Types of retrieval

Question 1

Define retrospective memory.

Answer 1

Remembering the past.

Question 2

What is prospective memory?

Answer 2

Remembering to do things in the future.

Question 3

What is one of the commonest everyday uses of memory?

Answer 3

Remembering to do things, i.e. prospective memory.

Question 4

What is one of the commonest reasons to complain about having a poor memory?

Answer 4

Forgetting to do things. However, prospective memory doesn’t appear to behave like other aspects of memory.

Question 5

Give an example of how prospective memory does not appear to behave like other aspects of memory.

Answer 5

Maylor (1990) found that prospective memory performance was not predicted by any of the traditional memory tasks.

Question 6

What did Maylor (1990) do?

Answer 6

Asked 222 elderly participants to telephone the lab once a day at a specified time for a week.

Question 7

What traditional (retrospective) memory tasks did Maylor (1990) use?

Answer 7

Digit span, 30 item free recall list, list learning task, and semantic memory (vocab test).

Question 8

What technique did Maylor (1990) find produced the best prospective memory performance?

Answer 8

Using the conjunction of phoning with a regularly occurring event - 0.11/5 errors.

Question 9

What technique did Maylor (1990) find produced good prospective memory performance?

Answer 9

Using external cues, for example setting an alarm (0.3/5 errors).

Question 10

What technique did Maylor (1990) find produced most of the failures in prospective memory performance?

Answer 10

Using internal cues - just trying to remember.

Question 11

What does prospective memory require, and what is it enhanced by?

Answer 11

Retrieving an intention at the appropriate time - like retrospective memory, it is enhanced by good retrieval cues.

Question 12

What do recent theories of prospective memory do?

Answer 12

Separate it into different components (e.g. Graf and Utti, 2001).

Question 13

What do recent theories of prospective memory suggest about performance of the elderly?

Answer 13

It may only be impaired in laboratory prospective tasks, e.g. Henry et al. (2004).

Question 14

When performing a recognition task, what two types of feelings can we have?

Answer 14

• recollective experience - remembering when the item was experienced before.
• familiarity - knowing the object has been seen before.

Question 15

What did Tulving (1985) state?

Answer 15

That we have two types of consciousness, autonoetic (self, own role) and noetic (just information). These are reflected in the phenomenon of the remember-know distinction, which in turn is represented as episodic and semantic memory.

Question 16

What variables particularly increase remember responses?

Answer 16

Deep processing, self generation and low word-frequency.

Question 17

What variables particularly increase know responses?

Answer 17

Maintenance rehearsal, non-words and massed learning.

Question 18

What are the process-distinction procedure and recollection-familiarity distinction descriptions of?

Answer 18

Two proposed memory processes.

Question 19

What does the episodic-semantic distinction generally contrast?

Answer 19

Memory structures.

Question 20

Give examples of a memory phenomenon, processes and structures to do with remembering and knowing.

Answer 20

Phenomenon - remember-know distinction.
Processes - process-distinction procedure and recollection-familiarity distinction.
Structures - episodic/semantic distinction.

Question 21

What did Johnson, Taylor and Raye (1977) do?

Answer 21

A lab experiment using source monitoring to test people’s memory for context - used paired associate learning and asked participants to judge how often the item was studied and tested.

Question 22

What did Johnson, Taylor and Raye (1977) find?

Answer 22

That people find it difficult to distinguish between internal (studying) and external (testing) events in frequency judgement - the two are interdependent. Source monitoring was innacurate.

Question 23

What can be concluded from laboratory tasks on source monitoring?

Answer 23

Even in a simple laboratory task, people have difficulty preventing information from two sources confounding each other.

Question 24

What did Johnson, Hashtroudi and Lindsay (1993) state?

Answer 24

That people’s inability to prevent sources from confounding each other has been expanded into a Source Monitoring Framework in memory.

Question 25

What is a particularly interesting example of source monitoring in action?

Answer 25

Reality monitoring - Johnson and Raye (1981). Memory for the information source may not be stored, so we may remember internally generated events but not that they were internally generated. The source of a memory may generally be reconstructed from its content.

Question 26

What did Johnson, Foley, Suengas and Raye (1988) state about the differences between real and imagined memories?

Answer 26

They differ in terms of perceptual information, contextual information, and supporting memories. However time blurs this distinction.

Question 27

What is the key research into real and suggested events?

Answer 27

Schooler, Gerhard and Loftus (1986), who investigated whether we can use reality monitoring to spot false memories.

Question 28

What did Schooler, Gerhard and Loftus (1986) do?

Answer 28

Used the same stimuli as in the Loftus, Miller and Burns (1978) road accident study, misinformed participants with a question about a Yield sign, when it had been a stop sign. Added in a description condition.

Question 29

What did Schooler, Gerhard and Loftus (1986) find?

Answer 29

Real memories had a higher proportion remembered and mean confidence and more sensory information than suggested ones.
Suggested memories had longer descriptions, more cognitive justification, more function explanation and more verbal hedges.

Question 30

What are verbal hedges?

Answer 30

The use of justification for one’s own thoughts - “because of ….., I think….”

Question 31

What else did Schooler, Gerhard and Loftus (1986) find?

Answer 31

Psychology students’ classification of real and suggested memories was just above chance, with confidence the main reason for classification . Geographic and cognitive information was particularly misleading. Training improves accuracy, but time blurs the distinction between perceptual and contextual information.

Question 32

Other than time, what can confuse real and false memories?

Answer 32

Repeatedly thinking about events may decrease the differences in memory between real and imagined events (Suengas and Johnson, 1988).

Question 33

According to Ross (1989), how is retrieval affected by social factors?

Answer 33

We rewrite our own memories in two ways:

1. Remembered attitudes - memories of previous attitudes are more similar to current ones than they were (hindsight bias).
2. Remembered behaviour - attitude change manipulations can distort memories of previous behaviour (cognitive dissonance).

Question 34

What could explain social influences on retrieval?

Answer 34

A simple bias in terms of state-congruent retrieval.

Question 35

What did Conway and Ross (1984) find about remembered abilities?

Answer 35

Groups of students rated their study skills before and after a training program. It made no difference to skills or grades, but afterwards they systematically remembered their pre-course grades as being worse than they were. Socially motivated to be state-incongruent.