Psych - Chapter 6 study guide

Flashbulb memories

An extremely vivid memory of the conditions surrounding one's first hearing the news of a surprising, shocking, or highly emotional event. Easily recalled due to high emotionality, consequentiality (importance), and rehearsal (how often it's spoken about. Ex: Death of a friend/family member or 9/11.

Top 10 reasons we forget

-Serial Position effect (primacy & recency) -Decay (disappears after no use) -Cue dependent (context dependent) -State dependent -Interference -Damage to Hippocampus -Head Trauma -Illness, virus, marijuana -ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) -Repression

How is information stored in you short-term memory?

-short-term memories are stored according to sound. The short-term memory can hold about seven (from five to nine) items for less than 30 seconds without rehearsal; also called working memory.

Youtube clip on memory loss/amnesia

Anterograde amnesia - The inability to form long-term memories occurring after the events of a brain injury.

Sensory Memory

Holds information from the senses for a period of time ranging from only a fraction of a second to about 2 seconds.

Hippocampus

Involved in the formation of semantic memories. Primarily responsible for processing and forming new memories from experiences, but is not where they are permanently stored.

Serial position effect

Primacy and recency effect. The finding that, for information learned in a sequence, recall is better for the beginning and ending items than for the middle items in the sequence.

Memory cues

Retrieval cue - any stimulus or bit of information that aids in retrieval.

Describe the capacity, duration, and susceptibility of short-term memory

The capacity of the short term memory is about 7 items (5-9 depending on the person) for about 30 seconds without rehearsal. Easy to lose track of items, especially if overloaded with information.

How does meaningfulness relate to memory?

The less meaningful the material is to you, the more you will forget.

Mnemonic systems: peg system

The peg system is a mnemonic system where you imagine something outrageous that has to do with the item you're attempting to recall.

Repression and motivated forgetting

-Repression: Removing unpleasant memories from one's consciousness, so that one is no longer aware that a painful event occurred -Motivated Forgetting: Suppression or repression in an effort to protect from material that is painful, frightening, or otherwise unpleasant

Retroactive interference and proactive interference

-Retroactive Interference: New learning interferes with recall of old (previous) learning -Proactive Interference: Information or experiences already stored hinder memory

Understand the concept of chunking and recoding.

-Chunking: A memory strategy that involves grouping or organizing bits of information into larger units, which are easier to remember. -Recoding: Recalling information and transforming it into something legible

Describe the process of memory (encoding, storage, retrieval, forgetting).

-Encoding: transforming information into a form that can be stored in your memory -Storage: keeping or maintaining information in your memory -Retrieval: the process of bringing to mind information that has been stored in memory -Forgetting: loss of memory, whether motivated or prospective

What is an LPC or LCDC?

-LPC: Licensed Professional Counselor -LCDC: Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor

Recognition, recall, relearning, savings score.

-Recognition: A memory task in which a person must simply identify material as familiar or as having been encountered before -Recall: A memory task in which a person must produce required information by searching memory. -Relearning: A measure of memory in which retention is expressed as the percentage of time saved when material is relearned compared with the time required to learn the material originally. -Savings score: The percentage of time saved when relearning material compared with the amount of time required for the original learning.

Types of long-term memory

Declarative memory and procedural memory are the two types of long-term memory. Procedural memory consists of how to do things. Declarative memory consists of facts, general knowledge, and personal experiences.

Herman Ebbinghaus, nonsense syllables.

Ebbinghaus - The first person to quantify the effect of relearning was Herman Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist and pioneering researcher of human memory. He memorized "nonsense syllables" (meaningless combinations of vowels and consonants, such as DAZ and MIB. Once he could recite it confidently, he would put it aside so that he could relearn it later. The point of this was so that he could calculate how much time he had saved in Round 2, a measure called the "savings score." The less meaningful the material is to you, the more you will forget.

How can you best get information into your long-term memory? How can this be applied to studying?

Elaborative rehearsal?

Tip of tongue phenomenon

Example of retrieval failure.

Describe the characteristics of long-term memory.

Has a virtually unlimited capacity and contains cast stores of a person's permanent or relatively permanent memories.

Maintenance vs. elaborate rehearsal: What is the significance of rehearsal and types?

Maintenance rehearsal is the process of repeating new info over and over to retain it in your short-term memory. Elaborate rehearsal is the process of relating new information to old information in order to better store it.