Cognitive Approach: Memory Notes

What is Memory?

• Memory is key to reading, writing, and self-awareness.
• It indicates learning that persists over time.
• Memory involves storing and retrieving information.
• Different elements of a memory may be stored in different brain sites.

How Memory Works: Information-Processing Model

• Learning and memory involve encoding, storage, and retrieval.
• Encoding requires attention.
• During storage, encoded information is stored in long-term memory.
• Retrieval involves accessing information stored in long-term memory.

Testing Memory

• Memory can be tested through recall and recognition.
• Recall: Free recall (producing words from a list in any order) and cued recall (using cues like first letters).
• Recognition: Selecting list words from a mix of list and non-list words.

Short Term vs Long Term Memory

• Short-term memory: Fragile, lasts a few seconds (e.g., remembering a phone number).
• Long-term memory: More durable (e.g., childhood memories).

Sensory Memory

• Duration varies for different senses:
  • Iconic (eyes): $0.5$ sec
  • Echoic (ears): $3-4$ sec
  • Hepatic (touch): More than $1$ sec
• Longer delays cause greater memory loss.

Multistore Model (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968)

• Information from the environment is initially received by sensory stores (iconic for visual, echoic for auditory).
• Information in sensory stores lasts briefly; decay can occur.
• Some information is processed in short-term store; unretained information is lost (displacement).
• Rehearsal is important for transferring information from short-term to long-term memory.
• Retrieval can be affected by interference.
• Brain damage studies show that short-term and long-term memory can be independently affected.

Evaluation of Multistore Model

• Influential model with major importance in distinguishing between long-term and short-term memory.
• Oversimplification: short-term memory does not form a unified system, and there is not a single long term memory system.
• Rehearsal isn't always used for information storage.

Short Term Memory

• Information we are consciously aware of at any given time.
• Capacity assessed using memory span (repeating numbers or words in order).
• Capacity can be enhanced through chunking (integrated pieces of information).
• Capacity of short-term memory is about four chunks (Cowan et al., 2005).

Working Memory (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974)

• Replaces the notion of short-term memory.
• System with separate components:
  • Central executive: Limited capacity, involved in planning and attention.
  • Phonological loop: Processing and storage of speech-based information.
  • Visuo-spatial sketchpad: Processing and storage of visual and spatial information.
  • Episodic buffer: Storage system holding information from phonological loop, visual spatial sketchpad and long-term memory.

Long Term Memory

• Stores a wide range of information.
  • Declarative (explicit): Conscious recollection of events and facts ('knowing that').
  • Non-declarative (procedural/implicit): Does not involve conscious recollection.

Declarative (Explicit) Memory

• Concerned with personal experiences and general knowledge; usually involves conscious recollection.
• Manifested in recall or recognition.
• Hippocampus processes declarative memories; damage leads to amnesia.
• Includes episodic, semantic, and autobiographical memory.

Declarative Memory Types:

• Episodic: Remembering past events; constructive and prone to error.
• Semantic: Remembering facts and information; knowledge of language and the world; less vulnerable to amnesia.
• Autobiographical: Remembering personal experiences; linked to personality.

Procedural (Implicit) Memory

• Concerned with motor and other skills revealed through behavior ('knowing how').
• Cerebellum processes procedural memories.
• Explained by priming and skill learning.

Procedural Memory Types

• Priming: Easy processing of a stimulus due to previous presentation.
• Skill Learning: Learning skills like riding a bicycle; little conscious awareness; slow and gradual.

Brain Organization

• Human memory is highly organized.
• Well-organized information is more likely to be remembered (categorical clustering).
• Reliant on schemas.

Categorical Clustering

• Words recalled category by category, not in random order.
• Learners remember information organized based on knowledge in long-term memory.

Schema Theory

• Schemas: Organized packets of information about the world, events, or people.
• Stored in long-term memory and used to guide actions.
• Enhance long-term memory by providing an organizational framework.
• Schematic knowledge can cause distortions in recalling a story (rationalization).

Forgetting

• Rate of forgetting is fastest shortly after learning.
• Interference: Current learning is disrupted.
  • Proactive: Disruption by previously learned information.
  • Retroactive: Disruption by future learning; sleep prevents this.
• Repression: Motivated forgetting of traumatic memories (Freud); recovered memories can be false.
• Cue-dependent Forgetting/Encoding specificity principle: Memory is better when information available at retrieval matches the memory trace.

Retrieving Long term memory

• Priming: Activating and associating strands of memories.
• Context effects: Retrieving information in the same context in which it encoded.
• Retrieval failure: When a retrieval cue does not retrieve a long term memory.
• Tip of the tongue phenomenon: When retrieval cues fail to trigger a memory
• State-dependent cues: Mood congruence and physiological state.

Motivated Forgetting

• Conscious effort to forget.

Forgetting: Consolidation

• Forgetting decreases over time due to consolidation.
• Consolidation: Physiological process establishing long-term memories.
• Lasts several hours or more, occurs during sleep.
• Retrograde amnesia affects memory that hasn't been fully consolidated.

Memory Construction

• Memory is constructed: imagined, selected, changed, and rebuilt.
• Misinformation Effect: Incorporating misleading information into one’s memory of an event.

Memory Construction: Eyewitness Testimony

• Prone to error.
• Memories become distorted after the crime and are fragile.
• Eyewitnesses may fail to attend closely to the crime.
  • The misinformation effect: Fragility of memory
  • Example: Loftus and Palmer Experiment

Memory Construction: Eye Witness

• Remembering Faces: Unfamiliar faces are harder to remember Other-race effect.
• Confirmation Bias: Memory distortions are the result of what the eyewitness expected to see.
• Weapon Focus: Anxiety and violence reduce the accuracy of eye witness memory.

Memory Construction: Eye Witness

• Experiences from Laboratory to Courtroom: Eyewitnesses in real life experiences are more likely to have been victims of an attack and also exposed to highly stressful situation. So memory construction may be more prevalent in the courtroom than in the laboratory.