Cognitive Approach: Memory

What is Memory?

• Key to reading, writing, and self-awareness.
• Indicates that learning persists over time.
• Involves storing and retrieving information.
• Different elements of a memory may be stored in different brain sites.

How Memory Works: Information-Processing Model

• Encoding: Requires attention to the material.
• Storage: Encoded information is stored in long-term memory.
• Retrieval: Accessing stored information in long-term memory.

Testing Memory

• Recall: Producing information from memory.
  • Free Recall: Recalling items in any order.
  • Cued Recall: Using cues to aid recall.
• Recognition: Identifying previously learned information among distractors.

Short Term vs Long Term Memory

• Short Term Memory: Fragile, lasts a few seconds.
• Long Term Memory: More durable, used for recalling past events and skills.

Sensory Memory

• Iconic: (eyes) lasts $0.5$ sec
• Echoic: (ears) lasts $3-4$ sec
• Hepatic: (touch) lasts more than $1$ sec
• Memory loss increases with delay.

Multistore Model (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968)

• Information from the environment is received by sensory stores (Iconic for visual, Echoic for auditory).
• Information in sensory stores lasts briefly and decays if not processed.
• Information goes from short-term memory to long-term memory through rehearsal.
• Retrieval can be affected by interference.
• Indicates the difference between short-term and long-term memories.
• Brain damage can affect short-term memory, long-term memory, or both.

Evaluation of Multistore Model

• influential model highlighting STM and LTM importance
• STM isn't a unified system and LTM is not singular entity
• Rehearsal is not always needed to store information

Short Term Memory

• Conscious awareness at any given time.
• Memory Span: Ability to repeat back items in order.
• Chunking: integrated pieces of information to enhance short term memory. According to Cowan et al. (2005) capacity is $4$ chunks

Baddeley and Hitch's Working Memory Model

• Replaces the concept of short-term memory with working memory.
• Components:
  • Central executive: limited processing system for planning and attention.
  • Phonological loops: Processes speech-based information.
  • Visuo-spatial sketchpad: Processes visual and spatial information.
  • Episodic buffer: Storage system integrating information.

Long Term Memory

• Stores experiences, knowledge, skills, and language.
• Types:
  • Declarative (Explicit)
  • Non-declarative (Procedural)

Declarative (Explicit) Memory

• Conscious recollection of facts and events.
• Processed in the hippocampus; its breakdown leads to amnesia
• Types:
  • Episodic: personal past events including what, where and when.
  • Semantic: language and facts, knowledge in the form of schemas.
  • Autobiographical: personal experiences, linked to personality.

Procedural (Implicit) Memory

• Skills revealed through behavior without conscious recollection.
• Processed in the cerebellum.
• Involves knowing how.
• Explained by:
  • Priming: Improved processing of a stimulus due to previous exposure; associated with reduced brain activity.
  • Skill learning: Gradual learning with little conscious awareness.

Brain Organisation

• Human memory is highly organised.
• Well-organized information is more likely to be remembered.
• Categorical clustering: Recalling words category by category rather than in random order.
• Schema theory: Schemas are organised packets of information that enhance long-term memory.

Forgetting

• Rate of forgetting is the fastest shortly after learning.
• Interference: Current learning is disrupted.
  • Proactive: Previous learning disrupts current learning.
  • Retroactive: Future learning disrupts previous learning; sleep prevents this.
• Repression: Motivated forgetting of traumatic memories.
• Cue Dependent Forgetting: Encoding specificity principle.

Retrieving Long-Term Memory

• Priming: Activating associated memory strands.
• Context effects: Retrieving information is easier in the same context.
• Retrieval failure: Cue does not trigger memory.
  • Tip of the tongue phenomenon: Failure to retrieve a known word or fact.
• State Dependent Cues:
  • Mood congruence effects: Recalling experiences consistent with current mood.
  • Physiological state dependent effects: Physiological state can act as a retrieval cue.
• Motivated Forgetting: Conscious effort to forget.

Forgetting: Consolidation

• Forgetting decreases over time due to consolidation.
• Consolidation: Physiological process establishing long-term memories, occurring during sleep.
• Retrograde amnesia: Affects memories that have not been fully consolidated.

Memory Construction

• Memory can be altered during recall.
• Misinformation Effect: Incorporating misleading information into memory.

Memory Construction: Eyewitness Testimony

• Prone to error due to failure to attend closely and distortion post-crime.

Fragility of Memory

• As shown in Loftus and Palmer's car accident study, wording affects recall.

Memory Construction: Eyewitness

• Unfamiliar faces are harder to remember
• Other-race effect: Difficulty recognizing faces of different races.
• Confirmation Bias: Memory distortions based on expectations.
• Weapon Focus: Focus on a weapon impairs memory of other details.

Memory Construction: Eye Witness Experience from Laboratory to Courtroom

• Memory construction may be more prevalent given the stress eyewitnesses experience.