Human Memory Chapter 1

Learning

Any change in the potential of people to alter their behavior as a consequence of experience

Long-term memory

Encompasses a wide variety of different types of long-term knowledge and different ways of using that knowledge

Schemas

General world knowledge structures about commonly experienced aspects of life

Semantic memories

Generalized and encyclopedic and not tied to a certain time or place; noetic

Embodied cognition

Mental activity doesn't occur in a vacuum but is grounded in the type of worlds our bodies inhabits

Negatively accelerated function

Most of the action occurs early on

Savings

The difference between the amount of effort required on a subsequent and prior learning

Learning curce

There is a period of time needed for information to be memorized

Memory

the location where information is kept, the thing that holds the contents of experience, and the mental process used to acquire, store, or retrieve information of all sorts

Engram

the neutral representation of a memory trace

Sensory registers

A collection of memory stores and each of the stores corresponds to a different sensory modality

Nonsense syllable

A consonant-vowel-consonant trigram that has no clear meaning in the language

Overlearning

A person continues to study information after perfect recall has been achieved

Control processes

Actively manipulates information in the short-term

Memory processes

Acts of using information in specific ways to make it available later or to bring back that information into the current stream of processing

Fuzzy trace theories

At least 2 memory traces involved in any act of remembering

Nondeclarative memory

Information in the long term that is difficult to articulate but still has profound influences in our lives

Forgetting curve

Loss of old information rather than the acquisition of new information

Declarative memory

Memories that are easy for a person to articulate and talk about

Paired associate

Memorizing pairs of items

Short-term memory

Retains information for less than a minute if nothing is actively done with it

Episodic memories

Specific episodes or events in our lives; autonoetic

Explicit memory

When a person is actively and consciously trying to remember something

Implicit memory

When a person is unaware that memory is being used