Chapter 7 Memory Revel Quiz Study Guide

__________ allows you to remember auditory stimuli for up to 5 or 10 seconds.

echoic memory

Psychologists measure people's memory abilities by assessing three capacities: __________.

recall, recognition, and relearning

Describe the role of long-term potentiation in memory.

Most scientists believe that long-term potentiation—a gradual strengthening of the connections among neurons from repetitive stimulation—plays a key role in the formation of memories and memory storage.

The two primary reasons why short-term memories fade are __________ and __________.

decay, interference

In Elizabeth Loftus's "lost in the mall" study, approximately what percentage of people distinctly remembered being lost in a shopping mall after being told that this had happened to them, even though it did not really happen?

25%

Describe how the relation between encoding and retrieval conditions influences remembering.

Individuals tend to remember better if they're tested under the same physical and emotional conditions as when they encoded the information.

Without even noticing that you are doing it, what memory technique do you use to remember larger quantities of information, even though your short-term memory capacity only holds about nine bits of information?

chunking

When we are not sure where a memory really came from ("Did it actually happen? Or was it all a dream?") we can use cues such as how vivid and detailed the memory is to determine the answer. This process is called __________.

source monitoring

Distinguish different types of amnesia and the relevance of amnesia to the brain's organization of memory.

Evidence from studies of patients with amnesia demonstrates that there are distinct memory systems, because people with amnesia for declarative memory often still form new procedural memories. Retrograde amnesia causes forgetting of past experiences, whereas anterograde amnesia prevents us from forming memories of new experiences.

Differentiate the subtypes of long-term memory.

Explicit memory subtypes include semantic and episodic memory. Implicit memory types include procedural and priming memory.

ZAK, BOL, GID, YAF, and other nonsense syllables were used in some of the earliest studies of memory, conducted by __________.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Identify how children's memory abilities change with age.

Infants display implicit memory for events; both infants' and children's memories are influenced by some of the same factors as adults' memory. Children's memory improves in part because of maturational changes in the brain that extend the span of memory. Over time, children become better able to use mnemonic and rehearsal strategies and become more aware of their memory limitations.

What is true about memory implanting?

It is easier to implant a false memory that is plausible than one that is implausible

Identify the ways that memories do and don't accurately reflect experiences.

Memories can be surprisingly accurate over very long periods of time, but tend to be reconstructive rather than reproductive.

Which of the following describes the term "schema"?

an organized knowledge structure or mental model that we have stored in memory

Unintentional plagiarism has been attributed to __________, which occurs when someone says they forgot having been exposed to the plagiarized material earlier and thought they had created it themselves.

cryptomnesia

There are various techniques available to help people improve their ability to recall material. For example, when you remember something new by connecting it mentally to something you already know, you are using __________.

elaborative rehearsal

More than 300 convicted prisoners to date have been released because DNA evidence showed they were innocent, despite confident testimony from __________.

eyewitnesses

Although it is presented as the most common kind of memory loss in the popular media, with depictions of someone losing all memory of his or her past, __________ is not actually the most common kind of amnesia.

generalized amnesia

A memory that is actually false but "feels real" and can be triggered by, for example, looking at a list of associated words, is called a(n) __________.

memory illusion

Over time, children develop greater knowledge of their own memory abilities and limitations. The term used to describe this is __________.

meta-memory

Identify factors that influence people's susceptibility to false memories and memory errors.

Flashbulb memories for highly significant events seem more crisp and vivid than do other memories but may be just as vulnerable to errors as other kinds of memory. One source of memory errors is source monitoring difficulty; we can't always remember where or from whom we learned something or whether it was a figment of our imagination, sometimes resulting in cryptomnesia. Our memories for events are easily influenced by suggestions from others that the events happened differently than our observations suggested.

What is the general progression of memory loss for patients with Alzheimer's disease?

Memory for recent events fades first, with distant memories usually being the last to go

Identify methods for connecting new information to existing knowledge.

Mnemonics are memory aids that link new information to more familiar knowledge. There are many kinds of mnemonics; they take effort to use but can assist recall.

Distinguish ways of measuring memory.

Recall requires generating previously encountered information on our own, whereas recognition simply requires selecting the correct information from an array of choices. How quickly we relearn material previously learned and forgotten provides another measure of memory.

Identify the role that schemas play in the storage of memories.

Schemas equip us with frames of reference for interpreting new situations. Nevertheless, they can sometimes lead to memory errors.

Explain the function, span, and duration of each of the three memory systems.

Sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory are stages of information processing that vary in how much information they hold and for how long they retain it. Short-term memory has a limited span of seven plus or minus two items that can be extended by grouping things into larger, meaningful units called chunks.

That frustrating feeling of knowing you know something but cannot pull it out of your brain at the moment you want it is known as the TOT phenomenon, because __________.

TOT stands for "tip-of-the-tongue"

Describe some of the real-world implications of false memories and memory errors.

The fact that we're receptive to suggestions about whether and how events took place bears important implications for children's memory and eyewitness testimony. Many scientists have argued that apparent "recovered memories" of early trauma may actually be due to the tendency of suggestive therapeutic procedures to induce false recollections.

Identify the key impairments of Alzheimer's disease.

The memory loss of patients with Alzheimer's disease begins with that of recent events, with memories of events of the distant past typically being the last to go. Alzheimer's disease is marked by loss of synapses and acetylcholine neurons.

What are the three processes of memory?

encoding, storage, retrieval

The connections among neurons gradually strengthen over time, and do so by means of repetitive stimulation. This process is known as __________.

long-term potentiation

Dee Dee has to remember 4 items that he needs at the corner market, so he visualizes the path he will take to get there. He imagines a bar of soap hanging from a large tree, envisions a roll of paper towels next to a stoplight, "sees" a packet of gum on the newspaper rack, and imagines the fire hydrant spurting out soda. Which memory strategy is Dee Dee relying on?

method of loci

When we have encountered a stimulus before, we are able to identify it more quickly and easily. The term for this subtype of implicit memory is __________.

priming

Our memory for how to do things is called __________.

procedural memory

Although using __________ can sometimes lead to mistakes, they provide us with a frame of reference for interpreting new situations.

schemas

Zhenya remembers that St. Paul is the capital of Minnesota. Alina remembers that she lived in St. Paul when she was 12 years old. Zhenya is demonstrating __________ memory, whereas Alina is demonstrating __________ memory.

semantic, episodic

George Sperling's partial report method studies from the 1960's demonstrated that when a display of 12 letters was viewed, participants retained all of the letters in __________ but not all of them could be transferred to short-term memory.

sensory memory