Memory

Bed Cot Sheets

Pillow Dream Rest

Tired Snore Yawn

Darkness Blanket Couch

• Take a minute or so to jot down as many of
these words as you can recall.
Did you remember couch? If so, give yourself a
point. How about snore? If so, good—give
yourself another point.
• Okay, how about sleep? If you’re like about a
third of typical people, you “remembered”
seeing the word sleep. But now take a close
look at the list. The word sleep isn’t there.
If you or your friends remembered seeing this
word on the list, you experienced a memory
illusion: a false but subjectively compelling
memory
 Reconstructive nature of memory
• This demonstration drives home a crucial point: Our memories
frequently fool us and fail us, our memories are far more
reconstructive than reproductive. When we try to recall an event,
we actively reconstruct our memories using the cues and
information available to us. We don’t passively reproduce our
memories, as we would if we were downloading information from a
web page.
• Remembering is largely a matter of patching together our often
fuzzy recollection with our best hunches about what really
happened. When we recall our past experiences, we rarely, if ever,
reproduce precise replicas of them (Neisser & Hyman, 1999; Mori,
2008). We should therefore be skeptical of claims that certain vivid
memories or even dreams are exact “photocopies” of past events
(van der Kolk et al., 1984).
• The memories of a small subset of individuals with a condition known as
infantile autism are even more astonishing. Contrary to popular
misconception (Stone & Rosenbaum, 1988), most individuals with autism
lack specialized memory abilities, but there are impressive exceptions.
Take the case of Kim Peek, who was the inspiration for the 1998 Academy
Award–winning film Rain Man (Peek died in 2009). Peek’s IQ was 87,
noticeably below the average of approximately 100. Yet Peek memorized
about 12,000 books word for word, the ZIP Codes of every town in the
United States, and the number of every highway connecting every city in
the United States (Foer, 2007; Treffert & Christensen, 2005). Kim Peek was
also a calendar calculator: If you gave him any past or future date, like
October 17, 2094, he’d give you the correct day of the week in a
matter of seconds. Not surprisingly, Kim earned the nickname of “Kim-
puter” among researchers who studied his astonishing memory feats.
 Three memory systems (what of
memory?)
• Sensory (iconic, echoic)
• Short term
-Role of rehearsal (elaborative and maintenance
rehearsal)
• Long term
➢ Explicit- semantic, episodic
➢ Implicit- procedural, priming, conditioning,
habituation
-Primacy and Recency effects
• Three major systems of memory: sensory
memory, short-term memory, and long-term
memory. These systems serve different purposes
and vary along at least two important
dimensions:
• span—how much information each system can
hold—and
• duration—over how long a period of time that
system can hold information.
• If sensory memory is what feeds raw materials
into the assembly line, short-term memory is
the workspace where construction happens.
After construction takes place, we either move
the product into the warehouse for long-term
storage or, in some cases, scrap it altogether.
• The first system, sensory memory, is tied closely to the
raw materials of our experiences, our perceptions of
the world; it holds these perceptions for just a few
seconds or less before passing some of them on to the
second system.
• Psychologists believe that each sense, including vision,
hearing, touch, taste, and smell, has its own form of
sensory memory. In the case of television or movie
clips, we experience an iconic memory, the type of
sensory memory that applies to vision. Iconic
memories last for only about a second, and
then they’re gone forever
• Sensory memory applies to hearing, too. Now
read that last sentence aloud:
“Sensory memory applies to hearing, too.” If you
pause for a few moments after saying it, you’ll be
able to replay the words precisely as you heard
them for a few seconds, much like a soft echo
reverberating from a mountaintop. That’s why
psychologists call this form of sensory memory
echoic memory. In contrast to iconic memories,
echoic memories can last as long as 5 to 10
seconds
• Once information makes it past our sensory
buffers, it passes into our short-term memory, a
second system for retaining information
in our memories for brief periods of time. Short-
term memory is the second factory worker in our
memory assembly line. Short-term memory is
closely related to what psychologists call working
memory, which refers to our ability to hold on to
information we’re currently thinking about,
attending to, or processing actively.
• Memory Loss from Short-Term Memory:
Decay versus Interference.
decay
fading of information from memory over time
interference
loss of information from memory because
of competition from additional incoming
information
• There are two different kinds of interference.
• One kind, retroactive interference, occurs when learning something new
hampers
earlier learning: The new interferes with the old (think of the prefix retro-,
because retroactive interference works in a reverse direction). If you’ve
learned one language, say Spanish, and then later learned a somewhat
similar language, perhaps Italian, you probably found that you started
making mistakes in Spanish you’d never made before.
• In contrast, proactive interference occurs when earlier learning gets in the
way of new learning: The old interferes with the new. For example,
knowing how to play tennis might interfere with our attempt to learn to
play racquetball, which requires a much smaller racquet.
• Not surprisingly, both retroactive and proactive interference are more
likely to occur when the old and new stimuli that we’ve learned are
similar. Learning a new language doesn’t much affect our ability to master
a new spaghetti recipe
• According to Miller, the Magic Number is the
universal limit of short-term memory, and it
applies to just about all information we
encounter: numbers, letters, people,
vegetables, and cities.
• seven plus or minus two pieces of information
in our short-term memory
• We can expand our ability to remember things in the
short term by using a technique called chunking:
organizing material into meaningful groupings.
• For example, look at the following string of 15 letters
for a few seconds, and then try to recall them:

KACFJNABISBCFUI
How’d you do? Odds are you didn’t do too well, probably
right around the Magic
Number, that is, only a subset of the letters listed.
Okay, now try this 15-letter string.
CIAUSAFBINBCJFK
•
Did you do any better this time? It’s the same 15 letters,
but you probably noticed something different about this
group than the first group: They consisted of meaningful
abbreviations. So you probably “chunked” these 15 letters
into five meaningful groups of three letters each: CIA, USA,
FBI, NBC, JFK. In this way, you reduced the number of items
you needed to remember from 15 to only 5. In fact, you
might have gotten this number down to less than five by
combining CIA and FBI (both the initials of U.S. government
intelligence agencies) into one chunk.
• Rehearsal is repeating the information
mentally, or even aloud. In that way, we keep
the information “alive” in our short-term
memories.
• There are two major types of rehearsal. The first,
maintenance rehearsal, simply involves repeating the
stimuli in their original form; we don’t attempt to
change the original stimuli in any way. We engage in
maintenance rehearsal whenever we hear a phone
number and keep on repeating it—either aloud or in
our minds—until we’re ready to dial the number. In
this way, we keep the information “alive” in our short-
term memory. Of course, if someone interrupts us
while we’re rehearsing, we’ll forget the number.
• Shallow processing
• Shallow processing or maintenance rehearsal focuses on
the physical features of an item rather than its meaning.
• Examples of physical features include color, length, font, or
sound of an item.
• Shallow processing can involve the simple repetition of
items.
• For example, we see pennies every day, but may have
difficulty recalling the information on the front or back of a
penny.
• Simply repeating an item over and over again for a test will
not commit that item to memory for a long period of time.
• The second type of rehearsal, elaborative
rehearsal, usually takes more effort.
In this type of rehearsal, we “elaborate” on
the stimuli we need to remember by linking
them in some meaningful way, perhaps by
visualizing them or trying to understand their
interrelationship (Craik & Lockhart, 1972).
• Deep processing or elaborative rehearsal focuses on the
meaning of an item and involves forming associations
between old and new information, with an effort on
making elaborate connections with existing knowledge.
• Examples include processing that focuses on the
pleasantness of an item, the definition of an item, and the
item’s relationship to other items.
• When learning new vocabulary, it is best to associate the
new item, a vocabulary word, with something you already
know well.
• In preparing for a test, relating course material to
information you already know or to something personal in
your own life (self-referent) will enhance its retrieval.
• Long-term memory, the third worker, is our
relatively enduring store of information. It
includes the facts, experiences, and skills
we’ve acquired over our lifetimes.
• explicit memory
• memories we recall intentionally and of which
we have conscious awareness
• implicit memory
• memories we don’t deliberately remember or
reflect on consciously
• semantic memory
• our knowledge of facts about the world
• episodic memory
• recollection of events in our lives
• procedural memory
• memory for how to do things, including motor
skills and habits
• priming
• our ability to identify a stimulus more easily or
more quickly after we’ve encountered similar
stimuli
• Complete this word while I go an grab some
food.
• Here is the word
• S__p
• Did you say it is soup? Ok, what if I go and
take a shower? What word will it be now?
• S__p
• Priming is an automatic or unconscious process
that can enhance the speed and accuracy of a
response as a result of past experience.
• Different cues prompt the retrieval of memory.
Memories are stored as a series of connections
that can be activated by different kinds of cues;
there is not any single location in the brain
associated with a specific memory trace.
• Priming helps trigger associated concepts or
memories, making the retrieval process more
efficient.
• Priming works best when your brain is on
autopilot. When you are not trying consciously to
make sense of what is happening around.
• 1. An example of priming is repetition
priming: You are faster reading the word
“pretzel” aloud when you have just recently
read it.
• 2. Another example is semantic priming: You
are faster and more likely to say the word
“nurse” when you have just recently read the
word “doctor.”
• In psychology, priming is a technique in which
the introduction of one stimulus influences
how people respond to a subsequent
stimulus. Priming works by activating an
association or representation in memory just
before another stimulus or task is introduced.
This phenomenon occurs without
our conscious awareness, yet it can have a
major impact on numerous aspects of our
everyday lives.
• For example, "cat" and "mouse" are two words
that are often linked with one another in
memory, so the appearance of one of the words
can prime the subject to respond more rapidly
when the second word appears.
• For example, exposing someone to the word
"yellow" will evoke a faster response to the word
"banana" than it would to unrelated words like
"television." Because yellow and banana are
more closely linked in memory, people respond
faster when the second word is presented.
 Priming in everyday life
• Grocery stores noticed a similar effect when
they discovered that the smell of freshly
baked bread increases sales. The smell of
“freshly baked” motivates people to buy more
food.
• Similarly adding “bio” or “all-natural” to your
product primes people into getting thoughts
of nature or farms.
Ball Sky Store

Shoe Desk Pencil

Tree Car Grass

Dog Rope Man

Paper Dress Cloud

Bird Xylophone Hat

House Knife Vase

• primacy effect
tendency to remember words at the
beginning of a list especially well
recency effect
tendency to remember words at the end of a
list especially well
 Three processes of memory (how of
memory?)
• Encoding
• Storage
• Retrieval
• Encoding refers to the process of getting
information into our memory banks. To
remember something, we first need to make
sure the information is in a format our
memories can use.
• Storage refers to the process of keeping
information in memory.
• To remember something, we need to fetch it
from our long-term memory banks. This is
retrieval, the third and final process of
memory
 Encoding-Attention
• To encode something, we must first attend to it.
Have you ever had the embarrassing experience
of going to a party and being introduced to
several people at the same time and then
realizing that you’d immediately forgotten all of
their names? Odds are high you were so nervous
or distracted that you never encoded their names
in the first place. Much of our everyday
experience never gets into our brain in the first
place.
 Storage-role of schemas
• A schema is an organized knowledge structure or mental
model that we’ve stored in memory. Our schema for
restaurants is characterized by a set order of events,
sometimes called a script. You’re seated at a table, given
menus from which you order food, wait while your food is
prepared, eat the food, get the check, and pay for the food
before leaving. And don’t forget the tip!. We order drinks
first, followed by appetizers, soup or salad, main course,
and finally dessert and coffee.
• Schemas serve a valuable function: They equip us with
frames of reference for interpreting new situations.
Without schemas, we’d find some information almost
impossible to comprehend.
 Retrieval- Cues
• Why is it easier to retrieve some things from memory
than others?

• Encoding specificity:phenomenon of remembering

something better when the conditions under which we
retrieve information are similar to the conditions under
which we encoded it

➢ Context-dependent learning
➢ State-dependent learning
• context-dependent learning
• superior retrieval of memories when the
external context of the original memories
matches the retrieval context.
• Evidence for context dependent learning
when undergraduates take exams. Students
tend to do slightly better on their exams when
tested in the same classroom in which they
learned the material (Smith, 1979).
• state-dependent learning
• superior retrieval of memories when the
organism is in the same physiological or
psychological state as it was during encoding
• State-dependent learning sometimes extends to
mood, in which case it’s termed mood-dependent
learning (Bower, 1981). Studies show that both
younger and older adults find it easier to recall
and recognize unpleasant memories than
pleasant ones when they’re sad and easier to
recall and recognize pleasant memories than
unpleasant ones when they’re happy (Knight,
Maines, & Robinson, 2002; Nelson & Craighead,
1977; Robinson & Rollings, 2011).
• Tip of the tongue phenomena
• We’ve all experienced retrieval failure in the
form of the frustrating tip-of-the-tongue
(TOT) phenomenon, in which we’re sure we
know the answer to a question, but can’t
come up with it
 Measuring memory
• Recall
• Recognition
• Relearning
• recall, that is, generating previously
remembered information on our own, tends
to be more difficult than recognition, selecting
previously remembered information from an
array of options
• Multiple choice type questions versus essay
type questions
• Why is recall usually harder than recognition?
• In part, it’s because recalling an item requires
two steps—generating an answer and then
determining whether it seems correct—
whereas recognizing an item takes only one
step: determining which item from a list
seems most correct
• Relearning. A third way of measuring
memory is relearning: how much more
quickly we learn information when we study
something we’ve already studied relative to
when we studied it the first time. For this
reason, psychologists often call this approach
the method of savings: Now that we’ve
studied something, we don’t need to take as
much time to refresh our memories of it (that
is, we’ve “saved” time by studying it).
 Improving memory
• mnemonic
• a learning aid, strategy, or device that
enhances recall. Mnemonics help us encode
memories in a way that makes them easier to
recall. Mnemonics differ from these “external”
memory aids in that they rely on internal
mental strategies, namely, strategies we use
during encoding that help us later retrieve
useful information.
• Mnemonic devices share two major features.
First, we can apply them to just about
anything and everything: the names of
planets, the elements of the periodic table,
the bones of the hand, the order of geological
time periods, and the colors of the rainbow
Second, most mnemonics depend on our
having a store of knowledge to begin with.
• Pegword method
• Method of loci
• Keyword method
 Forgetting
• Interference
• Decay
• Repression
• Intentional forgetting
• “What’s too painful to remember, we simply
choose to forget.”
• repression—the active elimination from
consciousness of memories or experiences we
find threatening.
• Intentional forgetting- You try to remove, or
at least ignore, some information in long-term
memory not because you find it to be
frightening or painful, as in repression, but
simply because it is inaccurate or no longer
useful.
• Memory and the Digital age
• Class discussion
 False memories
• Eyewitness testimony – memory errors and
wrongful conviction
• Suggestibility and Child testimony