ch. 6 Memory: Encoding & Storage

Sensory Memory (5 factors)

- 1st stage in information processing, - large storage capacity, - very brief timespan: 250-300 ms, but depends on sensory modality, - fades with time, -requires a mechanism for filtering information

Activation Computationals in the free association task

- Potential responses: terms that are currently active in long-term memory and so could potentially come to mind, such as Noah, Moses, Jesus, farm, zoo, Mississippi, and Johnstown in the free associations task. - Potential primes: terms that might be used to elicit responses from long- term memory, such as Bible, animals, and flood. - The strength of the association between each potential prime and each potential response: the triangular connections with curved tails.

Theory of Short Term Memory

- Proposed intermediate system in which information has to reside on its journey from sensory memory to long-term memory - A conceptual system which not only stores information but also serves as a work space for rehearsing, coding, retrieving, and decision making. Sensory Store --(attention)--STM--(rehersal)--LTM

The Modal Model of Memory

- STM is fleeting; we have to keep repeating it, and disruption causes us to forget. - LTM ("hard drive") stores, and we can thus retrieve it for STM

Power Law of Learning

- memory improves with practice - practice has diminishing returns - as memory traces become stronger, they can reach higher levels of activation and be retrieved more rapidly.

Serial Recall

- people are best at recalling the last, the first and are worst at remembering the middle words.

Memory strength

- property of a memory trace that determines how active the trace can become - improves (learning strengths) with practice but decays with time (forgetting function) - similar to base-level activation - some memories are more available because they are used frequently in all contexts

Visuospatial Sketchpad

- rehearsing spatial info - engaged during Corsi Block tapping task

LTP in rats (Barnes)

- stimulate hippocampus - activation changes with practice - remember something faster if you have thought about it more often.

Shepar & Teghtsoonian Temporary nature of STM

-Information is not kept indefinitely, - New info will always be coming in and pushing out old info,

What are the 2 critical factors in the activation equation?

1. Base level activation -starting activation for the idea, 2. Activation received through associations- adjusts activation to reflect context

Iconic vs. Echoic

1. Duration: Iconic < Echoic 2. Quantity: Iconic > Echoic 3. Contents: physical features in iconic, categorical in echoic.

2 systems of LTM

1. Explicit: declarative memory 2. Implicit: non-declarative memory

2 influential factors on memory

1. Maintenance Rehearsal - repetition - hold info without transferring it into deeper code (making memory easier) - prevents decay 2. Elaborative - elaborate of meaning - uses a deeper code - richer multimodal codes - memory becomes more unique and easier to retrieve (less interference)

2 brain regions important for memory

1. PFC: encoding new memories and retrieval of old memories. 2. Temporal Cortex (+ hippocampus): storage of new memories.

PQ4F method of studying

1. preview 2. questions 3. read 4. reflect 5. recite 6. review

Neurons in area ___ are active during the delayed match-to-sample task

46. Other areas are active during different tasks. Lesions inhibits performance. Also 47 in human PET scans.

(Miller) Short term memory span

7 +/- bits of information, but some argue it is less. - span = maximum number of items correctly recalled - we increase capacity by chunking (reorganizing into meaningful units)

Echo

A brief persistence of a sound in the auditory system - Perceptual regions of the cortex hold a brief representation of sensory information for further processing.

ACT

Adaptive Control of Thought Theory Activation: A rapidly changing state of memory traces that determine both the probability and speed of access to the memory trace, Eg. Free-association task

Activation Calculation Equation

Ai = Bi + (sum of) WjSji Ai = activation Bi = base level activation Wj = weight given to prime Sji = strength of association

Central Executive

Controls how the visuospatial sketchpad and phonological loop are used. It can put in or retrieve info from either system, translate info and needs its own temporary store of information.

What terms did William James use instead of LTM and STM?

Directly intuited past, properly recollected objects

Partial Report Advantage

Full report (as many as possible): ~4 items reported, Partial report (only those cued by the row): ~3 item or 9 in partial report People did better on partial report.

Flashbulb memory

Good memory for events that are very important or traumatic. But, this may not be as accurate as first thought and may fade with time.

Priming memories Meyer et al. study

Had people judge whether pairs of items were real words. When the pairs had an associative relationship, participants were faster than unrelated. Eg. bread + butter was faster than nurse + bread = Associative Spreading

Incidental vs. Intentional learning

Intention to learn material is not as important to memory as how the reader processes it. participants were given a orienting task, and some were told to remember words and others were not (shallow processing). Intentional: told them to remember Incidental: not told they'd need to remember Pleasantness rating: requires integration with other things you know Results: incedental learning happens all the time, intentional learning only if we are later being tested.

what is the best explanation for the power law of learning?

LTP, frontal regions are more for organization.

Delayed match-to-sample task

Monkeys with lesions in the FL cannot perform this WM task. If the task was immediate, they could do it, but not with the delay. Similar results with infants that do not have developed FLs. Object permanence is similar in developmental trajectory.

Neural correlates of the Power Law of Learning

Neural changes involving learning (LTP). - the increase in responsiveness of a neuron as a function of past stimulation - hippocampus and cortex - "neural learning" - Hebb's postulate

_____ correlates with memory and maintaining information over delays

PFC

word length effect

Participants could remember 5 single sylable words easily, but could not remember 5 multisyllable words easily

Remembering words & interference experiment

Participants had to read words aloud. Either with no interference, with a visual task, or auditory task. Then asked participants to recall as many words as possible (but were not warned). Results: Any type of interference slowed people down.

Evidence that the articulatory loop uses speech

Participants were more confused when they tried to remember spans that had a high proportion of rhyming letters (such as BCTHVZ) than when they tried to remember spans that did not (such as HBKLMW). Plus there is activation in Broca's area.

Sperling Iconic Memory Task

Presented subjects briefly with a 3 by 4 matrix of letters. Had people report all of the numbers they remembered (whole report) or had people cued to report only some of the items in a display (partial report) either in the top, middle or bottom depending on if they hear a high, middle or low tone. Results: the number of items reported decreased as the delay in the cuing tone increased. THe longer the delay, the worse people performed because the information faded.

Spreading Activation

Process by which currently attended items can make associated memories more available (facilitates the rate at which words are read) - proposes that activation spreads along paths of a network - Problem: total recall (William James) once you begin processing, where would it end? We do not have recall of everything - Activation decays

Paller et al. brain regions study

Processing activity in PF regions regulates input to hippocampus that store memories - activation in PF appears to drive LTP in the hippocampus, drives what we remember and what we forget. - activation results in the creation and strengthening of memories

Depth of processing

Proposes that rehearsal improves memory only if the material is rehearsed in a deep and meaningful way, passive rehearsal did not improve memory. -Shallow and deep processing

Deep processing

Put towards something meaningful, you recall much better. More durable memory.

Phonological loop

Rehearsing verbal info. Articulatory loop: "inner voice", involves speech (Broca's area). Phonological Stores: inner ear, stores info in a phonological form, "word-length effect". (tempo-parietal region)

Articulary Suppression shows what?

Shows independent nature of WM systems. - disturbs memory for linguistic information, but does not disturb memory for visual information.

Working Memory

Temporary storage for info that is currently being used in some conscious capacity. - Frontal and Parietal regions - visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop, central executive

Recency

Tend to remember the last few items of the list. Can prevent it by delaying your recall.

Activation Calculations

The speed and probability of accessing a memory are determined by the memory's level of activation, which in turn is determined by its base-level activation and the activation it receives from associated concepts.

Primacy effect

Try harder to remember the first words in the set, but over time becomes difficult. This will go away if we stop you from rehearsing.

Mismatch Negativity

When a sound is presented that is different from recently heard sounds in pitch or loudness (or is a different phoneme), there is an increase in the negativity of the ERP recording. - Signal seems to come from near A1.

Other evidence of endcoding principles

a) elaboration is important in memory performance b) self-generated elaborations are often better than those provided by the experimenter c) high activity in the PFC and hippocampal regions is predictive of subsequent recall for all kinds of material

In a state of arousal, the ____ releases hormones that influence the processing in the hippocampus that is critical in forming memories

amygdala

Echoic Memory

auditory memory

Learning

can be considered the process by which new information about the world is acquired.

Memory

can be considered the process by which the knowledge is retained and retrieved.

What contributes the most to textual learning?

creating questions. Testing the material also seems to be important for retention

Activation

determines both the probability that some given piece of information will be retrieved from long-term memory and the speed with which that retrieval will be accomplished

Long-term memory is stored ___

everywhere in the brain. Explicit memory uniquely depends on temporal lobe and diencephalic structures (hippocampus, subiculum)

Shallow Processing

fragile memory, won't be able to recall easily

What technique is sometimes used to get at levels of activation in memory?

free-association

Criticism of Short-Term Memory Theory based on rehersal

it seems that amount of rehearsal is not critical to long-term memory. Rather, it is critical that we process information in a way that is conducive to setting up a long-term memory trace (ie. meaningful information).

long-term working memory

part of our working memory is formed by information we can quickly access from long-term memory - explains why memory span is larger for meaningful rather than unrelated words.

what region of the brain seems to be more active in deep-level processing?

prefrontal regions

what is the difference between short-term memory and phonological loop?

processing in the phonological loop is not necessary for storage in LTM, it just keeps information available.

what strategy was assumed to be used in memory experiments?

rehearsal, increasing the likelihood of being stored in LTM. The more participants rehearsed, the more likely they were to remember it.

Working Memory Theory

theory of rehearsal that did not tie into LTM

T or F, information in long-term memory can vary from moment to moment in terms of how easy it is to retrieve it into working memory.

true.

Iconinc Memory

visual memory

Explicit Memory

‣ Explicit (declarative) memory is the conscious acquisition of knowledge about people, places and things. (a.k.a. episodic) ‣ It is particularly well developed in the vertebrate brain.

Implicit memory

‣ Implicit (nondeclarative) memory is the nonconscious learning of motor skills and other tasks. (a.k.a. procedural) ‣ It includes simple associations (classical conditioning) and nonassociations (sensitization and habituation). ‣ Implicit memory involves the same sensory, motor, or associational pathways used in the expression of the learning process.