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

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* 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”)

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### 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?

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* 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?

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### 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**

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* 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

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### 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…

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**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



* E.g. Challenger, 9/11

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* 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**


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

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## 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

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**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**
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