Human Memory

1. Human Memory Modules 26-30 (Myers)

2. Human Memory: Basic Questions • How does information get into memory? • How is information maintained in memory? • How is information pulled back out of memory?

3. The Analogy Figure 7.2 Three key processes in memory Figure 7.2 Three key processes in memory

4. (Spiral) FRQ on Memory #1 • Mrs. Haltli memorizes the license plate of her car during a family vacation, because she knows that the clerk at the hotel will ask for it at the reception desk. Explain the roles of the following memory concepts in her task using Atkinson and Shiffrin’s modified three-stage processing model of memory (Myers, 327). • Sensory Memory • Attention • Encoding • Working/short-term memory • Long-term memory • Retrieval (The purpose of FRQ #1 is to summarize the STAGES of the entire MEMORY PROCESS including encoding, storage, and retrieval).

5. Step #1: Encoding: Getting Information Into Memory • Step #1: Pay attention • After we see, hear, touch, etc. something, we unconsciously decide whether or not it’s important. If it is, we pay attention and encode it into memory. • Step #2: Filter out unimportant info • This takes place constantly! • Filtering happens twice • Immediately after sensory detection and before meaning recognition EX. React without knowing it • Immediately after meaning recognition and before response selection EX. You hear your name from across the room, even though you were not aware you were listening • a

6. Step #2: Storage: Maintaining Information in Memory • While and after you are encoding memory, it is stored according to it purpose in one, two, or all three different cognitive warehouses: • Sensory Memory: from raw sense date; sensory store is about ¼ sec. Attention moves it into short-term/working memory. Evidence: afterimages, Sperling’s experiment (pg. 336) • Short-term/working memory: from filtered sensory data; this store is limited to 20-30 sec. max and 7+ or – 2 chunks of information. In order to maintain information, you must rehearse (repeat) it. Also has a visual, acoustic, organizational, and syncing features. Evidence: Miller’s experiment on the “Magic Number,” Ebbinghaus’ study on decay without rehearsal (pg. 353), Baddeley’s working memory model • Long-term memory: passed on by short-term/working memory; thought to be infinite in capacity; organizes information; decays overtime and may be altered by interference at time of retrieval. Evidence: Synaptic changes and long-term potentiation (pg. 340), role of hippocampus and cerebellum (pg. 344), flashbulb memory and stress hormone studies (pg. 341)

7. Figure 7.7 The Atkinson and Schiffrin model of memory storage Baddeley’sexpansion on STM called “working memory • Information-processing theories • Subdivide memory into 3 different stores • Sensory, Short-term/working, Long-term

8. STM as “Working Memory” • Baddeley (1986) – 4 components of working memory • Phonological rehearsal loop: • represented ALL of STM in the original model • is active when one uses recitation to temporarily hold on to information. • Visuospatial sketchpad: • allows temporary holding and manipulation of visual images • E.g mentally rearrange the furniture in your bedroom • Executive control system: • handles the limited amount of information juggled at one time as people engage in reasoning and decision making • E.g. weigh pros and cons of something, like should I go to Five Guys or Arby's? • Episodic Buffer: • a temporary, limited capacity store that allows the various components of working memory to integrate information • serves as an interface between working and LTM.

9. Step #3: Retrieval • Getting information back out of memory so you can use it. This mostly relates to long-term memory, though some of the phenomena are also found in short-term/working memory. Here’s what helps us retrieve: • Retrieval cues (priming). Absence of Cues=Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon • Context • Proper mood to retrieve mood-congruent memories • We don’t know much else about retrieval, but we have learned why people forget. • Storage decay • Interference at the time of retrieval (proactive and retroactive) • Motivated forgetting, repression, and false recovered memories • Misinformation and imagination effects • Loftus’ study on car crashes (pg. 358) • source monitoring incidents

10. (Spiral) FRQ on Memory #2 • Mrs. Haltli is trying to memorize the names of all ten of her future-husband’s siblings in order to impress him while they are dating. What role will automatic processing have in this task (Myers, 327)? What role will effortful processing have in this task (Myers, 328)? As part of your answer, be sure to comment on • Rehearsal • Spacing effect • Serial position effect • Additionally, how can each of the following levels of processing aid her in her task, and how effective is each in memory encoding (Myers, 331)? • Visual encoding • Acoustic/phonemic encoding • Semantic encoding (The purpose of FRQ #2 is to study LEVELS OF ENCODING/PROCESSING and their effectiveness)

11. Automatic vs Effortful Encoding • Automatic: without knowing it, you memorize • Space: structural encoding; memorize the place on the page where information resides • Time: unintentionally note the sequence of the day’s events • Frequency:you unconsciously keep track of how many times you did something today • Well-learned information: you see the word “Taxi” on a car. You read it, but you don’t remember having read it. • Effortful: you memorize things on purpose by • Rehearsal: (see short-term/working memory) • Spacing effect: You shouldn’t try to memorize too much at once. Space out the material over a period of time. CRAMMING DOESN’T WORK! • Serial position effect: You’re most likely to remember items at the beginning of the list and at the end. The middle gets fuzzy.

12. Levels of Processing:Craik&Lockhart(1972),Poldrack&Wagner, (2004) • Incoming information processed at different levels, and some are more effective than others • Deeper processing = longer lasting memory codes • Encoding levels: each level has its own brain system • Structural, or contextual= shallow • Location on page? Upper or lower case? Word length? Color? • EX. You an see in your mind where the in information you needed was on the textbook page. • Acoustic/Phonemic = intermediate • The encoding of sound, especially the sound of words • EX. What sobriety conceals, alcohol reveals • Visual= deep • The encoding of picture images • EX. I can picture the view of the Pecos from Santa Fe Baldie. • Semantic = deep • The encoding of meaning, including the meaning of words • EX. I remember the word “cosecha,” because when I learned it in Spanish class, it was early spring and I was planting a garden

13. Figure 7.4 Levels-of-processing theory

14. Figure 7.5 Retention at three levels of processing

15. (Spiral) FRQ on Memory #3 • Mrs. Haltli wants to memorize all of the lyrics for The Lord of the Rings soundtrack, including the two dialects of Elvish. Explain how the following encoding strategies could benefit her in completing this task (Myers, 332). • Imagery • Mnemonics • Self-reference effect (self-referent encoding) (pg. 332) • Chunking • Hierarchies (The purpose of FRQ #3 is to study ENCODING TECHNIQUES and some LTM CONCEPTS) Note: This is not Mrs. H’s arm! Too manly.

16. Enriching Encoding: Improving Memory Visual Techniques • Imagery = creation of visual images to represent words to be remembered • Easier for concrete objects: Easier to remember “metaphor”or “door”when these words are flashed onto a screen? • Dual-coding theory----Semantic codes + visual codes= better memory

17. Enriching Encoding: Improving Memory Acoustic/Phonemic Techniques • Mnemonics= memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and organizational devices • Greek orators used them to help them retrieve lengthy memorized passages and speeches. • Both visual and acoustic codes used. • EX. of Acoustic: Peg-word system requires you to memorize a jingle, “One is a bun; two is a shoe; three is a tree; four is a door; five is a hive; six is sticks; seven is heaven; eitht is a gate; nine is swine; ten is hen.” Soon, you can remember the words without numbers (Bugelski et al., 1968). • EX. of Visual: Method of Loci requires you to do a “memory walk,” or memorize an image to represent each component of what you’re trying to remember. In a political speech: The basement is the introduction of my speech, the lobby is my welcome of guests, the elevator is my evidence on healthcare fraud, the second floor is my analysis of healthcare fraud, the staircase is my evidence of . . .

18. Enriching Encoding: Improving Memory Semantic Techniques • Elaboration = linking a stimulus to other information at the time of encoding • Thinking of examples like, “A phobia is an irrational fear. Oh, it’s like the common fear of spiders!” • Self-Referent Encoding • Making information personally meaningful • E.g. Do you remember every street you pass every day? • Do you remember the street your house is on? Organizational Techniques • Chunking = organizing items into familiar, manageable units; often automatic (not effortful) • EX. TW-ACIA-F-BILD-SAT-TYM-CA • EX. TWA-CIA-FBI-LDS-ATT-YMCA • Hierarchies= linear organization of concepts that interrelate; use once you develop expertise in a subject and are adding information; used for encoding subprinciples • (see example on next slide)

20. Memory Organization:Go through these slides. Find examples of each of these memory organizations in your own life. Leno O’Brien Carson Democrat Republican Independent • Clustering and Conceptual Hierarchies: • Clustering is the tendency to remember similar or related items in • groups (pg. 272) • Conceptual hierarchies are multilevel classification systems based on common properties among items (pg. 273). • Semantic Networks: • Semantic networks consist of nodes representing concepts, joined together by pathways that link related concepts • E.g. thinking of butter makes bread easier to remember (see next slide).

21. Schema: This is a classroom. What would you expect to find that you don’t, and what do you find that you usually don’t?

22. The Great Memory FRQ Swap! • Group 1 will give their FRQs to Group 2 • Group 2 will give their FRQs to Group 3 • Group 3 will give their FRQs to Group 1 • Group 1, grade FRQ 1, underlining key words and concepts. Give them a grade 1-10 at the bottom and write a short explanation justifying your grade. • Group 2, grade FRQ 2, underlining key words and concepts. Give them a grade 1-10 at the bottom and write a short explanation justifying your grade. • Group 3, grade FRQ 3, underlining key words and concepts. Give them a grade 1-10 at the bottom and write a short explanation justifying your grade.

23. Partner Review: Storage Theorists: You and a partner will work to be able to verbally summarize and become adept at explaining the discovery of these major storage theorists. Use imagery, mnemonics, self-reference effect chunking, clustering, hierarchies and other deep encoding methods to commit them to memory. • Atkinson and Schiffrin (1968): sensory, short, long (pg. 327) • Sperling (1960): experiments on sensory memory (pg. 336) • G. Miller (1956): experiments on limited capacity of short-term memory (pg. 337) • Baddeley (1986): Working Memory (look up on web) • Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve. Decay. Recall vs recognition (pg. 353) (MYERS MODULE 27-30)

24. STORAGE EXTRA INFO TO ENHANCE THE BASIC KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU GAINED FROM THE FRQ ACTIVITY

25. Storage: Maintaining Information in Memory • Information-processing theories • Subdivide memory into 3 different stores • Sensory, Short-term, Long-term Figure 7.7 The Atkinson and Schiffrinmodel of memory storage

26. Sensory Memory Characteristics: • Is brief preservation of information in original sensory form • Allows the sensation to linger briefly after the sensory stimulation is over in the visual form of an afterimage. • Auditory/Visual SM – approximately ¼ second

27. Sensory Memory Auditory/Visual SM – approximately ¼ second -George Sperling (1960) -Classic experiment on visual sensory store -illustrating how brief the sensory store actually is…his experiment is depicted in the following figure. Figure 7.8 Sperling’s (1960) study of sensory memory

28. STM Continued • Limited duration – about 20 seconds without rehearsal • Rehearsal – the process of repetitively verbalizing or thinking about the information How quickly is information lost without rehearsal? Miller Figure 7.9 Peterson and Peterson’s (1959) study of short-term memory

29. Short Term Memory (STM) • Definition: a limited-capacity store that can maintain unrehearsed information for up to about 20 seconds. • Miller’s Limited capacity – magical number 7 plus or minus 2 • Fact: The average person can hold 5-9 chunks of information in STM. • Chunking – grouping familiar stimuli for storage as a single unit • Open to pg. 269 for an example. • E.g. 8 -6- 7- 5- 3- 0- 9 can be thought of as 7 individual numbers or they can be chunked together in groups of 2, 3, etc.

30. STM as “Working Memory” • Baddeley (1986) – 4 components of working memory • Phonological rehearsal loop: • represented ALL of STM in the original model • is active when one uses recitation to temporarily hold on to information. • Visuospatial sketchpad: • allows temporary holding and manipulation of visual images • E.g mentally rearrange the furniture in your bedroom • Executive control system: • handles the limited amount of information juggled at one time as people engage in reasoning and decision making • E.g. weigh pros and cons of something, like should I go to Five Guys or Arby's? • Episodic Buffer: • a temporary, limited capacity store that allows the various components of working memory to integrate information • serves as an interface between working and LTM.

31. Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve for nonsense syllables

32. Recognition vs. Recall with nonsense syllables Figure 7.17 Recognition versus recall in the measurement of retention

33. (Spiral) Famous Study for Memory • Study 16: “Thanks for the Memories” by Loftus • Directions: After reading the above study, identify and write down each of the following for 1 of the 4 experiments. READ ALL 4. • Hypothesis • Dependent and Independent Variables • Experimental Design • Results • Implications

34. (Spiral) Forgetting Of course, there’s a lot of overlap between studies on remembering and studies on forgetting. Go through slides 35-46 on the class website homepage and write down at least 3 things you didn’t already know about forgetting. • Poor Cues • Interference • Pro and retroactive interference • Source and reality monitoring (misattributions) • misinformation • High Emotion and Flashbulb Memories • Ineffective Encoding • divided attention • superficial encoding (no semantic) • Decay • Amnesia • Retrograde • Anterograde • Connectionist Networks and PDP Models

35. Poor Cues=Poor Retrieval • Retrieval cues: The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon shows that recall is often guided by partial information about a word…retrieval cues. • The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon – a failure in retrieval • Recalling an event • Context cues: Memories can also be reinstated by context cues…easier to recall long-forgotten events if you return after a number of years to a place where you used to live.

36. Interference • Interference theory: The negative impact of competing information on retention • Proactive: previously learned information interferes with the retention of new information • Retroactive: new information impairs the retention for previously learned information • Reconstructing memories occurs during retrieval, but sometimes things go wrong • Misinformation effect: Elizabeth Loftus’s car crashes Figure 7.19 Retroactive and proactive interference THE KEY IS TO FOLLOW THE ARROW!

37. Interference, Ctd. • Source monitoring, reality monitoring • The misinformation effect is explained in part by the unreliability of source monitoring • Source monitoring: the process of making attributions about the origins of memories • People make decisions at the time of retrieval about where their memory is coming from. E.g. Cryptomnesia is inadvertent plagiarism that occurs when you think you came up with it but were really exposed to it earlier. • Reality monitoring : a type of source monitoring involving determining whether memories are based in actual events (external sources) or your imagination (internal sources) • E.g. Did I pack my lunch, or did I only think about packing it? “I told ‘em that a chain link fence would never hold rhinos! No, wait! I meant to tell ‘em!

38. Emotion: Stress Hormones Skew Remembering • Flashbulb memory • Details of strong, emotional memories are often wrong, and they become more wrong over time. • Due to stress hormones at time of encoding. Flashbulb memories decay more rapidly.

39. Flashbulb Memories

40. Ineffective Encoding and Decay • Ineffective Encoding: primarily due to (1) lack of attention or (2) phonemic or structural encoding instead of semantic encoding • Decay theory: forgetting occurs because memory traces fade with time. Remember Ebbingaus, Sperling, and Miller? Remember flashbulb memories?

41. Repression • Authenticity of repressed memories? • Motivated forgetting of painful or unpleasant memories. • Surge of reports of repressed memories of child sexual abuse. • Empirical studies that show that it is not at all hard to create false memories and that many recovered memories are actually the product of suggestion. • Memory illusions- Roediger and McDermott (2000) • (1) Participants are asked to learn a list of words, (2) Another target word that is not on the list but is strongly associated with the learned words is presented • Results: The subjects remember the non-presented target word over 50% of the time…on a recognition test, they remember it about 80% of the time. • Controversy • Research clearly shows that memories can be created by suggestion • This issue becomes quite emotionally charged. • Lack of data to estimate what proportion of recovered memories of abuse are authentic and what proportion are not.

42. Recovered Memory: A Controversial Topic • Crews, Frederick. The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute (*). New York Review Books. 1995. Basically consists of two lengthy and famous articles on Freud and the recovered memory controversy written originally for the New York Review. Crews argues that Freud was wrong in general and particulars because he was not a good or even honorable scientist and that the recovered memory movement is thereby built on a shaky foundation. Includes also letters to the editor mostly highly critical of Crews and supportive of Freud, psychoanalysis, and recovered memories. For a more extended and even harsher critique of Freud and believers in psychoanalysis, see Malcolm Macmillan's Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc (North-Holland, 1991) • Franklin, Eileen, & Wright, W. Sins of the Father. Crown, 1991. The notorious case of Ms. Franklin who recovered a repressed memory that her father killed her childhood friend over twenty years before. Her testimony was the only evidence used to convict her father. For suggestions that the memory probably was fabricated see Loftus, and Ofshe & Watters below and MacLean, Harry, Once Upon a Time (HarperCollins, 1993). • Fredrickson, Renee. Repressed Memories. (*) Fireside, 1992. An impassioned plea for the existence of repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse and guidelines for how to deal with them. • Freyd, Jennifer. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Harvard University Press, 1996. A distinguished cognitive psychologist presents the case for repressed and recovered memories of childhood abuse.

43. Figure 7.22 The prevalence of false memories observed by Roediger and McDermott (1995)

44. Amnesia • Retrograde Amnesia: you can’t remember memories before the incident, but new memories can still be created. • Anterograde Amnesia: you can’t remember most memories created after the incident, while long-term memories from before the event remain intact. • Both can occur together in the same patient. • Memory storage is still a theory, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on physically. We do know that the regions involved are certain sites in the temporal cortex, especially in the hippocampus and associated regions

45. How is Knowledge Representedand Organized in Memory? Connectionist Networks and PDP Models Parallel distributed processing (or PDP) models of memory suggest that the connections between units of knowledge are strengthened with experience. Tapping into any connection (via a memory process) provides us with access to all the other connections in the network. Specific memories correspond to specific patterns of activation in these networks. Example: Zoë's knowledge that the term neonate means "newborn" is linked to her memory of seeing a premature infant taken to a neonatal unit. Both neonate and neonatal are connected to her memory that neo means "new." When Zoë thinks of neonate, an image of her nephew as a newborn is also readily accessible. This background made it easier for her to understand that a neofreudian is a person who developed a new version of Freud's theory (Bernstein). Long-term Potentiation The physical version of connectionist networks and PDP models. Neurons connect to form memories. When memories are retrieved OFTEN, synaptic relations INCREASE. When memories are retrieved SELDOM, synaptic relations DECREASE. “Potentiation” refers to the action potentiation that travels down a neuron’s axon.

46. Other stuff . . .how interesting! • Encoding Specificity: closer a retrieval cue is to the way we encode the info, the better we are able to remember. • E.g. How do you remember the Pythagorean Theorem? Do you have a semantic link that you used to encode it? If so and you use the same link to retrieve it, you’ll likely remember it. • Transfer-Appropriate Processing: memory retrieval will be improved if the encoding method matches the retrieval method • E.g. Samantha studied for an auto mechanics test by spending many weekends with her head under the hood of a car. However, much to her surprise, when it came time to take the test, the professor handed out a multiple-choice exam. Samantha, who felt that she had really learned the material, scored poorly. According to the transfer-appropriate processing model, Samantha did not do well because she encoded the material by applying what she had learned from the text, but the exam asked her only to retrieve specific facts. Samantha's encoding process wasn't appropriate for the retrieval process required by the exam.

47. (Spiral) Memory Systems • Take an index card that has declarative, procedural, semantic, episodic, prospective, retrospective memory written on it. • Research the term that is on your card. • Find five different people who have researched the other five kinds of independent memory. • Creatively find a way to schematically connect all six types of independent memory visually on a piece of butcher paper using the cards. You may mark the paper. • Resources: Myers pgs. 342-343, Weiten pgs. 290-293

48. Independent Memory Systems Prospective= remembering to do something that hasn’t happened yet Retrospective: remembering an event from the past. Go to this website for additional information: http://www.human-memory.net/types_long.html

49. (Spiral) Improving Memory Myers 365-366. Look through these pages and plan on how to use at least three of these techniques to improve your memory in the near future. Write them down. You have 10 minutes.

50. (Spiral) AP Review on Memory: 1994 8. When rehearsal of incoming information is prevented, which of the following will most likely occur? • The information will remain indefinitely in short-term memory • There will be no transfer of the information to long-term memory • The sensory register will stop processing the information • Retrieval of the information from long-term memory will be easier • Information already in long-term memory will be integrated with the incoming information 28. A teenager would most likely draw upon which of the following to recall her tenth birthday party? • Episodic memory • Semantic memory • Echoic memory • Eeidetic imager • State-dependent learning • 33. Elena is presented with a list of 20 numbers. When asked to recall this list, she remembers more numbers from the beginning than from the end of the list. This phenomenon demonstrates which of the following types of effects? • Mnemonic • Primacy • Recency • Secondary • Clustering