learn where his father had died.

Medial Temporal Lobe Amnesia

A type of anmesia, first found in patient H.M., with a deficit that is very specific to the creation of new consciously-held long-term memories. There are generally no changes in IQ, perceptual skills, social skills, personality, and short-term memory.

A study involving E.P., an MTL amnesia patient, tasked him with presenting 8 pairs of objects, one labeled correct and the other labeled incorrect, and picking the correct one in each pair. What did they find?

Despite him ever remembering that he had done the task before. They found that E.P. slowly learned which objects were correct. However, this knowledge was very rigid, as if all the objects were placed in front of him, he is not able to select the correct objects. This demonstrates the still-intact implicit memory processes seen with MTL amnesia.

Retrograde Amnesia

Amnesia which results in a loss of memory for events prior to the time of trauma. It can be psychogenic or organic.

What type of technique has been used to gather a measure of the degree of retrograde amnesia in great detail.

Autobiographical memory interviews

Ribot’s Law

Describes the temporal gradient of retrograde amnesia. The observation that even with retrograde amnesia, more older memories, which had time to consolidate before trauma, stay intact after the loss of many recent memories. It serves as evidence for the consolidation process.

Confabulation

The recalling of false but not intentionally misleading autobiographical information seen in amnesic individuals and those with a dysexecutive syndrome. It can be provoked, occurring with conscious attempts to fill in gaps of knowledge, or spontaneous, which is less common, more florid, and often linked to frontal lobe damage.

What is the predominant theoretical assumption about retrieval?

It is a reactivation of patterns of neural activity.

A study by Fried examining retrieval involved subjects with severe epilepsy with electrodes implanted in and around the hippocampus to record neural activity. Subjects watched short 5-10 second-long film clips repeated five times consisting of familiar people, TV shows, animals, etc. They were then tasked with completing a 1 minute distractor task and then a free recall test. They tended to recall 84% of the clips shown. What did they find?

Electrode recordings of single neurons showed rapid firing with the recall of clips that showed the same firing patterns during encoding. It demonstrates support for the notion that retrieval is the reactivation of neural patterns.

Mental Time Travel

Retrieving episodic memories such that it allows for the “reliving” of a certain past event dedicated in memory ( in terms of neural activity).

Tip-Of-The-Tongue State

A memory lapse, accompanied by a feeling of extreme closeness to being able to retrieve information about something. It is essentially a state of partial retrieval and it is a type of metamemory judgment. This memory “gap” can be characterized by intense activity. It reflects how retrieval is fragmented, in the sense that we frequently retrieve just parts of an experience instead of a complete whole.

What are some notable findings about tip-of-the-tongue states?

Impressions resulting from tip-of-the-tongue states are generally accurate. Tip-of-the-tongue states are the most common with proper nouns and uncommon words. High levels of familiarity with the information can trigger tip-of-the-tongue states.

Tip of the tongue experiences can be commonly experienced by those who suffer from what?

Damage or dysfunction to the prefrontal cortex. Studies have shown that recognition tests can show that the information is still within the memory of those patients but cannot be easily recalled.

Difficult retrieval is often characterized by an averted gaze. It may be the result of what process?

Attempted reduction of retroactive interference by taking attention away from cues present in the external environment.

In a study about retrieval, participants were assigned to looking straight or closing their eyes while experiencing moderately difficult retrieval. They either kept their gaze straight or inverted. What was found?

They found that closing their eyes and averting their gaze led to the highest amounts of retrieval. It demonstrates how we often attempt to reduce retroactive experience through taking attention away from external cues.

Retrieval Cues

Hints that help with the retrieval of target memories. It is widely suggested that all memory comes with cues that can assist in retrieval.

Forgetting is often due to what factor?

The unavailability of effective enough retrieval cues. This suggests that any memory could be retrieved with effective enough retrieval cues.

Spreading Activation

The idea that each memory has an internal state reflecting how active it is and that activation level increases when a cue related to it is perceived or when attention is focused directly on it. This change in activation persists for some time. With enough activation, and through spreading pattern completion, the target memory can be retrieved.

Pattern Completion

The process by which spreading activation from a set of cues leads to the reinstatement of a memory.

Under what circumstances do retrieval cues tend to be effective?

When they are related to a target memory, have strong associations with the target memory, specific, in the sense that they can be independent of any other memories that could be associated with it, are associated with a strongly encoded target memory, are utilized in the right retrieval mode, and are attended to enough.

Cue-Overload Principle

States that retrieval cues would be less effective if more information is subsumed under them or if they are less specific. In essence, the effectiveness of a cue depends in how many items it is connected to.

In experiments testing the cue-overload principle, word lists were presented with 8 items each. These items can be divided into subcategories depending on their type (bird, vegetables, military weapons). These word lists were then recalled. What is generally found?

Recall of list items increases with the presence of more categories. It demonstrates how cues will be less effective in bringing out retrieval if they are connected to more multiple items.

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.

Repetition Priming

The improvement with performance seen with experience with a previously encountered stimulus. It occurs unconsciously, making it the main process that indirect memory tests rely on to measure memory.

How has autobiographical memory recall been observed to manipulate mood?

They found through writing that recalling happy memories tended to increase mood while recalling sad memories tended to decrease mood.

Reconstructive Memory

An active and inferential process of retrieval whereby gaps in memory are filled in mashed on prior experience, logic, and goals. It involves cue specification (specifying the nature of target and contextual features that may constrain retrieval, and establishing them as cues), cue maintenance (sustaining cues to guide search), and post-retrieval monitoring (evaluating the products of memory search).

Signal Detection Theory

Posits that memory targets (signals) and lures (noise) on a recognition test possess strength, with previously encountered items generally possessing more strength than novel ones. Retrieval involves ascertaining an item’s strength and deciding whether it exceeds a criterion level of strength, above which items are considered to be previously encountered.

Dual-Process Theories of Recognition

State that recognition memory judgments can be based on two independent forms of retrieval process: recollection and familiarity. The influences of familiarity and recollection can be separated using the remember/know procedure and process dissociation procedure.

Familiarity-Based Recognition

A fast, automated recognition process based on a memory’s strength. It is one of the two processes implicated in dual-process theories of recognition.

Recollection

A slow, attention demanding recognition process which involves retrieval of contextual information about a memory. It is one of the two processes implicated in dual-process theories of recognition.

What are some common factors that promote forgetting?

Poor encoding, absence of effective retrieval cues at test, cue overload, and interference.

Interference

When other memories interfere with the retrieval of a target memory. There are two types of interference, retroactive and proactive interference, which are determined by the presence of the target information in time.

Retroactive Interference

Interference where the presence of later learned information impairs the retrieval of previously learned information.

Proactive Interference

Interference where the presence of previously learned information impairs the retrieval of later learned information.

Release from Proactive Interference

When changes in the categories of information that are being memorized results in a subsequent improvement in retrieval performance as proactive interference stops building up and the previous information does not interfere similarity-wise with currently learned information. According to Cowan, release from proactive interference only occurs in list recall paradigms with lists that contain more than four items.

Interference displaces effective retrieval cues through contextual fluctuation. The more events intervene between study and test, the less similar the context is at the time of retrieval, as context continuously changes and drifts over time.

How does the cue overload principle explain how intervening events between encoding and retrieval interfere?

Multiple associations with the same cue leads to increased competition at retrieval. Cues become less effective when they are associated with more things. It is suspected to be the reason why similar material produces more interference. This also occurs with semantic memory. Eventually a stopping criterion for retrieval will be reached, but with time, competing associations will descend to their baseline activation and retrieval could be achieved .

Slamecka, in a part set cuing experiment, presented 40 words to participants, 8 in each of 5 categories, in a random order. Upon testing, some category items were given as cues. It was expected that the cues would help but what was found?

Recall was the worst for the heavily cued items as the presence of more category items hindered recall. Target recall was negatively affected by providing retrieval cues drawn from the same set and recall got worse as the number of same category items increased. It demonstrates retrieval competition due to multiple associations with the same cue, with the presentation of items as cues strengthening the association.

Ebbinghaus has stated that in order to seek truth about the nature of human memory, what is required?

Thorough experimentation and theorization.

Relativity of Remembering

The principle which states that memory does not exhibit any empirical regularities and that no general laws of memory exist.

Jenkins’ Model of Memory Experiments

States that memory experiments are a combination of four factors and that findings in memory experiments are largely context dependent and that they depend on the level of any of these variables that are held constant. Battig proposed that Jenkins’ model could hold across all types of empirical psychological research.

According to Jenkins’ Problem Pyramid, what are his proposed four factors?

Subjects (people involved in research), encoding activities (events during encoding, such as context and setting, instructions, and learning activities), events to be remembered (stimuli presented in laboratory settings, etc.), and retrieval measures of retention.

Attention Restoration Theory

States that interaction with environments that are rich with inherently fascinating stimuli invokes involuntary attentional mechanisms and allows directed attention to be replenished.

According to the attention restoration theory, being exposed to nature, which has “softly-fascinating” (successful in capturing attention but allowing for other attentional focus) features, can allow for what results?

Better performance on tasks that require directed attentional focus.

In a study by Berman et al., participants walked through a natural or urban environment and performed a backwards digit-span task afterwards, which involves directional attention mechanisms. What did they find?

Performance in the task significantly improved with walks through nature and was greater than walks through the urban environment. When viewing just pictures of nature, improvements were only found for executive functions but not alerting and orienting, as the latter involve less cognitive control.