Intro To Psych 2

Memory

If you lose the ability to recall your old memories, then you have no life. You might as well be a rutabaga or cabbage.” - James McGaugh

We take our memories for granted except for when it malfunctions.

Time, life, 

  • We are what we remember

  • Accumulated learning

  • We would lack a sense of self that comes from the past

  • Memory is complex

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Key Processes

  • Encoding

    • Getting information into our brain

  • Storage

    • Retaining that information

  • Retrieval

    • Getting the information out

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Encoding

  • Automatic Processing refers to the unconscious encoding of incidental information

    • Space time frequency
    • Well-learnt information like the meaning of words

  • Attention is critical to the encoding of memories

    • Focusing awareness on a narrowed range of stimuli or events
    • Multitasking often results in a reduction in memory performance
    • One highly attentive task at a time

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Levels of Processing

  • Structural encoding

    • The encoding of picture images

  • Phonetic Encoding

    • The encoding of sound, especially the sound of words-

  • Semantic Encoding

    • The encoding of meaning, including the meaning of words
    • We remember things better based on meaning

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Improving Encoding

  • Elaboration: Linking a stimulus to other information at the time of encoding

  • Visual Imagery: Creating mental pictures to represent the word to be remembered

  • Motivation to Remember: Putting in extra effort to attend to and organize the information to facilitate future recall

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Memory Storage

Akinson and Chiferin proposed that memory is a three-step model:

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Sensory Memory

Short-Term Memory (working memory) \n Long-Term Memory

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Sensory Memory

  • Preserves information through the senses, in its original form.

  • Allows us to experience a visual pattern, sound, or touch even after the event has come and gone.

  • Gives us additional time to recognize and memorize things

  • Only lasts for about .25 seconds

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Short-Term Memory (Working Memory)

  • Short-term memory has limited capacity.
    • 20 seconds of retention
  • Poor performance in basic recall is often a result of:
    • Time-related decay
    • Interference
    • When other information gets in the way of what is being scored
    • Proactive Interference
      • Occurs when something that i learnt previously disrupts the recall of something experienced later on
    • Retroactive Interference
      • You learn a song, but you’re going back to new lyrics you learned
  • Strategies used to counteract these effects include:
    • Rehearsal
    • Reciting information back into your short term memory
    • Chunking
    • The organizing of items into familiar, meaningful units
    • Tricking yourself into understanding more information by grouping it together
      • Random numbers are easier to remember than random letters
    • Mnemonic device
      • ROY G BIV

Long-Term Memory

  • Long-Term Memory is unlimited in capacity and can hold information for very long periods of time
  • Memories are more vivid if they are experienced during times of intense emotion
  • Flashbulb memories provide evidence of the permanence of long-term memories

Declarative Memory

  • Episodic Memory
    • Memories of specific moments
  • Semantic Memories
  • Contains general information that is not tied to the time in which it was learnt, general knowledge
  • Episodics are autobiographical, semantic memories are like a thesaurus

Non-declarative memory

  • Procedural Memory

    • How to do things, how to react in certain situations

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Retrieval

  • Retrieval cues are stimuli that help gain access to memories.
    • The more retrieval cues you have, the better your chances of retrieving the memory
  • Context cues involve putting yourself in the same context in which the memory occurred
    • Retracing your steps
    • We remember things better when we are where we got the memory
  • Schemas are organized clusters of knowledge about a particular object or event abstracted from previous experiences with the object or event

Students sitting down at desks, a teacher with their hands in the air in a grey/tan suit teaching in front of a board next to a computer

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Research suggests that we have a much easier time of remembering what we expect to happen compared to what actually happened

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 Misinformation Effect

  • Our poor abilities to retrieve information accurately is known as the misinformation effect

    • Misleading post-event information

  • When we retrieve information, it is never an exact replica of the past

    • Memories are prone to being changed/altered

  • A source-monitoring error occurs when a memory derived from one source is misattributed to another source

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Elizabeth Loftus

  • Call participants into a study and show them a short video clip of a car accident

One of the earliest memories i can think of occurred when I was around 4-5. I was on a cruise ship watching a movie called Planet 51. I remember the theatre space being fairly small, and there were many kids with me. That is about as much as I remember

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Memories are constructive

Works like a wikipedia page

You can change it, but so can other people

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If a person is having a memory of a traumatizing incident which was implanted, why does it still change their behavior

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You come to actually believe it, memories are unreliable 

Forgetting

  • Hermann Ebbinghaus

Retention

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Recall Measure

  • Reproduce information without any cues
    • Nothing given to help remember, like essays

Recognition Measure

  • Select previously learned information from an array of options

Relearning Measure

  • Memorize information a second time, and determine time and effort