Psychology Chapter 6
Amnesia
Severe memory loss.
Schema distortion
False or distorted memories caused by the tendency to fill in missing memory details with information that is consistent with existing knowledge about a topic.
Frontal lobes
Involved in retrieving and organizing information that is associated with autobiographical and episodic memories.
Complex memory
Involves clusters of information, and each part of the memory may be stored in the brain area that originally processed the information.
Suppression
Motivated forgetting that occurs consciously, a deliberate attempt to not think about and remember specific information.
Repression
Motivating forgetting that occurs unconsciously; a memory that is blocked and unavailable to consciousness.
Divided attention
Rather than focusing your full attention on what you're doing, you're also thinking about other matters.
Alan Baddeley
The British psychologist who developed the best known working memory model. It has 3 components, the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive.
George Miller
Wrote the paper titled, The Magical Number Severn, Plus or Minus Two. He believed that the capacity of short-term memory is limited to about seven items, or bites of information, at one time.
Source memory or Source monitoring
Your ability to remember the original details or features of a memory, including when, where, and how you acquired the information or had the experience.
Nonsense syllable
a three-letter combination, made up of two consonants and a vowel, such as WIB or MEP. It almost sounds like a word but they are meaningless.
Episodic memory
Category of long-term memory that includes memories of particular events. Memories of your experiences.
Hypothesis
A testable prediction, often derived from a theory.
Deja vu experience
A French word for "already seen." Involves brief but intense feelings of familiarity in a situation that has not been previously experienced.
Retrieval cue
A clue, prompt, or hint that helps trigger recall of a given piece of information stored in long-term memory.
False memory
A distorted or fabricated recollection of something that did not actually happen.
Pseudoevent
A false story. Events that appear spontaneous but are in fact staged and scripted by public relations experts to appeal to the news media or the public.
Long-term potentiation
A long-lasting increase in synaptic strength between two neurons.
Imagination inflation
A memory phenomenon in which vividly imagining an event markedly increases confidence that the event actually occurred.
Tip-of-the-tongue experience (TOT)
A memory phenomenon that involves the sensation of knowing that specific information is stored in long-term memory, but being temporarily unable to retrieve it.
Stage model of memory
A model describing as consisting of three distinct stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
Semantic network model
A model that describes units of information in long-term memory as being organized in a complex network of associations.
Iconic memory
A momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli ; a photographic or picture memory lasting no more than a few tenths of a second.
Alzheimer's disease
A progressive disease that destroys the brains neurons, gradually impairing memory, thinking, language, and other cognitive functions, resulting in the complete inability to care for oneself; the most common cause of dementia.
Script
A schema for the typical sequence of an everyday event.
Recognition
A test of long-term memory that involves identifying correct information out of several possible choices.
Cued recall
A test of long-term memory that involves remembering an item of information in response to a retrieval cue.
Recall
A test of long-term memory that involves retrieving information without the aid of retrieval cues; also called free recall.
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
A tool created by Hermann Ebbinghaus that reveals two distinct patterns in the relationship between forgetting and the passage of time. First, much of what we forget is lost relatively soon after we originally learned it. Second, it reveals that the amount of forgetting eventually levels off. That is, the information that is not quickly forgotten seems to be remarkably stable in memory over long periods of time.
Auditory sensory memory
Also referred to as echoic memory, meaning a brief memory that is like an echo.
Visual sensory memory
Also referred to as iconic memory, is a brief memory of an image, or icon.
Karl S. Lashley
An American psychologist who set out to find evidence for Pavlov's speculations. Lashley's research was his belief that memory was localized, meaning that a particular memory was stored in a specific brain area. At the end of his career, Lashley concluded that memories are not localized in specific locations but instead are distributed, or stored, throughout the brain. He was wrong, but not completely wrong, some memories do seem to be localized at specific spots in the brain.
Mood congruence
An encoding specificity phenomenon in which a given mood tends to evoke memories that are consistent with that mood.
Schema
An organized cluster of information about a particular topic.
Self reference effect
Applying information to yourself to help you remember.
Eric Kandel
Awarded the Nobel prize in 2000 for his discoveries on the neural basis of memory using Aplysia, a gentle, seaweed-munching sea snail that resides off the California coast. The key reason Kandel chose Aplysia is it only has about 20,000 good-sized neurons.
Nelson Cowan
Believes that the type of stimuli used in many short-term memory tests has led researchers to overestimate its capacity.
Samantic memory
Category of long-term memory that includes memories of general knowledge, concepts, facts, and names.
Procedural memory
Category of long-term memory that includes memories of different skills, operations, and actions.
Richard F. Thompson
Discovered the neurobiological basis for learning and memory. He used a very simple behavior, a classically conditioned eye blink, as a model system to locate memory trace in the brain. He succeeded, identifying the critical region in the cerebellum where the memory of the learned behavior was stored.
Medial temporal lobes
Do not actually store the information that comprises our autobiographical memories. Rather, they are involved in encoding complex memories, by forming links among the information stored in multiple brain regions.
Absentmindedness
Everyday memory failure that occurs because you don't pay enough attention to a bit of information at the time when you should be encoding it, such as which aisle you parked your car at the airport.
Retroactive interference
Forgetting in which a new memory interferes with remembering an old memory, backward-acting memory interference.
Proactive interference
Forgetting in which an old memory interferes with remembering a new memory, forward-acting memory interference.
Source confusion
Forgetting or misremembering the true source of a memory.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
German psychologist who began the scientific study of forgetting in the 1870's. His goal was to determine how much information was forgotten after different lengths of time.
Suggestion
Hypnosis, guided imagery, or other highly suggestive techniques that can inadvertently create vivid false memories.
Amygdala
Involved in encoding and storing the emotional qualities associated with particular memories, such as fear or anger.
False familiarity
Increase feelings of familiarity due to repeatedly imagining a \n event.
Chunking
Increasing the amount of information that can be held in short-term memory by grouping related items together into a single unit, or chunk.
Explicit memory
Information of knowledge that can be consciously recollected; also called declarative memory.
Implicit memory
Information or knowledge that affects behavior or task performance but cannot be consciously recollected; also called non-declarative memory.
Cerebellum
Involved in classically conditioning simple reflexes, such as the eye blink reflex.
Anterograde amnesia
Loss of memory caused by the inability to store new memories, foward-acting amnesia.
Retrograde amnesia
Loss or memory, especially episodic information, backward acting amnesia.
Kinesthetic codes
Means encoding stimuli by movement (like American Sign Language).
Semantic codes
Means representing information as its general meaning. Dominates long term memory.
Partial recall
Memory task in which on specific set of items are to be reported.
Delayed partial report
Memory task in which the information to be remembered is removed before the appearance of a visual or auditory cue indicating the specific set of items that are to be reported.
Clustering
Organizing items into related groups during recall from long-term memory.
Prefrontal lobe
Plays an important role in working memory.
Dementia
Progressive deterioration and impairment of memory, reasoning, and other cognitive functions occurring as the result of a disease or a condition.
George Sperling
Psychologist whose experiment demonstrated that our visual memory holds a great deal of information very briefly, for about half a second.
Acoustic codes
Refer to representing information as sequences of sound (like a song or rhyme).
Visual codes
Refer to representing stimuli as pictures (like someone's face).
Elaborative rehearsal
Rehearsal that involves focusing on the meaning of information to help encode and transfer it to long-term memory. Elaborative rehearsal significantly improves memory for new material. Elaborative rehearsal is better for long-term memory and deeper processing.
Prospective memory
Remembering to do something in the future. The crucial component of a prospective memory is when something needs to be remembered, rather than what. Rather than encoding failure, prospective memory failures are due to retrieval cue failure - the inability to recall a memory because of missing or inadequate retrieval cues.
Lost in the mall technique
Research strategy conducted by Elizabeth Loftus using information from family members to help create or induce false memories of childhood experiences for participants.
Suzanne Corkin & Brenda Milner
Studied Henry Molaison's brain for the past 50 years.
Mnemonics
Strategies for putting information into an organized context in order to remember it more easily.
Short-term memory
The active stage of memory in which information is stored for up to about 20 seconds. It is the stage of memory in which information transferred from sensory memory and information retrieved from long-term memory become conscious. Short-term memory provides temporary storage for information that is currently being used in some conscious cognitive activity.
Hippocampus
The encoding of new memories for events and information and the transfer of those new memories from short-term to long-term memory.
Memory consolidation
The gradual, physical process of converting new long-term memories to stable, enduring memory codes.
Memory trace or engram
The hypothetical brain changes associated with a particular stored memory.
Forgetting
The inability to recall information that was previously available.
Retrieval cue failure
The inability to recall long-term memories because of inadequate or missing retrieval cues.
Encoding failure
The inability to recall specific information because of insufficient encoding of the information for storage in long-term memory.
Maintenance rehearsal
The mental or verbal repetition of information in order to maintain it beyond the usual 20-second duration of short-term memory. Maintenance rehearsal works well for short-term memory and shallow processing.
Memory
The mental processes that enable you to retain and retrieve information over time.
Encoding specificity principle
The principle that when the conditions of information retrieval are similar to the conditions of information encoding, retrieval is more likely to be successful.
Retrieval
The process of accessing stored information.
Storage
The process of retaining information in memory so that it can be used at a later time.
Encoding
The process of transforming information into a form that can be entered into and retained by the memory system.
Flashbulb memory
The recall of very specific images or details surrounding a vivid, rare, or significant personal event; details may or may not be accurate.
Sensory memory
The stage of memory that registers information from the environment and holds it for a very brief period of time. The sensory memory stores impressions so that they overlap slightly with one another.
Long-term memory
The stage of memory that represents the long-term storage of information. Long-term memory is vulnerable to distortion. Information can be stored here , potentially for a lifetime.
Working memory
The temporary storage and active, conscious manipulation of information needed for complex cognitive tasks, such as reasoning, learning, and problem solving.
Recency effect (of serial position effect)
The tendency to recall the final items in a list.
Primacy effect (of serial position effect)
The tendency to recall the first items in a list.
Context effect
The tendency to recover information more easily when the retrieval occurs in the same setting as the original learning of the information.
Serial position effect
The tendency to remember items at the beginning and end of a list better then items in the middle.
Interference theory
The theory that forgetting is caused by the memory competing with or replacing another.
Decay theory
The view that forgetting is due to normal metabolic processes that occur in the brain over time.
Blending fact and fiction
Using vivid, authentic details to add to the legitimacy and believability of a pseudoevent.
Misinformation effect
When erroneous information received after an event leads to distorted or false memories of the events.
Serial recall
When you need to remember a list of items in their original order. Examples of serial recall is, remembering speeches, phone numbers, and directions.