3 Learning and memory Flashcards
What is the difference between escape learning and avoidance learning?
Escape learning: reducing unpleasantness of something that already exists
avoidance learning: avoiding something unpleasant that has not yet happened
In learning and memory, what is the concept of shaping?
Rewarding increasingly specific behaviours until you have a complicated behaviour that is learned.
What is instinctive drift?
Difficulty in overcoming instinctual behaviours (e.g. teaching raccoons to put coins in a piggy bank)
What is the self-reference effect?
The tendency to recall information best when we can put it into the context of our own lives, a phenomenon called the self-reference effect.
Give five common methods for forming memories/remembering things
Maintenance rehearsal: repetition of information to keep it in working memory, and/or short-term and eventually long-term memory
Mnemonics
Method of loci: associating an item of information with a location
Peg-word system: Associating numbers with items that rhyme or resemble the numbers.
Chunking/clustering: grouping elements of a larger list into groups of elements with related meanings
Sensory memory only lasts a few seconds. Give the two types of sensory memory
Echoic (auditory) and iconic (visual)
Short term memory is housed primarily in the hippocampus (where it is consolidated into long term memory), what is the rule that says approximately how many items can stay in short-term memory?
The 7 plus-or-minus 2 rule
What form of memory allows us to do math in our heads?
Working memory
What is elaborative rehearsal?
One way to consolidate information to long-term memory. Association of information to knowledge already stored in long term memory.
Similar to self-reference effect.
Very long term memories are moved to the cerebral cortex (e.g. name, birth date. etc)
What are the two types of long term memory and two subsets of declarative memories?
Implicit (nondeclarative/procedural - skills and conditioned responses)
Explicit (declarative): Divided into semantic (facts we know) and episodic (our experiences)
Define the following:
- Context effects of memory retrieval
- State-dependent memory/effect
- Serial position effect
Context effects: you can retrieve information better in the same context that you learning it
State-dependent effect: You recall information when in the same state (e.g. intoxicated) that you learning it
Serial position effect: You can recall the first (primacy) and last (recency) of information presented in a list
What is interference in memory loss?
Proactive interference: Old information interferes with the learning of new information (e.g. difficulty remembering new address because used to old one)
Retroactive interference: New information interferes with recall of old information (e.g. a teacher forgetting old students news when learning new student’s names)
What is a source-monitoring error?
Confusion between semantic and episodic memory
Details of an event are remembered but the context is confused (e.g. hearing a story that happened to someone else then recalling it happening to themselves)
