Psychology of Memory (FINAL)

Structural Metaphors of Memory

memory corresponds to a place where memories are stored (rooms in a house)

Procedural Metaphors of Memory

emphasized processes that create & re-create the memory (acid bath)

Functional Metaphors of Memory

identify the general principles of memory based on everyday use of memory (time machine; jumping into past/present/future)

Ebbinghaus' Research / Criticism

Research focused on serial, motor & perceptual learning.
learned list of 16 nonsense syllables until he could repeat without error, after delay he attempted to relearn the list. he found a difference between the time required to learn list initially and time required to relearn the list.

Forgetting Curve: after 20min you lose about 58% of the information (rapid forgetting)

Criticism: only studied himself (bias); his materials were not good, only studied nonsense words (narrow approach)

Ebbinghaus Method of Savings formula

Q = 100* / L - 85

Q: percent savings
L: initial learning time
*: difference between initial learning & relearning times
85: time required for two errorless recitations

Advantages/Disadvantages

EEG/ERP: good temporal resolution, not dangerous

PET/fMRI: good spatial resolution, (PET) dangerous

Sperling's Whole Report technique

12 letters presented for 50ms; report all letters.
results: 4-5 letters reported (33-42%)

Sperling's Partial Report technique

12 letters presented for 50ms; report all letters in row indicated by tone.
results: 3.3 out of 4 letters reported (82%);
duration: delayed tones/time to report letters
iconic memory: duration = 250ms before information decays

(1)Primacy / (2)Recency Effects

(1) memory is usually superior for items at beginning of serial position curve; thought to be caused by encoding of items into LTM.
(2) observation that memory is usually superior for items at the end of serial position curve; thought to be caused by maintenance of items in WM.

STM characteristics

storage capacity: 7 +/- 2 items (limited)
coding of information: phonetic
duration of information: 20sec
lost through decay & interference

Chunking

a subject control process whereby a large quantity of information is recoded into groups of smaller units in order to increase STM storage capacity.

WM model (Baddley & Hitch)

Phonological Loop: stores verbal & auditory info

Visuospatial Sketchpad: stores visual & spatial info

Central Executive: coordinates activities of phonological loop & visuospatial sketchpad; it retrieves information from LTM & switches attention among different parts of task (does NOT store information, just directs it)

Episodic Buffer: back-up storage for recall; assigns meaning to stimuli we're being exposed to & why its important.

WM capacity

the extent to which information can be retained over a period in which there's distractions or shifts of attention away from the stored information; varies across individuals, increases across childhood & with experience.

Modal Model (Atkinson & Shiffrin)

Sensory Register: raw copy, loss through decay, durations of 250ms, unlimited capacity.
Short-term store & long-term store (characteristics)

3 subject control processes: rehearsal, coding form of information, & retrieval
2 problems: interaction among 3 memory systems; recency effect disappears when distractor task follows final item in list.

Levels of Processing Theory

depth of processing (Craik & Lockhart): focus on encoding operations; retention varies according to the way information is processed.
Shallow: analysis based on physical features
Deep: analysis based on meaning.

(1)State-dependent & (2)Context-dependent Memory

(1) when encoding specificity is applied to internal human states such as drug states or mood states (test anxiety);
(2) when encoding specificity is applied to environments or contexts where learning occurs

ESP

greater similarity between encoding & retrieval conditions will result in greater memory for information

Galton's Research

asked participants to describe their breakfast table as it happened that morning; illumination, definition, coloring.
found that some reported rich images with lots of detail while others reported vague images.
10% claimed to have no images at all.

Paivio's (1975) Dual-coding Hypothesis

2 coding systems for representing information in memory;
concrete words coded nonverbally (with imagery) & verbally; abstract words coded ONLY verbally.

Shepherd & Metzler (1971) mental rotation experiment

results: increase in angle of rotation led to increase in RT (slower responses);
conclusion: RT differences suggest that participants were rotating the image of one of the objects in their mind.
constant rotation speed: 50 degrees of rotation = 1sec

LTM characteristics

Coding: semantic
duration: long (20s)
capacity: unlimited
loss of information mainly from interference

Tenets of Constructivism

1. memory content is interactive and not bound to specific events during the experienced episode;
2. retrieval is an interpretive process;
3. interferences occur unconsciously and are indistinguishable from originally coded content.

Bartlett's Research

"War of the Ghosts" experiment
1. non-meaningful memory content is poorly recalled & subject to distortion;
2. distortion reflects process of reinterpretation in order to add coherence to memory content;
3. emotional material is encoded more strongly than neutral material.

Misinformation Effect Research

misleading information presented after a person witnesses an event can change how that person describes that event later (Loftus); those in the MPI group were more likely to pick the yield sign than were participants who were not exposed to MPI

Memory Interference Hypothesis

MPI impairs or replaces memories that were formed during the original experiencing of the event; presentation of MPI of yield sign replaces original memory for stop sign.

Reminiscence Bump: results & theories

a spike in recalled memories corresponding to late adolescence to early adulthood or roughly the ages of 16-25; Pillemer believed individuals remember the least from middle.

Life Narrative Hypothesis: bump occurs because people assume their personal identity, social identity, & long-term goals during adolescence & young adulthood; more memories from bump are related to goals than first-time experiences.

Schrauf & Rubin: bump is shifted for individuals who emigrates to the US in their mid-30s compared to those who emigrated mid-20s

no bump for negative memories (Fading affect bias: negative emotional memories fade more quickly than +)

Infantile Amnesia

failure in retrieving memories from the first years of life; earliest tend to be fragmented memories involving a brief scene which lacks any extended temporal or spatial context; characterized by imagery & emotion, lack of a narrative.

2 problems: Source misattribution & blurring of actual episodes & reconstructed elements

Infantile Amnesia Techniques

1. Processing Differences: after age 3, language develops, consciousness expands, and a greater sense of self emerges; this changes the way information is processed.

2. Brain Development: species that undergo substantial brain development after birth demonstrate infantile amnesia.

3. Telescoping: thinking an event occurred more recently than it actually did;
a. due to the effects of multiple retrievals.

4. Repression (Freud): earliest memories are painful and easily pushed into the unconsciousness; accounts for some lost memories.

5. Reconstructive Retrieval (Freud): earliest memories are reinterpreted (largely unconsciously) through adult cognition.
a. Fragmentary, Imaginestic memories are poorly understood or lost during reconstruction.

6. Social Interaction Theory (Nelson, 1993)
a. First true AMs are made possible by children learning to talk about their experiences with an adult as a model.
b. Adult helps child create a high-level narrative structure that organizes their memory (social interaction)

Traumatic Memory Characteristics

college students' memories for traumatic episodes are not more fragmented than their nontraumatic memories; no difference in emotional intensity for pleasant, unpleasant, & traumatic episodes; traumatic memories didn't show diminished organization & coherence

Dissociation Theory (Janet)

traumatic event induces extreme state of arousal that disrupts ordinary cognitive processing; results in a dissociation of cognitive processes providing memory for time, location & causality

Repression (Freud)

anxiety-causing drives, ideas, & possibly episodic memories are restricted from awareness by an active psychological process; hysterical symptoms (known today as conversion reactions) may arise from the repression of trauma

AD

characterized by a slow, increasing decline in multiple areas, including memory, cognition, and the ability to perform daily tasks

AD Risk Factors / Treatments

previous head injury; presence of apolipoprotein (apo E) gene; low levels of neurotransmitter acetylcholine

cholinesterase inhibitors: slow breakdown of acetylcholine; massive doses of vitamin E; external memory aids: notebooks, diaries, calendars, signs around the house identifying rooms.

AD memory impairments

memory span: they don't demonstrate recency effect.
AM: same pattern as normal people, but recall less events.
Semantic Memory: no performance differences between deep & shallow levels of processing.
Implicit Memory tasks (priming): perform worse than those with anterograde

AD Physical Symptoms

irritability, character change, paranoia, psychotic behaviors;
behavioral problems: range from repeated questioning to physical violence.

AD Unimpaired aspects of memory

WM: phonological similarity effect & WLE comparable to normal so deficits not in phonological loop; difficulty with performing dual tasks.

Nun Study

they have Alzheimer's but don't present any symptoms;
3 primary factors that protected them against AD was living in a supportive community, having higher education, and keeping mentally & physically active.

Retrograde Amnesia

loss of information prior to amnesia-causing event; partial is common, complete is rare

Anterograde Amnesia

loss of ability to learn new information after amnesia-causing event; hippocampus & medial temporal lobes are typically damaged, sometimes the mammillary bodies of the diencephalon.

amnesic syndrome: impaired encoding of new information into episodic and semantic memory while most other cognitive functions are intact

Psychogenic Amnesia

extreme form of repression; amnesia resulting from psychological causes rather than physical brain damage. is usually due to traumatic experiences, impaired episodic & AM. semantic and procedural memories remain intact.

4 principles of memory improvement & learning efficiency

1. process material for meaning
2. practice retrieving from memory rather than reading
3. use metamemory to gain awareness of how you're learning
4. use distributed learning to

Method of Loci

imagine a route you know well (walking through rooms of parents' house in set order) and then associate each item with each room in turn;

Shopping list is milk, shampoo, newspaper, tea, toothpaste, window cleaner, (camera) film, trash bags; start in the first room and imagine some association with milk (perhaps a cow in your parents' front hallway); try for a vivid, rich elaborate image; then move to the next room and imagine something associated with shampoo

Pegword System

mnemonic technique that helps you remember the order of information, as well as providing set cues (rhyming words with #'s)

imagine each object in list associated with the comparable pegword item (1 = bun)

Partial Report CogLab

IV: delay between the offset of the matrix and the presentation of the cue to report one row;
DV: proportion of letters correctly recalled.

as delay of cue tone increases from 100 to 1000, the proportion of letters correctly recalled drops.

Brown-Peterson CogLab

on each trial you saw three letters (trigram) for 2 seconds, then given a distractor task involving counting backwards by 3s from given number; afterwards asked to recall trigram.

IV: duration of the distractor task
DV: % of correct recall of the trigram

% correct decreases as distractor duration increases; distractor task interferes with ability to actively rehearse the trigram of letters; distractor ranged from 3-18sec.

Operation Span

on each trial, saw math problem that you're asked to read out loud and then indicate whether the answer provided was correct or incorrect; then saw a word you were asked to read out loud; math problems & words alternated, until you were asked to recall the words in the same order in which they're presented.

isn't really an IV, because operation span is a way of measuring WM performance; maximum score possible is 60.

Remember-Know CogLab

Phase 1: saw list of words & asked to make a judgement. Phase 2: shown series of words (half from phase 1) and asked if it was from phase 1; "remember" judgement (you remember the word and presentation condition);
"know" judgment: word was on list but couldn't remember actual presentation.

IV: study condition; deep (synonym) or shallow (rhyme)
DV: proportion of times the word was recognized as being in Phase 1.

large level of processing effect for the remember judgements, but no levels of processing effect for the know judgements.

Forgot-it-all-Along CogLab

Phase 1: saw list of word pairs such as car-PORT; lowercase word was a cue, uppercase was the target.
Phase 2: produce target word when shown the cue (car-P__T) and type in 2 letters.
Phase 3: saw pair of items again, but this time were asked whether you remembered entering the uppercase word as a response.

IV: whether the context word presented during memory judgement task (Phase 3) was the same as during the cued-recall test (phase 2).
DV: % of times you said you remembered remembering a word.

should've been more accurate in remembering that you remembered the key word than when the cue was the same than when the cue was different between phases 2 & 3; should've forgotten that you remembered the target word more often in the different context condition.