Ch.7 Memory

7.1 What is the nature of Memory?

Memory can be defined as the mental capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information, which allows individuals to retain past experiences and knowledge.

3 Important processes:

1. Encoding

   • We have to take in the information (ex. the sights and sounds of that night)

2. Storage

   • Retain it in some mental storehouse

3. Revival

   • Retrieve it for a later purpose (ex. how did you two end up together)

• Every aspect of our lives depends on remembering who we are, how to act, what is important to us, and all the relevant information about our world.

7.2 What Is Memory Encoding?

Memory Step 1: Encoding - information gets into the memory storage. Some information gets taken in automatically while other information takes more effort

Encoding that requires effort:

1. Attention

2. Deep processing

3. Elaborating

4. Mental Imagery

1. What is Attention?

Selective attention - focusing on a specific aspect of an experience while ignoring the rest. → this is because the brain’s resources are limited

• The processing capacity of the conscious mind is estimated: 120 bits per second. It takes half of our conscious capacity to properly pay attention to someone talking to us

• Divided attention: concentrating on more than one activity at the same time (multi-tasking like listening to music while reading)

  • Negative consequences for learning and memory

• Sustained attention: ability to maintain attention to a selected stimulus for a prolonged period of time

• Those using pen and paper have a better likelihood of containing the information compared to tablet or laptop.

2. What Are the Levels of Processing?

Shallow processing: noting the physical features of a stimulus (ex. the shapes of letters in the word “mom”)

Intermediate Processing: labelling the stimulus (ex. reading the word “mom”)

Deep Processing: thinking about the meaning of a stimulus (ex. the word “mom” could make you think of your own mother and what makes her special)

• Taking something we already know and can easily get from our memory and attaching new information to it

Deeper processing → better recall

3. What Is Elaboration?

• the formation of a number of different connections around a stimulus at an given level of memory encoding

  ex. a person can elaborate the word “mom” on the different levels of processing

  Shallow: the m’s in the word mom look like two n’s

  Deep: thinking about various moms they know, images of moms in art, portrayals of moms in media.

• More elaborate → better the memory

• Self-referencing: thinking about your own experiences

• The more paths we make, the more likely we will remember the information

• Greater elaboration of information is linked with neural activity, especially in the left frontal lobe

4. How Does Imagery Improve Memory?

   • To create pictures that are associated with each thing that needs to be remembered

   • Dual code hypothesis: memory for pictures is better than memory for words because pictures are stored as both image codes and verbal codes → two potential paths in which we can retrieve information

7.3 What Is Memory Storage?

Storage - how information is kept over time and represented in memory

Sensory memory - time frames of a fraction of a second → several seconds

Short-term memory - time frames up to 30 seconds

Long-term memory - time frames up to a lifetime

1. What Is Sensory Memory?

• holds information from the world for a brief moment from the time exposed to it

• Echoic memory - auditory sensory memory which is retained up to several seconds

• Ionic memory - refers to visual sensory memory → only retained for ¼ of a second

Sperling Sensory Memory Experiment

• Flashed the letters on a screen for brief intervals and the participants could only report four or five letters. Some said they could see all nine letters but had trouble naming all of the letters

  Explanation: all 9 letters were processed at the ionic memory level → why they were all seen but the time they saw it was so brief that they did not have enough time to transfer all letters to the short-term memory where it could be named

2. What Is Short-term Memory?

• A limited-capacity memory system in which information is usually retained for only as long as 30 seconds unless strategies are used to retain it longer

• Limited in capacity but can store information for a longer time

George Miller:

• on multiple tasks: individuals are limited on how much information they can retain without the help of external aids. Limit of 7 ± 2 items. (phone numbers, student ID numbers, etc all fit in the range)

Memory span - number of digits an individual can report back in order, after a single exposure to them.

What Is Chunking and Rehearsal?

• 2 ways to improve short-term memory

Chunking: grouping information into higher units that can be remembered a single unit

• Makes large amounts of information more manageable

Rehearsal: the conscious repetition of information

• Information lasts 30s > without rehearsal in S-TM

• Works best to briefly remember a list of numbers or items

• Not good for long-term → we remember information in the long-term better if we add a meaning to it

What Is Working Memory?

- A combination of components, including STM and attention, that allows us to hold information for a while as we do cognitive tasks

Important for problem solving and cognitive tasks

STM → passive. WM → active

• You can retain a list of words by rehearsing them but you can’t solve a problem while rehearsing information and vice versa

• Chunks to remember in working memory are more complex → capacity 4 ± 1 / 3-5 chunks

• In working memory, the brain works with and puts information together to help us understand and make decisions. The mental place where thinking occurs

• Comparsion: The capacity of working memory is like the RAM on your computer

• Working memory is like the files you have open on your computer

• Lion man staute made a bunch of years ago: working memory would work like “ what would a lion and a man look like if i combined them together?”’

How does it work?:

1. Phonological Loop: briefly stores speech-based information about the sounds of language.

   • Acoustic code: sounds we heard (lasts a few seconds)

   • Rehersal: allows us to repeat the words

2. Visuo-spatial sketchpad: stores visual and sptial information.

   • Limited capacity

3. Central excecituve: Combines information from both components + the long term memory.

   • Limited capacity

   • Selects what information needs attention

   • Strategies to process information

   • Comparison: YOU opening and closing files on your computer

Central executive: the boss

Phonological Loop + Visuospatial sketchpad: coworkers who work for the boss

• There is no single place/strucutre in the brain that represents the workers in working memory. The areas of the brain associated with information that’s needed in cognition are temporarily activated when the information is recalled

  • ex. rehearsing words: verbal areas of the left hemisphere (Wernickles area) are active. Occiptotemporal regions are active when imagining pictures. Preforntal cortex too

3. What Is Long-Term Memory?

• permanent type of memory that stores a lot of information for a long time

• Storage capacity is unlimited in a way.

Components of Long-term Memory

1. Explicit Memory (Declarative Memory): who, what, where, when, why

   • The conscious recollection of information: specific facts, events that can be verbally communicated

   • Forgetting occurs in the first three years after taking the classes and then levelling off.

   • Permastore memory: part of original learning that happens to stay with the person forever

     • Episodic memory: retention of information about the where, when and what. How we remember life’s stories

       ex. where you were when your younger sibling was born, what you ate for breakfast this morning

       • Activity in the hippocampus is associated with past experiences

     • Semantic memory: knowledge about the world. Areas of expertise, general knowledge, learning in school, everyday knowledge

       ex. a person’s knowledge of chess, or geometry, who a famous singer is

       • Independent of a person’s identity with the past. You can know something but have no idea where you learned it from

Amnesia (memory loss): can forget who they are, their family, name, career, but can still talk and have general knowledge of the world → Episodic memory is impaired (maybe the hippocampus) but semantic memory remains

memories in the explicit memory are not one or the other but rather a mix of both

1. Implicit Memory (Nondeclarative memory): how

   behaviour is affected by prior experience without a conscious recollection of that experience.

   • Procedural memory (skills): memory for skills

     ex. not needing to look at the keyboard to be able to type

     driving eventually becomes part of your procedural memory

   • Priming: activation of known information to help remember new information better

     occurs when something evokes a response in memory

   • Classical Conditioning: association between two stimuli

How Is Memory Organized?

• stored carefully

• ex. recalling the names of the month: usually said in chronological order but cant be recllaed the same if asked to name in alphabetical order

• Schema: a pre-existing framework that helps people organize and interpret information for new experiences

  • ex. when you go to a new restaurant even though you’ve never been there before you know the protocol of what will happen (you order, waiter takes food,etc).

  • When we store information in memory, it fits into the collection of known information

  • Script: a schema for an event

What Are Connectionist Networks?

• Connectionism: memory is stored throughout the brain in connections among neurons, several of which may work together to process a single memory.

• Memories are not large knowledge structures but electrical impulses, organized to the extent of the neurons, their connections among them, and their activity organized

• Any piece of knowledge is linked to several hundreds to thousands of neurons and not a single location

• How does it work: neural activity involving memory is spread across multiple areas of the cerebral cortex. Nodes (location of neural activity) are interconnected and when it reach a specific point of activation, it can affect another node across synapses.

• Strength of synaptic connections are the fundamental bases of memory

• Explains how priming a concept (achievement) can influence behaviour (performance)

Where Are Memories Stored?

• rather than memories being storied in a single place in the brain, they are PROCESSED, represented as connections throughout the brain, states of brain activity, recreating the brains function from when the experience first occurred

How Do Neurons Relate to Memory?

• One memory can involve as many as 1000 neurons.

• Single neuron may fire as a response to faces, eyes or hair colour, but you would need these neurons to act together to recognize an individual

• Serotontin involved.

What Brain Structure Affect Memory Functions?

depends on what is being remembered

• Frontal Lobes: episodic memory

• Amygdala: emotional memories

• Temporal Lobe: explicit memory, priming

• Hippocampus: explicit memory, priming

• Cerebellum: implicit memory

7.4 What Is Memory Retrieval?

• Takes place when information that was retained in a memory comes out of storage

What is the Serial Position Effect?

• The tendency to recall the items at the beginning and end of a list than in the middle.

• Primary effect: better recall of items at the beginning of a list

  • Why?: they are rehearsed more or the receive more elaborate professing than the words later in the list

• Recency effect: better recall of items at the end of a list

  • Why?: When the words are recalled, they might still be in working memory. Even if they’re not, they were encountered the soonest which makes it easier to recall them more

• Both can influence how we feel about stimuli (ex. the best for last)

What Are Retriveal Cues and the Retrieval Task?

nature of cues can trigger your memory and the task of retrieving the memory that you set for yourself

• You need to create effective cues to remember something

• Cues can trigger and help the revival of a memory but the task of getting the memory you have to set yourself

• You may think you know the face of the person of a crime but when asked to point out the person you may have a hard time deciding who it was

Whats the Difference Between Recall and Recognition?

• Recall: a memory task which you have to retrieve previously stored information

  • You need to recall all the events of, for example, WW1 in an essay

• Recognition: a memory task in which an individual has to identify learned items (ex. mc test)

  • You judge whether a stimulus is familiar. You have the answer you just need to recognize it

What Is Encoding Specificity?

• Information present at the time of encoding/learning tends to be effective as a retrieval cue

  ex. you may recognize your prof inside the class but not outside the class in different attire

How does Context Affect Encoding and Retrieval

• a change in context between encoding and retrieval can cause memory to fail

• Content-dependent memory: when recalling information in the same context they learned it in, they have a better attempt to recall the information.

  • Why? They have encoded features of the context in which they learned along with the actual information which can act as retrieval cues later

What Are Special Cases of Retrieval?

• When we retrieve a memory, some parts of that memory may have gaps or missing parts that we somehow need to fill

• Factors that affect memory:

  • Patterns of information we remember

  • schemas and scripts

  • the situations that are associated with memories

  • personal/emotional context

• False Memories: remembering an event that didn’t happen

  • Involve an error in distinguishing between two kinds of mental content: Internally generated experience (you thinking you told your friend something) and externally generated experience (actually telling them something)

  • We can usually tell the difference because if it actually happened the memory is more vivid

• Study: participants are given a listen of related words and asked later if another related word that wasn’t on the list was there. They would say it was and this is because it’s so related to the other words that it creates a strong internal activation

Autobiographical memory: a special form of episodic memory: a persons recollections of their life experiences

• Reminiscence bump - the effect that adults remember more events from the second and third decades of their life than other decades. Could occur because we are forming a sense of identity during our teeens and twenties or because most important events happen during this time

3 Levels of Autobiographical Memories:

1. Life time periods - Long segments of time measured in years and even decades

   • ex. something about your life in high school

2. General events - extended composite episodes measured in days, weeks, or months

   • ex. a trip you took with your friends in high school

3. Event-specific knowledge - individual episodes measured in seconds, minutes, or hours

   • the feeling of going on a boat during your trip

What is Different About the Retrieval of Emotional Memories?

• emotion affects the encoding and storage of memories

• More emotionally intense → paying more attention to it → remembering it better

• Memory goes where attention flows

Flashbulb memory - the memory of emotionally significant events that people often recall with more accuracy and vivid images than everyday events

ex. The 9/11 attack

- Several decades later, people will often remember where they were and what was going on in their lives at the time of the event. Not as precise as people think they are

• They’re still more durable and accurate than day-to-day memories

• Why?: they’re usually rehearsed in the days following the event + the emotions triggered by the events

How is Memory Affected by Traumatic Events?

• Memory for traumatic events are usually more accurate then memory for other events

• Why?: the release of stress hormones during the event could affect the durability and vividness of the event

• They can still contain errors and they may occur in the details of the traumatic event

What Are Repressed Memories?

• motivated forgetting: when an individual forgets something because it is so painful that remembering it is intolerable

  • May be a consequence of emotional trauma

• Discovered memories: regardless of their accuracy, individuals do experience them as real

Study

• Children over 4 are very unlikely to report false reports

What Is the Truth About Eyewitness Testimony?

• much interest is focused on distortion, bias and inaccuracy in memory:

  • Distortion: memory fades with time or can be changed with new info

  • Bias:

• To prevent this: lineup whether witness views a group of individuals in real time or photos of who they think is the suspect

• Double-blind procedures: no one involved in the lineup knows the suspect of the case

7.5 Why Do We Forget?

Factors that influence how well we can retrieve information from long-term memory

What is Encoding Failure?

• Occurs when the information was never entered into long-term memory

• not a case of forgetting but a case of not remembering

What Is Retrieval Failure?

• ex. paid attention to the lecture, studying the material, you know it, but you cant recall it on the exam.

• Why?: problems with the information in storage, the effects of time, personal reasons for remembering/forgetting and the brain’s condition

• Trying to retrieve information consistently = better learning even if the recalling isn’t accurate

What is Interference?

Interference theory: people forget not because the memories are lost in the storage ut because other information is in the way of what they want to memory.

• Proactive: when material that was learned before disrupts the recall of material learned later

  • ex. typing in your old password instead of your new one

• Retroactive: when material learned later disrupts the retrieval of the information learned earlier

  • ex.

• Problems with retrieval cues can be an explanation for interference

  ex. one thing can make you think about two things

What is Decay?

Decay theory: when new learn something new, a chemical memory trace forms but over time this trace disintegrates

• Memories often fade over time but it alone cant explain forgetting

• We can recover memories we’ve forgtotten under certain retrieval conditions

What Is the Top-of-the- Tongue Phenomenon?

• A type of effortful retrieval that occurs when we are confident that we know something but cannot quite pull it out of memory

• occurs when we can recall some of the needed information but not all of it

• demonstrates that we do not store all fo the information about something in one way

What is Prospective Memory

Retrospective memory; remembering information from the past

Prospective memory: remembering information about doing something in the future

• timing: when we have to do something

• content: what we have to do

• Time-based prospective memory: our intention to engage in a specific behaviour after some time has gone bu

  ex. the intention to call someone an hour later

• Event-based prospective memory: we engage in the intended behaviour when some external event/cue triggers it. More efficient than time-based bc of the cues

• Absentmindedness: the failures in prospective memory

  • occurs when we are preoccupied with something else

What Is Amnesia?

• the loss of memory

• anterograde amnesia: a memory disorder that affects the retention of new information and events (antero = forward in time

• retrograde amnesia: the memory loss for a sement of past events

7.7 How Does Memory Contribute to Health and Wellness

Autobiographical memory: we store the lessons we have learned in life

• allows us to learn from our experience

  to understand ourselves and provide a source of identity

Jefferson Singer et al: internalized stories of personal experience serve as signs of the meaning we have created out of our life events and makes our lives make sense

Dan McAdams: autobiographical memories form the core of our personal identity

• indidivudals who describe important life experiences that go from bad → good (redemptive stories) are the kind of people who make a contribution to future generations

• Contamination stories: good → bad

• Reconstruction and construction reveals important information of how individuals grow, function and think.

How Do We Keep Memory Sharp and Preserve Brain Function

• engaging in intellectually challenging activities seems to offer some protection against the mental decline associated with aging

• Active cognitive life → diagnoses for brain disease later on → brains have compensated flexibility for the issues brought on by the disease

• Cognitive Store: an emergency stash of mental capcity that allows indidivudlas to avoid negative effects of harm to the brain (compensation)

Lecture Notes

confabulation - we fill in the blanks in our memory

Memory is filled with our imagination, beliefs, etc.

hierarchy of evaluative importance for everything we experience

part is made through genetics: what we need to pay attention to and what we don’t

part: our own experience

memories may be visual auditory or tactile

• recognition memory for smells but not the same as recall

the scent is important in conditioned memories

conscious and automatic: memory process system

encoding

• attention

  • limited naturally

  • most of what we pay attention to is decided before we were born

  • consciousness

  • spotlight analogy: we’re paying attention to the environment 23/7 → low level of attention. If you want to remember something you “put your spotlight on → higher-level attention.

  • Emotion affects intension → greater emotional intensity → more attention → more memorable memory

  • traumatic: Greater the trauma the more you can remember but until a point

  • preprogrammed behavioural patterns to what we pay attention to + our experiences: what we pay attention to

Shallow processing: constantly: structural encoding

• capital letters, what colour, etc)

Intermediate: what we use as children: phonemic encoding → learning by sound

• (rhyming, homonyms)

Deep: can be learned?: semantic encoding

• (meaning, symbolism)

Facilliating Encoding

• elaboration (using examples)

• visual imagery

  • if you’re like going through a rough treatment and are fighting for your life, if you believe the treatment is really doing something it’ll increase your immune system function

• self-referential encoding (applying information to your life)

• rehearsal and over-learning (

• deep and transfer appropriate processing (closer the encoding and retrival environment are, it’ll facilitate your memory)

  • environment is a strong facilitator of memories

  • mc: study for recognition memory

  • short answer: Recall

• disturbed practice

  • Distribute practice over time → increase the attention

  • most people after 50 minutes, their attention drops off significantly

• organize information

  • implementation intentions

Mnemonics Devices

• Verbal mnemonics

  • acrostics, acronyms, rhymes

• Visual mnemonics

  • link method, method of loci, keyword

  • SQ3R

chunking: utm: not remembering them as 3 letters but as one thing.

Encoding specificity

• Idea that ease of retrieval of a memory depends on match of encoding with retrieval

• - poor recall if shallow learning is examined using a deep processing technique

• You wont do well

State dependent memory

• if you’re sad its difficult to notice happy things and remember happy things and vice versa

Storage

• 3 storage facility (anologies)

• sensory register - visual and auadioty

• short term memory

• long term memory

• behavioural genetics

STM

• after 20-30s without rehearsal →iinformatin fades

limited capacity (7 items)

working memory: everything about short term memory + all of this

4 + 1 → chunks of information

• solves problems

• respond to environmental demands

• achieve goals

visual memory store

• temporary image

• info about location and nature of objects

• 20-30s

verbal memory store

• limited capacity

• shallow (processed in order of presentation and are subject to interference)

central executive - responsible (most important part of your brain) to control what you pay attention to.

double dissociation - you can have damage to verbal memory but not visual and vice versa

LTM

• theoretically limitless in capacity

The primacy effect

• you’ll remember the first word of a list

The recency effect

• remembering the later words

The Serial Position Curve

Working Memory and LTM

— evidence supporting a distinction between working memory and LTM

• working memory is easily accessed ut is limited in capacity

• Neurlogical studies in which brai damage impairs memory

• ltm impairment person shows normal working memory but cannot transfer information to LTM

• working memory deficit: a person has a memory span of 2 digits but normal LTM

Functional Aspects of Memory

— males remembered more about

—- females remembered more ab

what you’re interested in is what you’ll pay attention to more

Networks of Association

• LTM is organized in clusters of information that are related in meaning

• the network is composed of interconnected nodes

• a node mat contains thoughts, images, smells, emotions, or any other information (it is a schema plus)

• mnemonic devices allow one to add concepts to existing networks

Declarative memory

• semantic: general knowledge of facts

• episodic: autobiographical, what you’ve done. (episodic memory of having the lecture)

• explicit (conscious awareness)

Repressed Memories

• retrieval failures: you’ve encoded the information but can’t retrieve it when you want it (not a retrieval failure if you didn’t encode it in the first place)

• motivated forgetting: missing your dentist appointment when you’re working bc you’re scared of the dentist. the unconscious is acting on its own interest

• Denial: not believing that the thing is true or real / knowing its real but that it wont apply to you (ex.smoking)

• Repression

• Psychogenic amnesia: a type of psychological trauma that causes you to forget

  • Sometimes the information comes back sometimes it doesn’t

  • may be related to dissociation

• False Memory Syndrome

  • confabulation

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