Summary of Memory Data

Modified: 2024-07-07 5:37 AM CDST

• Meaning makes forgetting occur more slowly. Items like words and sentences are easier to learn and harder to forget.
  • Items such as 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. Peopld emember 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 audio 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 people 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, 9/11.,
    • or the Sandy Hook Shooting.
  • 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.