Long Term Memory Pt 2 Flashcards
(26 cards)
What is Metacognition?
The selection of strategies for processing; thinking about thinking
- Can influence your own cognition
- Mainly driven by our experiences of what is best (top-down processing)
Meta-Cognition in Knowledge Acquisition
Strategies such as selecting a good technique and allocating study time are concerned with knowledge acquisition (getting info into LTM)
What are the steps of metacognition in knowledge acquisition?
- Decide what kind of processing to use
- Decide how to allocate study time among the items
- Decide how you will maintain that info (ie distributed review)
Dunlosky & Nelson (1994)
Designed a paired-associate task in which students studied half of the associates by using a rehearsal strategy and studied the remainder by using an imagery strategy
Results of Dunlosky & Nelson
The imagery strategy was more effective
What was the accuracy of students in judging the effectiveness of the two strategies from Dunlosky & Nelson’s study?
Students were more accurate in judging the effectiveness of the two strategies when they made delayed judgments rather than immediate ones
- After 30 seconds the item is no longer in STM and thus a better judgment can be made as to if the info went into LTM
Retrieval Fluency
The ease with which an item can be recalled
- When people begin recalling a word list, they typically recall the words at the end of the list first due to STM
- However, we think it’s easy to remember something we just saw (a strong recency effect)
Koriat et al (2004)
Designed a series of experiments to investigate whether the retention interval would influence judgments of learning
- Students studied a list of paired associates and then took a test either immediately, one day later, or one week later
- And were asked to predict how many words they could remember during those intervals
Koriat et al Experiment 1 Results
- Retention interval did influence recall with recall decreasing based on the length of the time between study and test
- Students did not consider that forgetting occurs over time
Koriat et al – Experiment 2 Predictions
Asked a new group of participants to make prediction about the results/words recalled in Experiment 1
- Predictions were VERY accurate (thought that experiment 1 people would do poorly)
- This suggests that their predictions were not biased by their experiences
Retrieval
Recovering info from LTM depends on getting it back out using effective retrieval strategies
- It was proposed that people do a preliminary search of memory to decide whether they have stored any info that is relevant to a question, and then search LTM
Atkinson and Shiffrin on Retrieval
Proposed that people develop highly variable plans for searching LTM
What is Tip of the Tongue (TOT)
When you know something is stored in LTM but you are momentarily blocked from retrieving it
How to help with retrieval during Tip of the Tongue?
Successful retrieval is often helped by using partial information (ie initial letter)
- This guides your search and eliminates the info that doesn’t have that partial info
What are Indirect Tests of Memory?
Participants are exposed to words but are not aware that their memory is being tested
- Indirect tests are considered test of implicit memory
- Indirect - Implicit
What are Direct Tests of Memory?
Participants are aware that it’s a test of their memory
- Direct tests are considered test of explicit memory
- Conscious and goal directed
What are examples of direct memory tests?
Recall and Recognition (fill in the blank, multiple choice)
What is the Word Fragment Completion Task?
An indirect memory test in which participants are exposed to a word list and have to complete word puzzles that relate to the previous word list (but participants don’t know this)
Warrington & Weiskrantz on memory tests
Compared patients with amnesia and control patients on four memory tests:
1. Recall task (direct memory)
2. Recognition task (direct memory)
3. Word fragment completion (indirect memory)
4. An initial-letter generation task (indirect memory)
Results of Warrington & Weiskrantz
- Amnesic participants did significantly worse than the controls on the direct memory tests
- They did not differ from controls on the indirect memory tests (just as likely to use the words that they had seen)
- Suggests that direct and indirect memory systems are distinct
What are the Types of Memory (as part of LTM)?
Declarative Memory (Episodic and Semantic) and Non-Declarative Memory (Procedural)
What is episodic memory?
Temporally dated recollections of personal experiences (including sensory experiences)
- Types of memories you’d write in a diary
What is semantic memory?
General knowledge that is not always temporally dated
- Types of emmories you’d find in an encyclopedia, factual
What is procedural memory?
Memory for actions, skills, and operations
- How to do a certain action, like walking from class to car
