Cognition

Encode: label incoming sensory date

Storage: retention of encoded material

Retrieval: locate and recover memory when needed

Sensory memory: filters/screens incoming sensory data to keep (label & store)

Working memory: short term memory; lasts 20 seconds (in the moment); connection between sensory & long term

Chunking: frees up space by grouping data; 7 slots

Long term memory: stuff that happened in the past (over a minute ago)

Sperling: flashed a diagram with random letters for a second, then asked the experimentee what they saw

Echoic: auditory data/impression; part of sensory memory

Iconic: visual impression/data

Maintenance rehearsal: repeat to keep from fading

Elaborative rehearsal: connected to stored knowledge

Ex. coming up with a song to ex.memorize the periodic table

Procedural memory: things that we know how to do

Declarative memory: things we know how to describe

Episodic: your general knowledge/perspective

Semantic: overall general knowledge 

Retrieval cues: stimuli that prompt the activation of long term memories

Recall: you have a strong memory of something

Recognition: vaguely remember something

Eidetic: vibrant brief flashes

Highly superior autobiographical(hyperthymesia): photographic memory; remembering everything forever; very rare

Prospective memory: remembering to do something in the future

Automatic: thinking that doesn't require much conscious thought

Effortful: consciously trying to remember something

Structural: looks like

Phonemic: sounds like

Semantic: seems like

Shallow: weaker memories

Deep: stronger memories

Semantic encoding: actually understanding a concept

Long term potentiation: a persistent strengthening of synapses based on recent patterns of activity 

Flashbulb memory: exceptionally clear recollection of an important emotionally packed event

Anterograde: the inability to retain new memories 

Retrograde: the inability to recall old stuff

Infantile: the lack of memories before the age of 3

HM: went into brain surgery for seizures and ended up with a damaged hippocampus (anterograde), causing him to forget stuff within 5 minutes

Upside down star study: psychologists had him draw upside down stars a bunch and he became better and better at it until he could do it perfectly, even though he would constantly forget that he had been doing it

Proactive interference: when old info interferes with new info

Retroactive interference: when new info interferes with old info

Tip of the tongue phenomenon: poor match between retrieval cue and encoding

Context: setting influences your memory

Mood: being in the same physiological state as the memory that was made

State: remembering stuff that aligns with your current mental state

Misinformation effect: when something else influences your recall

Source amnesia: when the origin of a memory is unclear

Constructive memory: the brain trying to construct a memory based off of bits and pieces

Memory consolidation: hippocampus processes new memories, and then files them away during REM sleep; memory is slightly altered every time you think about it

Imagination inflation: the more you fantasize about a certain event, the more you think it actually occurred 

Initial exposure to a certain stimulus affects later exposure to another stimulus

Psychodynamic: shoving things into the subconscious garbage can; overflow causes mental issues

Psychoanalytic: the need to clear said garbage can; talk therapy, hypnosis

Serial position effect: the sequence influences what exactly you remember

Massed practice: spending a large amount of time on a big topic instead of spacing it out

Distributed practice: focusing on the topic at hand bit by bit over a long stretch of time

Mnemonic devices: Methods for encoding info to be remembered by associating it with info you already know

Method of loci (memory palace): associating items in a room with an object or concepts

Peg word: 2 objects interacting with each other

Testing effect: practicing something enough to strengthen it

Metacognition: thinking about the concept of thinking and trying to improve it

Forgetting curve: list of random nonsense words, all 3 letters, to see how quickly he’d forget these; discovers that most memory of the words was forgotten in the first hour; after it continued to decline at a much slower rate for a month

Loftus: false memories and eyewitness testimony

Repressed: shoving things in the unconscious garbage can