Unit 6 Slides

Unit 6 Lesson 1
Memory

Concepts
● Memory: the ability to store and retrieve information over time
● Cognition: the process of acquiring and using knowledge
Memories as types and stages
● Types of memory
○ Explicit
■ Knowledge or experiences that can be consciously remember
● Episodic memory: refers to the firsthand experiences that we had
○ 16th birthday party
○ Eating breakfast this morning
○ The time you laughed so hard
● May interact with semantic memory
○ must be monday because that’s the day I went to the dentist
● Semantic memory: refers to our knowledge of facts and concepts
about the world
○ Implicit (does not require conscious awareness)
■ Influence of experience on behavior, even if the individual is not aware of
those influences
● Procedural memory
● Priming
● Learning through classical conditioning
○ Atkinsons and Shiffrin’s Model (1968)

■
● Memory stages
○ Sensory
■ Function: for basic physical characteristics
■ Capacity: large
■ Duration: very brief retention of images
■ Divided into two types
 ● Iconic memory - visual information
● Echoic memory - auditory information
○ Short term
■ Where small amounts of information can be temporarily kept for more
than a few seconds, but usually for less then one minute
■ Working memory
● the process that we use to make sense of, modify, interpret, and
store information in short term memory
■ How to improve STM
● Maintenance rehearsal
○ involves the repetition of information in its original,
unaltered form.
● Chunking
○ the process of grouping different bits of information
together into more manageable or meaningful chunks
○ Long term
■ Memory storage that can hold information for days, months, and years
● Memory Processes
○ Encoding
○ Storage
○ Retrieval

○ Concept of “Working Memory”: short term memory, rather than a placeholder for
memories that need to be rehearsed until stored in long term memory, helps
modify, interpret, and store information

○ Automatic processing (implicit)

■ Things we can naturally remember: space, time, frequency
○ Effortful Processing
■ The process whereby we take in new information and process it with focus
and effort
● Ex. driving or learning a new language
■ Effortful processing can become automatic

● Cues to Improving Memory

○ Elaborative encoding
■ Material is better remembered if it is processed more fully
○ Make use of self-reference effect
■ Material better remembered if linked to self
○ Beware of the forgetting curve
 ■ Ebbinghaus Curve
● The more time he practiced, the fewer repetition is required
later on
■ Information that we have learned drops off rapidly with time
○ Make use of spacing effect
■ Information is learned better when it's studied in shorter periods spaced
over time
○ Rely on overlearning
■ Can continue to learn even after we think we know the information
perfectly
○ Use context-dependent retrieval
■ Better retrieval when it occurs in the same situation in which we learned
the material
○ Use state-dependent retrieval
■ We have better retrieval when we are in the same psychological state as
we were when we learned the material

● The biology of memory

○ Amnesia
■ Memory disorder with inability to remember information
Two types
○ Retrograde amnesia
■ A memory disorder that produces inability to retrieve events that occurred
before a given time
○ Anterograde amnesia
■ The inability to transfer information from short-term into long-term
memory, making it impossible to form new memories
● Alzheimer’s disease brain
○ Hippocampus: shrinks severely
○ Cortex: shrivels up, damaning areas involved in thinking, planning, and
remembering
○ Ventricles: filled with cerebrospinal fluid grow larger
● Dementia vs. Alzheimer’s
○ Dementia
■ Use to address collection of symptoms
■ Temporary, reversible, and cured with proper treatment
■ Can occur in any stages
○ Alzheimer’s
■ Terminal disease
■ Tend to happen in later stages
● Interference
○ Proactive interference
■ When old information interferes with new information
● Use old password
○ Retroactive interference
■ New information interferes with old information
● Changed password
● The Mandela Effect
○ a type of false memory that occurs when many different people incorrectly
remember the same thing
● False vs. Repressed
○ False memories = the creation of memories of an event that never happened
○ Repression = the purposeful forgetting of actual, especially anxiety-producing
events
■ Conscious: some memories are actively forgotten
■ Unconscious: some memories are painful that they are locked in
unconscious corners of the brain
○ Debate over repression
■ People who experienced trauma have trouble forgetting, not remembering,
the event
■ Concern the recovery of repressed memories is the creation of false
memories
● Cult or Paranormal phenomena as repressed memories
○ Memories of alien abductions shared by many people
 Unit 6 Lesson 2
Thinking
● Concepts
○ Cognition functions instinctively so that we group objects, people, living things
into neat categories
● Creativity
○ Hard to measure and define
■ IQ test to measure intelligence
■ No CQ test (creativity coefficient)
○ Convergent and divergent thinking
■ Convergent thinking
● Straightforward kind of intelligence needed for answering
questions
■ Divergent thinking
● Complex skills based drawing from multiple things at once
○ Ex. solve global warming, coming up with new cure for
disease
● Robert Sternberg’s Five Components of Creativity
1. Expertise: well-developed base of knowledge
2. Imaginative thinking skills: to see things in new ways
3. Venturesome personality: tolerates ambiguity and risk, seeks new experiences
4. Intrinsic motivation: internally driven
5. Creative environment

● Algorithmic approach
○ Systematically work through every possibility of combination that can yield the
answer
■ Works better with computer, not brain
● Heuristic approach
○ Group scrambled letters into chunks of two
○ Availability heuristic
■ Things that come to mind easily we think of as more common and more
important
■ At the expense of things that may be more common but don’t easily come
to mind
● Ex. easily recall plane crashes, hard to recall safe flights
○ Representative heuristics
● Patterns and judgements
 ○ Mental shortcuts → tools for making quick decisions and surviving/navigating the
world
■ Can lead to prejudice stereotyping, and other flawed decisions
● Confirmation bias
○ Tendence we have of seeking out information or answers that confirms our
existing beliefs/worldview
● Framing
○ How we present information influence how others make decisions

Unit 6 Textbook

Studying and Building Memories

● Memory: learning that persists over time; information has been acquired, stored and can
be retrieved
○ get information into our brain, a process called encoding
○ retain that information, a process called storage
○ later get the information back out, a process called retrieval
1. We first record to-be-remembered information as a fleeting sensory memory.
2. From there, we process information into short-term memory, where we encode it
through rehearsal.
3. Finally, information moves into long-term memory for later retrieval.
● Working memory: active processing that takes place in the middle stage

Memory Storage and Retrieval

● Hippocampus: a temporal-lobe neural center located in the limbic system, is the brain’s
equivalent of a “save” button for explicit memories
● Recall: retrieving information that is not currently in your conscious awareness but that
was learned at an earlier time. A fill-in-the-blank question tests your recall.
● Recognition: identifying items previously learned. A multiple-choice question tests your
recognition.
● Relearning: learning something more quickly when you learn it a second or later time.
When you study for a final exam or engage in a language used in early childhood, you
will relearn the material more easily than you did initially.
● Priming: the “wakening of associations.”

Forgetting, Memory Construction, and Memory Improvement

● anterograde amnesia: could recall their past, but could not form new memories
● retrograde amnesia: cannot recall their past—the old information stored in long-term
memory
 ● Proactive interference: occurs when prior learning disrupts your recall of new
information.
● Retroactive interference: interference occurs when new learning disrupts recall of old
information.
● Repress: painful or unacceptable memories to protect our self-concept and to minimize
anxiety.
Thinking, Concepts, and Creativity
● Cognition: the mental activities associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and
communicating information—by appreciating our human smarts.
● Concepts: mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people.
● Prototypes: a mental image or best example of a category
● Creativity: the ability to produce ideas that are both novel and valuable
● Convergent thinking: intelligence test
● Divergent thinking: creativity test
● Five components of creativity
1. Expertise
2. Imaginative thinking skills
3. A venturesome personality
4. Intrinsic motivation
5. A creative environment
Solving Problems and Making Decisions
● Algorithms: step-by-step procedures that guarantee a solution.
● Heuristics: simpler thinking strategies
● Insight: arrive at a solution to a problem
● Confirmation bias: eagerly seek out and favor evidence verifying our ideas than
evidence refuting them
● Mental set: our tendency to approach a problem with the mind-set of what has worked
for us previously.
● Intuition: our fast, automatic, unreasoned feelings and thoughts.
● Representativeness heuristic: To judge the likelihood of things in terms of how well
they represent particular prototypes
● Availability heuristic: operates when we estimate the likelihood of events based on how
mentally available they are.
● Overconfidence: This tendency to overestimate the accuracy of our knowledge and
judgments
● Belief perseverance: fuels social conflict
● Framing: the way we present an issue, sways our decisions and judgments.