Cognitive Psychology: Chapter 7

Retrieving Information from Long Term Memory

1. Cued Recall Test 2. Generation Effect

Retrieval Cue

A word or other stimulus that helps a person remember information storied in memory. -Location can serve as a retrieval cue

Which example below best demonstrates state-dependent learning?

Although Emily doesn't very often think about her first love, Steve, she can't help getting caught up in happy memories when "their song" (the first song they danced to) plays on the radio.

______ transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state, in which they are resistant to disruption.

Consolidation

Classic Levels of Processing Research

For each word presented, answer one of the following questions... (Craik and Tulving research concludes that deeper processing leads to better memory) 1. Shallow: is the word printed in capitol letters? (structural) -Processing that involves repetition with little attention to meaning. Shallow processing is usually associated with maintenance rehearsal. 2. Medium: Does the word rhyme with train (phonemic) 3. Deep: Does the word fit into this sentence (semantic) -Processing that involves attention to meaning and relating an iten to something else. Deep processing is usually associated with elaborative rehearsal. *The original studies used incidental memory *Frontal lobe is connected to deep processing

Ice Water Experiment

Ice water activates a stress hormone response -The people that dip their arms in ice water have a better memory of the emotional images they saw prior -amygadala

According to the levels of processing theory, which of the following tasks will produce the best long-term memory for a set of words?

Making a connection between each word and something you've previously learned

Relating words to survival (James Nairne)

Memory was shaped to increase the ability of survival -Experiment: relate words on a list to things you need to survive on a remote island -Nairne found that linking words to survival situations created memory that was not only better, but was also better than memory achieved b the elaborative strategies listed earlier.

Elaboration in Practice

Mnemonic Devices -Mnemonics aid memory by organizing, chunking, and/or adding meaning to-be-learned material -Can be verbal, visual (imagery), or a combination -Examples: acrostics, acronyms, rhymes, or songs -Roy G Biv, PEMDAS, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

Your book explains that brief episodes of retrograde amnesia (e.g., the traumatic disruption of newly formed memories when a football player takes a hit to the head and can't recall the last play before the hit) reflect

a failure of memory consolidation.

Acquiring information and transforming it into long-term memory is

encoding

According to your text, imagery enhances memory because

imagery can be used to create connections between items to be remembered.

Hebb's idea of long-term potentiation, which provides a physiological mechanism for the long-term storage of memories, includes the idea of

increased firing in the neurons.

The standard model of consolidation suggests the hippocampus is critical only for ______ memories; the multiple trace model suggests the hippocampus is also critical for ______ memories.

recent explicit ... remote episodic

Graded amnesia occurs because

recent memories are more connected to the hippocampus than remote memories.

Treatment of PTSD has benefitted from recent research on

reconsolidation

Retrograde amnesia is usually less severe for ______ memories.

remote

In Slameka and Graf's (1978) study, some participants read word pairs, while other participants had to fill in the blank letters of the second word in a pair with a word related to the first word. The latter group performed better on a later memory task, illustrating

the generation effect.

Students report they tend to easily remember information from textbooks that are relevant to their lives, an example of

the self-reference effect.

Bransford and Johnson's study had participants hear a passage which turned out to be about a man on the street serenading his girlfriend in a tall building. The wording of the passage made it difficult to understand, but looking at a picture made it easier to understand. The results of this study illustrated the importance of ______ in forming reliable long-term memories.

an organizational context during learning

Match Learning and Testing Conditions

1. Encoding specificity -The principle that we learn information together with its context. This means that presence of the context can lead to enhanced memory for the information -match the context -Baddedly; scuba diving test -under water vs. on land 2. State-Dependent Learning -The principle that memory is best when a person is in the same state for encoding and retrieval. -match the internal state -happy vs. sad 3. Transfer-Appropriate Processing -When the type of task that occurs during encoding matches the type of task that occurs during retrieval -match the task -study the way you are going to be tested -meaning task > rhyming vs. rhyming > rhyming

Elaboration Strategies

1. The Self Reference Effect -Memory for a word is improved by relating the word to oneself -Experiment by T.B. Rogers et. al. - they used the same procedure as Craik and Tulving 2. Visual Imagery 3. Generation effect - Memory for material is better when a person generates the material himself, rather than passively recieving it -Generate your own words to remember other words rather than using words that have already been given to you 4. Organization -Group information into meaningful categories -outlines, tree diagrams, hierarchies, flow charts, concept maps -Establish mental model, or schema, for efficient retrieval 5. Retrieval Practice -The testing effect: enhanced performance on a memory test cause by being tested on the material to be remembered. -Roediger and Karpicke experiment -Conclusion: being tested is better than reading over the information again

Free Recall vs. Cued Recall

In free recall a subject is simply asked to recall a stimuli. In cued recall a subject is presented with retrieval cues to aid in recall of the previously experienced stimuli. Experiment by Tulving and Pearlstone: -One group of participants were asked to recall a list of words. The next group of participants were asked to recall a list of words but were also given a list of categories to help (or cue) the list of words they were supposed to recall. Experiment by Mantyla: -Subjects were asked to recalled 504 words and were asked to come up with three words that describe all of the 504 words. -The results indicated that when the self-generated retrieval cues were presented, subjects remembered 91% percent of the words, but when the other-person-generated retrieval cues were presented, subjects remembered only 55% of the words. -Another experiment by Mantyla: - Another control group was presented with only the cue words generated by someone, these subjects were only about to determine 17% of the nouns.

Standard Model of Consolidation

Proposes that memory retrieval depends on the hippocampus during consolidation, but that once consolidation is complete, retrieval no longer depends on the hippocampus Reactivation: A process in which the hippocampus replays the neural activity associated with a memory -connection of the hippocampus and the cortex -glue that binds together the representations of memory from different cortical areas -Graded amnesia- this amnesia tends to be most severe for events that happened just before the injury and to become less severe for earlier event. This gradual decrease decrease in amnesia corresponds, according to the standard model, to the changes in connection between the hippocampus and cortical areas; as time passes after an event, connection between the cortical areas are formed and strengthened, and the connections between the hippocampus and cortex weaken and eventually vanish. -The hippocampus is strongly active when memories are first formed and initially recalled but becomes less involved as memories are consolidated, until eventually the connections between cortical areas themselves are sufficient to retrieve remote memories - memories that occurred a long time ago.

Consolidation and Sleep - Steffan Gais

Recent research supports the idea that while the reactivation process associated with consolidation may begin as soon as a memory is formed, it is particularly associated with consolidation may begin as soon as a memory is formed, it is particularly strong during sleep.

Consolidation and Retrieval

Reconsolidation: A process proposed by Nadar and others that occurs when a memory is retrieved and so becomes reactivated. Once this occurs, the memory must be consolidated again, as it was during the initial learning. This repeat consolidation is reconsolidation - updating memory. -Retrieved memories become fragile, just as it was immediately after it was first formed, and the drug can prevent reconsolidation. -A reactivated memory becomes fragile until it is reconsolidated

Maintenance Rehearsal

Rehearsal that involves repetition without any consideration of meaning or making connections to other information -Typically this type of rehearsal results in poor memory.

Elaborative Rehearsal

Rehearsal that involves thinking about the meaning of an item to be remembered or making connections between that item and prior knowledge -meaning and connection -relationship between encoding a retrieval

Matching conditions of encoding and retrieval

Retrieval can be increased by matching the conditions at retrieval to the conditions that existed at encoding. -EX. if you are in a room and think about something and then you move to another room and forget what you wanted to do. Your best chance of remembering that task would be to go back to where you first thought of the task.

Which of the following scenarios best illustrates how effective or ineffective maintenance rehearsal is in transferring information into LTM?

Serena's keys were stolen from her purse. She cannot give a detailed description of her keychain to the police, even though she used it every day for three years.

Memory Consolidation in the Brain

Synapse: The small spaces between the end of a neuron and the cell body or dendrite of another neuron and that when signals reach the end of a neurpn, they cause neurotransmitters to be released onto the next neuron. Neural circuits are interconnected groups of neurons 1. Synaptic Consolidation - minutes or hours -Structural Changes at Synapse -long-term potentiation: The increased firing that occurs in a neuron due to prior activity at the synapse -The first time neuron A is stimulated, neuron B fires slowly. However, after repeated stimulation, neuron B fires much more rapidly to the same stimulus *Memories for an experience cause changes in many thousands of synapses, and a specific experience is probably represented by the pattern of firing across this group of neurons -Similar to population coding 2. Systems Consolidation -months or years -reorganization of neural circuits -Major mechanisms: -1. reactivation -2. reconsolidation *Neuropsychological evidence from amnesia *Both forms of consolidation happen together but at different speeds and levels of the nervous system

Levels of processing theory and Depth Processing

The idea that memory depends on how information is encoded, with better memory being achieved when processing is deep than when processing is shallow -Craik and Lockhart -the term is rarely used today, but the following phrase is still relevant - that memory memory retrieval is affected by how items are encoded The idea that the processing that occurs as an item is being encoded into memory can be deep medium or shallow. -degree of semantic involvement

Multiple Trace Model of Consolidation

The idea that the hippocampus is involved in the retrieval of remote memories, especially episodic memories. This contrasts with the standard model of memory, which proposes that the hippocampus is involved only in the retrieval of recent memories. -Thus, the response of the hippocampus decreases over time, as proposed by the standard model of consolidation. However, in contrast to the standard model's claim that the hippocampus is not necessary for the retrieval of remote memories, the decrease in response occurs only for memories that have lost their episodic character and are now more semantic in nature. -Only for semantic explicit memories *episodic explicit memories always require the hippocampus

Encoding

The process of acquiring information and transferring it into long-term memory

Consolidation - Muller and Pizecker

The process that transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state, in which they are resistant to disruption.

Paired-associate Learning (Bower and Winzenz) Visual Imagery elaboration strategy

The researchers decided to test whether using visual imagery, "images in the head" that connect words visually, can create connections that enhance memory - they used the paired-associate learning procedure to test their question Paired-associate learning: A learning task in which participants are first presented with pairs of words, then one word of each pair is presented and the task is to recall the other word. -The subjects who had created images remembered more than twice as many words as the subjects who had just repeated the word pairs

Free recall of the stimulus list "apple, desk, shoe, sofa, plum, chair, cherry, coat, lamp, pants" will most likely yield which of these response patterns?

a. "apple, chair, cherry, coat, desk, lamp, plum, shoe, sofa" b. "apple, cherry, plum, shoe, coat, lamp, chair, pants" Correct c. "apple, desk, shoe, coat, lamp, pants" d. "apple, desk, shoe, sofa, plum, chair, cherry, coat, lamp, pants"

According to the levels of processing theory, memory durability depends on the depth at which information is

encoded.

People often report an annoying memory failure where they walk from one end of the house to the other for something, and when they get to their destination, they forget what they went to retrieve. As soon as they return to the first room, they are reminded of what they wanted in the first place. This common experience best illustrates the principle of

encoding specificity.

The principle that we encode information together with its context is known as

encoding specificity.

From the behavior of H.M., who experienced memory problems after a brain operation, we can conclude that the hippocampus is important in

explicit long-term memory acquisition.

The memory mechanism Hebb proposed is associated with

long-term potentiation.

The maintenance rehearsal task of learning a word by repeating it over and over again is most likely to

produce some short-term remembering, but fail to produce longer-term memories.

Elaborative rehearsal of a word will LEAST likely be accomplished by

repeating it over and over

The standard model of consolidation proposes that the hippocampus is

strongly active when memories are first formed and being consolidated but becomes less active when retrieving older memories that are already consolidated.

Jenkins and Russell (1952) presented a list of words like "chair, apple, dish, shoe, cherry, sofa" to participants. In a test, participants recalled the words in a different order than the order in which they were originally presented. This result occurred because of the

tendency of objects in the same category to become organized.

Memory performance is enhanced if the type of task at encoding matches the type of task at retrieval. This is called

transfer-appropriate processing.

Recent research on memory, based largely on fear conditioning in rats, indicates that

when a memory is reactivated, it becomes capable of being changed or altered, just as it was immediately after it was formed.