PSY100 Chapter 7: What is Memory? (Textbook)

How rare are false accusations?

2% to 7%

What are the rates of non-reporting cases?

85%

How many women and men are affected by sexual violence?

1 in 3
1 in 6

Who are Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson-Cannino?

• On July 1984, a man broke into 22 year old Jennifer Thompson-Cannino's apartment and raped her. Thompson-Cannino was sure that her eyes were open and that she was studying her attackers face. She reported this case and went in to pick who had raped her.

• He was later convicted and she believed that it was Ronald Cotton. He was then given a life sentence also at the age of 22.

• Bobby Poole, an inmate with Ronald Cotton, repeatedly joked about raping her and then got on trial, but they gave Cotton another life sentence because Thompson-Cannino said he had never seen Bobby Poole in his life.

• After new DNA tech was produced, they came to the conclusion that it was Bobby Poole that did rape Thompson-Cannino.

• Now both of them are friends, but Jennifer still sees him in her dreams, but they go around the world talking about wrongful conviction and identification reform

How do psychologists define memory?

The retention and retrieval of information or experience over time as the result of three key processes:

• Encoding: taking in info, which is encoding the sights and sounds
• Storage: Retaining info and storing it in our mental storehouse
• Retrieval: Retrieving it for later purpose like when someone asks "how did you and ____ get together?"

ex. think of taking a picture, then storing it away and then pulling it up when you want to look at it

ex. a restaurant server has to do this like 100 times a week, they take an order (encoding), they store the order (storage) then they retrieve it when giving the order and who to give it to (retrieval)

We don't usually think of the operation of memory, when do we think of it?

When our memory fails or someone we know experiences memory loss

What is the basic summary of encoding?

The first step in memory; the process by which information gets into memory storage.

• ex. when you are watching a Youtube video, when you are listening to a lecture, when your friend is talking to you

Some information seems to just get encoded virtually automatically, but some we have to actively encode through what processes?

• Paying attention
• Deeply processing
• Elaborating
• Using mental imagery

What is selective attention? Why do we have selective attention?

Focusing a specific aspect of an experience and ignoring others

• Because the brain has limited resources, we can't attend o everything

What is the processing capacity of the conscious brain?

120 bits

• we literally use half of our conscious brain when fully paying attention to one person
• These limitations mean we are basically always actively paying to one thing while simultaneously ignoring other

How much info do we pay attention to?

A small amount of info in our environment

What are the two ways attention can be distributed?

• Divided
• Sustained

What is divided attention?

Concentrating on more than one activity at the same time.
If you are on youtube and watching your psych lecture

What is sustained attention aka vigilance?

The ability to maintain attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period of time.
ex. studying and cramming before a test

What is detrimental to (bad for) encoding?

Multiasking; it is the ultimate for divide attention

• it has negative consequences on memory
  ex. if you are on your phone and trying to listen to your lecture at the same, being on your phone will impede on your learning rather than help it

How can multitasking be deadly?

Driving and texting

• Canada Automible Association reported 4 million crashes because of driving and texting
• Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, Manitoba have equal or more car crashes due to driving and texting than impaired driving

Why is taking hand written notes better than typing?

• Partially because your laptop can have other distractions like social media, games etc.
• But even when it is used only for notes, pen and paper for paper fucking NEG

What does research show about taking notes, which is better writing or texting when taking notes?

Texting had more words that overlapped with the lecture and was closer to the lecture content because they could type faster, but people who wrote did better because they couldn't write the lecture slides verbatim

How are handwritten notes more likely to represent active engagement during encoding?

Because you have to put it in your own words LIKE WITH KNOWT SO it is deep processing

• Handwritten is even better to take study off of

What is also important besides time spent studying?

Actively engaging with the course material outside of studying, going to lecture, listening to the presentations, attending class

What are levels of processing?

a continuum of memory processing (encoding) that include:

• shallow
• intermediate
• deep

Who came up with the idea of levels of processing?

Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart

What are some examples of each level of processing?

The word mom:
Shallow: Just noting the the physical features of stimulus

• Recognizing the shapes and letters of the word mom

Intermediate: Giving the stimulus a label

• Reading the word mom

Deep: Thinking about the meaning of a stimulus

• Thinking about the meaning of mom and about your own mommy like imagining your mom's face or her qualities

What is the best way of processing?

Deep
The more deeply we process something, the easier it is to recall the memory
ex. if you attach something meaningful to a face, you are more likely to remember it

What essential is deep processing?

Taking something we already know and is easy to retrieve from memory and attaching it to new info in a meaningful way

SOO when we are trying to remember that info, we are gonna retrieve the old easily remember info which will bring the new info along with it babes

What is elaboration?

The formation of a number of different connections around a stimulus at any given level of memory encoding.

• Can happen with any level of processing
  ex. for shallow, you recognize the shape of m is two ns to make mom
  for deep, you would think of multiple moms you seen in tv and you would think of like mothers you know and mothers in art

• The more elaborate the processing, the deeper the connection. You can memorize things without even fully memorizing by making connections

What is an effective way to elaborate deeply on info?

Self-referencing - relating material to your own experience by drawing mental links between aspects of your own life and new info

What happens when we elaborate on a topic when encoding it?

We are creating multiple pathways to help us retrieve the info

• The more pathways we create, the more likely we are to remember it

Why does self-referencing work so well?

BECAUSE HUMANS ARE EGOCENTRIC and perceive our world through our own framework

• We are more likely to remember shit if relates to us or peopel we know or things we like or are familiar with

How is the process of elaboration shown in the brain? Explain the study and what it means.

• They used an MRI to study the brain of the people

• They flashed multiple words for a few seconds and told them to tell them if it was lowercase or uppercase and measured their neural pathways

• Then they told them to differentiate between words that were concrete like chair or book and abstract like love and democracy and there was more activity in the left frontal lobe when they were told to do that resulting in better memory meaning that greater elaboration of info is linked to neural activity, especially in the brains left frontal love

How does mental imagery improve memory? Who memorized the most amount of numbers for pi? How does it come in handy?

The use of imagery means that a person uses images to associate with the thing that they need to learn

• Akira
• Think of a waiter at a restaurant memorizing people's faces with the food that they are eating
• Think of when you remember the image on the page with what you are studying, think of soc100 and how you were able to describe the flow chart with the churches

What did Allan Paivio think about memory?

• Memory is stored in two ways:
  Verbal code - word or label
  Imagery code - it is highly detailed and descriptive and improves memory better than verbal codes

What is the dual code hypothesis? How exactly does it work?

Memory for pictures is better than memory for words because it contains both imagery and verbal codes

• When we use imagery to remember, we have two possible avenues to retrieve info and info in both imagery and words is easier to remember

What combination helps you memorize things the best with the least resistance?

• Deep processing and elaboration with mental imagery
  Think of naruto's 9 tails fighting pain's 66 in order to remember 6699 as a pin

Does encoding alone determine the quality of a memory?

The memory also needs to be stored properly after encoding

What is the Atkinson–Shiffrin theory?

Theory stating that memory storage involves three separate systems:

• Sensory memory: Time frames of a fraction of a second to several seconds
• Short-term memory: Time frames for up to 30 seconds
• Long-term memory. Time frames for up to a lifetime

Describe the process of the R2 RICHARD Atkinson–Shiffrin theory.

Sensory input goes into sensory memory, through attention it goes to short term memory only up to 30 seconds UNLESS REHEARSED then it goes to long-term where it can be retrieved for a lifetime

What is sensory memory?

Memory system that involves holding information from the world in its original sensory form for only an instant, not much longer than the brief time it is exposed to the visual, auditory, and other senses.

Is sensory memory rich and detailed?

YES, but we lose info fast if we don't use strategies to transfer to short term or long term memory

• You are bombarded with multiple stimuli, but only process a number of them.
• You process many more stimuli than you notice, it retains info from your sense including a large portion of what you think you ignore, but it doesn't retain it for long enough

What is echoic memory?

Echo meaning sound

• auditory sensory memory, which retained for multiple seconds
• Imagine standing in an elevator and you leave and your friend is like "what song was playing in that elevator?"
  -If your friend asks quickly enough, you may be able have a trace of the song left on your sensory registers

What is iconic memory?

Icon meaning image

• Visual sensory memory, which is retained for a quarter of a second
• Your ability to "write" a word in the air, the residual iconic memory is what makes a moving line appear in the air

What about smell and touch senses?

There is not enough research to say anything

Explain the experiment about sensory memory.

George Sperling's experiement

• He flashed 9 letters at the same time for 1/20th of a second for participants, but they could only recall for 4-5 letters

• They could recall seeing 9 letters for only an instant, but they couldn't name all the letters meaning that it was in the iconic sensory memory BUT forgetting from the ISM could be forgotten so fast that they weren't able to store it to short-term memory

• He knew that the 9 letters were stored in their ISM, so he used a low, medium and high tone to signal the bottom, middle or top row, but they did not know what row to report until the letters were gone

What is short term memory?

Limited-capacity memory system in which information is usually retained for only as long as 30 seconds unless the individual uses strategies to retain it longer.

How does short-term memory differ from sensory memory?

It is limited in capacity, but can store info for longer

Most sensory info doesn't go further than ___, but _____

Auditory and visual sensory memory
If we pay attention, it gets transferred to short term

What did George Miller come up with?

"The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two"

• Individuals can keep track of 7+- 2 items without any external aids
• Think of all the important numbers in your life including your phone number or student ID number

What does memory span mean?

The number of digits that an individual can report back after a single presentation of them

• College students can usually do 8-9, but you can do 10 shorty
• If there is a longer list, it exceeds the short term memory limit and if you rely on short term memory for that, you can make errors

What are two ways to improve your short-term memory?

Chunking and rehearsal

What is chunking?

It involves grouping or packing info into higher units rather than single units

• It makes a large amount of info more manageable

Give an example of how chunks can hold meaning.

When you read the words like hot, city, smile etc. they were chunked, so you read like 15 letters, but since they were chunked into words

Think of the random letters separated into groups of 3 , they were harder to memorize because the chunks didn't have meaning

What is rehearsal?

The conscious repetition of information

• It is just repeating info over and over in your head to keep it in your memory

• Info only lasts half a minute or less without rehearsal, but can be retained indefinitely if rehearsed

Is rehearsal often verbal?

Yes it is like an inner voice, but can be visual or spatial like an inner eye

Does rehearsal work well at retaining info over long term? Why or why not?

No because you aren't attaching any meaning to it, you are just repeating it over and over again. It can be good for memorizing info for a bit like a list of entrees at a restaurant, but for like studying for a test, you've noticed that repeating shit don't work

• It can be done consciously or automatically as a way to encode info into long term memory

What is working memory?

A combination of components, including short-term memory and attention, that allow individuals to hold information temporarily as they perform cognitive tasks; a kind of mental workbench on which the brain manipulates and assembles information to guide understanding, decision making, and problem solving.

Why is Atkinson-Shiffrin's theory sorta inaccurate for short-term memory?

There is a lot more to short-term memory than just storage, you attend to it, you manipulate and use to solve problems

• think of the leonidas thing with crash course, you repeated the name and used the name to solve the problem in the video

What is the difference between short-term memory and working memory?

Short-term memory: a PASSIVE warehouse that just waits for info to be moved to long-term memory

Working memory: an ACTIVE warehouse

But we cannot solve a problem while trying to rehearse (short term memory) and we can't rehearse info (requiring effort and attention) while trying to solve a problem

How is working memory capacity different from short term memory?

7 +_ 2 chunks: short term memory
4 +_ 1 chunks: working memory
If the chunks are more complex, the harder it is to memorize (working memory)
Working capacity is more associated with cognitive aptitudes like intelligence

What does the brain do in working memory?

Manipulates info to help us understand, make decisions and solve problems,
Long term is the hard drive
Working memory is RAM we can acess any time

What do archaeologists, anthropologists and psychologists understand in how memory is evolved?

• Lays foundation of creative culture
• Prehistoric tools and works of art reveal how (and when) early humans were thinking

What's the key difference between homo sapiens and neathendrals?

Their working memory

What is the lion man?

Someone 32,000 ago made a lion head and man body out of ivory and this showed their working memory of combining two aspects together

How else is working memory

• It provides a helpful framework for addressing problems outside the laboratory like it can show if children are at risk of underachievement and to improve their memory

• It can also help show early detection of Alzheimer's

Why do people try to improve their working memory and what are the results?

Because of its importance on problem solving and cognitive functions

• It was mixed results at first, but recent studies have showns specific brain training can improve working memory with several months of practice
• The duration for effective enchancement training has been prolonged past what it used to be in the past

How doe working memory work?

Cognitive psychologists have proposed schematics and models to help us figure out this question based on the way working memory allows to hold info temporarily "in mind" as we preform cognitive tasks

Who proposed the three-part model of working memory?

British psychologist Alan Baddeley

What are the three components of working memory?

Central execute: The boss
Phonological loop: one of the two workers
Visuo-spatial: one of the two workers

What is the phonological loop?

• Specialized to briefly store speech-based info about the sounds of language
  THE PHONE THE PHONE IS RINGINGGG

What are the two components of phonological loops?

The acoustic code: the sounds we heard that decay in a few second
Rehearsal: allows us to repeat words in our phonological store

What is the visuo-spatial sketchpad?

• Stores visual and spatial info like visual imagery
• It is limited, so if you put too much info in your visuo-spatial sketchpad, you cannot represent them accurately enough so you won't be able to retrieve it easily

Do the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad function together

No, they function independently

• We rehearse numbers with our phonological loop while making spatial arrangements of the numbers

What is the central executive?

• Integrates info from both phonological loop and visuo-spatial sketchpad and long-term memory

• Play important roles in attention, planning and organizing.

• Acts as a supervisor for what deserves our attention and what doesn't

• It also selects which strategies to use to process info and solve problems

• Also has limited capacity

How do all of the three components work together?

If working memories is the files you open your computer, the central executive is you

Are you supposed to follow Bradley's model down verbatim? Like is this how the brain works exactly?

Neuroscientists have only begun exploring the brain and its parts

• There are no current parts of the brain that represent the workers, but parts of the brain that are activated when certain actions are being engaged in

• When rehearsing words, verbal areas are activated like the Weckinre's area WHEREAS occipotemporal parts of the brain are activated when imagining pictures

• The prefrontal cortex plays a role in attention is deployed to these various aspects of memory

What is long-term memory?

A relatively permanent type of memory that stores huge amounts of information for a long time.

What does Jon Von Neumann conclude about long-term memory capacity?

We have 280 (2.8 x 10^20) quintillion bits of storage in our long-term memory, although we forget things, we store more info than a computer

How has the availability internet affect our memory?

When tasked with hard memory tasks, we are more compelled to search it up on Google instead of using our memory

What are the sub-structures of long-term memory?

Explicit (declarative memory): Episodic and semantic
Implicit (non-declarative memory): Procedural memory (skills), priming, classical conditioning

What is explicit and implicit memory in simple terms?

Explicit: Who, what, where, when and why
Implicit: How

What is the case of H.M.?

He was affected epilepsy, so they removed his hippocampus and a portion of the temporal lobes of both hemispheres

• His epilepsy improved, but he developed the inability for his episodic memory to surpass his working memory

• His memory timeframe was only a few minutes at a time, he could not remember learning any new events and past events (Explicit), but could remember how to do things (implicit) was less affected
  ex. he could learn how to ride but he has no memory of how and when he learned it

Who reported his case?

Brenda Milner - a neuropsychologist McGill helped H.M. and understanding his memories and ensured no one else has to go through what he went through with his memory

• With her understanding of the brain and psychology, she created cognitive neuroscience

What did Milner demonstrate with H.M.?

The difference between implicit (less influenced) and explicit memory (drastically influenced)

• He was able to implicit improve his motor skills over time even with no memory of how to do it

What is explicit memory, or declarative memory?

The conscious recollection of information, such as specific facts or events and, at least in humans, information that can be verbally communicated.
ex. remembering the events of a movie you've seen or remembering the names of the countries of social

Who tested how long explicit memory lasted?

Harry Bahrick

What did Harry Bahrick do and how did he come to his conclusion?

He took students who had taken Spanish in college and students who hadn't taken Spanish in college (control group). He tested some of them w/ vocab tests right after they had finished the school year and some 50 years after. He noticed that for the people who took Spanish in college that their memory went from a high of 100% to a lower number then plateau'd, but for those who took no Spanish courses, their memory of the content stayed the same

When did forgetting occur in Bahrick's experiment?

3 years after college then leveled out

What was the difference between the A and the C students in Bahrick's experiment and why is this important?

The A students remember more 50 years later, so it shows that how much you initially learned is more important than how long ago you learned it

What else did Bahrick discover and what does it mean?

Permastore memory:
Memory we will always remember even without rehearsal
Represents a portion of original learning that appears to stay destined with someone forever
He even asked about facial recognition and they got it right, and name recognition was almost as high too

Who is Endel Tulving?

He was an advocate for distinguishing explicit memory into two types: semantic and episodic

What is episodic memory?

The retention of information about the where, when, and what of life’s happenings—that is, how individuals remember life’s episodes.

• It is autobiographical

• Like when you were born, where your siblings were born, what you had for breakfast this morning

What happens in the brain referring to episodic memory?

Reinstating activity that occurred when the episode took place itself

When we talk about past experience, activation in the hippocampus reinstates activity associated with the memory

What is semantic memory?

A person’s knowledge about the world, including their areas of expertise; general knowledge, such as of things learned in school, and everyday knowledge.

• your knowledge of bio or the premiers you were forced to learn about in social

What is a key feature of episodic memory?

It is independent of an individual's past
For ex. you knew Athens was the capital of Greece in that crash course video, but you don't know exactly when or how you learned it AS OPPOSED to your first day on campus

• if you are taking a history class, the info you need to know to do well is semantic memory

How is the difference between episodic and semantic memory shown in amnesia?

Someone could not remember who they are, where they are from, what they ate in the morning (episodic), but they can remember what the capital of Greece is, who the PM is and how bananas grow (semantic)

• in this case, episodic memory is impaired, but semantic isn't

What is a critique of episodic and semantic memory? How is it controversial?

Many believe that there is a grey area
for ex. you remember what you studied in bio with neurons (semantic), but you can also remember where it was, who it was with and even how mr. hatchard moved his body when describing the brain and neurons (episodic)

• In cases like these, they can work hand in hand rather than independently on each other to form memories

Explain the characteristics of episodic memory. Units, organization, emotions, retrieval process, retrieval report, education, intelligence, legal testimony.

Events, episodes
Time
Important
Deliberate (effortful)
"I remember"
Irrelevant
Irrelevant
Admissible in court

Explain the characteristics of semantic memory. Units, organization, emotions, retrieval process, retrieval report, education, intelligence, legal testimony.

Facts, ideas, concepts
Concepts
Less important
Automatic
"I know"
Relevant
Relevant
Inadmissible in court

What is implicit / non-declarative memory?

Memory in which behaviour is affected by prior experience without a conscious recollection of that experience.

• For. ex when you ride a bike or when you sing a song you heard in the supermarket that you weren't even aware that you heard or even when you sing the words of a song you hate because you have heard it too many times

What are the 3 subsystems of implicit memory?

Procedural memory, classical conditioning, priming

What is procedural memory? Give an example and how it differs from explicit.

Implicit memory process that involves memory for skills

• When you type, you just know where the keys are, you don't have to consciously look for them or when you drive a car you don't have to consciously think about turning the car on or steering the wheel

• Try explaining how to tie a shoe lace without a shoe in front of you