Memory

Question 1

What are the three stages of memory?

Answer 1

1. sensory memory
2. short-term memory
3. long-term memory

Question 2

What is the function of sensory memory?

Answer 2

Sensory memory is a buffer between what is in the world and what we actually take into our minds. This information is held for less than a second before it is lost or transferred to short-term memory.

Question 3

What are common properties of sensory memory?

Answer 3

• very short duration
• connects memory to perception
• includes echoic and iconic memory

Question 4

What did George Sperling study?

Answer 4

iconic memory

Question 5

Explain iconic memory.

Answer 5

This is the idea that we have partial photographic memory within our sensory memory. We can see images of letters or numbers and recall them from the image in our brain, but they usually fade too quickly to remember very many. This is called a partial report.

Question 6

What term did Ulric Neisser coin in the field of visual memory?

Answer 6

icon

An icon is a fleeting visual memory that lasts only about half a second.

Question 7

If you see a picture, then immediately see another one, you will have weakened memory of the first picture. What is this phenomenon called?

Answer 7

backward masking

The closer the second stimulus is to the first, the better it will “mask” the first. This is also the case when listening to and remembering sounds.

Question 8

How does the “rubber pencil” optical illusion work?

Answer 8

Since icons are stored in your sensory memory, the image of the pencil in any of its states remains with you as the pencil moves. The pencil moves quickly enough that you are constantly generating new iconic memories, making the pencil appear rubbery.

Question 9

What is echoic memory?

Answer 9

Like iconic memory, echoic memory holds an exact copy of a sound in our sensory memory for a few seconds.

Question 10

If you are watching a movie and your roommate asks you to take out the trash, which are you more likely to pay attention to/remember and why?

Answer 10

The movie will likely be remembered due to selective attention. Selective attention allows us to encode into short- or long-term memory the things that are important to us at the time they enter our sensory memory.

Question 11

What is the most common example of selective memory? Why do we have selective memory?

Answer 11

The cocktail party effect highlights that a person can attend to one salient message (like their own name) and tune out others. Another example is that we remember things that conform to our own beliefs and forget the things that don’t.

People must selectively attend to stimuli because they only have so much capacity.

Question 12

What kind of memory is used when you say a number over and over (rehearsal) before you dial it into your phone?

Answer 12

Short-term memory is used, and lasts in your brain for roughly 10-30 seconds. Information in short-term memory is lost due to interference.

Question 13

What is the type of rehearsal that allows short-term memories to transfer to long-term memory?

Answer 13

elaborative rehearsal

Question 14

What is the difference between maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal?

Answer 14

Maintenance rehearsal is simply repeating the stimulus again and again in order to remember it. While maintenance rehearsal is good for rote memorization, elaborative rehearsal organizes the stimulus into something meaningful so that it is processed deeply and remembered better.

Question 15

To what does George Miller’s finding regarding “the magical number seven, plus or minus two” refer?

Answer 15

This phrase refers to the idea of chunking, which states that we can recall roughly seven chunks of information from our short-term memory, plus or minus two chunks.

Question 16

If we can only hold seven chunks of information in our short-term memory, does that mean we can’t remember a list of more than seven words?

Answer 16

No. Bits of information, like words or letters, can be chunked together. This is why we can remember words with more than seven or so letters: the letters are combined into one chunk (the full word).

If we want to remember a list of more than seven words, we can arrange them into fewer than seven categories or chunks.

Question 17

Since short-term memory is believed to be more auditory than visual, how are stimuli encoded?

Answer 17

phonologically

Question 18

What are the types of interference?

Answer 18

proactive interference and retroactive interference

Question 19

If you learn a song one way and then are asked to sing it differently later, you may have difficulty remembering the new way as you keep remembering the old way instead. What kind of interference is this?

Answer 19

proactive interference

Your original memory of how the song is sung is inhibiting your ability to remember the newer memories of the song.

Question 20

If your favorite sports team gets newly designed jerseys, you may forget what the old jerseys looked like over time. What kind of interference is occurring?

Answer 20

retroactive interference

New information entering your memory clouds the old memories, inhibiting their recall.

Question 21

What kind of memory is used when remembering your own phone number?

Answer 21

Long-term memory, which can last for days, weeks, years, or life. Very little gets transferred from your short-term to your long-term memory.

Question 22

What are the three measures of memory retention?

Answer 22

1. recall
2. recognition
3. savings (or relearning)

Question 23

What is recognition?

Answer 23

Recognition is the easiest form of memory retention measurement, since all it requires is someone remembering that they have been exposed to the stimulus before.

Question 24

What is recall and what are its two types?

Answer 24

In memory tasks, recall is when a participant must restate something learned previously.

1. Free recall is when the subject is not cued with anything like a word stem or a subject grouping.
2. Cued recall is when a specific stimulus must be restated, like a fill-in-the-blank question on an exam.

Question 25

How does savings test long-term memory?

Answer 25

If you learn something, like a language, and then don’t use it, some of it will be forgotten. If you study the same language again, it will take less time to learn than it did originally. Savings assesses how much was left in your long-term memory between the first and second time the language was learned.

Question 26

What principle says that you should take a test in the same seat you were in when you learned the material for the test in order to remember it better?

Answer 26

the encoding-specificity principle

Question 27

What are the three types of long-term memory?

Answer 27

1. episodic memory
2. semantic memory
3. procedural memory

Question 28

What kind of memory is used when riding a bike?

Answer 28

Procedural memory is the part of long-term memory that remembers how to perform an action.

Question 29

What makes episodic memory different from semantic memory?

Answer 29

Episodic memory involves the self, like remembering your first kiss or other episodes from your life.

Semantic memory does not involve the self, but rather facts, like directions from your home to school.

Question 30

What kind of memory is used when remembering a fact?

Answer 30

declarative memory

Question 31

What kind of memory accounts for the fact that you know how to tie your shoes, even though you can’t remember when you learned it?

Answer 31

Implicit memories are unconscious, and sometimes you don’t even know you have those memories.

Question 32

1. What is an explicit memory?
2. What two types of memory make up explicit memory?

Answer 32

1. A memory one can intentionally, consciously recall.
2. Episodic Memory & Semantic Memory

Question 33

If an individual can remember events from before the onset of amnesia (but not after), what kind of amnesia does he have?

Answer 33

Anterograde amnesia, which prevents patients from making new autobiographical memories, but allows them to recall memories from before the onset of amnesia.

Sometimes anterograde amnesia may be the result of a brain injury; sometimes it is a precursor of dementia.

Question 34

If an individual can form new memories but is unable to recall any autoibiographical memories from before the onset of amnesia, what kind of amnesia does he have?

Answer 34

Retrograde amnesia, which prevents recall of autobiographical memories before onset of amnesia.

Question 35

What is another term for photographic memory?

Answer 35

eidetic memory

Question 36

What well-known major contribution did Hermann Ebbinghaus make to the understanding of memory?

Answer 36

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) first established primacy, recency, and the serial position and forgetting curves?

Question 37

Explain Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve.

Answer 37

When we learn new information, much of it is lost almost immediately after learning it. After this initial drop, however, forgetting nearly plateaus and the loss of memory is far less drastic.

Question 38

“Oh, what’s that actress’ name? The blonde one, she’s in all those romantic comedies, she was married to that other actor, and she was on a soap opera as a kid. Why can’t I remember her name?”

What is happening in this sentence?

Answer 38

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is preventing us from recalling information we already know.

The semantic network theory believes we are trying to connect cues we hold about the identity of the actress until we can link the cues to her name, even though we are unable to recall the name immediately.

(The tip of the tongue phenomenon is an example of the phenomenon/memory error of blocking.)

Question 39

What is a flashbulb memory?

Answer 39

A flashbulb memory is a form of memory in which it seems almost as if one’s brain captured a picture or brief video of an event and storing it in one’s memory.

People report vividly recalling where they were and what they were thinking during an important, culturally significant event, such as September 11, 2001, or when President Kennedy was killed, or during a personally-relevant event such as being asked for a divorce or the first day of college.

Interestingly, resarch suggests that although flashbulb memories are vivid, they may not be as accurate as people think they are!!

Question 40

When you are sad, why could your memory make you even sadder?

Answer 40

Mood-congruent memory is the process of recalling memories that match our moods. So if you are sad, you will remember other sad memories, but if you are happy, you will recall other happy memories.

Question 41

What did Brenda Milner contribute to memory research?

Answer 41

Milner studied amnesic patient “HM,” who had hippocampal lesions due to epilepsy. HM showed that amnesics could form new implicit memories without forming accompanying explicit memories.

Question 42

Who studied memory implantation and found that the memories we make can be altered without our awareness?

Answer 42

Elizabeth Loftus

She demonstrated that memory is not static, and can be affected by perception and language, which is why eyewitness testimony is fallible.

Loftus is famous for her work regarding rich false memories (memories for events that did not occur to the person remembering the event). Loftus developed laboratory techniques to investigate the formation of rich false memories, such as the lost in a shopping mall technique, which was used to implant false memories in college students.

Question 43

What did Frederick Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” story teach us about memory?

Answer 43

When reconstructing memories, we do not recall exactitudes, but rather gists. We make errors of omission and commission, and new information is assimilated into our schemata. Memory then grows out of these schemata.

Question 44

What is Allan Paivio’s dual-coding theory?

Answer 44

This theory states that encoding stimuli visually (imagery) and semantically (verbally) in our brains allows for better memory of the stimulus itself. During recall, we can access one or both of the ways the stimulus was encoded, making it easier to remember.

Question 45

What theory did Craik and Lockhart propose with respect to memory?

Answer 45

the levels-of-processing theory

Question 46

What does the levels-of-processing theory suggest?

Answer 46

When we learn new things, they are encoded in our brains either shallowly or deeply. Rote memorization is an example of shallow processing, while semantic understanding is an example of deep processing. This theory suggests that we will remember things better the deeper they are processed.

Question 47

What did Karl Lashley discover about memory?

Answer 47

Memories are not stored in one specific area (though some areas are closely linked with memory), but are distributed to various areas of the cortex.

Question 48

What rhyme is closely associated with Donald Hebb’s theory of learning and memory?

Answer 48

“cells that fire together wire together”

Hebb’s theory was that the neurons in our brains adapt to the things that are important to us, and we make synaptic connections when we learn and make new memories.

Question 49

How did E. R. Kandel help support Hebbian theory?

Answer 49

He provided experimental support for the theory with his research on the synaptic changes in brains of the Aplysia (sea slug).

Question 50

What does the serial position curve illustrate?

Answer 50

The serial position curve, which looks like a “U” shows which items are remembered when presented with a long list of items.

The earlier items are remembered due to primacy, the later items are remembered due to recency, and the middle items are least commonly remembered.

Question 51

What is serial learning?

Answer 51

Serial learning is learning lists of items in a specific order, like the states in alphabetical order or the chronology of U.S. presidents.

Question 52

What is serial anticipation?

Answer 52

Serial anticipation is learning a serial list but then recalling the items from the list using the previous correct answer as a cue for the following answer.

Question 53

What kind of learning is used during exposure to new vocabulary words in a different language?

Answer 53

Paired association is used to create a match between something we know and something we don’t know, like “cheese” in English and “fromage” in french.

Question 54

Define:

free recall

Answer 54

Participants learn items on a list, then must recall them without cues or a particular order.

Question 55

What are some things that help people remember lists?

Answer 55

• importance
• brevity
• acoustic and semantic dissimilarity
• familiarity
• concreteness

Question 56

What are two theories of forgetting?

Answer 56

1. decay theory (or trace theory)
2. interference theory

Question 57

What is decay (or trace) theory?

Answer 57

Decay theory is the belief that forgetting is caused by memory decay, and that memories just naturally fade over time.

Question 58

Why does the interference theory state we lose our memories?

Answer 58

Much like it sounds, interference theory suggests that other things in the mind get in the way to block memories between learning and recall.

Question 59

What are memory tricks like “Roy G. Biv” called?

Answer 59

mnemonics

Mnemonics are ways to remember things by placing them in an order that is easy to remember, like making up a name to remember the colors of the rainbow.

Question 60

When participants are exposed to new information they are not told to remember, then are tested on that information, what is being measured?

Answer 60

incidental learning

Question 61

According to the generation-recognition model, why is a fill-in-the-blank test more difficult than a multiple choice test?

Answer 61

because your brain must take an extra step to recall information that it does not have presented. The brain does not have to take this step when simply recognizing that something has been seen or heard before.

Question 62

According to studies on semantic priming, why do we remember semantically similar words more effectively than semantically dissimilar words?

Answer 62

Words that are semantically similar are linked together and more likely encoded into long-term memory than words that are acoustically similar or semantically dissimilar because meaning is created.

Question 63

Explain Collins’ and Loftus’ spreading activation model.

Answer 63

The spreading activation model is a hierarchy of word associations. The more closely two words are linked, like “bird” and “feather,” the quicker they can generate a response. The further apart the words are, the longer a response will take.

Question 64

Do we remember completed tasks or unfinished tasks better?

Answer 64

According to the Zeigarnik effect, we remember unfinished tasks better.

Question 65

Can hypnosis aid in accurate memory retrieval?

Answer 65

No, memories recovered under hypnosis are likely to be imagined/false!

Although hypnosis has many beneficial uses that are supported by research, such as helping children with cancer better tolerate chemotherapy and reducing symptoms for adults with IBS, it has a deleterious effect on memory. Hypnosis can lead to the formation of rich false memories.

Question 66

Through her research, Elizabeth Loftus has made many important contributions to our understanding of memory. What are her primary contributions?

For information on Loftus, please see this resource from Ted

Answer 66

Loftus’s work focuses on understanding memory better in order to reduce injustices in the legal system.

1. Discovery of the Misinformation Effect/ development of methods for lab research of the Misinformation Effect/Expert testimony regarding the effects of leading questions & eyewitness testimony fallibility.
2. Development of research methodology for implanting rich false memories/Major role in the Memory Wars/Role as an important legal expert in cases involving recovered/false memories of trauma

Question 67

1. What is the misinformation effect?
2. What are Loftus’s contributions in this area?

Answer 67

1. Loftus developed the methodology to investigate the role of misinformation in memory, discovering the Misinformation Effect– i.e, providing false or biased information can significantly alter an individual’s memories of an event.
2. She found that using biased language in questions regarding a video of a car accident video led participants who had watched the video to significantly changed their memories of the video. This finding has important implications for the use of leading questions with witnesses.

(Also, inclusion of outright false information in questions can cause participants to remember false details of events!)

Question 68

What are the Memory Wars?

Answer 68

The Memory Wars were a highly acrimonious conflict between some clinicians and researchers regarding the validity of recovered memories of traumatic events.

Some noted therapists, such as Judy Herman, strongly supported the validity of recovered trauma memories. (For an explanation of Herman’s work and point of view, please consult her book Trauma and Recovery). Others, such as Elizabeth Loftus, were concerned that some therapists were unintentionally implanting rich false memories (For an explanation of Loftus’s work, please read Loftus and Ketcham’s The Myth of Repressed Memory).

Question 69

Daniel Schacter is a leading memory researcher. In his best-selling book, The Seven Sins of Memory, Schacter explains that human memory, overall, is adaptive and impressive, but it has limitations, which Schacter describes as the seven sins of human memory.

Name the 7 Sins of Memory

Answer 69

Schacter’s 7 Sins of Memory are:

1. Transience
2. Absent-mindedness
3. Blocking
4. Misattribution
5. Suggestibility
6. Bias
7. Persistence

For more an overview of Schacter’s seven sins, please read this resource from Scientific American.