Episodic Memory: Memory for life events (e.g., family holiday).
Semantic Memory: Memory for facts (e.g., penguin is a bird).
Procedural Memory: Memory for skills or actions (e.g., inserting a SIM card).
Long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) are processed by different brain areas.
Frontal lobe: Essential for STM.
Hippocampus: Involved in forming new semantic and episodic LTMs.
Brain damage case studies (e.g., Henry Molaison) demonstrate that long- and short-term memory are separate.
Three Key Processes of Memory
Encoding: Taking new information into memory (input).
Storage: Maintaining information in temporary or permanent memory; requires consolidation (revision, sleep).
Retrieval: Accessing stored information (output).
Memory is essential for completing tasks, solving problems, and making sense of new information.
Ways to Retrieve Information
Recognition: Comparing presented information to memory (e.g., multiple-choice test).
Cued Recall: Using a cue to remember (e.g., seeing initials to recall a name).
Free Recall: Retrieving information directly from memory without cues (e.g., essay exams).
How Memories are Formed
Link new information to existing knowledge.
Repeatedly retrieve information, spaced out over time.
The Multi-Store Model
Atkinson and Shiffrin's model includes three memory stores: sensory, short-term (STM), and long-term (LTM).
Each store differs in encoding, capacity, and duration.
Encoding means taking information into memory.
Sensory Memory
Brief duration.
Information is taken if a person pays attention to it and passes it to the STM.
Separate sensory store for each of the senses: visual, auditory, and so on.
Auditory store holds spoken words for around two seconds.
Visual sensory store has a brief duration that is less than one second but a large capacity.
Short-Term Memory (STM)
STM is used for active processing of information in everyday tasks.
Rehearsal is needed to transfer information from STM to LTM.
Limited duration (up to 30 seconds) and capacity (5-9 items).
Long-Term Memory (LTM)
LTM potentially lasts a lifetime and stores an unlimited amount of information.
Encoding in Each Store
Sensory memory encodes information via all five senses.
STM encodes information based on its sound (acoustic encoding).
LTM encodes information based on its meaning (semantic encoding).
Information can be converted to the appropriate type of encoding for each store.
Supporting Evidence for the Multi-Store Model of Memory
Serial Position Curve: Words at the start (primacy effect) and end (recency effect) of a list are better remembered.
Murdock (1962) supported the multi-store model of memory with experiment that found the primacy and recency effect.
Explaining Primacy and Recency Effects
Primacy Effect: Items at the start of a list are rehearsed and encoded into LTM.
Recency Effect: The last few items are still in STM.
Middle items are displaced from STM due to its limited capacity.
Reconstructive Memory
Remembering is an active process of building memories based on understanding (Bartlett).
People use existing schema knowledge to fill gaps in memories during retrieval.
'Effort after meaning': Making sense of new information using past information.
LTM is based around schemas which are clusters of related meaningful information that people derive from life experience and which are influenced by their culture.
Factors That Affect Memory
Amnesia: Can result in forgetting episodic memories.
Interference: Mixing up similar events or information.
Context: Easier to remember things in the context they were learned.
Reviewing and self-testing helps consolidate information in LTM.
False memories are distorted or false recollections of events that did not happen.