Unit title 5

CHAPTER 7 - Human memory

Three key processes involved in memory:

1) Encoding (getting information in)
2) Storage (maintaining it)
3) Retrieval (getting it out)

Encoding = involves forming a memory code.

Example: When you form a memory code for a word, you might emphasise how it looks, how it sounds, or what it
means. Encoding usually requires attention.
Storage = involves maintaining encoded information in memory over time.
Retrieval = involves recovering information from memory stores.

Just as memory involves more than storage, forgetting involves more than “losing” something from the memory store.
Forgetting may be due to deficiencies in any of the three key processes in memory (encoding, storage, or retrieval)

Unit 1:
Encoding: Getting information into memory
Example: Have you ever been introduced to someone and then realised after only 30 seconds that you had already
“forgotten” his or her name? This familiar kind of forgetting often results from a failure to form a memory code for the
name. You don’t remember them because they aren’t encoded for storage into memory. This common problem
illustrates that active encoding is a crucial process in memory.

i. THE ROLE OF ATTENTION:

• Attention = involves focusing awareness on a narrowed range of stimuli or events.
• For you to remember information, you need to pay attention to the information given.
• Sometimes you even need to screen out most of the potential stimulation around you in order to:
- read a book
- converse with a friend
- carry on a coherent train of thought
• Example: One study of a simulated driving task found that cell phone conversations increased the chances of missing
traffic signals and that they slowed down reactions to signals that were detected.

ii. LEVELS OF PROCESSING:

• Not all attention is created equal.

• You can attend to things in different ways, focusing on different aspects of the stimulus input.

• Important factors influencing how much they remember - is how people attend to information.

• Incoming information can be processed at different levels.

• People engage in three progressively deeper levels of processing: structural, phonemic, and semantic encoding.

• By Craik & Lockhart

Structural encoding = Relatively shallow processing that emphasises the physical structure of the stimulus.
Example: if words are flashed on a screen, structural encoding registers such things as how they are printed (capital
letters/ lowercase) or the length of the words.

Phonemic encoding = Emphasises what a word sounds like.

Example: phonemic encoding involves naming or saying (perhaps silently) the words.
Semantic encoding = Emphasises the meaning of verbal input. It involves thinking about the objects and actions the
words represent.

• Deeper levels of processing result in longer-lasting memory codes.

iii. ENRICHING ENCODING:

• There are other dimensions to encoding, dimensions that can enrich the encoding process and thereby improve

memory, such as:

1. Elaboration
2. Visual imagery
3. Self-Referent encoding
4. Motivation to remember

1) Elaboration:
- Semantic encoding can often be enhanced through a process called elaboration.
- Elaboration = is linking a stimulus to other information at the time of encoding.
- Example: You read that phobias are often caused by classical conditioning, and you apply this idea to your own fear of
spiders. In doing so, you are engaging in elaboration.
- The additional connections created by elaboration usually help people remember information.

2) Visual imagery:
- The creation of visual images to represent words (imagery), can be used to enrich encoding.
- Some words are easier to create images for than others.

Concrete object Abstract object

If you were asked to remember the word juggler, you If you were asked to remember the word truth, you would
could readily form an image of someone juggling balls. probably have more difficulty forming a suitable image.
- It is easier to form images of concrete objects than of abstract concepts.
- Study was done and results is that high-imagery words are easier to remember than low-imagery words.

- Imagery facilitates memory because it provides a second kind of memory code, and two codes are better than one.
- Dual-coding theory: memory is enhanced by forming semantic and visual codes, since either can lead to recall.
3) Self-referent encoding:
- Making material personally meaningful can also enrich encoding.
- People’s recall of information tends to be slanted in favour of material that is relevant to them.
- Self-referent encoding = involves deciding how or whether information is personally relevant.
- Self-referent encoding led to improved recall of structural, phonemic, and semantic encoding.

4) Motivation to remember (MTR):

- Encoding effectiveness is one’s motivation to remember at the time of encoding.
- When MTR is high at the time of encoding, people are more likely to exert extra effort to
attend to and organise information in ways that facilitate future recall.
- Study: participants were asked to memorise facts about six people presented in photos.
Motivation to remember was manipulated, either at the time of encoding or at the time of
retrieval, by offering participants a financial bonus for every fact they recalled about a specific
target person.
- Increasing MTR at the time of encoding led to greater recall, whereas increasing MTR as the
time of retrieval had little effect.
- Thus, encoding processes can be enhanced by strong motivation.

Unit 2:
Storage: Maintaining Information in Memory

• One of the earliest models used to explain memory storage was the wax tablet. Both Aristotle and Plato compared
memory to a block of wax that differed in size and hardness for various individuals. Remembering was like stamping an
impression into the wax. As long as the image remained in the wax, the memory would remain intact.
• Modern models explain the information storage by computers and information storage in human memory.
• The main contribution of these information-processing theories was to subdivide memory into three separate
memory stores (The Atkinson and Shiffrin model of memory storage):
1. Sensory memory
2. Short-term memory
3. Long-term memory

i. Sensory memory:
• Sensory memory = preserves information in its original sensory form for a brief time, usually only a fraction of a
second.
• Allows the sensation of a visual pattern, sound, or touch to linger for a brief moment after the sensory stimulation is
over.
• In the case of vision, people really perceive an afterimage rather than the actual stimulus.
• You need to take advantage of this stimulus persistence immediately, because it doesn’t last long.

ii. Short-term memory:

• Short-term memory (STM) = is a limited-capacity store that can maintain unrehearsed information for about 10-20

seconds.
• There is a way that you can maintain information in your short-term store:

- Engaging in rehearsal.
- Rehearsal = the process of repetitively verbalising or thinking about the information.
- Rehearsal keeps recycling the information through your short-term memory.
- This reliance on recitation illustrates why short-term memory has been thought to depend primarily on phonemic
encoding.
 Durability of storage:
- Without rehearsal, information in short-term memory is lost in 10 to 20 seconds.
- Theorists originally believed that the loss of information from short-term memory was due purely to time-related
decay of memory traces.
- But follow-up research showed that interference from competing material also contributes.

Capacity of storage:
- Short-term memory is also limited in the number of items it can hold.
- When short-term memory is filled to capacity, the insertion of new information “bumps out” some of the
information currently in STM.
- It has long been known that people can increase the capacity of their short-term memory by combining stimuli into
larger, possibly higher-order units, called chunks.
- Chunk = a group of familiar stimuli stored as a single unit.
- People routinely draw information out of their long-term memory banks to help them evaluate and understand
information they’re working with in short-term memory.

Short-term memory as “working memory” (Alan Baddeley):

Baddeley’s model of working memory consists of the four components:
-
1. Phonological loop (This component is at work when you use recitation to temporarily hold
on to a phone number)
2. Visuospatial loop (Permits people to temporarily hold and manipulate visual images. This
element is at work when you try to mentally rearrange the furniture in your bedroom or map
out a route to travel somewhere)
3. Central executive system (It controls the deployment of attention, switching the focus of attention and dividing
attention as needed)
4. Episodic buffer (It is a temporary, limited-capacity store that allows the various components of working memory
to integrate information. It also serves as the interface between working memory and long-term memory)
- Studies have shown that people vary in how well they can juggle information in their working memory while fending
off distractions.
- Working memory capacity (WMC) = refers to one’s ability to hold and manipulate information in conscious attention.
- WMC can be temporarily reduced by situational factors such as:
• pressure to perform

• excessive worry

- Variations in WMC correlate positively with measures of high-level cognitive abilities (reading comprehension,
complex reasoning, and even intelligence).
- Variations in WMC also appear to influence musical ability, as reading music while playing an instrument taxes working
memory capacity.

iii. Long-term memory:

• Long-term memory (LTM) = is an unlimited capacity store that can hold information over lengthy periods of time.

• All information stored in long-term memory is kept there permanently.

• Forgetting occurs only because people sometimes cannot retrieve needed information from LTM.

• Two lines of research:

1) Epilepsy - stimulation of the temporal lobe sometimes elicited vivid descriptions of events long past. Patients
would describe scenes that apparently came from their childhood as if they were there once again. These
descriptions were exact playbacks of long-lost memories unearthed by electrical stimulation of the brain.
2) Flashbulb memories = are unusually vivid and detailed recollections of the circumstances in which people
learned about momentous, newsworthy events. For instance, many older adults in the United States can
remember exactly where they were, what they were doing, and how they felt when they learned that
President John F. Kennedy had been shot.

How is Knowledge Represented and Organised in Memory?

i. Clustering and conceptual hierarchies:

• People spontaneously organise information into categories for storage in memory.
• Similarly, when possible, factual information may be organised into conceptual hierarchies.
 • A conceptual hierarchy = is a multilevel classification system based on common properties among items.
• Example:

ii. Schemas:
• A schema = is an organised cluster of knowledge about a particular object or event abstracted from previous
experience with the object or event.
• Example: college students have schemas for what professors’ offices are like.
• People are more likely to remember things that are consistent with their schemas than things that are not.
• People sometimes exhibit better recall of things that violate their schema-based expectations.

iii. Semantic Networks:

• A semantic network = consists of nodes representing concepts, joined together by pathways that link related

concepts.
• Example:

• The ovals are the nodes, and the words inside the ovals are the interlinked concepts. The lines connecting the
nodes are the pathways. The length of each pathway represents the degree of association between two concepts.
• Shorter pathways imply stronger associations.
• Semantic networks have proven useful in explaining why thinking about one word (such as butter) can make a closely
related word (such as bread) easier to remember.
• Spreading activation = when people think about a word, their thoughts naturally go to related words.

iv. Connectionist networks and Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models:

• The human brain appears to depend extensively on parallel distributed processing, that is simultaneous processing

of the same information that is spread across networks of neurons.

• Connectionist or parallel distributed processing (PDP) models = assume that cognitive processes depend on

patterns of activation in highly interconnected computational networks that resemble neural networks.
• A PDP system consists of a large network of interconnected computing units/nodes, that operate much like neurons.

• These nodes may be inactive or they may send either excitatory or inhibitory signals to other units.

• A specific node’s level of activation reflects the weighted balance of excitatory and inhibitory inputs from many other

units.
• In semantic networks, specific nodes represent specific concepts or pieces of knowledge.

• In connectionist networks, a piece of knowledge is represented by a particular pattern of activation across an entire

network.
• Thus, the information lies in the strengths of the connections, which is why the PDP approach is called

“connectionism.”
 Unit 3:
Retrieval: Getting Information out of Memory

USING CUES TO AID RETRIEVAL:

- Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon = the temporary inability to remember something you know, accompanied by a
feeling that it’s just out of reach. Typically triggered by the need to recall a name.
- Occurrence increases with age.
- It is the failure in retrieval.
- Retrieval cues = stimuli that help gain access to memories.

REINSTATING THE CONTEXT OF AN EVENT:

- Trying to recall an event by putting yourself back in the context in which it occurred involves working with context cues
to aid retrieval.

RECONSTRUCTING MEMORIES AND THE MISINFORMATION EFFECT:

- When you retrieve information from long-term memory, you’re not able to pull up a “mental video- tape” that
provides an exact replay of the past.
- Your memories, are sketchy reconstructions that may be distorted and may include details that didn’t actually occur.
- The misinformation effect = occurs when participants’ recall of an event they witnessed is altered by introducing
misleading post-event information.

REALITY MONITORING, SOURCE MONITORING AND DESTINATION MEMORY:

- Reality monitoring = refers to the process of deciding whether memories are based on external sources (one’s
perceptions of actual events) or internal sources (one’s thoughts and imaginations).
- People engage in reality monitoring when they reflect on whether something actually happened or they only thought
about it happening.
- Example: “Did I pack the umbrella or only think about packing it?”
- Studies indicate that people focus on several types of clues in making their reality-monitoring decisions.
- Source monitoring = involves making attributions about the origins of memories.
- Is a crucial facet of memory retrieval that contributes to many of the mistakes that people make in reconstructing their
experiences.
- Thus, when people pull up specific memory records, they have to make decisions at the time of retrieval about where
the memories came from.
- Example: “Did I read that in the New York Times or Rolling Stone?”
- Destination memory = involves recalling to whom one has told what.

Unit 4:
Forgetting: When Memory Lapses

• You need to forget information that is no longer relevant.

• Forgetting can reduce competition among memories that would other wise cause confusion.
• Research has shown that forgetting can be caused by defects in encoding, storage, retrieval, or some combination of
these processes.

How quickly we forget: Ebbinghaus’s Forgetting Curve

• Hermann Ebbinghaus - first person to conduct scientific

studies of forgetting
• He invented nonsense syllables = consonant-vowel-consonant

arrangements that do not correspond to words.

• A forgetting curve = graphs retention and forgetting over

time.
• Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve shows a precipitous drop in

retention during the first few hours after the nonsense syllables
were memorised. Thus most forgetting occurs very rapidly after
learning something.
Measures of forgetting:
• Measures of forgetting inevitably measure retention as well.

• Retention = refers to the proportion of material retained (remembered).

• A recall measure of retention = requires subjects to reproduce information on their

own without any cues.

• A recognition measure of retention = requires subjects to select previously learned

information from an array of options.

• A relearning measure of retention = requires a subject to memorise information a

second time to determine how much time or how many practice trials are saved by
having learned it before.

Why we forget?
Causes of forgetting:
i. Ineffective encoding
• Pseudoforgetting = when you can’t really forget something you never learned.

• Pseudoforgetting is usually attributable to lack of attention.

• When you can’t remember the information that you’ve read, your forgetting may be due to ineffective encoding.

ii. Decay
• Decay theory = attributes forgetting to the impermanence of memory storage.
• Proposes that forgetting occurs because memory traces fade with time.
• The mere passage of time produces forgetting.

iii. Interference
• Interference theory = proposes that people forget information because of
competition from other material.
• Interference is assumed to be

greatest when intervening material is

most similar to the test material.
• Decreasing the similarity should

reduce interference and cause less

forgetting.
• Two types of interference:

a. Retroactive interference = occurs when new information impairs the

retention of previously learned information.
b. Proactive interference = occurs when previously learned information
interferes with the retention of new information.

iv. Retrieval failure

• Encoding specificity principle = the value of a cue depends on how well it corresponds to the memory code formed
during encoding.
• Transfer-appropriate processing = occurs when the initial processing of information is similar to the type of
processing required by the subsequent measure of retention.

v. Motivated forgetting
• The tendency to forget things one doesn’t want to think about is called motivated forgetting, or to use Sigmund
Freud’s terminology, repression.
• Repression = refers to keeping distressing thoughts and feelings buried in the unconscious.

The recovered memories controversy:

• The return of individuals’ long-lost memories of sexual abuse and other traumas during childhood.

• The controversy surrounding recovered memories of abuse is complex and difficult to sort out.

• The crux of the problem is that child abuse usually takes place behind closed doors.

• In the absence of corroborative evidence, there is no way to reliably distinguish genuine recovered memories from

false ones.
 • Some recovered memory incidents have been substantiated by independent witnesses or admissions of guilt from
the accused.
• But in the vast majority of cases, the allegations of abuse have been vehemently denied, and independent
corroboration has not been available.

Unit 6:
Systems and Types of memory

Declarative versus Procedural memory:

- The declarative memory system = handles factual information.
- It contains recollections of words, definitions, names, dates, faces, events, concepts, and ideas.
- The non-declarative memory system = houses memory for actions, skills, conditioned responses, and emotional
responses.
- It contains procedural memories of how to execute perceptual-motor skills, such as riding a bike, typing, and tying
one’s shoes.

Semantic versus Episodic memory:

- The episodic memory system = is made up of
chronological, or temporally dated, recollections of
personal experiences.
- It includes information about when you did these
things, saw them, or heard them.
- It contains recollections about being in a ninth-grade
play, visiting the Grand Canyon, attending a Norah
Jones concert, or going to a movie last weekend.
- The semantic memory system = contains general
knowledge that is not tied to the time when the
information was learned.
- Semantic memory contains information such as
Christmas is December 25, dogs have four legs, and
Phoenix is located in Arizona.
- You probably don’t remember when you learned these facts.
- Such information is usually stored undated.

Prospective versus Retrospective memory:

Two types of memories: (This distinction does not refer to independent memory systems, but rather to fundamentally
different types of memory tasks)
- Prospective memory = involves remembering to perform actions in the future.
- Examples of prospective memory tasks include remembering to grab your umbrella, to walk the dog, to call
someone, and to grab the tickets for the big game.
- Retrospective memory = involves remembering events from the past or previously learned information.
- Retrospective memory is at work when you try to recall who won the Super Bowl last year, when you reminisce
about your high school days, or when you try to remember what your professor said in a lecture last week.