PSYC 230 Exam 2- UNC Chanon

Best to worst for duration

LTM, STM, Echoic, Iconic

Best to worst for capacity

LTM, Sensory memory, STM

Sensory Memory

1. decays rapidly (varies by modality)

2. has large capacity

3. stores sensory information (not semantic)

4. NOT related to attention

Echoic

duration: ~10 seconds

auditory sensory memory: Say what? But catch what the person said before they repeat it

iconic

Sperling: flashing letters

duration: ~300- 500 milliseconds

Metacontrast Masking

Sperling letters but overwritten by the "O" coming up

taking over sensory image

Whole vs. Partial Report Task

partial has a smaller response set

Duration of STM

duration: ~ 15-20 seconds

(without rehearsal)

Capacity of STM

Miller: 7 (+ or - 2)

Luck and Vogel: 4

Chunking

group together (connected items or words) so that they can be stored or processed as single concepts

4 items

Items or amount of info?

all about amount of info

Think Hard drive- not thinking about how many pictures I can fit b/c depends on quality (size) of photos

Components of WM

i) Central Executive

ii) Visuospatial Sketch Pad

iii) Phonological Loop

Working Memory

Highlights the fact that manipulation of the information can take place in STM

WM has trouble when...

similar types of information are presented at the same time

Phonological Loop

verbal and auditory info

Visuospatial sketch pad

visual and spatial info

central executive

coordinates activity between the two

where the "work" happens

phonological similarity effects

when phonologically similar (ex) hop, top, pot), we don't remember as well

word length effect

People are better at remembering shorter words

takes longer to rehearse longer words

Articulatory Suppression

inability to rehearse words so word length effect goes away

suggests you are rehearsing these words and that's why longer words are harder to remember

episodic buffer

backup store that communicates with LTM and WM components

hold info longer and has greater capacity than phonological loop or visuospatial sketch pad

testing anxiety and working memory

When you have test anxiety, it actually is using your WM capacity, therefore it interrupts your ability to do well on whatever test you're doing

LTM capacity

largest store

LTM duration

from minutes to years

Serial Position curve

Curve you get when you ask people to read a list of words and then write down all the words they remember

primacy effect

people are better at remembering words at the beginning of the list

have time to rehearse the words and encode in LTM without interference

recency effect

people are better at remembering words at the end of the list

just heard them

Got rid of recency effect?

People had a 30 second delay with another verbal task at end, couldn't keep words in STM

Susceptibility- LTM vs. STM

LTM- longer lasting and susceptible to semantic interference

STM- susceptible to rapid decay and phonological interference

decrease proactive interference?

when present a different category of stimuli.

Once you switch the category of items, proactive interference goes away

retrograde amnesia

loss of memory fro events prior to the trauma

strongest for things that happened closest to accident (can't remember most recent things)

anterograde amnesia

inability to make new LTM

patient H.M.

Had Seizures

According to surgeon- entire hippocampus in each hemisphere removed

Bilateral Medial Temporal Lobectomy (1953)

After surgery:

i) Above normal intelligence

ii) Normal Short-term memory

iii) Severe Anterograde amnesia

iv) Retrograde amnesia for ~ 3 years before surgery (more distant memories were not affected)

Clive Wearing

musician

showed the hippocampus is responsible for ones ability to encode new long-term memories

did not lose procedural memory

Patient K.F.

damage near the Left Sylvian Fissure, had STM deficits (digit span of 2; reduced Recency effect) without LTM deficits.

Different area of brain damage

declarative/ explicit memory

memory that you can declare; have knowledge of that you can explain

Episodic

1. Tell me about your birthday party

2. Event that you're remembering

Semantic

1. What is the capital of Delaware

2. Where were you born

Evidence that episodic and semantic are separate...

1. K.C. damaged hippocampus

a. No episodic memory, cannot relive any events of his past

b. Semantic memory intact, can remember general information about the past

2. Italian woman

A. Impaired semantic memory

B. Episodic memory for past events was preserved

Evidence that episodic and semantic interact...

Both occur together in Autobiographical memories

a) Episodic can be lost while semantic is retained

Episodic can improve semantic

a) Recall of actors names

Relate facts to events in your own life

a) Semantic can change experience/episodic memory

Remember/ know procedure: forgetting is not all or none

Remember if a stimulus is familiar and the circumstance under which it was encountered?

Know if the stimulus is familiar but don't remember experiencing it earlier?

Don't remember the stimulus at all

semanticization of memory

loss of episodic details for memories of long-ago events

"remember"

episodic

"know"

semantic

implicit memory

memory that cannot be verbally reported

not LTM dependent

Procedural memory

1. Depends on extensive and repeated experience

2. Experimentally it is often measured with the serial RT task kind of like Simon, but sometimes the sequences would repeat

3. Amnesic can learn, despite not remembering ever doing the task.

4. Parkinson's and Huntington's patients show impairment

Priming

1. Perceptual

2. Conceptual

3. Semantic

*amnesiacs show normal priming effects

perceptual priming

Usually related to actual perceptual systems

Tulving Study

a) People are better able to fill in word fragments for words they've seen before

b) Accuracy

Conceptual Priming

What is a man's name that starts with H? P?

class said Henry and Peter because we had heard them earlier in lecture

Semantic priming

categories

ex) "dog" can prime "wolf"

repetition priming

improvements in a behavioral response when stimuli are repeatedly presented. The improvements can be measured in terms of accuracy or reaction time, and can occur when the repeated stimuli are either identical or similar to previous stimuli

Tulving Study: perceptual priming

a) Giant list of words

b) Had to fill in empty spaces

c) People were not very good at filling them in without implicit memory (they were looking at accuracy)

d) 3 phases: Learning phase & test phase (1hr)

e) & test phase (7 days later)

f) On of lures in first memory test, they were more likely to get it in the 7 hr test

g) Priming lasted longer than word recognition

i) Evidence for something other than recognition memory

Real Life Priming

a) People who were deliberately trying to memorize ads did better

b) In deliberate and coincidental, they both had an effect on how they rated the advertisement later

c) The lower they are, the more eye catching

d) Things that they had seen were rated as more appealing (because they were familiar in an implicit way)

habituation

Repeated non nocuous stimulus, you can ignore it after a while

ex)after a while on a boat you don't feel the motion as much

Sensitization

as you repeat, it gets worse

ex) after the 20th umm or like it will start to drive you crazy

steps of LTM encoding (in order)

acquisition, rehearsal, consolidation and retrieval

acquisition

getting into STM

consolidation

stabilizing over a longer time period

retrieval

Process of transferring info from LTM back into working memory (consciousness)

Most of our failures of memory are failures to retrieve

rehearsal

maintenance- STM

elaborative- LTM

elaborative rehearsal

Thinking about the meaning

Make connections to something you already know

shallow processing

little attention to meaning

focus on physical features

poor memory

circular reasoning

The more you interact with the material, the deeper it will be

organization and categorization

Fruit and occupation list, when recalling automatically say words in their categories

Laundry passage

complex sentences

Like memory palace - more bizarre and more detail, better memory

More vivid/ visual imagery

visual imagery

boat/tree word pairing

to remember the words, visualize a boat on top of a tree

personal connection

connect what you are memorizing to something meaningful to you

generation

Generating material yourself, rather than rereading

Blank outline

testing effect

taking a practice exam

how to improve retrieval?

Matching environment between encoding and retrieving

Transfer-appropriate processing

Transfer Appropriate processing

phenomenon whereby the results of a memory task will be better if the type of processing used during encoding is the same as the type during retrieval

Matching encoding with matching testing will lead to better results

All about type of encoding and type of testing (actual task)

context clues

matching environmental context; study in same place you take the test you will do better

encoding specificity

a. Study words underwater vs. study words on land

b. People who encoded words underwater did better when tested under the water

c. All about the environment

d. Quiet studiers did better when tested in quiet

e. Noise studiers did better when tested in noise

state-dependent learning

a. Made half people feel sad and half people feel happy

b. People who were sad when they learned, did better when they were sad when they were tested

All about mood

cued- recall

cue- presented to aid recall

increased performance over free-recall

retrieval cues most effective when created by the person who uses them

consolidation

transforms new memories from fragile state to more permanent state

graded amnesia

memory for recent events is more fragile than for remote events

sleep effect: consolidation

Reactivation process is important for consolidation and begins as soon as the memory is formed, but it is particularly strong during sleep.

English-German Vocab pairs

Group 1- went to sleep within 3 hours

Group 2- Stayed awake for 10 hours then slept a normal night

People who went to sleep right away did much better

expectation effect: consolidation

Depends on whether you're expected to be tested on material

Expected group did better

Mnemonic similarity task

used to study pattern separation--picture task from class

Pattern separation

the ability to see highly similar things but recognize them as diff object-- calling a lure "similar "

age related to deficit in pattern separation?

gets worse as you get older

deficit due to conceptual or perceptual interference?

The age related deficit in pattern separation ability seems to be due to perceptual ability

have intact semantic memory, might just be slower processing

perceptual interference

non-nameable objects

conceptual interference

objects that perform the same task

e.g. dry measuring cup changes to liquid measuring cup

pattern completion

retrieval on an item based on a partial cue-- calling a lure "old"

pattern separation dependent on...

connections b/w entorhinal cortex and hippocampus

Alzheimer's brain

brain w/ a lot of tissue loss, especially beginning in medial temporal lobe

Stephanie's task relies on entorhinal and hippocampus so affected individuals wont do as well

Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm

a procedure in cognitive psychology used to study false memory in humans

in which subjects are presented with lists of semantically related words (e.g., nurse, hospital, etc.) at encoding. After a delay, subjects are asked to recall or recognize these words. In the recognition memory version of the task, subjects are asked whether they remember previously presented words, as well as related (but never presented) critical lure words ('doctor').

Why does the DRM paradigm create false memories?

because the words from each list were associated with a missing key word. When you try to reconstruct the list, your memory recreates all of the associated information, even information that wasn't experienced

need for false memory to occur?

familiarity with category term

Without prior knowledge of "anger", this effect would not appear; false memory resulted from top-down processing/schemas.

looming cognitive style (LCS)

People with this style think of threats as rapidly approaching them in space/time

Approaching threats are more threatening.

LCS associated with?

anxiety, biased memory for threatening information, and sensitivity to approach movement

stimuli of John's research

image movement

methods of John's research

i. Encoding:

1. Threating and non-threatening animals

2. Approaching and receding

ii. Recognition test:

1. Old or new?

2. If old, approaching or receding?

Results of John's research

When anxious participants falsely recognized threatening images, those with high LCS remembered them as approaching more often than those with low LCS. This was not the case with nonthreatening images.

Participants high in LCS and anxiety remembered images they'd never seen before as approaching more often if the image was threatening than if the image was nonthreatening

Conclusions of John's research

Anxious individuals with maladaptive cognitive styles like the LCS apply threatening characteristics (approach movement) to their false memories. ◦ This is only the case for threatening information.

It is possible that this effect extends into everyday life, with top-down processing leading to distortions which reinforce anxiety.

forgetting can be good?

yes; we would always be in a state of regret

If unable to forget, intrusive memories may keep us from being able to focus well on the current stimuli. Painful memories may seem as fresh and raw as if they just happened.

hyperthymesia

Can't forget

One confirmed case in 2007

"forgetfulness is a form of freedom"

Patient AJ (Jill Price)

Jill Price recall everything and is unable to forget anything.

Mundane memories are always accessible, forming a "running movie" simultaneously with current experiences.