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 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)

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

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

💡 **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

**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 s**tudy 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

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

* 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)

💡 Schemas : knowledge or expectations about a domain or event

* 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**