Ch 5 PSYCH 224-Long Term Memory

Long-Term Memory

Episodic memories

• encodes, stores, and retrieves memories of our personal experiences

• conceived of as context dependent memory

• there are also hippocampal dependent memories

• can be thought of as mental time travel 

• tied to your experiences specifically

Semantic memory

• encodes, stores, and retrieves information concerning knowledge of the world

• ex: what is a duck?, what is the capital of australia?

• independent of learning context (can’t remember where you learned the specific information

• hippocampus damage may not affect semantic memory

Explicit Memory

• conscious awareness

• episodic, semantic, working memory

Implicit Memory

• not consciously aware pf

• amnesia

Nickerson & Anderson

• conducted study on pennies and remembering

Elaborative Processing

Involves creating additional information that relates and expands on what it is that needs to be remembered

Levels of Processing

• Craik and Lockhart (1972)

• Memory byproduct of level of processing performed at encoding

• Level of processing leads to different memories 

  • Shallow → poor memory

  • Deep → better memor

Shallow processing

Shallow processing→ the most basic (visual form) to phonology (how it sounds/rhymes with)

Deep processing

elaborate process, such as its meaning

self-referencing effect

• Memory is better when we relate the information to ourselves specifically

• Rogers, Kuiper & Kirker (1977)

• linking to be learned info to personally relevan tinformation about oneself creates strong encoding

Generation Effect

• memory is better when we generate associations ourselves than when we simply read or see them

Retrieval Process

• a progression from one or more retrieval cues to target through associative connections

Retrieval cues

bits of information about the target memory that guide the search

Memory trace

the particular memory we’re seeking