Psychology 2421 - Attention, Memory, and Remembering

Chapters 5, 6, 7, and Open Science

Process of remembering

• acquisition

• storage

• retrieval

Acquisition of a memory

• process of gaining information and placing it into a memory

Storage of a memory

• holding the information in a memory

Retrieval of a memory

• locating the information in storage and bringing it to active use

  • remembering

The modal model of information processing

• describes how information is moved around the brain

  • sensory memory

  • short-term memory

  • long-term memory

Sensory memory

• holds raw memory of sensory inputs for around 1 second

  • feels like you have access to everything you can see but does not last long

• very brief, mostly fades away immediately

Short-term memory

• passive storage block

• space where we decide to store something or let it go

• capacity of 7 ± 2

• easier to store in short-term but more fragile and easier to loose

• need to rehearse to keep in there

Maintence

• repeating information over and over again to make sure it stays in short-term memory

Long-term memory

• memories that have been deeply encoded and stored

• takes lots of effort to get here

• capacity is unlimited

• very stable

Retrieval

• moment where we take a memory from long-term memory and bring it to our working memory to actively think about it

Update to short-term memory

• short-term memory is not seen as a space where memories are moved

• seen as an activated state memory already inside long-term memory

• changed to working memory

Working memory

• brains temporary space used to hold, organize, and use information

• limited capacity

  • large individual differences in capacity

• fragile and easily disrupted

• needed for coordinating multiple pieces of information

Differences between working and long-term memory

• size

• ease of entry

• ease of retrieval

• fragility

Relationship between serial position and likelihood of recall

• more likely to recall when at the start or end

• primacy effect

• recency effect

Primacy effect

• more likely to remember first few words on a list

• extra attention to initial words

  • have lots of energy/focus that you can put toward

  • not competing with other words to get focus

  • more chance for rehearsal

  • more chance to be encoded into long-term memory

Recency effect

• more likely to remember the last few words on a list

• just heard them so you are still actively thinking about them

  • still active in working memory

How to show that working memory and long-term memory are separate

• make them do something in between showing them and asking them to recall

  • distracting working memory

  • when working memory is busy doing something else, recency effect goes away

• slow presentation down and give more time to process between things

  • more time for rehearsal and encoding into long-term memory

  • primacy effect increases

Measuring capacity of working memory

• the digit span task

• the operation/reading span task

The digit span task

• hear series of digits and repeat them back right away

• do this with larger sequences until you start to make errors

  • average capacity = 7 ± 2 items

Chunking

• groups individual info into meaningful units to make it easier to remember lots of things

• flexible, variable, influenced by prior knowledge, and task dependent

  • 1, 2, 6, 7

  • group as 12, 67 to make it easier to remember

  • or us a meaningful association like 12 is my birthday so i will put 1, 2 together

Chase and Ericsson - 1982

• tested people on numbers and how they remembered them

  • track and field fan remembered 3, 4, 9, 2 as 3 minutes and 49.2 seconds

• used meaningful knowledge to remember not just basic numbers in a row

The operational/reading span task

• to measure working memory capacity by testing how well a person can hold information in their head which doing a distracting task at the same time

  • read a series of sentences

  • continue to do a task afterwards

  • say all the final words of the sentence in order

• measures active processing

Active processing

• how memory operates when your brain is actively working

Why the operation/reading span task is useful

• shows us how large people's working memory capacity are

  • people who do better on this task normally perform better on tasks needing coordination of information

The working memory system

• Executive control processes

• articulatory rehearsal loop

  • subvocalization

  • phonological buffer

• visuospatial buffer

• episodic buffer

Executive control process

• controls what you are currently doing/thinking about

  • selection and sequence of thoughts

  • what is important right now

  • what resources are needed

  • how much attention is required

Articulatory rehearsal loop

• subvocalization

• phonological buffer

  • can rely on this sub-process

  • takes few resources and lets executive control focus on the primary task

Subvocalization

• silent speech

• moment when you are repeating stuff internally in your head

Phonological buffer

• passive storage of sound

• moment when you prepare to repeat the stuff in your head again

Issues with articulatory rehearsal loop

• sound alike errors

• concurrent articulation task/articulatory suppression

Sound alike errors

• may say something so much over and over again that you make change it to a word/thing that sounds similar to it

  • sounds morph together

Concurrent articulation task

• hard to rehearse something in your head when you are doing saying something else and your energy has to go towards that

  • during working memory task say something out loud dedededede

  • takes the resources needed for speech production and doesn’t allow for rehearsal loop in head

  • working memory capacity drops from 7-9 to 5-6

Visuospatial buffer

• stores visual materials as mental images

  • short-term memory for visual info

• also called visuospatial sketchpad

Episodic buffer

• helps organize things into a chronological sequence

  • what order are things happening in?

  • is this all apart of one event or multiple separate events?

Working memory depending on modality

• uses different processes depending on how the task is done

  • deaf since birth does not rely on inner ear but on inner hand

  • deaf since birth does not have sound alike errors but look alike errors with

  • working memory is disrupted if moving their hands

Visual working memory

• maintaining information in mind’s eye without rehearsal

• limited capacity

  • can only hold for so long

• lots of individual differences

How to minimize the contribution of rehearsal to visual working memory

• make the visual stimuli harder to label

  • slight changes in shades

• articulatory suppression

  • tying us verbal resources to block the ability to repeat in your head

Individual differences in visual working memory capacity

• driven by how good you can keep the unwanted information out

  • stable over time

• attention filtering

Attention filtering

• using attentional focus to selectively encode relevant items

• ability to focus on the visual info relevant to you and ignore the irrelevant info

  • strength decreases as you age

High performers at attentional filtering

• keep relevant info

• ignore distractors

Low performers at attentional filtering

• keep relevant info and irrelevant info

• creates too much info to work with

ADHD and attentional filtering

• not good at filtering

• remembers all info and focuses on all of it

• cannot filter out irrelevant info

Contralateral delay activity (CDA)

• event-related EEG component

• used to measure how many items someone is holding in visual working memory

  • measures amplitude spike in CDA

  • goes up by how many items you are holding

Transferring visual info into long-term memory

• requires lots of effort

  • shown an image for the first time and there is a big spike in CDA

    • in working memory

  • the 8th time in a row has a much lower spike in CDA

    • has been transferred to long-term memory and we can no longer measure CDA

Transferring non-visual information into long-term memory

• needs a lot of effort

• more you rehearse something, the more likely it will be moved to long-term memory

• more attention you can devote to it, the better you can remember it

Types of rehearsal

• maintenance rehearsal

• relational/elaborative rehearsal

Maintenance rehearsal

• focus on items themselves

• thinking about them over and over again

• good to remember in short-term but not likely they get moved to long-term

Relational/elaborative rehearsal

• focus on what the items mean and how they relate to one another

• relating to events that you have experienced

• much greater long-term benefits

Exposure does not = strong memory

• repeated exposure is not enough to create a precise long-term memory encoding

• can recognize a lot of things but to actually draw them yourself and create an accurate drawing is very hard

  • see things a lot but have not paid enough attention to encode a detailed reliable description of it

Intentional learning

• being told to learn/remember something for a test

• does not = good memory

Unintentional learning

• shallow processing

  • does the word contain the letter e?

  • how many letters does it contain?

• deep processing

  • how pleasant is this word?

  • needed to think about the meaning of the word

• deeply engaging with material can create better memory even when not trying to learn something

How deeper connections helps processing

• more connections a memory has, the more pathways to retrieve it

• easier to retrieve it

• having no connections to a word won’t let us get into the web of memories

Mnemonic strategies

• techniques to improve memory

  • acronyms

  • mental imagery

  • peg-word system

Acronyms

• form of chunking

• each letter helps connect to another word

  • ROYGBIV = colors of the rainbow

Mental imagery

• creating a mental image connecting things

• creates verbal-visual traces that are stronger than repetition alone

• memory palace

Memory palace

• thinking about a space that you know well

• attaching pieces of information to items in the space

• when you think about an item you will think about the info attached

  • helps remember lots of information

Understanding and it’s role on memory

• improves memory

• remember information better and more accurately when you understand it

Patient H.M.

• got surgery to remove hippocampus to help with seizures

• lost ability to form new memories

• could remember old memories

• kept implict memory

  • could learn new things but not remember learning something

  • something would feel familiar but not know why

• shows us that there are different types of memories

• could hold stuff in working memory but as soon as he switched to focusing on something else it would fall out and he would have no idea of it ever being there

Korsakoff patients

• result of severe alcohol use

• cannot form new implicit memories

  • good for studying difference between implicit and explicit memory

• can show improvement in a task but have no memory of every doing it

Explicit memory

• conscious and direct memory

• know what happened and when it happened

• can remember doing something

  • recall

  • recognition

Implicit memory

• memory/learning that is demonstrated without conscious awareness

• show effects from a previous experience but not have a memory of the experience

Mirror drawing test

• draw an image on a piece of paper but you can only see it in the mirror

• improvements can be seen in people with and without explicit memory

  • even if they don’t remember ever doing the task before

Recall

• reproducing something from memory

• needs deep memory trace

• needs many connections in memory

Recognition

• being able to see something and match it to information that we know

• able to identify something as familiar when you see it

• weaker memory trace

• not as many connections needed in memory

Context-dependent learning

• learning is preparation for the retrieval of information

• the context that something is learned influences the connections with that memory

  • think about things you are experiencing to remember something

Scuba divers experiment

• participants learned stuff on land and in water

• then were tested on land and in water

  • memory was best when learned context and tested context was the same

• different environments create different memory connections

Context reinstatement

• easier to remember something if you recreate the physical, environment, and mental context where you learned something

• being in the same space or thinking about the same space both produce the same retrieval benefit

The memory network

• each item is a node

• nodes are tied to each other through associative links

• when a node is activated, it spread through the network to other linked nodes

  • when it gets enough activation to pass the threshold it is brought into working memory

Subthreshold activation

• nodes that are not as deeply connected to the rest of connection map

• will not be activated

Multiple subthreshold activation

• multiple subthreshold activations can add together to bring something to summation even when it is not fully activated

Retrieval cues

• provides more activation pathways to target memory

  • like a hint

  • makes it easier to retrieve

• different clues provide different pathways to the target

Lexical decision task

• shown string of letters

• asked if they are real words or not

• time it takes to make a decision shows how quickly they can look up words

Semantic priming

• recognizing a word happens faster when it is after a semantically related word

• when you see something the node is activated and the brain automatically spreads activation to nearby nodes

  • doctor and nurse are related so they have a faster response

  • bird and desk are not related so they have a slower response

Time cost

• how long it takes to move over from one network to another and activate a new node

Familiarity

• you know something

• but do not know why you know it

Source memory

• you know something

• and you know why you know it

Remember judgments

• conscious recollection

• intact source memory

• accurate familiarity

  • greater activation of the hippocampus

• more accurate than knowing

Know judgments

• not intact source memory

• accurate familiarity

  • greater activation of the rhinal cortex

• less accurate than remembering

Source confusion

• putting familiarity to the wrong source

  • i recognize this person

  • so they much have been the person to commit the crime

Evidence of learning/memory without explicit awareness

• previous exposure makes later processing easier

  • see doctor

  • later are faster at processing nurse

  • even if you don’t remember seeing doctor earlier

• word-stem completion

Word-stem completion

• people see list of words

  • later receive CLA_ _ _

• asked to fill in the rest of the word

• more likely to say the word that seen earlier on the list even if they don’t consciously remember seeing it

Implicit memory influencing behavior

• previous experiences can influence your behavior and judgments without you consciously remembering the experience

  • Familiarity affects behavior - Jacoby et el

  • Familiarity affects what you believe - Begg et al

Familiarity affects behavior - Jacoby et al

• see a list of names

• see on of the names again later

• feels familiar

• don’t remember why it is familiar

• make a decision based on familiarity

Familiarity affects what you believe - Begg et al

• people read statements

• later in the day they saw those statements again

• because they seen them before and they felt more familiar, people are more likely to believe them as true

Misattributions of implicit memory

• people watched a fake crime

• later show lineup of people who were supposedly involved in the crime

  • none of them were

• felt like they seen one of the people before so they choose them when the person who actually did the crime isn’t even an option

• source confusion

Processing fluency

• repeated activation makes a pathway stronger

• makes future processing faster, easier, and more fluent

• can produce feelings of familiarity

Familiarity without experience

• illusion of familiarity

• a novel stimulus feels familiar because it is processed more fluent than expected

Hierarchy of memory types

• different memory abilities can be separate from one another

• memory

  • explicit memory

    • episodic memory

    • semantic memory

  • implicit memory

    • procedural memory

    • priming

    • perceptual learning

    • classical conditioning

Episodic memory

• memory for specific experiences

  • personal events

  • episodes

Semantic memory

• general knowledge

• not tied to any specific time or place

Procedural memory

• knowing how to do something

  • skills

Priming

• changes in perception caused by previous experience

Perceptual learning

• changes in perceptual systems as a result of experiences

Classical conditioning

• learning associations between stimuli

Amnesia

• impairment with memory

  • retrograde

  • anterograde

Retrograde amnesia

• memories learned before the incident that caused them amnesia are disrupted

  • lose some memories from before the amnesia

• can form new memories

Anterograde amnesia

• new memories are disrupted

  • difficulty to form new memories after the amnesia

• old memories are still intact

Double dissociation

• one type of memory is impaired while another remains intact

• and another patient can show the opposite pattern

  • shows that the two abilities are functionally separate

• need to have both sides to say this

• hippocampal damage

• amygdala damage

Hippocampal damage

• impaired explicit memory

• intact implicit memory

Amygdala damage

• impaired implicit

• intact explicit