Memory and McConaughey - Study Tips from science of memory

Study Strategies

Highlighting = shallow encoding

Cramming = Mass practice

In front of TV = divided attention

All night = sleep loss hurts cognition

Desirable Difficulties (e.g., Bjork & Bjork, 2011)

• Challenges that may seem to slow down learning and performance, but which lead to longer and better memory

  • Elaboration = deep encoding

  • Testing yourself = retrieval practice

  • Distributed practice = the spacing effect

  • Varying study context

Science-backed study tips!

• There are different aspects of memory

  • Encoding = getting stuff into memory

  • Retrieval = pulling stuff out of memory

Elaborate

• Think about the meaning. Link parts of the material to each other and to your own interests, generate new examples (”deep encoding”)

  • Connect it to everything you can in your network of knowledge

• This leads to depth of encoding in memory (Craik & Lockhart, 1972)

  • Improving memory with deep encoding

  1. Make a column number of 1-18

  2. For each word shown, write Y for Yes and N for no but do not write the words themselves

Shallow processing = Upper or lower case

Medium processing = Rhyme

Deep processing = Fits in sentence Replicated in Craik & Tulving (1975)

Test yourself

• Practice retrieving from memory (”testing effect” or “retrieval practice”)

• Solidifies/strengthens what you have learned

• Roediger & Karpicke, 2006

  • 120 students read a reading comprehension passage, the neither restudied it or tested themselves on it

  • Finally, took test 5 minutes, 2 days, or 1 week later

• Once you’re outside of the 5 minute window, then you are no longer getting benefits from restudying, retrieval is most effective

• The more opportunities that teachers give students to test and re-test, the better they will perform

Where meta-cognition* fails

*= knowing how our own minds work

Re-studying → Higher confidence

Testing effect → Higher retention

Why? People do not to have to see that they do not know not anything or got something wrong

Recognition → Identifying that something is familiar from previous experience

Recall → Mentally searching and retrieving information from long-term memory

Recall much harder!

Recall vs. recognition: Which is easier?

“Tip of the tongue” phenomenon

A difficulty in retrieval:

You can almost - but not quite- recall the word you’re searching for

Underscores the importance of practicing retrieval rather than relying on recognition

Spread study sessions apart (”distributed practice”/ spacing effect”)

Get Sleep

• Not all difficulties are “desirable”…more on sleep and memory later

Pay Attention

• Learning objectives:

  • How is seeing not just something the eyes do?

  • What is inattentional blindness?

  • Why was inattentional blindness surprising to perception researchers?

  • What is change blindness?

• How is attention relevant to health and safety?

• The information we acquire through sight is passed all the way to the back of the brain, to the occipital lobe

  • Rich perception

    • Every moment contains more information than we can take it at any given moment

• We move attention around

• We don’t have a simultaneous perception of what is in front of us

• We cannot process everything at once, there is too much

• Hence, our minds use attention to construct our own perception of reality

How much are we missing?

• Misunderstanding about how perception works: people assume that what we see is just to do with what we physically see

• Function of what your mind is able to do with that information

• Attention is about what you do with your mind

Inattentional Blindness (Simons & Chabris, 1999)

• When there is stuff right in front of your eyes that you are missing, not because your eyes are not working, but because your attention is already taken up by a primary task and you don’t have enough attentional resources to spill over onto the other stuff (e.g. the gorilla and the curtain)

• Look-but-failed-to-see-accidents

  • SMIDSY (sorry mate I didn’t see you)

Eye tracking studies

• Eye trackers record what people look at

• Often used in studies of attention

• Indexes overt but not covert attention

• People who didn’t see unexpected item looked at it often as those who did

  Beanland & Pammer (2010)

  Koivisto, Hyona & Revonsuo (2004)

  Memmert (2006)

<aside> 💡 It does not matter what is in your view, it is about what you’re paying attention to

</aside>

What about mobile phones?

Primitive Features

• The idea that some basic features don’t need attention to be seen (visual pop-out)

• Only when you try to combine these features is when they start to require attention

  • Conjunction features

E.g. Green line and slanted line becomes green slanted line as a conjunction feature

Visual pop-out

• Primitive feature means no matter how big it is, the amount of attention you need to identify it remains the same

Feature Integration Theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980)

• Certain basic features are processed quickly in parallel (all at once)

• Attentions serves to bind simple features together into conjunctions

• This binding process is slow and serial, you need to move attention from one item to the other in order to be aware of more complex objects

What are different ways that we can manipulate attention to make it more likely that people are going to see an unexpected object?

• Spatial attention

  • Moving attention around from place to place (spotlight metaphor of attention)

• Tuning your attention to particular features → feature-based attention

  • E.g. finding wally, you would focus on things that are red

Change blindness

• We are very bad at noticing changes

• When things are quickly inserted, we don’t notice them

• Gradual change blindness = you don’t notice things that are changing very slowly

Simons & Levin, 1998

• People are having a conversation, asking stranger on campus for some directions

• 2 people carrying a door walk between them

• The person asking for directions walks off behind the door

• The person carrying the door at the back jumps in and acts as if he was the one in the conversation

• 50% of people did not notice they were talking to a different person

<aside> 💡 Change blindness = We are very bad at noticing even large changes. There is a failure to update representations between views

Inattentional blindness = Failure to see something we are looking at because our attention is preoccupied

</aside>

Takeaway: The world is overwhelming and many things are competing for our attention, which gives many opportunities for change blindness and inattentional blindness to occur

Memory Revisited

Note: The generation effect

• We better remember material that we generated ourselves than material we simply memorised

For example…

Rapid - f… - better memory if you generated that stem

Rapid - fast

Desirable Difficulties

• Challenges that may seem to slow down learning & performance, but which lead to longer and better memory

  • Elaboration = Deep encoding

  • Testing yourself = Retrieval

  • Distributed Practice = Spacing Effect

  • Interleaved Practice

  • Blocked Practice

  

Interleaved and Blocked Practice

• Medical students learned ECG diagnoses in one of two conditions…

  • Blocked: Multiple examples of different diagnoses clumped by category

  • Interleaved: Examples of ECGs mixed across diagnoses

• Interleaved practice led to superior diagnostic accuracy (46%) compared to blocked practice (30%)

• Other study:

  • Students received practice problems over a 3-month period, either interleaved by type or blocked by type. Then on surprise test…

  

WHY?

• Interleaved practice encourages comparison, contrasts and discrimination between concepts

• Also prevents you from going on “auto-pilot” once you have established a heuristic

Elaboration

• Concrete information is easier to visualise and remember

• “memory champions” often take advantage of visual encoding

• When studying, it may be useful to use visual encoding

• The memory palace method (aka method of loci)

  • We are better at remembering things that have context

  • Why? Hippocampus, which is thought to be involved in emotion and spatial navigation is in control of STM and LTM processing

  • Memory palace = memorising random data + spatial navigation and visual images

  • You assign images to content you want to memorise and then place them on a path in a real life location, then retrace the path in the mind and see the images

  STEP 1: Pick a place you know really well (e.g. your apartment)

  STEP 2: Choose the thing you want to memorise

  STEP 3: Create Images (e.g. for each line or item)

  STEP 4: Place images along the path

  STEP 5: Memorise

  • Studies show students that use memory palace or other pneumonic techniques consistently and significantly outperform the students that don’t

• Advantage of dual-coding! (My psych IA)

• Self-reference effect → Better memory for material when you think about how it connects to…you

Sleep

• Beware: Not all difficulties are “desirable”

• Pro tip: Get sleep

• Tested >600 1st year students across 3 different universities

  • Every hour of lost nightly sleep was associated with a 0.07 reduction in end-of-term GPA

• 6 hours or less per night caused deficits equivalent to 2 nights sleep deprivation

• Sleepiness ratings suggested participants were unaware of the deficits

Louie & Wilson, 2001

• Activity in cells in the rat hippocampus* while running mazes (top) corresponds well with activity in the same cells during REM (bottom)

• Sleep is important for memory consolidation

  • Memories are reactivated and consolidated during sleep

*Hippocampus is a brain structure central to both memory and spatial navigation

Consolidation

• The “stabilisation” of memories that have been encoded. Unfolds over time

• Analogy: Like letting paint dry and settle before applying a second layer

Students in France learned Swahili-French pairs

e.g., nyanya-tomate

Two sessions of learning, 12-hours apart

Then were tested 1 week & 6 months later

Two groups:

Group 1: 1st study session in morning, 2nd in the evening

Group 2: 1st study session in the evening, 2nd was after 12 hours of sleep

Group 2 began the 2nd study session knowing more, they needed to study only half as much to get 100% correct, remembered more both 1 week and 6 months later

The Paradox of Memory

What factors help memories consolidate?

• Sleep (See last lecture)

Emotions influence memory & consolidation

<aside> 💡 Flashbulb memory - A vivid recollection of where you were and what you were doing when something emotional occurred.

</aside>

• E.g. Challenger, 9/11

• For rats → adrenaline seems to be essential for memory formation

• McGaugh & Cahill → presentation of mum and son leaving home to visit father’s workplace as the “boring” condition, or presentation of mum visiting son in hospital after he has been hit by a car.

  • They brought back participants 3 weeks later to ask questions

  • Participants who had rated themselves as having a stronger emotional reaction had better memory of the story

• McGaugh & Cahill → Replicated the experiment but everyone heard the emotional story → condition took a beta-blocker ; placebo condition

  • They still rated the story as emotional, but if took beta-blocker, then their memory was worsened

Why? McGaugh:

• Emotional events are activated by the hormones the emotion produced, then the amygdala sends a message to the brain as if to say “this information is important, remember it”

• Events have emotional power when they are important to us

• Hormones released with strong emotions seem to solidify memory

• Ongoing research is testing whether beta-blockers can be used to help with PTSD

Highlights

• A dose of adrenaline prevented forgetting of the maze

• Blocking adrenaline prevented retention of stressful memories

• In people, memory was better for an emotional than non-emotional story…unless they took a beta-blocker to block adrenaline

• Amygdala activity correlated with better memory for emotional images

What about exercise?

• There are memory benefits to exercise

• 10 mins of exercise a day improves memory (light exercise)

• In the brains of those who had exercised, they discovered enhanced communication between the hippocampus and the cortical brain regions (which are involved in vivid recollection of memories)

Brain Training Games (not so true)

• Evidence is questionable

• Luminosity had to pay damages for deceptive advertising

• Transfer → when you are playing those games, you get better at those games, but your improvement at that game does not translate to improved memory generally

Superior memory or ordinary memory?

• Many “memory athletes” claim to be ordinary people with ordinary memories

• They do not score higher on general cognitive ability or have better memory of events in their lives

• Their brains are not structurally different from normal

• All from Maguire, Valentine, Wilding & Kapur, 2003

Hippocampus

• Heavily involved in forming new memories

• Critical for spatial memory and navigation

• Neuroplastic: Brain changes with experiences

• London taxi drivers with years of experience had a larger hippocampus than normal (Maguire et al, 2004)

• Instead, brain scans (fMRI) showed that memory athletes were using different brain areas than non-memory-athletes

• These were areas involved in visual imagery and spatial navigation

• It was the encoding strategies they were using!

  • Maguire, Valentine, Wilding & Kapur, 2003

Contrast to Hyperthymestic Syndrome

Distinct from ‘memory athletes’

• Can recall everyday since she was 14

• But normal ability to recall digits

• Some unusual differences in brain structure

• AKA Highly superior autobiographic memory

  • Parker, Cahill & McGaugh, 2006

Reconstructive memory + Schemas

• Memory is not a simple readout of stored information

• Memory is constructed

• We structure our memories around meaning (its a double-edged sword)

<aside> 💡 Schemas : knowledge or expectations about a domain or event

</aside>

• Enable chunking

  • One reason why experts seem able to remember so much more

• The Deese-Roediger-McDermott effect

  • Memory can be distorted by our biases and assumptions and by misleading information - by our schemas

• Bartlett

  • War of Ghosts

  • Overtime, as detailed memory began to fade, participants’ telling of the story began to conform to norms of Edwardian England

  • Bartlett suggested that recollections become increasingly shaped by our schemas as detailed memories fade

Loftus - False memories

• Car crash study - Loftus & Palmer 1974

  • People watched movie of a car accident

  • Were asked to guess speed when the cars hit each other

  • …or when they ***********smashed into each other

  • People asked to estimate when smashed estimated higher speeds and even said there was broken glass when there was no glass

• Memory can be very open to suggestions and distorted

• Leading questions in police investigations → can literally change eyewitness memory

• Lost in the mall study - Loftus & Pickerell, 1995

  1. Were told 3 true events and 1 false event (lost in the mall) that happened to them as a child

  2. Interview 1: “reminded” of the 4 events and wrote everything they could remember

  3. Interview 2: (2 weeks later): Asked to remember events and identify false event

  4. Several (but not all) participants thought the false event was real

Autobiographical memory is suggestive

Source monitoring - we are bad at it

• We take in info from many different sources

  • External source monitoring: distinguishing between external sources (e.g. what I saw vs. what someone told me)

  • Internal source monitoring: Distinguishing between internal sources (e.g., what I thought vs. what I said)

  • Reality monitoring: distinguishing between internal and external sources

Into the Cognition-Verse

Recap of Memory Palace:

• Goes back over 2000 years

• Australian Aboriginal Songlines - which similarly use spatial imagery and landscape cues to aid memory - goes back 10s of 1000s of years

Emotion

• Confidence, not consistency, characterises flashbulb memories

• However adrenaline and emotion still seem to enhance memory

• Hormonal neurobiological mechanism that allows emotion to

• How do we reconcile the fact that emotional arousal strengthens memory consolidation, but FBI research reflects increased confidence, not accuracy

  • Emotion seems to solidify the central details of an emotional event, but the peripheral details like who you were with, seem to deteriorate over time

Jennifer Thompson

• Man cut her phone line and broke in

• Paid attention to every detail of his face so that she could remember for the police

• Jennifer picked the man from a photo lineup and was so confident

  • It was the wrong man, someone already in prison later confessed to it

HM

• Severe epilepsy

• Experimental technique / surgery from a doctor to help with seizure

  • He removed the hippocampus and the surrounding tissue (medial temporal lobe)

  • Stopped seizures

• He suffered from anterograde amnesia as a result, so he had past memories but could not form new ones

Amnesia

Retrograde: Inability to access old memories

Typically more profound for most recent memories Old memories have had time to consolidate

Anterograde: Inability to create new memories

Anterograde is more common

Damage to hippocampus & medial temporal lobe

• Clive Wearing could not form new memories at ALL

Multi-Store/Working Memory Model

Memory types

• Learning new skills and rules = procedural

• Patient HM got better with practice

• He retained the knowledge of the skill but didn’t actually remember the practicing of it, he could just do it

• Memory can be broken down to so many different aspects of memory

Semantic memory: Facts, ideas general knowledge

Episodic memory: linked to specific time and place

Priming:

• Prior exposure changes performance or judgment

Conditioning:

• Adapting to repetition or making associations between stimuli or between stimulus & response

Attention

External attention → How do we attend to the world?

Modality (sight, sound etc)

Location

Features and Objects

Time

Internal attention → To internal information

Long-term memory

Working memory

Selecting responses