Memory psych 1001

What is Long-term memory? What are its capacity, duration and function?

Allows us to retain important information(facts experiences and skills) for minutes, days, weeks, months or years; to tie together the past with the present

What is the role of the hippocampus and amygdala in memory? What is long-term potentiation?

Amygdala is important structure for the processing of emotions especially fear; hippocampus is important structure for the information of new memories; amygdala helping us recall the emotions associated with fear-provoking events and the hippocampus helping us recall the events themselves; Long-term potentiation (LTP) refers to a gradual strengthening of the connections among neurons by repetitive stimulation over time;

What is the keyword method?

This strategy depends on your ability to think of an English word (the keyword) that reminds you of the word you're trying to remember. Take the Spanish word casa, which means "house" in English. Think of an English word, like case, that sounds like or brings to mind casa. Now think of an image that combines case (or another word of your choice) and house. Perhaps you can picture a guitar case on the roof of your house. When you think of this image and the accompanying word "case," they should help you to retrieve the meaning of casa.

What is the magic number?

the Magic Number is the universal limit of short-term memory, and it applies to just about all information we encounter: numbers, letters, people, vegetables, and cities. Because it's hard to retain much more than seven plus or minus two pieces of information in our short-term memory

What is the serial position effect?

the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst

What is anterograde amnesia? retrograde amnesia?

Anterograde amnesia: lose the capacity to form new memories; retrograde amnesia: lose some memories of our past

What are attention, rehearsal, encoding and retrieval?

Attention selects info from sensory memory Encoding: sends info to long term storage Rehearsal: maintains info in working memory(2 types maintenance(repeating stimuli in original form) and elaborative(linking stimuli with visualization)) repeating information mentaly keeps information alive Retrieval: brings info form long term memory to working memory

What is Sensory memory? What is its capacity, duration and function?

Brief storage of perceptual information before it's passed to short term memory; Tied closely to raw material of our experiences and perceptions of the world holds them for just a few seconds or less before passing some to the second system Allows us to fill in the blanks in perceptions and buys brain extra time to process incoming information

In forgetting, what is the difference between decay and interference? What does each of these look like as a cause of forgetting.

Decay theory is similar to interference theory in the way that old memories are lost over time. Memories are lost in Decay Theory by the passing of time. In InterferenceTheory, memories are lost due to newly acquired memories.

What is a flashbulb memory?

Emotional memories that seem so vivid people appear to recount them in remarkable and photographic detail

What are the three levels of processing and what kinds of tasks are associated with each? Which will produce the best recall? How is elaboration important?

Encoding: process of giving information to memory banks, in a format brains can use Storage: keeping information in memory; Retrieval: final process for memory; reactivation of reconstruction of experiences from our memory stores

What are the different kinds of long-term memory? What kinds of memory are typical of each different kind?

Explicit(memorize it on purpose) Semantic: knowledge of facts about the worlds Episodic: recollection of events in out world Implicit memory(happens without thinking about it) procedural(tying shoes, driving a car) Classical conditioning(test anxiety, pavlov's dogs) priming

Memory illusions?

False but subjectively compelling memory

How did the Sperling study measure the duration and capacity of sensory memory?

Flashed a display of 12 letters with 4 letters arranged in 3 rows and displayed for only 1/20 of a second, then told participants to recall the words, most could only recall 4 or 5 diff. Letters; showed that all 12 letters have an equal chance of being recalled; he then did it again but told people to report specific rows and virtually all people got all letter in the row correctly which proved that people had access to all 12 letters in their memory

Who is Clive Wearing? What kinds of things could he remember and what kinds of things could he not remember as a result of his brain injury? What do these deficits and retentions indicate about memory?

Hippocampus was destroyed by a herpes virus, has complete anterograde amnesia. Man who's memory lasts like 2 minutes. He can remember long term things like his wife's name etc Semantic Memory(no longer associate with specific episodes in life, general knowledge that is extracted after repeat episodes), but long term episodic memory(something that occurred at a specific time and place), and everything else he would forget after a couple minutes.

What are echoic and iconic memory? What is the duration of each of these?

Iconic Memory: sensory memory that applies to vision, only lasts for about a second Echoic memory: auditory sensory memory; lasts as long as 5-10 seconds

What is proactive interference?

Interference with acquisitions of new information due to previous learning of information

What is retroactive interference?

Interference with retention of old information due to acquisition of new information

What is a mnemonic?

Learning aid, strategy, or device that enhances recall; helps encode memories

How did Peterson and Peterson study the duration of short-term memory?

Lloyd and Margaret Peterson (1959) presented participants with lists of three letters each, such as MKP or ASN, and then asked them to recall these three-letter strings. In some cases, they made participants wait only three seconds before recalling the letters; in other cases, they made them wait up to 18 seconds. Each time, they asked participants to count backwards by threes while they were waiting. They found that after about 10 or 15 seconds, most participants did no better than chance. So the duration of short-term memory is quite brief; it's probably no longer than about 20 seconds.

What kind of memory seems to be involved in primacy?

Long term

What is a schema? How do schemas help/hinder memory?

Organized knowledge structure ornamental model that we've stored in memory; they equip us with frames of reference of interpreting new situations; can lead us to remember things that never happened, can also oversimplify and produces memory illusions

What is source monitoring?

Our efforts to identify the origins(sources) of a memory

What is a suggestive memory technique?

Procedure that encourages patients to recall memories that may or may not have taken place

What is the misinformation effect? Who is Elizabeth Loftus? What are examples of implanted memories?

Providing people with misleading information after an event can lead to fictitious memories; Loftus is a psychologist who opened eyes to the effects misleading questions have on everyday memories and eyewitness reports, found that suggestive memory techniques often create false memories; examples are the lost in the mall study, the car crash study

What is the difference between recall, recognition and relearning as measures of memory?

Recall: generating previously remembered information on our own(essay test) Recognition: selecting previously remembered information from an array of options(multiple choice) Relearning: reacquiring knowledge that we'd previously learned but forgotten over time

What is Short-term memory? What is its capacity, duration and function?

Retains information for brief periods of time; Works actively with information handed to it, transforming into more meaningful material before passing some to the 3rd system; lasts about 20 seconds

What kind of memory is involved in recency?

Short term

What is massed practice versus distributive practice? What are helpful study hints derived from memory research?

Studying information in small increments over time(distributed) vs large increments over a brief amount of time(massed); we remember things better in the long run when we spread learning over a long interval than packed into short intervals; cramming helps remember for that exam but is bad for long term retention

What kinds of things increase the likelihood of false memories?

Suggestive questions and statements, mixing true events

What is primacy?

Tendency to remember words at the beginning of a list especially well

What is recency?

Tendency to remember words at the end of a list especially well

What is the method of loci?

Type of mnemonic; relies on imagery of locations; think of common path you take everyday and things you encounter, assign things you need to remember to the things you would encounter

What are the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon and encoding specificity (context-dependent learning; state-dependent learning)?

When we know the answer but can't come up with it; knowing but being unable to access it Encoding specificity is remembering something better when the conditions under which we retrieve information are similar to the conditions under which we encoded it Context dependent learning: superior retrieval of memories when the external context of the original memories matches the retrieval context State dependent learning:superior retrieval of memories when the organism is in the same physiological or psychological(internal) state as it was in during encoding

Who was Ebbinghaus, and what was his forgetting curve?

ermann Ebbinghaus (January 24, 1850 - February 26, 1909) was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. forgetting curve describes the decrease in ability of the brain to retain memory over time, humans start losing the memory of learned knowledge over time, in a matter of days or weeks, unless the learned knowledge is consciously reviewed time and again

If you want to eliminate the recency effect, what would you do?

one would need to have a greater time in between when one can recall what words they saw and when they saw them. This should be done by doing another task

What is chunking?

organizing information into meaningful groupings, allowing us to extend the span of short-term memory

What is the Modal Model of Memory?

proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) and is a structural model. They proposed that memory consisted of three stores: a sensory memory, short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). Information passes from store to store in a linear way, and has been described as an information processing model (like a computer) with an input, process and output.