- Attention
- Human attention is limited because of our brain cannot attend to everything at the same time
- Consequently, we have selective attention
- Levels of processing
- Memory is better with deep processing (e.g., focus on meaning)
- Other levels include shallow (focus on elements) and intermediate
- Encoding
- Elaboration is a form of encoding. Imagine I cannot recall Dr. Berry's name, but I know much about him: he's president, lives in that big house across from Overstreet, he's bald, he's shorter than me, he drives a big, white Ford truck...
- BINGO! his name now comes to me because of elaboration
- The Process of Memory
- Memory is a construct, meaning that it is abstract not concrete. It cannot be purchased, weighed, or real even.
- Instead, it must be described as a process. Psychologists use three steps to describe that process:
encoding, storage, and retrieval. - Those steps comprise the Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory.
- The model contains the three steps above plus three more stages:
- sensory memory (lasts a few seconds)
- short term memory (lasts a few minutes)
- long term memory (lasts from hours to a lifetime)
- The model contains the three steps above plus three more stages:
- Memory consists of retrieving items from storage via three methods:
- recall (Who was the first psychologist?)
- Should remind you of an essay test
- recognition (Was the first psychologist: Wundt, James, Titchener, Hall?
- Should reming you of a multiple choice test
- relearning (Time how long it takes you to learn that Wundt was the first, now forget that and learn it again. The time it takes to learn it the second time should be less.)
- Should remind you of the greater ease of learning the same thing again.
- BTW, each method yields its own type of results, so any statement about memory should state the method used. (i.e., you might not RECALL that Wundt was the first psychologist, but you might RECOGNIZE his name from a list.
- recall (Who was the first psychologist?)
- Process (graphic)
- The graphic shows ordinary words the public might use for the process of memory:
- Learning
- Retention
- Remembering
- It then shows the words psychologists use:
- Encoding
- Storage
- Retrieval
- It also defines the place where psychologists measure memory: in between storage and retrieval. NOTE: if an item is not encoded, it cannot be stored, and, thus, cannot be retrieved. Most popular memory courses improve encoding techniques (see Mnemonics below)
- The graphic shows ordinary words the public might use for the process of memory:
- The History of Memory Research
- Hermann
Ebbinghaus
- In my history of psychology text, I write about Ebbinghaus:
No one before him had attempted to experiment on memory. Before Ebbinghaus began his experiments on memory that topic was firmly within the grasp of philosophy. His research on memory required him to create, almost out of thin air, new techniques for experimentally manipulating items to remember and new ways of measuring memory. The nonsense syllable was the new technique. It was a consonant-vowel-consonant combination that was not a word. He realized early on that he needed items to place into memory with which he had little or no previous experience. Examples he used (in German, naturally) were: ZAT, BOK, and SID (Boring, 1950, p. 388), nonsense syllables that would work in English as well. Ebbinghaus wished to study memory in its purest form, that is, without linking it to items already stored in the mind due to experience. He proceeded to memorize thousands of lists randomly made up from the 2,300 nonsense syllables he had created. To measure his own memory (he was the only participant), he measured the time it took him to learn a particular list for the first time and later, after a predetermined interval, measure the time it took him to relearn it. In each instance, the criterion of learning was reciting the list without any errors. He discovered that it always took him less time to learn the list on the second trial. He called that method a savings score because he was saving time when he learned the list the second time. From his data, he constructed a graph showing that the interval between the first trial and the second trial was the most important feature. That graph, now known as Ebbinghaus’ curve of forgetting, has stood the test of time. It has been replicated time and again since he first published it.
- The nonsense syllable or CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant)
- CVCs are not words (e.g., CAT is a word, but BEP is a CVC)
- Ebbinghaus memorized list of nonsense syllables and then, after forgetting them, relearned them
- He discovered:
- it took less time to memorize the second time
- memory declined rapidly shortly after memorization and much more slowly thereafter
- he called that his curve of forgetting
- The Curve of
Forgetting the graphic shows the typical shape of memory decline over time
- I consider these data among the most powerful in all of psychology because they have been replicated over and over since Ebbinghaus first discovered them
- BUT, there's more...
- There are ways to circumvent the curve of forgetting, mostly via practice and automaticity
- Practice might not make perfect, but it preserves memory (which neurosurgeon would you prefer to operate on you? One fresh out of med school and who has only done 10 brain surgeries or one with a lot of experience who routinely performs 75 or more brain surgeries per year.
- Automaticiy consists of actions so well practiced that they are performed without conscious thought (think of driving a car)
- There are ways to circumvent the curve of forgetting, mostly via practice and automaticity
- Serial Position
Effect
- We often learn things that are ordered such as lists or song lyrics
- The serial position effect describes the phenomenon where the beginning (primacy effect) and the end (recency effect) are more easily learned than items in the middle
- Graphic Note that in the 12-item list shown, participants made more errors on the items just past the middle of the list.
- Graphic Note that in the 12-item list shown, participants made more errors on the items just past the middle of the list.
- Stages of Memory
- The three classic stages are: sensory memory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM). A newer stage is working memory, a revision of STM. All are further explained below.
- Think of the stages of memory as filters. Everything goes into sensory memory, but it does not last long (seconds), most is lost, and some goes into STM which might last a minute or so, then even less gets transferred to LTM where it might last for hours to a lifetime.
- Sensory memory
- Iconic or visual, might last two seconds or less
- Bahrick's partial recall tasks
- Bahrick showed participants 3 X 3 grids of letters such as:
- Sensory memory
- for less than a second
- hardly anyone could remember all 9 letters
- no one could remember them if he waited more than 2 seconds for their response
- that's how he knew the iconic or visual sensory register had a very short duration
- But, when he only asked for one letter or a row of letters to be remembered nearly all the participants could remember that letter or that row
- What should they answer when presented this stimulus immediately after: "O"
- Can you see why?
- Echoic or auditory, lasts longer than iconic
- Think of language, for example suppose I said to you, "A funny thing happened to me on the way to work today, but before I tell you about that, let me remind you that you should study hard for the next test, also we don't know when SAU will open again. Now, about that funny thing..."
- Notice how the words above are like the cars on a train, all hooked together. So, unlike visual input, which hits you all at once, auditory input is serial, one word after another and you have to keep what was already said in mind so that you can understand the whole string of words.
- STM
- The next stage is STM
- STM without rehearsal (see below) might last 20 seconds
- Rehearsal is when participants mentally remind themselves what the item to be remembered was. Here's an example:
- Suppose you wanted to call a new phone number that someone just told you and when you call you get a busy signal. Then, when you go to call again, that number is gone from your STM. But, if you had repeated the number to yourself over and over between the two calls it would still be in STM.
- Often in memory research investigators wish to eliminate rehearsal. One common way to do that is to have the participant count backwards by threes from 100: 100, 97, 94,91,89,86...Persons made to do that show short STMs.
- STM is limited in size too. It can hold about 5 to 9 items. See George Miller's famous 1956 article
- Chunking game
- hard to do online: I would ask you to guess what word I was thinking, then write the correct letters:
- argumenta___
- I'd also cheat:
- xykpro... (no such word in English
- Also works for sentences:
- You can lead...
- That dog won't...
- A stitch...
- All of these are aphorisms or common sayings
- See HERE for more such aphorisms
- hard to do online: I would ask you to guess what word I was thinking, then write the correct letters:
- LTM
- LTM lasts from minutes to years
- Consolidation is the name of the process by which STM items become fixed in LTM
- Virtually unlimited storage
- Types of LTM
- Procedural
- think of riding a bicycle. It's a procedure. If I brought you a bicycle and asked you to ride it, could you? Yes, most likely, if you had ever ridden on before, even years before.
- Usually, any skill learning is procedural
- Semantic
- Knowledge is one type of semantic memory. What is the Israeli parliament called? (Look it up.)
- Semantic memories are not tine-tagged. Your probably do not remember when you learned that 3 x 7 = 21
- Episodic memories are time-tagged. Thinks of your HS graduation, your birthdays, when you got engaged, when your children were born.
- So, episodic memories are personal. But, all of your semantic memories were first episodic memories.
- Procedural
-
Working memory
- Baddeley's working memory is a reworking of STM. It adds an number of features: a rehearsal loop (makes STM last longer), a visuospatial sketchpad (a way of triggering memories via internal visual stimuli or memories of locations), and an executive control system to manage it all.
| A | P | B |
| Q | O | E |
| R | N | J |
- This is the active part of the process
- Serial Position effect
- it's easiest to learn beginning (primacy effect)
- and the end (recency effect)
- Recall: "Wbo was the first psychologist?" (Do you remember?)
- Recognition: "Was the first American psychologist: Dewey, Titchener, James, or Cattell? (Did you pick him out?)
- Example: you speak to your favorite Walmart cashier all of the time but you fail to recognize her in class. Why?
- Your retrieval is better when you are in the same context that you first encoded the memory.
- Example: I might remember my golf score on the 13th hole better when I'm actually on the golf course.
- False memories (see bottom of this page)
- Autobiographical Memories
- What is your oldest memory? How old were you?
- Infantile amnesia is common. See: LINK (it's slow sometimes, sorry)
- Text from that site:
- As a parent, I have informally tested my children from time to time about their memories. Once, I asked my oldest if he remembered visiting the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum a year after his last visit. He was about five years old at the time and he did not remember. I probed, and asked if he remembered what animal was just inside the main doors in the museum's rotunda. He still did not remember. Here is what he did not remember, the giant elephant in the rotunda:
- Three Levels of Autobiographical Memories (Conway & Rubin, 1993)
Level Label Description 1 Life time periods Long segments of time (years) 2 General events Extended Composite Episodes (days to months) 3 Event specific knowledge Individual episodes (seconds to hours)
- Level 1: I lived in Latin America for 13 years (Colombia, Argentina, Cuba, and Chile)
- Level 2: Over the last five years SAU has sent me to Cuba 6 times to establish and maintain an exchange program
- Level 3: I broke the top joint of my middle finger in football practice one day in 1966(and it's still bent!)
- Emotional Memories
- Flashbulb Memories
- Recall of important public or private events
- Called "flashbulb" because it's as if you took a picture of it in your mind
- Public event examples: Pearl Harbor (1941), Kennedy assasination (1963), World Trade Center (2011)
- Can be personal too, like when you get the fat envelope from Harvard grad school (that means you're in!)
- Flashbulb Memories
- Traumatic Events
- Tend to be retrieved easier
- May be disturbing (e.g., PTSD)
- Repressed Memories and Eyewitness Testimony (see bottom of this page)
- Theories of Forgetting
- Decay
- This is the oldest theory of memory and forgetting. It assumed that memories rotted away over time. (Kind of like a banana: first it's green, then yellow, then black spotted, then black, then mush). BUT, the data do not support decay theory because some old memories never fade away.
- Retrieval Failure
- Retrieval failure theories see forgetting as the inability to find and recover a memory in storage, Hence the title of retrieval failure. Opposed to this are theories of true forgetting. Meaning a particular memory might be, in fact, completely lost and no amount of searching could recover it. (For example, imagine you are looking at my garage and you want to borrow my weed whacker, but you can't find it. Unless, you take every last item out of the garage you will not know if it was really there or not. Under retrieval failure you might say, "I could not find it." But under true forgetting (if the weed whacker was no longer in my garage) you might say "I don't know if he ever had a weed whacker."
- Interference
- For many years, interference theory was the most popular theory of memory and forgetting. Today, most psychologists agree that it exists as described, but that it works better in laboratory situations than in the real world.
- Proactive
interference (graphic)
- Look at the graphic above. E stands for experimental group, C stands for control group
- The experimental group was given a memory task (A-B) followed by a related task (A-C) and then asked to remember A-C the second task. The control group on learned the A-C task and both were tested on the A-C task. The results were that the experimental group did mor e poorly on the memory task than the control group. The interference interpretation is that the A-B taskt interfered proactively (meaning that the A-B task prior to the A-C task made it harder for the experimental group to learn the A-C task (proactive interference is past affects future)
- Retroactive
interference (graphic)
- Look at the graphic above. The terminology is the same. But this time both groups are made to learn the A-B task first. The experimental group then is made to learn a second task, A-C, but the control group is not. This time the test is over the A-B task and once again the control group does better on the memory task than the experimental group. This type of interference is called retroactive because the A-C task caused the experimental group to forget more of the A-B task. (retroactive interference is future affects the past)
- Scripts
- We learn scripts all of the time
- Think of what you do at a restaurant
- Decide which one to go to, Enter, Be Seated, Get Menu, Order, Wait, Eat, Pay, Leave. That script is learned and applies to nearly any restaurant
- Here's another example: CLASSROOM
- What do you think of here? Desks, Teachers, Students, Lights, Windows, Tests, etc.
- Do you think of elephants? No, not likely. Elephants do not fit the CLASSROOM script
- Decay
- Mnemonics
- As stated above, most memory improvement strategies involve improving encoding. Mnemonic devices are one common way to improve encoding. Most such devices involve chunking.
- Good examples of chunking include words (e.g., collections or chunks of letters), sentences (On old olympus' towering tops a Finn and German viewed some hops. That sentence serves as a memory aid for the 12 pairs of cranial nerves in order. olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, sensory (accessory), and hypoglossal. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO KNOW THE CRANIAL NERVES)
- Types of mnemonics
- Acrostics: sentences such as "Every good boy does fine." That sentence encodes the notes on the lines of the musical treble clef : EGBDF from bottom to top.
- Acronyms: words that encode items such as HOMES for the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. (YOU DON'T NEED TO KNOW THE NAMES OF THE LAKES) or FACE a word that encodes the spaces on the musical treble clef from bottom to top.
- Note that imagery is commonly used in these techniques
- More complicated types
- Loci: mentally put items to be remembered in a familiar location such as your house. Imagine a grocery list: steak, milk, cookies, eggs, and flour. You might remember them as follows:
- Living room--cookies--imagine your LR furniture made out of Girl Scout cookie boxes
- Bathroom--milk--imagine milk coming out of your shower
- Kitchen--flour--imagine curtains made from old flour sacks
- Bed room--steak--imagine sleeping on a large ribeye bed
- Dining room--eggs--imagine having to walk on eggshells
- Link: mentally put all of the list items into one concept (this technique is more prone to dropping items from memory)
- I like to imagine a "grocery dog" where:
- its body is a steak
- its legs are four milk cartons
- its head is a bag of flour
- its ears are two eggs
- its tail is a cookie
- Can you picture it?
- I like to imagine a "grocery dog" where:
- Peg Words
- This is a more complicated system that involves memorizing a list of paired words:
- one-bun
- two-shoe
- three-tree
- four-door
- five-hive
- six-sticks
- seven-heaven
- eight-gate
- etc
- Then associations are made with each pair, for example say you want to remember your grocery list above:
- steak in a bun
- milk in a shoe
- cookies hanging from a tree
- eggs splattered on a door
- flour covering a bee hive
- When mastered this technique is highly effective
- One study trained the elderly to use these techniques effectively
- This is a more complicated system that involves memorizing a list of paired words:
- Loci: mentally put items to be remembered in a familiar location such as your house. Imagine a grocery list: steak, milk, cookies, eggs, and flour. You might remember them as follows:
-
Lucy Anschutz, Cameron J. Camp, Robert P. Markley & Jack J. Kramer (1985) Maintenance and generalization of mnemonics for grocery shopping by older adults, Experimental Aging Research, 11, 157-160, DOI: 10.1080/03610738508259180
- Avoiding encoding
- Another strategy is to avoid encoding altogether, in other words:
- Keep a list on paper, on your smartphone
- Be disciplined enough to do so (meaning record on your phone or write down in a notebook, plus have those handy.)
- FYI, I always carry a pen and a notebook, not to mention a phone. My shopping list is on my phone.
- Amnesias
- Amnesias range from being serious
problems requiring hospitalization to simple absentmindedness
- Oliver Sacks,
the famous neurologist, made a career out of studying amnesias. One of his most famous patients (see Amnesias link above) suffered severely from anterograde and retrograde amnesias. Jimmy had to be hospitalized because his anterograde amnesia made him a danger to others.
- Anterograde (graphic)
- The inability to store new information in long term memory
- The graphic (above) indicates how these patients live completely in the present
- Note: someone suffering from anterograde amnesia may read the same newspaper over and over and not realize it. Or, like Jimmy (see Amnesias) might greet you every time you encounter that person. (Wouldn't you be suspicious of someone who said "Good morning" to you more than once on the same day?)
- Retrograde (graphic)
- The inability to recall past information
- The graphic (above) indicates how people might be unable to recall specific past events or, at worst, have no idea of their past.
- Jimmy (see Amnesias) believed he was 18 years old (he was middle aged) and could only recall a few emotionally-laden events (e.g., the death of his brother) from the years since he was 18.
- Retrograde amnesias can be induced by physical trauma or drugs (e.g., alcoholic blackouts).
- In severe retrograde amnesia nearly all past memories might be inaccessible (i.e., someone cannot even recall name in addition to not remembering nearly all else.
- Anterograde (graphic)
- Oliver Sacks,
the famous neurologist, made a career out of studying amnesias. One of his most famous patients (see Amnesias link above) suffered severely from anterograde and retrograde amnesias. Jimmy had to be hospitalized because his anterograde amnesia made him a danger to others.
- Amnesias range from being serious
problems requiring hospitalization to simple absentmindedness
