Ch. #8 Memory and Information Processing

The implications of such research are clear: Declines in information-processing skills are not inevitable or universal. Thus...

Nature may place some boundaries on the information-processing system, but nurture plays a significant role in sustaining memory and problem-solving skills.

Most people find questions requiring ________ easier to answer than those requiring ________, and those requiring cued recall easier than those requiring pure recall.

Recognition memory; cued recall.

Memory or encoding strategies develop in a fairly predictable order, with ________ emerging first, followed by ________, and then by ________.

Rehearsal; organization; elaboration.

What is an example of rehearsal?

To rehearse the objects in Figure 8.6, you might say "Apple, truck, grapes..." repeatedly. Rehearsal is believed to help form memories by activating the hippocampus with each repetition.

Despite this devastating loss of ability to form new episodic memories, how did H.M. show evidence of implicit memory?

To test this, H.M. was presented with a mirror tracing task in which he was asked to trace a diagram by looking only in his hand reflected in the mirror, which makes this rather challenging and requires practice to perfect the drawing. H.M. did not recall repeatedly practicing this task, yet his performance improved over the course of three days, indicating some retention of this procedural task.

As well, older adults fare poorly compared with younger adults when the material to be learned is ________ or ________ to them.

Unfamiliar or unimportant.

How did H.M.'s unfortunate case provide the first solid evidence that memory had a neural basis (pt. #1)?

Up to the point, it was assumed the memories were somehow spread throughout the brain. H.M.'s surgeon reported that he had removed a specific region of the medial temporal lobe — the hippocampus — in order to treat H.M.'s seizures

What is problem solving?

Use of the information-processing system to achieve a goal or arrive at a decision.

What is a visual-spatial sketchpad?

Visual-spatial sketchpad, which holds visual information such as colors and shapes.

Why is the sense of self one of several reasons for this loss of early memories?

We need to consider that infants and toddlers lack a strong sense of self and as a result may not have the necessary "pages" on which they can write memories of personally experienced events. Without a sense of self, it is difficult to organize events as "things that happened to me."

At the age of 27, H.M. had much of the hippocampus removed from both sides of his brain as part of an effort to control his severe seizures. What did his neurosurgeon not realize?

What is neurosurgeon did not realize at the time was that H.M. would suffer from catastrophic memory loss for the remaining 55 years of his life. In particular, H.M. experienced anterograde amnesia: He was no longer able to form new memories.

Does the long term memory of young infants, Caroline Rovee-Collier and her colleagues devised what clever task that relies on the operant conditioning technique?

When a ribbon is tied to a baby's angle and connected to a mobile, the infant will shake a leg now and then and learn very quickly (in minutes) that leg kicking brings about a positively reinforcing consequence: the jiggling of the mobile.

To test infant memory, the mobile is presented in a later time to see whether the infant will kick again. To succeed at this task, the infant must not only recognize the mobile but also recall that the thing to do is to kick; this task is tapping into implicit or procedural memory. What were the findings?

When given two 9-minute training sessions, 2-month-olds remember how to make the mobile move for up to 2 days, 3-month-olds for about 1 week, and 6-month-olds for about 2 weeks.

Becca Lecy (1966) has shed light on this issue by showing that activating negative stereotypes in the minds of elderly adults (through rapid, subliminal presentations of words such as Alzheimer's and senile) on a computer screen causes them to perform worse on memory test and express less confidence in their memory skills than...

When positive stereotypes of old age are planted in their minds (through words such as wise and sage).

Why do some cognitive researchers believe that older adults may approach problem-solving differently than younger adults?

While it is true that younger adults generate more possible solutions to a problem then older adults, the solutions generated by older adults tend to be more goal-focused and selective, emphasizing quality over quantity.

Why is verbatim versus gist storage one of several reasons for this loss of early memories?

With age, we are increasingly likely to rely on gist or fuzzy memory traces, which are less likely to be forgotten and are more efficient than verbatim memory traces in the sense that they take less space in memory. Children pass through a transition period from storing largely verbatim memories to storying more of gist memories, and the earlier verbatim memories are unlikely to be retained over time.

What is working memory?

Working memory is akin to a mental "scratch pad" the temporary stores information while actively operating on it. It is what is being manipulated in one's mind at any moment.

Memories are virtual to problem-solving skills. To solve any problem, a person must process information about the task, as well as use stored information, to achieve a goal. Thus, ________ is a critical component of problem solving.

Working memory.

Research indicates that ________ capacity increases during childhood and adolescence, peaks around age 45, then begins to decline.

Working-memory.

Older adults may have more trouble than younger ones ignoring irrelevant task information. For instance, trying to memorize a list of words while walking is more problematic for older adults than for middle-aged or younger adults. Why?

Research confirms that older adults show a pattern of neural activity consistent with increased monitoring of their environment when working under conditions with more distractions and task-irrelevant information.

Are increases in metamemory a major contributor to improved memory performance over the childhood years?

Researchers are most likely to see a connection between metamemory and memory performance among older children and among children who have been specifically asked to remember something.

How is using effective encoding strategies such as rehearsal, organization, and elaboration to learn material only half the battle?

Retrieval strategies can also influence how much is recalled. In general, young children rely more on external cues or behavioral actions for both encoding and retrieving information then do older children.

Finally, for the memory process to be complete, there must be ________.

Retrieval.

Robert Siegler (1981, 2000) proposed that the information processing perspective could provide a fuller analysis about how problem-solving capacities change during childhood. His ________ determines what information about a problem children take in and what rules they then formulate to account for this information.

Rule assessment approach.

What are scripts or generalized event representations (GERs)?

Scripts or generalized event representations (GERs) represent the typical sequence of actions related to an event and guide future behaviors in similar settings.

As children engage in routine daily activities, such as getting ready for bed or eating at a fast-food restaurant, they construct ________ or ________ of these activities.

Scripts; generalized event representations (GERs).

What is consolidation?

Second, information undergoes consolidation, processes that stabilize and organize the information to facilitate long-term storage.

In addition, researchers have proposed a framework called selective optimization with compensation (SOC), to understand how older adults make up with and compensate for their diminishing cognitive resources. What three processes are involved?

Selection (focus on a limited set of goals and the skills most needed to achieve them), optimization (practice those skills to keep them sharp), and compensation (develop ways around the need for other skills).

What is an example of semantic memory?

Semantic memory might be knowing that Napolis situated between India and China or that it's capital Kathmandu.

Explicit memories is tested through traditional recognition and recall tests (such as a course's final exam with multiple-choice and essay questions) and can be further divided into ________ for general facts and ________ for specific experiences.

Semantic memory; episodic memory.

Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968) proposed a simple information-processing framework with what memory components, organized primarily by their duration?

Sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

How is it also clear that the memory consolidation process undergoes developmental change?

Separate from the changes in encoding, consolidation and storage of memory show improvement over infancy and childhood that seem to correspond to maturation of the hippocampus within the medial temporal lobes as well as the other parts of the brain believed to be centrally involved in consolidation of memories.

Why may the degree of improvement in short-term memory capacity that is evident as children age depend on what is tested or how it is tested?

Short term memory capacity is domain specific - it varies with background knowledge and type of task. Greater knowledge in a domain or area of study increases the speed with which new, related information can be processed. In other words, the more you know about a subject, the faster you can process information related to this subject.

Injecting this "old age" protein into young mice led to impaired memory but once the protein had dispersed from their bodies, their memories rebounded to normal levels. However...

Sleep deprivation, at least in mice, interferes with the synthesis of hippocampal proteins, leading to memory deficits.

The processes of consolidation are facilitated by ________ and disrupted by ________.

Sleep; stress.

Why is neurogenesis one of several reasons for this loss of early memories?

Some intriguing research with mice suggests that neurogenesis, the birth of new cells, in the hippocampus early in life "refreshes" our memory store. That is, new cells and new memories displace older cells and older memories. After birth, the period with the highest rate of neurogenesis is infancy, so perhaps this is why memories from infancy are largely nonexistent.

How can researchers learn something about memory by noting whether or not infants can imitate an action performed by model?

Some studies suggest a young infants, even newborns, can imitate certain actions, such as sticking out the tongue or opening the mouth.

What are several reasons for this loss of early memories?

Space in working memory; lack of language; level of sociocultural support; sense of self; verbatim versus gist storage; and neurogenesis.

We also know that the ________ of mental processes improve with age, as neurons become myelinated, and this allows older children and adults to simultaneously perform more mental operations in working memory than young children can.

Speed. As basic mental processes become automatic, they can also be performed with little mental effort. This, in turn, frees space in working memory for other purposes, such as storing the information needed to solve a problem.

What is storage?

Storage refers to holding information in a long term memory store. Memories fade over time unless they are appropriately stored in long-term memory.

In the absence of consolidation, the information will not make the leap from the first step of encoding to the third step of ________.

Storage.

If shown 12 items, 4-year-olds might recall only 2-4 of them, 8-year-olds would recall 7-9 items, and adults might recall 10 -11 of the items after a delay of several minutes. Are there specific memory strategies that evolve during childhood to permit the dramatic improvement in performance?

Strategies to aid memory can be applied at the time information is presented for learning (encoding strategies) or they can be applied at the time when the retrieval of the information is sought (retrieval strategies).

Procedural memory (such as memory of how to ride a bike), which is a type of implicit memory, is mediated by an area of the forebrain called the ________.

Striatum.

What is eyewitness memory (or testimony)?

The reporting of events witnessed or experienced - for example, a child's reporting that she saw her little brother snitch some candy before dinner.

What is elaboration?

The strategy of elaboration involves actively creating meaningful links between items to be remembered. Elaboration is achieved by adding something to the items, in the form of either words or images.

What is metamemory?

The term metamemory refers to knowledge of memory and to monitoring and regulating memory processes.

Metamemory is also influenced by children's language skills and by their general knowledge about mental states and their roles in behavior - what is known as ________.

Theory of mind.

Like their younger counterparts, why are older adults likely to be more deficient on tasks requiring recall memory then on tasks requiring only recognition of what was learned?

A large gap between recognition and recall shows that older people have encoded and stored the information but cannot retrieve it without the help of cues.

How can this be seen with an fMRI scan of the brain as participants are cued to retrieve an autobiographical memory?

Brain scans show activation of the amygdala, an area of the brain associated with emotions, when participants retrieve an emotionally-charged memory but not when they retrieve a neutral memory.

There is little to say about knowledge base other than that it continues to expand during adolescence. Therefore...

Adolescents may do better than children on some tasks simply because they know more about the topic.

As infants age, how do they demonstrate recall or deferred imitation over longer periods?

By 6 months, infants can defer their imitation of an action over a longer delay and can recall the order of a simple sequence of events. By age 2, events can be recalled for months, and recall is more flexible - less bound by the specific heat is present at the time of learning.

What is cued recall memory?

Between recognition and recall memory is cued recall memory, in which you would be given a hint or cue to facilitate retrieval (for example, "When was the constitution ratified? It is the year the French Revolution began and rhymes with wine.").

Research suggests that both middle-aged and older adults take advantage of SOC, although the older adults less so than middle-aged ones. However...

Both groups are more likely to use SOC on days when they experience greater stress. In addition, SOC has been used to try to help other adults overcome weaknesses is explicit memory by taking advantage of their relative strength of implicit memory.

These findings suggest that older adults, like young children, have difficulty with tasks that are ________ — that require speed, the learning of unfamiliar material, the use of unexercised abilities, recall rather than recognition, or explicit and effortful rather than implicit an automatic memory.

Cognitively demanding.

Contextual theorist stress variability from person to person and situation to situation based on:

Cohort differences, motivational factors, and task demands.

Researchers have adopted a ________ on learning and memory, emphasizing both biological and genetic factors along with environmental and situational factors.

Contextual perspective.

What are executive control processes?

Control processes run the show, guiding the selection, organization, manipulation, and interpretation of information throughout. Stored knowledge about the world and about information processing guides what is done with new information.

Is an example of elaboration?

Creating and using a sentence such as "the apple fell on the horses nose" could help you remember two of the items in Figure 8.6.

Expertise provides an advantage because, in part, it allows experts to hold and manipulate more information in short-term memory than non-experts. What is an example of this (pt. #2)?

Creating meaningful chunks out of the pieces on the chessboard also shows that long-term memory plays a role in expertise. What expert players have previously learned allows them to quickly identify meaningful patterns when shown a new chessboard with pieces in play.

In short, early memories are ________ and ________.

Cue-dependent; context-specific.

What is the information-processing approach to human cognition?

Emphasizes the basic mental processes involved in attention, perception, memory, and decision making.

Not until after H.M.'s death would researchers be able to create a three-dimensional model of his brain and find the part of the temporal lobe, called the ________, had been removed.

Entorhinal cortex.

What is an episodic buffer?

Episodic buffer, which links auditory and visual information.

Some 40 years after his surgery, technological advances in imaging allowed researchers to use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to get a closer look at H.M.'s brain. To their surprise they found that the surgery has not removed all of the hippocampus, as his surgeon had believed. Yet...

Even with the remaining portion of the hippocampus, H.M. had no memory for new information, indicating that there must be more to memory than this one structure.

What is the affective or emotional intensity of an event also influence later recall?

Events associated with either highly negative or highly positive emotions are recalled better than events that were experienced in the context of more neutral emotions.

What is sensory register?

Ever-so-briefly (less than a second) holds the abundant sensory information - sights, sounds, smells, and more -that swirls around us.

Why is the level of sociocultural support one of several reasons for this loss of early memories?

Examination of mother-toddler conversations about past events shows that some others provide rich elaboration of these events, whereas others do not, in the course of conversing with their toddlers. It may be that regular rehearsal, in this case in the form of a parent repeating the story, is the sociocultural context needed to ensure long-term recall of an early event.

Processing information successfully requires both knowing what you were doing and making decisions. This is why researchers have added ________ to the memory model.

Executive control processes.

What is explicit memory?

Explicit memory (also called declarative memory) involves deliberate, effortful recollection of events.

Research suggests that implicit memory develops earlier in infancy than explicit memory. Further, how do the two types of memory follow different developmental paths?

Explicit memory capacity increases from infancy to adulthood, and declines in later adulthood. By contrast, implicit memory capacity changes little; young children often do no worse than older children and elderly adults often do no worse than younger adults on tests of implicit memory.

Infants, like children and adults, face problem-solving tasks every day. For example, they may want to obtain an object beyond their reach or to make a toy repeat the interesting sound it produce earlier. Can infants overcome obstacles to achieve desired goals?

It appears they can. In one study, infants awew presented with an object out of their reach; however, by pulling a cloth with one hand, they could drag the object within their reach. Although the 6-month-olds did not retrieve the object, 9-month-olds solved this problem.

From birth, humans habituate to repeatedly presented lights, sounds, and smells; search simulator recognized as "old hat." Fetuses demonstrate through habituation that they can learn and remember prior to birth. Thus...

It is clear that newborns are capable of recognition memory and prefer a new sight to something they have seen many times. As they age, infants need less "study time" before a stimulus becomes old hat, and they can retain what they have learned for days or even weeks.

How do new learning and memory strategies emerge during adolescence?

It is during adolescence that the memory strategy of elaboration is mastered. Adolescents also develop and refine advanced learning and memory strategies highly relevant for school learning - for example note-taking and underlining skills.

What is an example of metamemory?

It is knowing, for example, what your memory limits are, which memory strategies are more or less effective for you, and which memory tasks are more or less difficult for you. It is also noting that your efforts to remember something or not working and that you need to try something different.

This enhanced memory for emotion-arousing event occurs even though the emotion associated with the event tends to dissipate with time, especially if it is a negative emotion. Why is this?

It is likely that strong emotions activate the body's arousal system and the neural components associated with arousal enhance coding and consolidation of events.

What is one of the most famous case studies of memory?

It is that of Henry Molaison, who is known in the scientific literature only by his initials H.M.

Three month old infants who were reminded of their previous learning by seeing the mobile move 2 to 4 weeks after their original learning experience, kicked up a storm as soon as the ribbon was attached to their ankles, whereas infants who are not reminded show no signs of remembering to kick. What does this indicate about stronger cues to aid recall?

It seems, then, the cued recall (in this case, memory cued by the presence of the mobile or, better yet, its rotation by the experimenter) emerges during the first couple of months of life and that infants remember best when they are reminded of what they have learned.

An individual's knowledge of a content area to be learned, or ________, as it is called, clearly affects learning and memory performance.

Knowledge base.

Researchers emphasize that performance on learning and memory tasks is the product of an interaction among:

(1) Characteristics of the learner, such as goals, motivations, abilities, and health; (2) characteristics of the task or situation; and (3) characteristics of the broader environment, including the cultural context in which a task is performed.

What is a utilization deficiency?

A third problem is a utilization deficiency, in which children spontaneously produce a strategy but their task performance does not benefit from using the strategy.

In addition to changes in memory strategies, how do basic capacities continue to increase during adolescence?

Adolescents have a greater functional use of their working memory because maturational changes in the brain allow them to process information more quickly into simultaneously process more chunks of information.

What is the overlapping waves theory?

According to Siegler's (2006) overlapping waves theory, the development of problem-solving skills is a matter of knowing a variety of strategies, becoming increasingly selective with experience about which strategy to use, changing strategies as needed, and getting better at using known strategies.

What is fuzzy-trace theory?

According to this explanation,. children store verbatim and general accounts of an event separately. Verbatim information (such as word-for-word recall of a biology class lecture) is unstable and likely to be lost over long periods; it is easier to remember the gist of an event (for example, recall of the general points in the biology lecture).

How can successful metacognition be seen in adolescents who choose the strategy of elaboration over rote repetition when they realize that the former is more effective?

Adolescence are fairly accurate at monitoring whether or not they have allocated adequate study time to learn new material, and they allocate more study time to information judged to be difficult. This regulation of study time shows an awareness of the task demands as well as their own strengths in light of the task's difficulty.

How does the use of metacognition during cognitive tasks vary by gender?

Adolescent girls consistently report using more metacognitive strategies and adolescent boys. This may help explain why girls are in higher grades in school the boys.

What are the effects of semantic memory, or knowledge base, on performance?

Adults who have considerable interest in and knowledge of cars - experts in the domain of cars - or more successful in recognition and recollection tasks about cars than the typical adult who is a car novice. Similar knowledge base effects are found for other areas of expertise.

Why do we remember a little about our early years? In one study, children between 4 and 13 years of age were interviewed twice, with a gap of about two years between the two interviews. On both occasions, children were asked to recall their earliest memories. What were the results?

All of the children were able to describe events they had experienced a young age, demonstrating solid autobiographical memory. But among children who were 4-7 years of age when first interviewed, most did not recall the same events two years later, suggesting these early autobiographical memories are prone to being forgotten.

Why is lack of language one of several reasons for this loss of early memories?

Although a relative lack of verbal skills during the first few years of life may limit what we are able to recover from this period, other research suggests that it does not completely block us from later attaching verbal labels to our preverbal memories.

Encoding begins with the sensory registration of stimuli from the environment. The sensory systems are working fairly well from a very young age and undergo only slight improvements during the first year. However...

Although the senses themselves are functioning well, there is evidence that the encoding of this information improves over the first several years of life as the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal lobes mature.

Further, how could the researchers enhance young infants' memory by giving them three 6-minute learning sessions rather than two 9-minute sessions?

Although the total training time was the same in the two conditions, the distributed, or spread out, training was more effective. As it turns out, distributed practice is beneficial across the lifespan.

Could elderly adults, like young children, be deficient in the specific knowledge called metamemory?

Although this theory sounds plausible, research shows that older adults seem to know as much as younger adults about such things as which memory strategies are best and which memory tasks are the hardest.

What is an example of episodic memory?

An example of episodic memory might be remembering that you were home sick when you heard on the news that a major earthquake had struck Nepal on April 25, 2015, killing more than 8,000 people.

What is organization?

Another important memory strategy is organization, or classifying items into meaningful groups.

What is chunking?

Another organizational strategy, chunking, could be used to break a long number (6065551843) into manageable subunits (606-555-1843, a phone number) or a series of letters (e.g., F R H O X T O X O L G S M) into meaningful chunks (FOX SOX HTML ORG).

When asked about their visit to a fast-food restaurant the day before, children usually report what happens in general when they go to the restaurant rather than what happened specifically during yesterday's visit. What are the implications of this?

As children age, their scripts become more detailed. Perhaps more important than age, however, is experience: Children with greater experience of an event develop richer scripts than children with less experience.

People believe that the personal significance of an event affects our memory for the event - that events of great importance to the self will be remembered better than less important events. However...

As it turns out, the personal significance of an event, as rated at the time the event occurs, has little effect on one's ability to later recall the event.

What is an example of the overlapping waves theory?

At each age, children have multiple problem-solving strategies available to them. As children gain more experience, which typically occurs the age, they decrease their use of less-adaptive strategies and increase their use of more adaptive strategies; occasionally new strategies may appear.

What are autobiographical memories?

Autobiographical memories, episodic memories of personal events, are essential ingredients of present and future experiences as well as our understanding of who we are.

Not only is task experience important, but the nature of the task is also relevant. What is an example of this?

Awareness of memory processes benefits even young children on tasks that are simple and familiar and we are connections between metamemory knowledge and memory performance are fairly obvious.

Some promising research with mice point to the role of a protein ( ________) that accumulates with age and inhibits the formation of new brain cells and results in associated loss of memory.

B2M.

What is long-term memory?

Believed to be a relatively permanent and seemingly unlimited store of information.

What are the four major hypotheses about why learning and memory improve in childhood?

Changes in basic capacities; changes in memory strategies; increase knowledge of memory; and increased knowledge of the world.

Expertise provides an advantage because, in part, it allows experts to hold and manipulate more information in short-term memory than non-experts. What is an example of this (pt. #1)?

Chess experts, for example, might look at a chessboard with 20 pieces and see 3 or 4 clusters of chess pieces in play, whereas the novice chess player looks at the same board and sees 20 different chess pieces that seem to have a little logic to their placement.

Children and adults have many specific autobiographical events stored in long-term memory. Yet research shows that older children and adults exhibit ________; that is, they have few autobiographical memories of events that occurred during the first few years of life.

Childhood (or infantle) amnesia.

Is one of these explanations of memory development better than the others?

Darlene DeMaire and John Ferron (2003) tested whether a model that includes three of these factors — basic capacities, strategies, and metamemory - could explain recall memory better than a single factor. For both younger (5-8 years) and older (8-11 years) children, the three-factor model predicted memory performance better than a single-factor model.

Why are changes in basic processing capacities that occur with age perhaps the biggest issue with memory?

Declines in sensory abilities may tax available processing resources, leading to memory deficits. In addition, working-memory capacity diminishes with age.

More importantly, though, infants as young as 6 months display ________, the ability to imitate a novel act after a delay, which clearly requires memory ability and represents an early form of explicit or declarative memory.

Deferred imitation.

Gradually, how do children not only learn to choose the most useful strategy for a problem but also become increasingly effective at executing new strategies?

Familiarity with a task in with strategies frees up processing space, allowing children to engage in more metacognitive analysis of the strategies at their disposal.

Siegler (1981) administered the balance beam problem to individuals 3-20. He detected what clear age differences in the extent to which both weight and distance from the fulcrum were taken into account in the rules that guided decisions about which end of the balance beam would drop?

Few 3-year-olds used a rule; they guessed. By contrast, 4- and 5-year-olds were governed by rules. The increased accuracy of young adults comes with a price - increased time to solve the problem.

How do cognitive psychologist now recognize that information processing is more complex than this model or similar models suggest?

For example, they appreciate that people, like computers, engage in parallel processing, carrying out multiple cognitive activities simultaneously (for example, listening to a lecture and taking notes at the same time), rather than performing operations in a sequence (such as solving a math problem by carrying out a series of ordered steps).

How do adolescents use existing strategies more selectively than younger children?

For example, they are adept at using their strategies to memorize the material on which they know they will be tested and letting go of irrelevant information.

How do adolescents make more deliberate use of strategies that younger children use unconsciously?

For example, they may deliberately organize a list of words instead of simply using the organization or grouping that happens to be there already.

The actual storage and retrieval of new information take place in whichever area of the cortex originally encoded or was activated by the information. What is an example of this (pt. #1)?

For example, vocabulary seems to be stored in the limbic-temporal cortex, as evidenced by the vocabulary impairment experienced by individuals with damage to this part of the brain. Thus, sensory information initially activates one of the cortical association areas distributed throughout the brain.

Yet how have even 4-year-olds not mastered many of the effective strategies for moving information into long-term memory?

For example, when instructed to remember toys they have been shown, 3- and 4-year-olds will look carefully at the objects and will often label them once, but they rarely use the memory strategy called rehearsal.

How do children's scripts affect how they form memories of new experiences as well as how they recall past events?

For example, when presented with information inconsistent with their scripts, preschoolers may misremember the information so that it better fits their scripts.

How is elaboration especially helpful in learning foreign languages?

For example, you might link the Spanish word pato (pronounced pot-o) to the English equivalent duck by imagining a duck with a pot on its head.

What is an example of a script or generalized event representation (GER)?

For instance, children who have been to a fast-food restaurant might have a script like this: You wait in line, tell the person behind the counter what you want, pay for the food, carry the tray of food to the table, eat the food, gather the trash, and throw it away before leaving.

Piaget use an object search task, the A-not-B task, to help understand cognitive changes during infancy. How can performance on this task also contribute to our understanding of memory capabilities?

For this task, an infant or toddler is seated at a table that contains two identical clothes, under which a small toy can be hidden. As the youngster watches, the toy is placed under one of the cloths (A). The infant who reaches for the correct location of A is demonstrating memory.

Positron emission tomography (PET) scans of the brain have allowed researchers to make inferences about memory processes by observing brain activity taking place as subjects perform various types of memory tasks. What have we learned?

From such studies, we have learned the different parts of the brain are involved in different forms of memory.

Some research have tried to explain childhood amnesia in terms of ________.

Fuzzy-trace theory.

How did H.M.'s unfortunate case provide the first solid evidence that memory had a neural basis (pt. #2)?

Given the devastating loss of memory resulting from this removal, scientists concluded that the hippocampus was instrumental in creating new episodic memories.

What is habituation?

Habituation — learning not to respond to a repeated stimulus - might be thought of as learning to be bored by the familiar (for example, eventually not hearing the continual ticking of the clock or the drip of a leaky faucet) and is evidence that a stimulus is recognized as familiar.

Assessing infant memory requires ingenuity because infants cannot tell researchers what they remember. What methods have been used to uncover infants memory capabilities?

Habituation, operant conditioning, object search, and imitation techniques.

What is short-term memory?

Holds a limited amount of information, perhaps only four chunks, for a short period of time.

Young children and older adults tend to pursue specific hypotheses instead ("Is it a pig?" "Is it a pencil?"). Consequently, they must ask more questions to identify the right object. However...

If the task is altered to make it more familiar (for example, the use of playing cards as stimuli), then older adults do far better. The familiarity of the material allows them to draw on their knowledge base to solve the problem.

What is an example of a perseveration error?

If they previously found their favorite toy under the sofa, they search this location on future occasions when the toy is lost. They seem to be unable to get the old strategy - ineffective in the new situation — out of their mind and move on to a different strategy that could be successful.

What is recognition memory?

If you were asked multiple choice question about when the Constitution was ratified, you need not actively retrieve the correct dates; you may only need to recognize it among the options. This is an example of recognition memory.

What is recall memory?

If you were asked, "When was the constitution ratified?" This is a test of recall memory; it requires active retrieval without the aid of cues.

What is implicit memory?

Implicit memory (also called nondeclarative memory) occurs unintentionally, automatically, and without awareness.

How is weaker working memory associated with impulsivity and adolescent alcohol use?

Improving working memory may help strengthen academic skills as well as non-academic decision-making. Fortunately, there is evidence that training programs can improve working memory among teenagers, including those born with extremely low birth weight.

How do metamemory and metacognition also improve during adolescence?

In general, adolescents are more skilled than children at adjusting the learning strategies to different purposes (e.g., studying versus skimming) and better able to judge when a task is likely to be "easy" versus "hard."

When do children first show evidence of metacognition?

In instructed to remember where the Sesame Street character Big Bird has been hidden so that they can later wake him up, even 2- and 3-year-olds will go and stand in the hiding spot, or at least look or point at that spot; they do not do these things as often if Big Bird is visible and they do not need to remember where he is.

To determine how old we have to be when we experience significant life events to remember them, researchers typically ask adults to answer questions about early life experiences such as the birth of a younger sibling, hospitalization, the death of a family member, or family move early in life. What is an example of this?

In one study using this method, college students were able to recall some information from events that happened as early as age 2, but age 2 seems to be the lowest age limit for recall of early life events as an adult.

Alan Baddeley (1986, 2001, 2012) proposed a four-component model of working memory to try to address the limitations in this area in the Atkinson and Shiffrin model. What did he find?

In particular, research showed that a single short-term memory store just was not sufficient, because verbal and visual memory seem to be stored separately.

Consolidation is also assisted when we can relate new material with prior knowledge. How is this process reflected in patterns of brain activity measured during sleep?

In particular, when sleep spindles - those spikes of neural activity observed during REM sleep - are denser, there seems to be greater retention of new learning that is associated with prior knowledge.

In most important areas of problem solving, Siegler (1996) concluded, children do not simply progress from one way of thinking to another as they age, as his balance beam research suggested. Instead...

In working problems in arithmetic, spelling, science, and other school subjects, most children in any age group use multiple rules or problem-solving strategies rather than just one.

By selecting and optimizing, older adults can often compensate for their diminishing explicit memory, allowing them to maintain ________ for a longer period of time.

Independence.

If you start with the hypothesis that difference in knowledge base explain memory differences between older and younger adults, why do you immediately encounter a problem?

Information that undergoes meaningful consolidation can clearly be retained in long-term memory for many years to come. So deficiencies in knowledge base are probably not the source of most memory problems that many older adults display.

How does comparing people new to their chosen field of study with those more experienced tell researchers that experience pays off in more effective memory and problem-solving skills?

Information-processing research shows that adults often function best cognitively in domains in which they have achieved expertise.

What is a mediation deficiency?

Initially, children have a mediation deficiency, which means they cannot spontaneously use or benefit from strategies, even if they are taught how to use them.

Children do not suddenly start using strategies, however, and even once they have demonstrated knowledge of a strategy, they do not consistently apply it in all situations. Why is this?

Initially, children have a mediation deficiency.

How do studies show that older adults can profit from mental exercise that increasingly challenges them?

Like physical exercise contributes to overall physical well-being, mental exercise contributes to overall mental well-being. And just as your physical workouts need to increasingly challenge you, your mental workouts must become more rigorous.

What is retrograde amnesia?

Loss of memory for information and events occurring prior to the incident that caused the amnesia.

Children younger than 4 show little flexibility in switching from an ineffective strategy to an effective one, and they typically do not generate new strategies even as they gain experience with a task. In contrast...

Many 4- and 5-year-olds will flexibility switch strategies and generate new strategies, making them do better on memory tasks than younger children.

What about the hypothesis that failure to use effective memory strategies accounts for deficit in old age?

Many older adults do not spontaneously use strategies, even those as simple as writing notes to help remember a phone message. At least some older adults show improved memory performance when they are prompted to use a strategy.

Explicit memory is largely localized in the medial temporal lobe of the brain (medial refers to the middle of the brain and the temporal lobe is located at the base of the brain). In particular, the ________ are thought to be crucial to consolidating information into a memory trace for long-term storage.

Medial temporal structures.

Although older adults know a lot about memory, they express more negative beliefs about their memory skills than the younger adults. Thus...

Memory loss may contribute to a drop in confidence in memory skills, but negative beliefs about one's memory skills also appear to hurt memory performance.

It is not clear whether the declines in actual memory performance lead to the development of negative beliefs about memory or whether negative believes — either one's own or those of the surrounding culture — undermine ________.

Memory performance.

What is metacognition?

More broadly, metamemory is one aspect of metacognition, or knowledge of the human mind and the range of cognitive processes.

What is a production deficiency?

More typical is a production deficiency, in which children can use strategies they are taught but do not produce them on their own.

How does the comprehensive model of memory show, for example, that short-term memory is more complex than originally conceived?

Most cognitive researchers distinguish between passive and active forms of short-term memory and use the term working memory to refer to short-term memory being used to achieve a goal.

How are limitations in working-memory capacity most likely rooted in slower functioning of the nervous system both early and late in life?

Much research shows that speed of processing increases during childhood and adolescence, peaks in early adulthood, then declines slowly over the adult years. Children and older adults may not be able to keep up with the processing demands of complex learning and memory tasks.

Are the benefits of expertise content-specific, or does gaining expertise in one domain carry over into other domains and make a person a generally more effective learner or problem solver?

No, each expert apparently relies on domain-specific knowledge and domain-specific information processing strategies to achieve cognitive feats.

How does working memory capacity predict how well adults will perform on a range of cognitive tasks?

Older adults do fine on short-term memory tasks that require them to juggle just a few pieces of information in working memory. However, when the amount of information they are to "operate on" increases, they begin to show deficits.

Studies of memory skills in adulthood suggest that the aspects of learning and memory in which older adults look most deficient in comparison with young and middle-aged adults are some of the same areas in which young children compare unfavorably with older children. What is an example of this?

Older adults often struggle to perform well on memory tasks that are timed. In contrast, on tasks where timing is not an issue and respondents have as much time as they want, older adults may not show significant memory deficits, at least not until very old age.

With explicit memory, where there tends to be a larger decline, how does the magnitude of the decline vary with the type of explicit memory?

Older adults retain fairly good semantic memory (general factual knowledge accumulated over time) but show steady declines in episodic memory (recall specific events that are tied to a specific time in place).

Why do older adults seem to have more trouble with explicit memory tasks that require mental effort than with implicit memory tasks that are largely automatic?

Older adults, then, have a little trouble with skills and procedures that have been routinized over the years - established habits - although there might be some slight decline, often in the form of slower response times.

What is the first conclusion about the development of learning and memory?

Older children are faster information processors and can juggle more information in working memory. Maturation of the nervous system leads to improvements in consolidation of memories. Older and younger children, however, do not differ in terms of sensory register and long-term memory capacity.

What is the fourth conclusion about the development of learning and memory?

Older children generally know more, and their larger knowledge base may provide some boost to their ability to learn and remember. A richer knowledge base allows faster and more efficient processing of information related to the domain of knowledge.

What are changes in memory strategies?

Older children have better "software;" they have learned and consistently use effective methods for putting information into long-term memory and retreating it when they need it.

What are changes in basic capacities?

Older children have higher powered "hardware" than younger children do; neural advances in their brains have contributed to more working-memory space for manipulating information and an ability to process information faster.

What is an increased knowledge of memory?

Older children know more about memory (for example, how long they must study to learn things thoroughly, which kinds of memory tasks take more effort, and which strategies best fit each task).

What is the third conclusion about the development of learning and memory?

Older children know more about memory, and good metamemory may help children choose more appropriate strategies and control and monitor their learning more effectively.

What is an increased knowledge of the world?

Older children know more than younger children about the world in general. This knowledge, or expertise, makes material to be learned more familiar, and familiar material is easier to learn and remember than unfamiliar material.

What is the second conclusion about the development of learning and memory?

Older children use more effective memory strategies in encoding and retrieving information. Acquisition of memory strategies reflects qualitative rather than quantitative changes.

It has been estimated that it takes about 10 years of training and experience to become a true expert in a field and to build a rich and well organized knowledge base. But...

Once this base is achieved, the expert not only knows and remembers more but also thinks more effectively than individuals who lack expertise.

Why is space in working memory one of several reasons for this loss of early memories?

One explanation of childhood images that infants and toddlers may not have enough space in working memory to hold the multiple pieces of information about actor, action, and setting needed to encode and consolidate a coherent memory of an event.

Why would children who use a strategy fail to benefit from it?

One possibility is that using a new strategy is mentally taxing and leaves no free cognitive resources for other aspects of the task. Once the strategy becomes routine, then other components of the task can be addressed simultaneously.

What is memory?

Our ability to store and later retrieve information about past events.

Using brain imaging techniques, researchers have also identified different patterns of activity during memory tasks in the prefrontal cortex of younger and older adults. Although some studies show underactivity in older adults' brains, why do other show overactivity?

Overactivity may indicate that the older brain is trying to compensate for age-related losses. By compensating, or working harder and drawing on many brain areas, the older brain may be able to perform as well as younger brain, at least until this overactivity can no longer overcome steeper age-related declines.

Success on memory and problem-solving tasks improves over time as we increasingly test out strategies, keeping those that lead to greater success and dropping the ones that are duds. Rather than picturing development as a series of stages resembling stair steps, Siegler argues, we should picture it as ________.

Overlapping waves.

What determines whether an event is likely to be recalled at a later point in time? Consider four factors identified by Patricia Bauer (2007) that may influence autobiographical memories:

Personal significance, distinctiveness, emotional intensity, and life phase of the event.

What are the three types of short-term memory storage?

Phonological loop, visual-spatial sketchpad, and episodic buffer.

What is a phonological loop?

Phonological loop, which briefly holds auditory information such as words are music.

How does the use of metacognition during cognitive tasks vary by socioeconomic background?

Students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds report more use of metacognitive strategies than their lower socioeconomic peers. Families with higher socioeconomic status may have more resources, such as books in the home, and may talk more explicitly about effective learning strategies.

Consider research using the Twenty Questions task in which participants are shown an array of items and asked to find out, using as few questions as possible, which item the experimenter has in mind. What is the best problem-solving strategy?

The best problem-solving strategy is to ask constraint-seeking questions - ones that rule out more than one item (for example, "Is it an animal?").

When was the episodic buffer added to this model?

The episodic buffer was added to this model when research showed that some memories are not visual or verbal per se, but instead serve to connect visual and verbal information and facilitate long-term storage of episodic memories (memory of events).

What is encoding?

The first step is to encode the information: get it into the system. If it never gets in, it cannot be remembered.

Annese and colleagues concluded that H.M.'s memory problems were likely a result of what?

The loss of the entorhinal cortex, which effectively cut off the hippocampus from the rest of the brain.

Why has the distinctiveness or the uniqueness of an event been consistently associated with better recall?

The more unique an event is, the more likely it is to be recalled later on, and to be recalled as a distinct event with relevant details. Common events and experiences are often recalled, if at all, as multiple events lumped together as one.

What is retrieval?

The process of getting information out when it is needed. People say they have successfully remembered something when they can retrieve it from long-term memory.

How does the information-processing model describe what happens between the stimulus and the response?

The question will move through the memory system. You will need to draw on your long-term memory to understand the question, then you will have to search long-term memory for the two relevant dates. Moreover, you will need to locate your store knowledge of the mathematical operation of subtraction. You will transfer this stored information to working memory so that you can use your subtraction "program" to derive the correct answer.

What is rehearsal?

The repeating of items they are trying to learn and remember.

In sum, the basic capacities of the sensory register and long-term memory do not change much with age. However...

There are improvements with age in operating speed and efficiency of working memory, which includes improvements in the encoding and consolidation processes through which memories are processed for long-term storage. These changes correspond to maturational changes in the brain.

How do infants' deferred imitation of actions at age 9 months predict their productive language skills at 16 months?

There is a connection between performance on an early memory task and performance on a more complex memory task, in this case, words produced or remembered at 16 months.

This time of life typically coincides with the major life events of living home, acquiring education or training for a job or career, forming romantic relationships, starting a family, and having other experiences signifying adulthood. Thus...

These events form one's cultural life script, the stories of our lives that we tell over and over again. The scripts are biased toward positive, life-affirming events.

Researchers have found that 3-year-olds understand the difference between thinking about an object in their heads and experiencing it in reality and that 4-year-olds realize behavior is guided by beliefs. Thus...

These findings indicate that metacognitive awareness is present at least in a rudimentary form at a young age but there continue to be significant improvements throughout childhood.

What do the encoding and consolidation processes include?

These processes include synaptic consolidation, which occurs in the minutes or hours after initial learning, and system consolidation, which takes place over a longer period of time.

How are experts able to use their elaborately organized and complete knowledge bases to solve problems effectively and efficiently?

They can quickly, surely, and almost automatically call up the right information from the extensive knowledge base to devise effective solutions to problems and carry them out efficiently.

However, how does this research also suggest that young infants have difficulty recalling what they have learned if the cues are insufficient or different?

They have trouble remembering when the mobile (for example, the specific animals hanging from it) or the context in which they encountered it (for example, the design on the playpen liner) is even slightly different from the context in which they have learned.

What is an example of knowledge base?

Think about the difference between reading about a topic that you already know well and reading about a new topic. In the first case, you can read quickly because you are able to like the information to the knowledge you have already stored. All you really need to do is check for any new information or information that contradicts what you already know. Learning about a highly unfamiliar topic is more difficult.

What is the rule assessment approach?

This approach assumes that children's problem-solving attempts are not hit or miss but are governed by rules; it also assumes that children fail to solve problems because they fail to encode all the critical aspects of the problem and are guided by faulty rules.

What is a central executive?

This expanded view of short term memory consists of a central executive, which directs attention and controls the flow of information; it is the supervisor of the working-memory system.

The actual storage and retrieval of new information take place in whichever area of the cortex originally encoded or was activated by the information. What is an example of this (pt. #2)?

This information thenpasses to the medial temporal lobe for consolidation. Even when this consolidation occurs, the resulting memory traces stored in the cortical association area of the brain the first registered the information, and it is from this area that the information must be retrieved.

Think back to the example of the professor who seems to want you to remember when the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Now imagine that you were asked how many years passed between this event and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What is this an example of?

This is a simple example of problem solving.

Research on autobiographical memory has revealed that people recall more information from the life phase of their teens and 20s than from any other time expect the near present. Why?

This memory or reminiscence bump may occur because memories from adolescence and early adulthood are more easily accessible the memories from other periods of the lifespan.

What is the entorhinal cortex?

This structure plays a critical role in connecting the hippocampus to other parts of the brain.

How does whether or not memory improves seem to depend on a person's level of intelligence?

Those with higher intelligence benefit from strategies whereas those with lower intelligence do not benefit, possibly because they do not correctly implement the strategy.

What is an example of organization?

You might cluster the apple, the grapes, and the hamburger in Figure 8.6 into a category of foods and form other categories for animals, vehicles, and baseball equipment. You would then rehearse each category and recall it as a cluster.

What are perseveration errors?

Younger children have a tendency to make perseveration errors: they continue to use the same strategy that was successful in the past despite the strategy's current lack of success.

What is an example of metacognition?

Your store of metacognitive knowledge might include an understanding that you are better at learning a new language than at learning algebra, that it is harder to pay attention to a task when there is distracting noise in the background than when it is quiet, and that it is wise to check a proposed solution to a problem before concluding that it is correct.

Research indicates that, on average, older adults do not fare as well as younger adults under a variety of conditions that require memory. However...

• Not all older people experience these difficulties. • Not all kinds of memory tasks cause older people difficulty. • Declines, when observed, typically do not become noticeable until we hit or 70s. • Difficulties in remembering affect elderly people more noticeably as they continue to age and are most severe among the oldest elderly people.