Memory #1

1. What is the Modal Model of Memory (also called the three stage
model)?
● 3 memory subsystems
● Sensory store -Short term Memory- Long-term memory
2. What is Sensory memory? What is its capacity, duration and function?
● Sensory Memory: Very brief, keeps sensory info long enough to
pay attention to it and hopefully it goes to short term memory
● Capacity: Very large(“scenic” it holds everything in the scene)
● Duration:Very short(½ a sec to 3 seconds)
● Function:To sustain sensations for identification
3. How did the Sperling study measure the duration and capacity of
sensory memory?
● He had letters in a 3x4 grid and asked people to jot down as much as
they could remember. Most got ⅓. But when a bar flashed quickly after
the letter got shown, people got a higher percentage of the letters right. It
shows that iconic memory exists and that iconic memory lasts half a
second.
4. What are echoic and iconic memory? What is the duration of each of
these?
● Echoic memory:Auditory memory system, 2nd most studied
● Duration:3 second duration
● Iconic memory:Visual memory system, studied the longest
● Duration: shortest duration, half a second
5. What is Short-term memory? What is its capacity, duration and
function?
● Short-term memory: Keeps info in the mind in an active, readily
available state for a short period
● Capacity:7+/- 2 items or “chunks”
● Duration:10-15 seconds
● Function:To do conscious work; to think
6. What is chunking?
● Chunking: Grouping items so that you can increase capacity of
short-term memory
● Not all chunks are equal, the more complicated a chunk gets,
the fewer we can hold.
7. What is the magic number? This is also known as the capacity of our
short-term memory.
● 7 plus or minus two chunks
● Also assumes you are not trying to mentally manipulate the
chunks
8. How did Peterson and Peterson study the duration of short-term
memory?
● Try to remember letters but at the same time count backwards
from 7
 9. What are attention, rehearsal, encoding and retrieval? Note: These
terms are also brought up throughout the lecture.
● Attention:Selects info from sensory memory
● Rehearsal:Maintains info in working memory
● Encoding:actively thinking about the meaning of a memory ,
sends info to LTM(long term store)
● Retrieval:Brings info from LTM to working memory
● Combines known as the Control processes of working memory

Memory #2
1. What is Long-term memory? What are its capacity, duration and
function?
● Long term memory: Storage and recall over a long period of
time
● Capacity:Enormous(essentially unlimited)
● Duration:very long(essentially permanent)
● Function: To tie together the past with the present (past
experiences as a way to guide us)
2. Who is Clive Wearing? What kinds of things could he remember and
what kinds of things could he not remember as a result of his brain
injury? What do these deficits and retention indicate about memory?
● He lost his hippocampus
● He remembers his love for his wife and basically forgot
everything
● He can play card games, read and write (but he doesn’t
remember learning these things)
● Clue that long term memory isn’t just a unitary thing and that
there are various types of long term memory.
3. What is the serial position effect?
● Remembering things shown first and last in a list more often
4. What is recency?
● Remembering items shown last
● Cause by short term memory
5. What is primacy?
● Remembering items shown first
6. What are the different kinds of long-term memory? For example,
explicit vs. implicit memory, types of explicit memory, etc.
● Explicit memory: things you can talk about
● Episodic memory: memory for specific time and place(events)
knowledge memory
● Semantic memory: I know instead of I remember
● Implicit memory: things that happened in the past impacting
you know without you having to consciously thinking about it
● Procedural memory: how to ___
● Classical conditioning effects: Pavlo’s dogs, Test Anxiety,
Aversion therapy, Systematic desensitization
 ● Priming: Occurs when an individual's exposure to a certain
stimulus influences their response to a subsequent prompt,
without any awareness of the connection.
7. What is a mnemonic?
● Force you to think about meaning and relationships
8. What is imagery?
● Using images of the thing you want to memorize
9. What is the method of loci?
● Think about space that you know really well and then you
identify some of the things you would use as anchors
● Imagine a familiar space and assign ideas to landmarks within
that space.
10. What is the keyword method?
● Pato-pot-duck
● And then you come up with a meaningful relationship between a
pot and a duck to know that pato is spanish for duck

Textbook Questions About Memory (Chapter 7)

1. What is the misinformation effect and source monitoring errors?
● Happens when misleading info after an event affects how a
person recalls said event
● Inferences,scripts,schema and associations
2. What are examples of implanted memories?
● False memories put into people minds
3. What kinds of things increase the likelihood of false memories?
● Plausible and the fake memory happened in the distant past
4. What are the different types of levels of processing for memory?
Which will produce the best recall?
● Visual processing pays attention to how a sentence looks.
Phonological processing pays attention to how words in the
sentence sound and semantic processing pays attention to the
meaning of the sentence. Semantic processing tends to produce
more enduring long-term memories.
5. How is elaboration important?
● Helps makes connections between new material and what
people already know
6. What is anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia?
● Anterograde Amnesia:Inability to encode new memories from
our experiences
● Retrograde Amnesia:Loss of memories from our past
7. What is the role of the amygdala in memory?
● -Amygdala helps us recall emotions associated with fear-
provoking events and the hippocampus helps us recall events
themselves.
● -Gradual strengthening of the connections among neurons by
repetitive stimulation over time.
 8. What is a flashbulb memory?
● -Flashbulb memory: Emotional memory that is extraordinarily
vivid and detailed (changes over time).

9. What is the difference between recall, recognition, and relearning as

measures of memory?
● Recall: Generating previously remembered information

● Recognition: Selecting previously remembered information from

an array of options

● Relearning: Reacquiring knowledge that we'd previously

learned but largely forgotten over time.
10. What is encoding specificity (e.g., context-dependent learning;
state-dependent learning)?
● memory is more likely to be recalled when the cues present
during retrieval match the cues present during encoding
11. What are helpful study hints derived from memory research
(e.g., spaced studying)?
● Spacing, reducing stress, sleep, test, encode etc
12. Who was Ebbinghaus, and what was his forgetting curve?
● -A German researcher who tested his own recollection across
different time intervals. He found out that most of our forgetting
occurs almost immediately after learning new material, with
less and less forgetting after that.
● -Shows how much faster information he relearned the second
time following various delays
13. In forgetting, what is the difference between decay and
interference?
● -Decay: Fading of information from memory over time
● -Interference: Loss of information from memory because of
competition from additional incoming information
14. What is retroactive interference?
● -Retroactive interference: Interference with retention of old
information due to acquisition of new information. "new
interferes with the old"
15. What is proactive interference?
● -Proactive interference: Interference with acquisition of new
information due to previous learning of information. "old
interferes with the new"
16. What is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon?
● a state in which one cannot quite recall a familiar word but can't
recall words of similar form and meaning.
Cognitive #1
1. What are heuristics?
● “Rules of thumb” that are usually right but not always
 ● Humans rely on it
● Quick solutions but at the cost of possible errors
2. What are algorithms?
● A procedure that always produces the correct solution
● Recipe for success
● Take a lot of time and computation resources
● Computers execute it
3. What is inductive reasoning?
● Trying to reason from specific examples, to a more general
conclusion
4. What is a descriptive approach?
● How we actually solve problems
● Psychologists more interested in this approach
5. What is a normative approach?
● How we should solve problems
● Economics uses this
● Establishes a baseline
6. What are base rates? How do people ignore base rates?
● Keeping track of how frequently things occur in the world
around us,
● Ignored by people distracted by less relevant information
7. What is the availability heuristic?
● Relies on immediate examples that comes to mind when
evaluating a concept
8. What is the representativeness heuristic?
● Identifying probabilities by the degree of representation, rather
than by considering all the possible outcomes
9. What is confirmation bias?
● Seek evidence consistent for what we already believe
10. What is deductive reasoning?
● Reasoning from general knowledge knowledge to a more
specific example
11. In problem-solving, what is the initial state, the goal state, and
the current state?
● Initial state:Where you are starting
● Goal state:Where you are trying to get to, more than one goal
state
● Current state:Where you are right now
12. What is a weak method of problem-solving?
● Not knowledge based
13. What is forward chaining?
● What are all the transitions I can make, doing the thing that
gets you closer to the goal state
14. What is backward chaining?
● Move the goal state closer to the current state
 15. What is the difference between experts and novices in problem-
solving?
● Not the weak methods, but rather domain knowledge
● Ability to recognize meaningful patterns based on experience
16. What is the paradox of expertise?
● People best at doing things are the worst at teaching how to do
it
17. How can analogies be helpful?
● Similar problems can help find methods to a solution
Cognitive #2
1. What are Functional fixedness and Duncker’s candle problem?
● Fixate on the function that an object is serving now, blocks us
from consider alternate uses
2. What were the findings of research on the question of whether labels
help or hurt memory for pictures?
● Sometimes helps, sometimes hurts. If the label doesn’t match it
doesn’t work.
3. What is linguistic determinism? Note: The lecturer said that linguistic
determinism is similar but slightly different. The difference is that
linguistic determinism suggests that language directly determines our
perception of the world, while linguistic relativity suggests that language
influences our perception of the world.
● Language directly determine our perception of the world( strong)
4. What is linguistic relativity?
● The language that you speak influences/determines how you
perceive, think about, and remember the world around you
5. What are the conditions for a proper test of linguistic relativity?
● Have to look at a situation where languages have a choice
● Ability to divide domain differently
● THEN you can test
● Multiple languages
● Differences between languages(linguistic
● Independent demonstrations of cognitive differences
6. Why was so much research done with colors?
● Color has both biological and linguistic aspects
7. Describe the research done with the Tarahumara and what its
findings tell us about linguistic relativity?
● Colors A, B and C all have the same name in Tarahumara, but A
has a different name in English
● Wavelength of B lies between those of A and C
● B and C more similar in terms of wavelength than A and B
● Which color is more different?
8. What is the current psychological view on the question of does
language affect how we reason and remember about the world?
● Language can clearly influence our ability to perceive,
remember, and solve problems
 ● The ability of language to determine how we perceive,
remember, and solve problems is limited
● How limited remains to be seen

Textbook Questions (Textbook sections 8.1-8.15)

1. What are mental sets?
● Mental framework on how to solve a problem based on past
experience
● Can’t think in different way to confront problem
2. What is the difference between automatic and controlled systems?
● Automatic is unconscious and controlled is conscious
3. What are belief perseverance and confirmation bias?
● Belief perseverance: holding firm on a belief w=even when its
wrong
● Confirmation bias: Look for info that confirms your own belief,
and exclude info that contradicts.
4. What is framing?
● Bias in which people decide on objects based on if the objects
were presented with a negative or positive connotation
5. What is loss aversion?
● Tendency to make choices (even risky ones) to minimize losses
6. What are overconfidence and hindsight biases?
● Overconfidence biases: Individuals overestimate their ability to
predict future events
● Hindsight bias:Looking backwards and time and saying that
mistakes that were made were obvious
7. Define language and identify the following features of language:
phonemes, morphemes, and syntax.
● Phonemes: smallest unit of sound in a word
● Morphemes: smallest unit of language that has a meaning
● Syntax: The arrangement of words in sentences, clauses and
phrases