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.