Review of Long-term Memory

1. Maintenance Rehearsal Sensory Memory Working or Short-term Memory Long-term memory Encoding Sensory Input Attention Retrieval Review of Long-term Memory • Organizes and stores info • Capacity unlimited • Thought by some to be permanent • Encoding transfers info from STM to LTM

2. Automatic vs. Effortful Encoding • Automatic processing • Unconscious encoding of information • Examples: • What did you eat for lunch today? • Was the last time you studied during the day or night? • You know the meanings of these very words you are reading. Are you actively trying to process the definition of the words?

3. Automatic vs. Effortful Encoding • Effortful processing • Requires attention and conscious effort • Examples: • Memorizing your notes for your upcoming Introduction to Psychology exams • Repeating a phone number in your head until you can write it down • Different levels of effortful processing

4. Levels of Processing Experiment • Instructions: • A word will appear once a second • Follow the instructions on your sheet • Simply check yes or no in the appropriate column • There will be 42 words total Beach Waist Child Trunk Turkey General Teacher Image Book Ink Pheasant Patient Barn Boat Leaf Ankle Bass House Earlobe Carriage Mother Blue Radio Indian Dog Grill Carrot Cousin Aunt Red Picnic Uncle Rabbit Knee Brain Trout Elephant Duck Memory Cabbage Gold Horse

5. Shallow processing • Processing only superficial characteristics of a piece of information • Examples: • visual encoding: encoding of images • Does a word contain the letter “e”? • Does a word contain all capital letters? • Was the word in italics? • acoustic encoding: sound-based encoding • Does a word rhyme with gum? • Maintenance rehearsal: simple repetition

6. Deep levels of processing • Elaboration: focus on meaning of info to encode info into LTM • don’t simply repeat items over and over • tie item to other info in memory • also called elaborative rehearsal

7. Ways to use deep processing • Actively question new info • Think about its implications • Relate info to things you already know • Generate own examples of concepts • Don’t highlight passage as you read • focus on the ideas in the text

8. Deep Semantic (type of…) Shallow - Acoustic Acoustic (rhymes with...) Type ofProcessing Shallow - Visual Visual (written in capitals?) Percent of words recalled Which level is more effective? Deep processing leads to better recall than shallow processing

9. More evidence for deep processing • Positive correlation between grades and use of elaboration in 5th-grade students • In an experiment, college students assigned to use elaboration received higher grades than students not taught elaboration

10. Enhancing encoding • Dual coding theory • Mnemonics • visualization • key word method • method of loci • peg word method

11. Method of Loci • Imagine moving through a familiar series of locations • the campus, your house, etc. • Associate each place/room with a visual representation of the objects to be remembered

12. Method of Loci For example, imagine this visual scenario

13. Ebbinghaus experiment • Can boost memory through repetition • The more time spent learning information, the more you retain • Experiment • Day 1 - memorized lists of nonsense syllables: BAF, HAB, JUV, VEZ, etc… • varied number of repetitions • Day 2 - examined how long it took to relearn the list studied on Day one

14. Time in minutes taken to relearn list on day 2 As rehearsal increases, relearning time decreases Number of repetitions of list on day 1 Ebbinghaus results