Memory and Cognition PSYC1011
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
- Make a column number of 1-18
- 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)
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
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
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)
- 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
- Were told 3 true events and 1 false event (lost in the mall) that happened to them as a child
- Interview 1: “reminded” of the 4 events and wrote everything they could remember
- Interview 2: (2 weeks later): Asked to remember events and identify false event
- 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