Cognitive Psychology (5) - Long-Term Memory

Long-Term Memory

A high-capacity storage system that contains your memories for experiences and information you have accumulated throughout your lifetime.

Episodic Memory

Focuses on your memories for events that happened to you personally; it allows you to travel backward in subjective time to reminisce about earlier episodes in your life.

Semantic Memory

Your organised knowledge about the world, including words and other factual information.

Procedural Memory

Refers to your knowledge about how to do something (ex. riding a bicycle); it is often conceptualised in terms of sequences of motor-based information that are necessary to complete action components of a task.

Encoding

Processing information and represent it in your memory.

Retrieval

You locate information in storage, and you access that information.

Craik & Lockhart's Levels/Depth of Processing

Deep, meaningful processing of information leads to more accurate recall than shallow, sensory kinds of processing (ex. considering a word's meaning rather than considering its physical appearance)

Craik and Tulving found that people were about _____ times as likely to recall a word if they had originally answered questions about the word's physical appearance.

three

Deep levels of processing encourage recall because of two factors: ...

distinctiveness and elaboration.

Distinctiveness

A stimulus is different from other memory traces.

Elaboration

Rich processing in terms of meaning and interconnected concepts.

Self-Reference Effect

You will remember more information if you try to relate that information to yourself.

T.B. Rogers and his coauthors asked participants to process each English word according to the specified instruction. They processed words according to:

(a) visual characteristics

(b) acoustic characteristics

(c) semantic characteristics

(d) self-reference instructions

The results showed that ...

recall was poor for the two tasks that used shallow processing (visual and acoustic characteristics); recall was highest in the self-reference condition.

What are three cognitive factors that contribute to the self-reference effect?

The "self" produces an especially rich set of distinctive cues; self-reference instructions encourage people to consider how their personal traits are connected with one another; you rehearse material more frequently if it is associated with yourself.

Encoding-Specificity Principle

Recall is better if the context during retrieval is similar to the context during encoding; when the two contexts do not match, you are more likely to forget the items

What were the results for Marian and Fausey's study that tested people living in Chile who were fluent in both English and Spanish?

People were relatively accurate if they had heard the story and answered questions in the same language; they were less accurate if they heard the story in one language and answered the questions in a different language; showed encoding specificity.

Recall Task

Participants must reproduce the items they learned earlier.

Recognition Task

Participants must judge whether they saw a particular item at an earlier time.

The encoding-specificity effect is most likely to occur in memory tasks that ...

assess your recall; use real-life incidents; examine events that happened long ago

In the studies on encoding specificity, researchers often manipulate the physical context in which material is encoded and retrieved. However, ________ context may not be as important as ______ context.

physical; mental (the encoding-specificity principle may depend on how similar the two environments feel rather than how similar they look)

Deep, semantic processing is effective only if the retrieval conditions also emphasise ...

deeper, more meaningful features.

Emotion

Reaction to a specific stimulus.

Mood

A general, long-lasting experience.

Pollyanna Principle

Pleasant items are usually processed more efficiently and more accurately than less-pleasant items.

Waring and Kensinger explored people's recognition for photos of stimuli.

(1) very positive

(2) very negative

(3) neutral

Each item was shown with a neutral background. It was found that ...

People recalled positive and negative stimuli equally well; their recall for neutral stimuli was lower.

*It was also found that when the central stimulus is boring, people explore and remember the background more accurately than in other conditions.

*When the stimuli are negative, people do not remember the background very accurately.

Over time, unpleasant memories fade ____ than pleasant memories.

more

Positivity Effect

People tend to rate unpleasant past events more positively with the passage of time.

Bushman showed two videos; one with violent fighting and destruction of property and the other with no violence but judged equally exciting. He inserted two 30-second advertisements for neutral items. College students watched either clip and were asked to recall two brand names that had been featured in the commercials and everything they could recall.

There was significantly better recall for commercials that appeared in the nonviolent film; additional research confirms that anger and violence typically reduce memory accuracy.

We tend to ______ information when it is associated with violent, unpleasant stimuli.

forget

Explicit Memory Task

Directly asks you to remember some information; you realise that your memory is being tested, and the test requires you to intentionally retrieve some information that you previously learned (ex. recall and recognition in short-answers/essays/multiple choice)

Implicit Memory Task

You are instructed to complete a cognitive task that does not directly ask you for either recall or recognition.

Repetition Priming Task

Recent exposure to a word increases the likelihood that you'll think of this particular word when you are subsequently presented with a cue that could evoke many different words.

Dissociation

A variable has large effects on Test A, but little or not effects on Test B; also occurs when a variable has one kind of effect if measured by Test A, and the opposite effect if measured by Test B.

High-anxious participants were ____ likely than low-anxious participants to recall the negative, anxiety-arousing words.

more

High-anxious participants were ____ likely than low-anxious participants to recall both neutral and pleasant words.

less

Amnesia

Severe deficits in their episodic memory.

Retrograde Amnesia

Loss of memory for events that occurred prior to brain damage.

Anterograde Amnesia

Loss of ability to form memories for events that have occurred after brain damage.

Expertise

Impressive memory abilities, as well as consistently exceptional performance on representative tasks in a particular area.

Schema

General knowledge or expectation, which is distilled from your past experiences with someone or something.

Consistency Bias

Exaggerate consistency between our past feelings and beliefs and our current viewpoint ("The way we were depends on the way we are."); as a result, we underestimate how much we have changed throughout our lives.

Source Monitoring

Trying to identify the origin of a particular memory.

Reality Monitoring

You try to identify whether an event really occurred or whether you imagined it.

Flashbulb Memory

Memory for the circumstances in which you first learned about a very surprising and emotionally arousing event (ex. 9/11)

Post-Event Misinformation Effect

People first view an event and are then given misleading information about it; they mistakenly recall the misleading information rather than the event they actually saw.

Retroactive Interference

People have trouble recalling old material because new material keeps interfering.

Constructivist Approach

We construct knowledge by integrating new information with what we know.

Recovered-Memory Perspective

Individuals who experienced sexual abuse during childhood managed to forget that memory for many years; it may come flooding back to consciousness.

False-Memory Perspective

Most of recovered memories are actually incorrect memories.

The episodic and semantic components of our long-term memory store information based on ...

meaning.