Human Memory

Human Memory

Encoding
1. Encoding: Involves forming memory code, requires attention
2. Attention: Involves focusing awarness on a narrowed range of stimuli of events (selective attention critical to everyday functioning)
  1. Cocktail Party Phenomenon: Suggests attention involves late selection, based on the meaning of input
  2. Human brain can only effectively handle one attention-consuming task at a time
3. Levels of Processing: 3 Progressively Deeper Levels of Processing
  1. Structural Encoding: Shallow processing, that emphasizes the physical structure of the stimulus
  2. Phonemic Encoding: Emphasizes what a word sounds like
  3. Semantic Encoding: Emphasizes the meaning of verbal input
    1. Enriched by elaboration
      1. Elaboration: Linking a stimulus to other information at the time of encoding
  4. Levels-of-Processing Theory: Proposes that deeper levels of processing result in longer-lasting memory codes
4. Visual Imagery:
  1. Imagery: The creation of visual images to represent the words to be remembered and to enrich encoding
  2. Dual Coding Theory: holds that memory is enhanced by forming semantic and visual codes, since either can lead to recall
5. Self-Referent Encoding:
  1. Defintion: Involves deciding how or whether information is personally relevant
  2. Appears to enhance recall by promoting additional elaboration and better organization of information
Storage
1. Storage: Involves maintaining encoded information in memory over time
2. Sensory Memory: Preserves information in its original sensory form for a brief time, usually only a fraction of a second
  1. In the case of vision people really perceive an afterimage rather than the actual stimulus. Ex: Sparkler at night
    1. Memory trance in the visual sensory store decays in about 1/4 of a seconds
3. Short-Term Memory
  1. STM Definition: A limited-capacity store that can maintain unrehearsed information for up to about 20 seconds
    1. Can maintain info in short term indefinitely by engaging in rehearsal
      1. Rehearsal: The process of repetitively verbalizing or thinking about the information
4. Capacity of Storage
  1. George Miller (1956) "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information"
  2. Capacity of short term may be less than assumed (four plus or minus one)
  3. Chunk: A group of familiar stimuli stored as a single unit
5. Long-Term Memory
  1. LTM Definition: An unlimited capacity store that can hold information over lengthy periods of time
  2. Flashbulb Memories: Usually vivid and detailed recollections of momentous events
6. Short-Term Memory as "Working Memory"
  1. Working Memory: A limited capacity storage system that temporarily maintains and stores information by providing an interface between perception memory and action
  2. Baddeley's Model: Consists of 4 Components
    1. Phonological loop: At work when you use recitation to temporarily remember a phone number and is believed to facilitate the acquisition of language
    2. Visuospatial Sketchpad: Permits people to temporarily hold and manipulate visual images. At work when you try to mentally rearrange furniture in bedroom
    3. Central Executive System: Controls the deployment of attention, switching the focus of attention and dividing attention as needed, also coordinates the actions of the other modules
    4. Episodic Buffer: Temporary, limited-capacity store that allows the various components of working memory to integrate info and that serves as an interface between working and long term memory
  3. Working Memory Capacity (WMC): Refers to ones ability to hold and manipulate info in conscious attention
7. Knowledge Organization in Memory
  1. Clustering: The tendency to remember similar or related items in groups
  2. Conceptual Hierarchy: Multilevel classification system based on common properties among items
  3. Schema: An organized cluster of knowledge about a particular object or event abstracted from previous experience with the object or event
  4. Semantic Networks: Consists of nodes representing concepts, joined together by pathways that link related concepts
  5. Spreading Activation: When people think about a word, their thoughts naturally go to related words
  6. Connectionists (Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP)): Models assume that cognitive processes depend on patterns of activation in highly interconnected computational networks that resemble neural networks
Retrieval
1. Retrieval: Involves recovering information from memory stores
2. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon: The temporary inability to remember something you know, accompanied by a feeling that it's just out of reach
3. Encoding Specificity Principle (Tulving): Suggested your memory for info would be better when the conditions during encoding and retrieval were similar
4. Context clues often facilitate the retrieval of information
5. Misinformation Effect
  1. Definition: Occurs when participants' recall of an event they witnessed is altered by introducing misleading post event information
    1. Recall is often biased in the direction of higher-level schemas
6. Source and Reality Monitoring
  1. Reality Monitoring: Refers to the process of deciding whether memories are based on external sources (perceptions) or internal sources (thoughts and imaginations)
  2. Source Monitoring: Involves making attributions about the origins of memories
  3. Source-Monitoring Error: Occurs when a memory derived from one source is misattributed to another source
  4. Destination Memory: Involves recalling to whom one has told what
Forgetting
1. Can reduce competition among memories that can cause confusion
2. Adaptive
3. Ebbinghau's Forgetting Curve: Graphs retention and forgetting over time
4. Measures of Forgetting:
  1. Retention: Refers to the proportion of material retained
  2. Retention Interval: The length of time between the presentation of materials to be remembered and the measurement of forgetting
  3. Recall: Measure of retention requires subjects to reproduce information on their own without any cues
  4. Recognition: Measure of retention requires subjects to select previously learned info from an array of options
  5. Relearning: Measure of retention requires a subject to memorize info a second time to determine how much time or how many practice trials are saved by having learned it before
5. Why We Forget
  1. Psuedoforgetting: Usually due to lack of attention
  2. Decay Theory: Proposes that forgetting occurs because memory traces fade with time
  3. Interference Theory: Proposes that people forget info because of competition from other material
    1. Retroactive Interference: Occurs when new information impairs the retention of previously learned info
    2. Proactive Interference: Occurs when previously learned info interferes with the retention of new info
  4. Retrieval Failure
    1. The Encoding Specificity Principle: States the value of a retrieval cue depends on how well it corresponds to the memory code
    2. Transfer-Appropriate Processing: Occurs when the initial processing of info is similar to the type of processing required by the subsequent measure of retention
  5. Motivated Forgetting: The tendency to forget things one doesn't want to think about
  6. Repression: Refers to keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious
6. Seven Sins of Memory
  1. Transcience: Simple weakening of memory over time
  2. Absentmindedness: Refers to a memory failure that is often due to a failure to pay attention because we are preoccupied with other tings
  3. Blocking: Temporary problem that occurs when we fail to retrieve an item of info such as someones name when we meet them
  4. Misattribution: Assign a memory to the wrong source
  5. Suggestibility: Our memory is distorted because of, for example, misleading questions
  6. Bias: Refers to inaccuracy due to the effect of our current knowledge on our reconstruction of the past
  7. Persistence: Involves unwanted memories and thoughts, in the extreme they can be associated with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder
Physiology of Memory
1. Neural Circuitry of Memory
  1. One line of research suggests that memory formation results in alterations in synaptic transmission at specific sites
  2. Long-Term Potential (LTP): A long-lasting increase in neural excitability at synapses along a specific neural pathway
2. Anatomy of Memory
  1. 2 Types of amnesia:
    1. Retrograde Amnesia: Involves the loss of memories for events that occurred prior to the onset of amnesia
    2. Anterograde Amnesia: Involves the loss of memories for events that occur after the onset of amnesia
  2. Consolidation: A hypothetical process involving the gradual conversion of information into durable memory codes stored in LTM
System and Types of Memory
1. Implicit Memory: Apparent when retention is exhibited on a task that does not require intentional remembering
2. Explicit Memory: Involves intentional recollection of previous experiences
3. Declarative Memory: System handles factual info
4. Nondeclarative or Procedural Memory: System houses memory for actions, skills, operations and conditioned responses
5. Episodic Memory System: Made up of chronological, or temporally dated, recollections of personal experiences
6. Semantic Memory System: Contains general knowledge that is not tied to the time when the info was learned
7. Prospective Memory: Involves remembering to perform actions in the future
8. Retrospective Memory: Involves remembering events from the past or previously learned info

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	Created by Darby Milman about 8 years ago