Lectures 12-13 Memory

Question 1

Define memory

Answer 1

• Capacity of the nervous system to acquire and retain usable skill and knowledge
• ability to use experience in your life

Question 2

Stages of memory depend on what characteristics?

Answer 2

• duration
• capacity
• purpose

Question 3

What are the 3 stages/types of memory?

Answer 3

1. Sensory
2. Short term (close to working)
3. long term memory

Question 4

Types of sensory memory? Examples?

Answer 4

1. iconic (visual)
   –> letters flashed on a screen for a short period of time. Ability to remember letters is iconic memory
2. echoic (auditory)
   –> you’re listening to your professor give a lecture, and you remember the sentence they said to write it in your notes

Question 5

Sensory memory (dur. cap. pur.)

Answer 5

Duration:
- iconic: 3-4 sec
- echoic: 1/4 sec
(Very short)
Capacity:
- very large
Purpose:
- perceive the world around us as constant, we don’t forget what’s around us

Question 6

Short term memory (Dur, cap, pur)

Answer 6

Duration:
- 20-30 sec
Capacity:
- 7 +/- 2 (depending on how big the info is)
Purpose:
- keep track of info you need to remember for a short amount of time to accomplish a specific task

Question 7

Chunking def?

Answer 7

Organizing pieces of information into groups that are meaningful to you

Question 8

Short term memory example?

Answer 8

You remember the code you’re sent to log in, but you don’t need it after that

Question 9

Imagine that you receive a code to get access to your bank account. You look at the code and repeat it until you use it 10 sec later. Based on the modal memory model, what are you doing?

Answer 9

You get the iconic sensory input (look at code). You pay attention to the information and rehearse it so it is in your short term memory. Then, the information is lost because you don’t continue to rehearse it

Question 10

You might have noted when you play cards that you keep checking the cards you have. Based on what we have learned about memory why is that? What type of memory is active when we first get the cards? Explain your answer.

Answer 10

Short term memory
You have to keep checking because you don’t keep rehearsing the information and it hasn’t been encoded into long term memory.
When we first get the cards, it’s iconic sensory memory. You briefly remember the information about what you saw, but you can’t remember it after that. So, you pay attention and rehearse it to keep it in short term memory

Question 11

Types of long term memory? Type of information? Easy to describe?

Answer 11

• Declarative (what)
  –> Semantic (fact)
  –> Episodic (personal experiences)
  –> easy to describe
• Procedural (how)
  –> unconscious recall of motor skills, behaviors, habits
  –> very difficult to describe
  –> usually motor memories

Question 12

What type of memory did Ebbinghaus study? What theory did he discover?

Answer 12

Long term memory
“Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve”

Question 13

Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve: what does it show? what was he remembering? How to increase the curve? Problems?

Answer 13

• shows extreme and then gradual decrease/loss in memory
• used CVC trials
• you can remember much more if you look at it again, more retention in the long run
  problems:
• he chose nonsense words. You’re much more likely to remember something if it has meaning to you

Question 14

What is CVC? give an example?

Answer 14

Consonant vowel consonant
one syllable, 3 letter words
ex. bap, tif, bep, zik

Question 15

Let’s say that you spent the whole night studying for an exam. Based on Ebbinghaus’s studies, are you doing the right thing? (Yes/no) Why? How could you improve your study habits?

Answer 15

• No, you’re not doing the right thing.
• According to Ebbinghaus, repeated exposure and rehearsing the information is very important to remembering it in the long term
• If you study all night, you’re only exposed to it once
• to improve, repeatedly study over the course of a few weeks
• also, staying up all night doesn’t allow you to sleep, which is also important for encoding information

Question 16

Other ways to improve long term memory?

Answer 16

• overlearning (repetition)
• distributed practice
• elaborate on material
• get good sleep
• memory techniques such as mnemonics, method of loci, and palace method

Question 17

Why do we need sensory memory? Give an example of iconic memory and an example of echoic memory

Answer 17

• Sensory memory is important because it allows us to perceive our environment as constant. Without it, we would forget our surroundings
• Iconic ex: seeing letters flashed on a screen for a short period of time and being able to repeat them
• Echoic ex: hearing your professor speak and being able to copy the sentence into your notes a moment later

Question 18

What are the types of long-term memory? How do they differ from each other.

Answer 18

• Declarative (what)
  –> Semantic (fact)
  –> Episodic (personal experiences)
  –> easy to describe
• Procedural (how)
  –> unconscious recall of motor skills, behaviors, habits
  –> very difficult to describe
  –> usually motor memories

Question 19

Give a personal example of each type of long-term memory:

Answer 19

Declarative:
- semantic: I remember that the capital of Portugal is Lisbon
- episodic: I remember the events on the day of my high school graduation
Procedural:
- I know how to ride a bike

Question 20

What are the 2 reasons why we forget?

Answer 20

1. interference
2. decay

Question 21

what is decay?

Answer 21

when you don’t use a pathway, it becomes weaker, and eventually the connection is gone

Question 22

define interference

Answer 22

either the storage or retrieval is blocked or impaired by the presence of other information

Question 23

What is interference related to? what are the two types? explain and give examples

Answer 23

• related to the cues we use to remember things
• proactive
  –> old information interferes with new
  –> you have an old friend called prudence, then you meet someone called patience. You might call patience ‘prudence’ on accident
• retroactive:
  –> new information interferes with old
  –> if you change your phone, it can be difficult to remember the old one
  –> learning a 3rd language –> 2nd one is harder

Question 24

What is failure of memory? What are the most common examples:

Answer 24

• remembering wrong (not forgetting)
  examples:
• long term memory is biased
• you reconstruct what makes sense to you (constructivist theory)
• flashbulb memories
• misattributions

Question 25

Describe false fame effect, sleeper effect and cryptomnesia

Answer 25

False fame:
- exposure to people’s names can make you believe they’re famous
- the name is familiar, and you can’t attribute the familiarity to having read the name of a non-famous person
- you attribute it to their ‘fame’

Sleeper effect:
- you see information on a source you know is untrustworthy
- eventually, you forget the source of the information (and its untrustworthiness), and only remember the information
- the information becomes ‘fact’ in your mine

Cryptomnesia:
- you remember an idea, but not where it came from –> you think it’s your own
- you tell your friend an idea
- time goes by, and they come to you and say they came up with the idea
- they don’t remember the source of the idea was originally you

Question 26

Why do people make “bad” eyewitnesses? Can an eyewitness be manipulated? How? How are false memories created?

Answer 26

• bad eyewitnesses because memory is easily suggestible
• bad at identifying features of other races/ethnicities
• yes, people can be manipulated
• exposure to an idea or piece of information that you don’t remember can ‘create’ a memory of that piece of information
• False memories are created by suggesting things that the eyewitness did not originally remember
• ex. in the first interview, you’re asked if they wore a red jacket. You say no, or you don’t know. Second interview: you’re asked if they wore a red jacket. The red jacket sounds familiar, you’re more likely to say yes

Question 27

Describe the “Car accident experiment” and what Dr. Loftus concluded from it.

Answer 27

• Dr Elizabeth Loftus played a short clip of a car accident for 3 groups of people, and asked how fast they were going
• for group 1, she said ‘smashed’, for 2 she said ‘bumped’ and for 3 she said ‘hit’
• determined that people were so easily suggestible by the language of the question, that it significantly altered their perception of how fast the cars were going

Question 28

I have noticed that despite having studied French for many years, if I try to speak it now the English words come to my mind before the French ones. What is happening to my memory of the French language?

Answer 28

there is retroactive interference. You learned French as your second language, and English as your 3rd. the new information (english) is interfering with recall of the old information (french)

Question 29

What does the constructivist theory of memory say? How does this model explain how the stories we tell change trough time?

Answer 29

• you construct memories to fit with what makes sense to you
• the stories change as we rationalize what makes sense to us, especially after we hear new information (whether its true or not)