Modified: 2023-09-27
Meaning makes forgetting occur more slowly. Items like words and sentences are easier to learn and harder to forget. Items like nonsense syllables and trigrams (CCCs or Consonant Consonant Consonant) are harder to learn and easier to forget.
Chunking is a term often used in memory research. It refers to the process of gathering many smaller items together and making a single larger item out of those smaller ones. Probably the best example are words. The 26 letters of the alphabet can be chunked into some 300,000 or so English words. Words can be chunked into sentences. Some sentences are sayings like: "You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink." Those sayings are easily remembered. If I had only showed you the first three words, you probably would have remembered the whole saying. Musicians play music in chunks. Beginning musicians read and play every note, but advanced musicians read and play musical phrases. They have chunked the notes and recognize them as a familiar group.
Practice improves memory, but how you practice also affects it. The same amounts of practice, but distributed in the one case and massed in the other, lead to different outcomes. Distributed practice is when practice is spread out over time. For example, you may study a total of 12 hours for the next test; you did so over 6 days. Massed practice is when practice is done all at once. For example, you study 12 hours the night before the test (Sound familiar?). Many studies have confirmed that the first strategy is the better one. Subjects remember more longer when they distribute their practice.
Overlearning is when practice is continued beyond the criterion of one error-free trial. Actors overlearn their lines. They will rehearse far beyond the time necessary for the criterion above. In the military, drills constitute overlearning. In sports, athletes practice far beyond the time necessary to meet the above criterion. In all of the cases above, overlearning helps to negate the negative effects of stress on memory. Overlearned items can be recalled under higher levels of stress than can items that were not overlearned.
Items encoded under high physiological arousal are remembered more and longer. For example, combat veterans report their most vivid memories are correlated with their arousal at the time the memory was encoded. In some cases, the memories are so vivid that they disturb sleep. In another example, some professional baseball players report that they remember every pitch thrown to them in a World Series game. High student arousal may also account for why some lecturers are more memorable than others. The converse, encoding under low arousal, shows an opposite pattern to the high arousal data. For example, listening to tapes while sleeping leads to little memory of items in those tapes.
We are much better at remembering pictures than we are at remembering words and names. There are probably biological and evolutionary reasons for that. When subjects are asked to recognize a small set of photos that they saw the previous day from a larger set, they typically recognize around 97% correct.
Finally, flashbulb memory is a term used to describe a vivid memory that was strongly encoded by a brief exposure to a memory item. Good examples from history include the attack on Pearl Harbor, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle, and 9/11. People who were exposed to those events typically recall them very strongly, as if the memories had been frozen in the light of a flashbulb. Flashbulb memories can also be personal and private. For example, subjects are most likely to recall their first sexual experience compared to their tenth.