Gloria Mensah, Sarah Eve, Anthony Amos, Elijah Davila, Kamron

CHAPTER NINE: MEMORY

MEMORY

• The Phenomenon of memory

• Encoding: Getting Information in

• Storage: Retaining Information

• Retrieval: Getting Information out

• Forgetting

• Memory Construction

• Improving memory

THE PHENOMENON OF MEMORY

MEMORY

An indication that learning has persisted over time, our ability to store and retrieve information

Flashbulb Memories

Perceived clarity for our memories of surprising, significant events.

Can you remember where you were when you heard about 911?

INFORMATION PROCESSING Encoding

Getting information into our brain

Storage Retaining that information

Retrieval Getting that information back out

INFORMATION PROCESSING Three stage processing model (Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin)

Sensory memory- immediate brief recording of sensory information in the memory system

Short-term memory- activated memory that holds a few items briefly before information is either stored or forgotten

Long-term memory- the relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system. Includes knowledge, skills, and experiences.

INFORMATION PROCESSING

Some information skips the first two stages and is processed directly into our long-term memory without our conscious awareness. Like shining a flash light, we focus our attention on certain incoming stimuli that is often novel or important

INFORMATION PROCESSING

RETRIEVAL: GETTING INFORMATION OUT

RETRIEVAL

Recall- a measure of memory in which the person must retrieve information learned earlier, fill-in-the-blank test

Recognition- a measure of memory in which the person need only identify items previously learned, multiple choice test

Relearning- a memory measure that assesses the amount of time saved when learning material for a second time, the speed at which we remember and relearn something

Memories are held in storage by a web of associations, each piece is interconnected with others.

When you encode into memory a target piece of information (the name of someone sitting next to you in class) you associate it with other bits of information (your surroundings, mood, seating position, etc) these are called RETRIEVAL CUES. Retrieval cues are anchor points, the more cues you have the more likely you are to remember.

RETRIEVAL Retrieval devices:

Mnemonic Devices: ROY G BIV, PEMDAS

Our senses make the best retrieval devices

Priming: activating one strand of associations that leads to a specific memory

Our associations are often activated, or primed, without our awareness.

RETRIEVAL

Déjà Vu- (already seen) happens most commonly to well-educated, imaginative young adults, especially when stressed.

Our memory system might produce Déjà Vu. We previously might have been in a similar situation, the current situation may be loaded with cues that unconsciously retrieve the earlier experience. (We take in and retain vast amounts of information while hardly noticing and often forgetting where it came from)

RETRIEVAL

Our mood can serve as a retrieval cue. What we feel in one state, is sometimes more easily recalled when we are again in that state, phenomenon called state-dependant memory.

Mood congruent memory- the tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with one’s current good or bad mood.

HOW WE ENCODE Automatic Processing: the unconscious encoding of incidental information,

such as space, time, and frequency, and of well-learned information, such as word meanings. Space: While reading your textbook, you often encode the place on a page

where certain material appears. When you try to recall it later, you may visualize its location.

Time: Retracing your steps when you realize you left something Frequency: Effortlessly keeping track of how many times something happens,

like how many times someone said something.

HOW WE ENCODE Effortful Processing: encoding that requires attention and conscious effort

Rehearsal: the conscious repetition of information, either to maintain it in consciousness or to encode it for storage

Spacing Effect: the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study or practice

Serial Position Effect: our tendency to recall best the last and first items in a list

WHAT WE ENCODE

• Encoding Meaning: processing information and associating it with what we already know or imagine

• Visual Encoding: the encoding of picture images• Acoustic encoding: the encoding of sound, especially the sound of words• Semantic Encoding: the encoding of meaning, including the meaning of words

VISUAL ENCODING Imagery: mental pictures; a powerful aid to effortful processing, especially when

combined with semantic encoding Mnemonics: memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery

and organizational devices

ORGANIZING INFORMATION FOR ENCODING Chunking: organizing items into familiar, manageable units; often occurs

automatically Occurs so naturally that we take it for granted

SYNAPTIC CHANGES

• Neuroscientist are expanding the search for the location of memories by exploring changes within and between single neurons.

• Eric Kandel and James Schwartz observed changes in the sending neurons of California Sea Snail, Aplysia. They observed the snails neural connections before and after conditioning the snails in order to pinpoint their changes.

SYNAPTIC CHANGES• The prolonged strengthening of potential neural firing is called Long Term

Potentiation.

• Amnesia- the loss of memory

•Implicit Memory- retention independent of conscious recollection

• Explicit Memory- memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and “declare”.

• Hippocampus- a neural center that is located in the limbic system and helps process explicit memories for storage

• Cerebellum- the brain region extending out from the rear of the brainstem.

STRESS AND MEMORY

• The stress hormones that humans and animals produce when excited or stressed make more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity.

• Emotion triggered hormonal changes help explain why we remember exciting and shocking events longer.

FORGETTINGMemory researcher Daniel Schacter (1999) enumerates seven ways our memories fail us

Three sins of forgetting

• Absent-minders: inattention to details produces encoding failure

• Transience: storage decay over time

• Blocking: inaccessibility of stored information

Three sins of distortion

• Misattribution: confusing the source of information

• Suggestibility: the lingering effects of misinformation

• Bias: belief colored recollections

One sin of intrusion

• Persistence: unwanted memories

ENCODING FAILURE

• We cannot what we fail to encode because information never reaches our long term memory

• We do not notice much of what we sense

• Age can affects encoding deficiency

• If you are familiar with US coins, can you recognize the real thing?

ENCODING FAILURE

• One explanation for these forgetting curves is a gradual failure of the physical memory trace. Another reason memory fades is because of the accumulation of other learning that disrupts our retrieval.

STORAGE DECAYEbbinghaus (1885) learned lists of

nonsense labels and measured how much he retained when relearning each list, from

20 to 30 days later.

Harry Bahrick (1984) examined the forgetting curve for Spanish vocabulary learned in school compared with those just completing a high school course.

RETRIEVAL FAILURE• Information gets into our brain but we cannot get it out

• Retrieval problems contribute to older adults’ occasional memory failures.

• Forgetting is often not memories discarded but memories unretrieved.

Interference

• Learning items may interfere with others, especially when the items are similar

• Proactive Interference occurs when something you learned earlier disrupts your recall of something you experience later. Your metal attic gets clustered

as you collect more information

• Benton Underwood (1957) found that those who learn different lists of words on successive days have more difficulty remembering each new list the next

day.

• Retroactive Interference occurs when new information makes it harder to recall something you learned earlier

• You can minimize retroactive interference by reducing the number of interference events.

• Researchers John Jenkins and Karl Dallenbach (1924) discovered the sleep benefits in a now-classic experiment: Two people each learned nonsense syllables, then tries to recall them after up to eight hours of being awake or asleep at night.

RETRIEVAL FAILURE

• Michael Ross and his colleagues(1981) found that people unknowingly revise their own histories

• We automatically encode sensory information in amazing detail

• Sigmund Freud”s concept of repression proposes that our memory systems self-censor painful information.

• To protect our self-concept and to minimize anxiety, we supposedly repress painful memeories

RETRIEVAL FAILURE

MEMORY CONSTRUCTION

• Misinformation effect: incorporating misleading information into one’s memory of an event

• Source Amnesia: attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined. Source amnesia, along with the misinformation effect, is at the heart of many false memories

• Repeatedly imagining nonexistent actions and events can create false memories.

• When we encode memories, we distribute different aspects of them to different parts of the brain.

• The frailest part of a memory is its source.

• Sometimes we remember things (like people or events) and cannot remember where we know them from

TRUE OR FALSE MEMORIES• Real memories are more detailed, whereas imagined memories are more of a gist of

things. For children, it is easier to remember the imagined memories because of the gist of it rather than real memories with more detail.

• Hypnosis and questioning can often lead to false recall. Just by asking “Was the sky blue?” could ultimately change the story in the persons mind.

• Police interviewers are now being trained to ask less suggestive questions, and more effective ones. The detective would ask the witness to visualize the scene– lighting, sounds, weather, time of day, smells, mood, and positions of objects– and let the witness tell their story with no interruption, every point recalled even if it is trivial. After this is when the detective would ask follow-up questions like “Was there anything unusual about the person’s appearance or clothing?” This is referred to as the cognitive interview technique and it increases accuracy to some 50 percent.

Children Eyewitness Recall

• Children have good memory and can actually provide accurate information.

• However, they are also highly suggestible.

• Ceci and Bruck study about the suggestibility of children

• ‘Memory Wars’ over abuse in children and whether the memories are true or not.

People who are committed to protecting abused children and those committed to protecting wrongly accused adults agree on the following:

Injustice happens

Incest and other sexual abuse happen

Forgetting happens

Recovered memories are commonplace

Memories “recovered” under hypnosis or the influence of drugs are especially unreliable

Memories of things happening before age three are also unreliable

Memories, whether real or false, can be emotionally upsetting

CHILDREN AND ABUSE