Download
1 / 48
480 likes | 640 Vues
Memory. Cognitive psychologist now view memory as similar to computer information processing: encoding, storage and retrieval. Cognitive Psych: the Psychology of thinking.
E N D
Memory • Cognitive psychologist now view memory as similar to computer information processing: encoding, storage and retrieval.
Cognitive Psych: the Psychology of thinking • Flashbulb Memories: a short visual image of an extremely important scene: where you were when the Challenger exploded; Kennedy assassinated;
Sensory Memories • The initial, fleeting, photographic encoding of spoken or visual sensations. Last about 4 to 5 seconds. • First step in encoding.
Encoding • Automatic Processing- unconscious processing of incidental info (the way you walked from your locker to this room) • Effortful Processing- encoding that requires attention and conscious effort (learning the psychological perspectives) 6
How We Encode • Semantic: we encode best things that make sense: Learning meaningful material requires about 1/10th the effort of material that has no meaning.
How we encode • Semantically: most powerful • Acoustically: next most powerful • Visually: least powerful • Two codes are better than one: so if you can see and understand you will remember more easily.
People don’t remember that tanning and smoking will damage your skin…but if you show them…
Importance of Meaning • Meaning and Memory Activity 11
Encoding • In addition to encoding messages with meaning, encoding using imagery, or mental pictures, is also very effective. 14
Imagery • Activity using Imagery 15
General Principles of Remembering (encoding) • The more repetition one day the less required to relearn: The amount of remembered depends on the amount of time spent learning. • Overlearning: continued learning passed the point we know information increases the amount we retain later.
Principles of Remembering (encoding) • Information learned just before we fall asleep is poorly remembered. • Spacing effect: spacing our learning of a subject over a long period of time aids in long term remembering. The longer the space between practice sessions, the better the recall. NO CRAMMING!
Principles of Remembering (encoding) • Serial Position Effect: When trying to remember long lists of items, we tend to remember the first and last items the best. • We will remember the first item the best of those two; Primacy effect.
Organizing for better memory • Peg words: associating known words/images with new words or numbers to remember. • Method of loci: placing ideas to remember around a familiar location. • Chunking: grouping ideas into chunks to reduce the number of items to encode. • Mnemonic Devices: memory aids that use imagery and organization (e.g. using the letters of items to be remembered to form a sentence to give you retrieval cues: Every Good Boy Does Fine; Roy G. Biv)
Mnemonic Examples • EGBDF • MVEMJSUNP • KPCOFGS • PEMDAS • HOMES 21
What is the memory capacity of the Sensory, STM & LTM? • Sensory: Sperling experiment 22
Sensory Memory (cont’d) • Iconic memory: the memory we have for visual information; amazing detail, but only lasts for a few tenths of a second. • Echoic memory: the memory we have for auditory info; this lasts 3-4 seconds. 23
Short term memory • + or minus 7 items for a short period. There is a rapid decay of unrehearsed information after roughly 12 seconds. • This is our on screen display or selective attention; what we are focusing on at any time. • Information may stay in Hippocampus longer and then either be discarded or sent to Long term memory.
Long Term Memory • Virtually limitless. • One estimate holds that the average adult has roughly a billion bits of info in their memory, and a storage capacity that is probably a thousand to a million times greater.
Memory is Synaptic Change • New memories cause physiological changes in the brain making networks easier to fire by adjusting the dendrite/neurotransmitters system. The easier to fire, the easier linked memories or concepts are to remember. • This stored ability for a circuit to fire is called: Long Term Potentiation (LTP). • Stress hormones help create LTP, allowing for more automatic encoding; “stronger emotional experiences make for stronger, more reliable memories.”
Two memory systems operating in tandem (Jimmie) • Implicit memories: (procedural) knowing how to do something; centralized in the cerebellum (littlebrain). This explains infantile amnesia, learning to swim or ride a bike. Those with hippocampus damage can still learn how to do things. • Explicit memories: (declarative) memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and “declare”: events (episodic), people, facts, school learning.
Memory Retrieval • To retrieve a memory you must first have some kind of retrieval cue, that Primes the neural network or schema. Those cues can be visual, auditory, or other sensations or internal thoughts. • Memory is retrieved into the hippocampus, which acts as a working memory.
Retrieval • Activating one strand of a schematic memory is called Priming. Mnemonic devices prime our memory so that we link difficult to remember memories with something easier or more familiar.
Forgetting as Retrieval error • If we cannot remember something, it could be that we never encoded it, or that we are having difficulty retrieving it. Interference of other memories are common retrieval errors.
Forgetting as Retrieval error. • Proactive interference: this is when something similar you learned in the past interferes with something new you are trying to encode. Say you studied French for three years and then decided to take Spanish in college. You may find yourself retrieving French words or pronouncing Spanish words with a French accent.
Forgetting as Retrieval error • Retroactive Interference: This is when a newly learned memory goes back and interferes with an old one. Say you’ve been driving for a while and then decide to learn a stick shift. Then when you start driving an automatic, you slam on the break with your left foot thinking it is a clutch.
Memory Construction is like a mosaic with decentralized bits all over brain. • Our memories are what we encode as well as how we retrieve them. Remember, we encode information semantically, for meaning, and may fill in the blanks with details that aren’t correct, or color the memory by the mood we are in.
Memory Contruction: like a mosiac • Déjà vu is often caused by a cue that makes you believe you’ve experienced the whole picture before, when really it was only one part that was familiar.
Retrieval • Context effect: Putting yourself back into the context where a memory was formed may trigger that memory. Going by an old house, a smell of perfume from a former girlfriend, or the smell of autumn football, may bring back a flood of memories. If you learn a list underwater, you will remember it better underwater.
Retrieval • State dependent memory: the state we are in influence the memories that are retrieved. When sad, happy, drunk, etc. These become a retrieval cue. • Memory is also mood congruent, it goes both ways: when sad we are likely to remember events as being sadder than we thought at the time or happier if happy.
Source Amnesia • Where we got a memory from, the source, is one of our weakest areas of memory. • People often believe an event occurred when really the event was a story they had heard (Ronald Reagan), or a dream, or a story told to them by their parents about when they were little that didn’t occur the way they remember.
Eyewitness Memory • Because of source amnesia and misinformation effect, eyewitness memories are notoriously bad. Recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse are also becoming called into question because of unwittingly planting false memories through the process of recovery.
Misinformation Effect • Similarly, we can encode a false memory if we are led to believe something occurred that didn’t. That memory will become just as real as memory of an event that actually occurred. Similarly, we fill in the gaps when retrieving memories, so the retrieval cues offered can change the memory as it comes out.
Tip of Tongue • Problem of retrieval, when you know you know it, but just can’t pull it. Things come to mind several minutes or hours later…
Repression or Motivated forgetting • Whether or not repression (burying a traumatic memory to a level you cannot retrieve) exists is being called into question. People seem to purposefully forget things (motivated forgetting), but many repressed memories that are recovered seem to have been planted, usually unknowingly. However, it is just as true that some recovered memories have been proven correct.
