There are 10 things we are going to look at:
- Memory Systems
- Sensory Memory
- Perspective Memory
- Working Memory
- Executive Processes
- Visio-Spatial Sketchpad
- Phonological Loop
- Declarative Memory
- Semantic Memory
- Episodic Memory
- Implicit Memory
- Memory Processes
- Forgetting
- Mnemonics
- Memory Stability
- Age & Memory
- Language
- Memory Instability
-
- False Memory
- Eye Witness Memory
-
- Consolidation
- Memory Disorders
- Tip Of The Tongue
- Amnesia
- Repressed Memory
Outline
- 1. Naïve Mnemonics
- (pronounced “nemonics”)
- techniques to aid memory
- Systems for:
- encoding
- retrieving
- or both.
- we don’t like Isolated facts
- we like interesting facts
- Greek goddess of memory (Mnemosyne)
- mother of the muses
- important part of your culture if you have a goddess dedicated to it
- Cicero
- Principle of order.
- Put ideas in their proper places
- Naive (natural) Mnemonics
- Do naturally
- Without training
- Rehearsal
- Repeat words over and over
- 6thcentury BC
- knew that rehearsal helps memory
- rehearsal = repetition
- keep things in STM
- repeat number on the way to the phone
- Rhymes and songs
- Chunking
- Recode information to make it easier to remember
- Remember familiar items better
- break into segments,
- then group together
- easier to remember a meaningful group
- Subjective chunks
- meaningful to you
- 2 to six items
- cultural conventions (SS, phone)
- George Miller
- Magical number seven plus or minus two
- larger grouping by auditory chunking
- use chunking to improve Alzheimer’s disease patients to improve verbal working memory
- 2. Technical mnemonics
- Not spontaneously used
- Require some training and practice
- Can be very effective
- Great for info you want to remember for a long time
- Require investment
- Most the “memory classes” present a technical mnemonic system
- Method of Loci
- One Oldest mnemonic system
- used by ancient Greeks & Romans
- Archbasilica of St. John Lateran
- 4thcentury (324, consecrated)
- Simonides of Ceos, famous poet
- 477 BC, banquet, building collapsed
- identified by visualizing where they sat
- Combines two elements:
- images & places
- both are equally important
- Places (loci) provide
- pegs or anchors to store the images
- remember any image when cued by a location
- Your House
- Front door = opening
- first room you enter is your first topic
- Journey method
- current house, imaginary house
- childhood home
- Journey across campus
- across the country or
- around the world
- card decks
- memorize the order of a deck of cards if 52 locations
- memorize the bones of the body while you walk around the neighborhood
- Large house
- “walk thru” your house
- The Roman’s “memory theaters” or tabernacles.
- Sherlock Holmes
- mental palace
- attic of the brain
- Imaginary Town
- Reports of
- 10 districts
- 10 houses each
- 10 rooms in each
- 100 objects in each
- Reports of
- One Oldest mnemonic system
- 3. Chaining
- More behavioral than a mnemonic technique
- Highly effective
- Forward: common way to learn songs
- a naïve mnemonic
- Backward: great way to learn songs, poems or speeches
- a technical mnemonic but easy
- More behavioral than a mnemonic technique
- More Mnemonics
- Rhyme
- Ode mnemonics
- well into the 14thcentury
- everything but legal documents recited in rhymes and poems
- Rules of commerce, ethics, social behavior
- “I before E, except after C”
- “30 days hath September, April, June…”
- don’t have to rhyme
- Ode mnemonics
- Music
- “Fifty Nifty United States”
- Jack Sheldon singing Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m just a bill”
- Hannah Montana’s Bone Dance
- “ABCDEFG” song
- Child rehearing number
- random words will often sing it
- make up own tune
- Music doesn’t have to be good, just memorable
- Nicknames
- Abbreviate or rename familiar places
- parks, bridges, buildings
- People = 2 syllable limit?
- Abbreviate: State or U
- Rep theater
- Abbreviate or rename familiar places
- Acronyms
- reduction mnemonic
- first letter of each word
- RDO (regular day off)
- KPI (key productivity indicator)
- SLO (student learning outcome)
- Acronyms
- RADAR
- radio
- detection
- and
- ranging
- MASH
- mobile
- army
- surgical
- hospital
- Name the Great Lakes
- HOMES
- Huron
- Ontario
- Michigan
- Erie
- Superior
- HOMES
- RADAR
- Acrostics
- Every Good Boy Does Fine
- lines on treble clef
- On old Olympus towering top, a Finn and German viewed some hops
- 12 cranial nerves
- Look like an acronym
- starts the opposite way (short to long)
- Poems or sentences where the first letter of each word stands for something
- Great for remembering the order of items
- Not great for remembering the underlying information
- Every Good Boy Does Fine
- Proverbs
- short versions of folk wisdom
- “Red in the morning, sailors take warning…”
- “Spring forward, fall back”
- spelling knowledge:
- desert vs dessert; more is better
- Rhyme
- External Mnemonics
- Images
- infographics, mind maps, clusters, cartoons
- paintings and stained-glass windows
- used to remind people
- compass on a map
- mental image
- grocery store
- images alone can be helpful.
- work best when they are interactive
- don’t have to be bizarre or vivid; must be interactive
- bizarre or unusual images tend to be interactive
- Cathedrals
- illuminated manuscripts
- frescoes
- stained glass windows
- Stations of the Cross
- to us and are easy to use.
- Disadvantages of mnemonics, particularly technical:
- Takes a lot of effort to use them
- more than most people will devote)
- Most don’t work on complex material
- poems or stories
- Don’t help remember physical sequences (dance movements, etc.)
- Limited usefulness for everyday tasks
- People don’t use them;
- even if trained to use them
- Takes a lot of effort to use them
- Studying for test
- Note cards
- Flash cards
- Mind maps
- Clusters
- Doodling
- Outlines
- Classic outline
- indenting for each subsequent level
- Cornell System
- vertical line (~3 inches in)
- main ideas & details
- Memory researchers
- not more likely to use them
- Write things down
- Lists = To Do
- Calendars = When Do
- paper & electronic
- Memos & Notes
- Post-it Notes
- 3×5 index cards
- One idea per card
- Writing on your hand
- Photographics
- wonderful memory aids
- don’t encode flower, flower, flower
- go “pretty” and throw the rest away.
- We are meaning extractors.
- Objects
- briefcase at front door
- String on finger
- Knot in a scarf or handkerchief.
- Anything out of the ordinary
- Images
Outline
- 1. Memory Systems
- Types of memory
- Procedural Memory: what you can do
- Sensory Memory: buffers for vision & audition
- Prospective Memory: remember what going to do; sensitive to elderly
- Declarative Memory (things you know)
- Episodic Memory (life story of events); right hemisphere
- Semantic Memory (names and facts); left hemisphere
- Non-Declarative Memory: doesn’t use hippocampus
- Non-word learning
- Acquired slowly
- Includes
- conditioned responses
- skills
- habits
- priming
- 2 Views of Memory
- Short-term memory
- Memory of events just occurred
- About seven items (+-2)
- Rehearsal to get it in
- Once gone, lost forever
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory
- Memory of previous events
- Long-term memory is vast
- Difficult to estimate how big
- Rehearsal not needed
- May recall with hints
- STM can be moved to LTM
- Held in working memory
- If score changes, throw out old score
- Consolidation
- Varies widely between people & material
- Interesting facts more than boring
- Emotional items learned quickly
- cortisol activates amygdala
- storage of emotional events
- LTM not permanent
- Change, fade & vary in detail
- Reconsolidate a memory if:
- A reminder followed by similar experience
- New experiences during reconsolidation can modify memory
- Working Memory
- Temporary storage of tasks
- Attending to right now
- Delayed-response task
- Ss given signal
- Give response after a delay
- Damage to prefrontal cortex
- Impairs working memory tasks
- Older people often have impaired working memory
- Prefrontal cortex may change as age?
- 2. Schema
- What Are Schemas?
- cognitive structures
- categories
- mental models
- differ between people
- based on personal knowledge base
- As your knowledge base grows, your schemas expand
- How Schemas Develop
- Start with a simple schema for animals
- all animals are referred to as dog or cat or duck
- friendly cats, touchy cats
- Assimilation
- adding info to knowledge base
- like putting more things in your house
- small adjustments
- slight cognitive distortion
- thingamabobs = things in a box
- Accommodation
- large adjustments
- buy an additional house
- add new categories
- differentiate between categories
- add categories for live cats, fictional cats, cartoon cats, book cats, neighbor cats, etc.
- department store schema
- shopping mall schema
- bus schema
- librarian schema
- How Do Schemas Work?
- use schema to organize knowledge
- use schema to interpret new info
- it is hard to change schemas
- hardest to change schemas based on only a few samples
- Schema Characteristics
- develop over time; gradual build up
- product of our experience
- unique to us
- automatically triggered
- any sensory input can trigger a schema
- all the senses can be involved, individually or collectively
- context sensitive
- accessible & available
- Why Use Schemas
- organize your thinking
- plan your behaviors
- allow you to anticipate events and fill in missing details
- automatic
- When Are Schemas Used?
- activated by stimulus features
- the fewer the samples, the stronger the schema
- prejudices and stereotypes
- priming
- Types of Schema: person, self and script
- Person schema
- general knowledge and beliefs about other people
- traits, characteristics & behaviors
- helpful, friendly and honest?
- are generalizations about people
- Self-schemas
- person schemas about you
- general knowledge about who you are
- about your own personality, abilities and goals
- Person schema
- Scripts are event schemas
- knowledge of interpersonal behaviors
- what to do where
- restaurants
- someone says hello to you
- More Examples
- cultural schema (sports, personal distance, gestures)
- role schema (police officer, judge, professor, student)
- world view
- stereotypes
- prejudice
- Schema or Schemata?
- You can use schemata for an individual schema and schema for the plural. You can use schema for singular and schemata for plural. Or you can use schema for singular and schemas for plural. I use whichever the spellchecker won’t complain about. I have a pretty flexible schema for schemas.
- Evidence for schema
- Piaget (1923)
- first application of term to psychology
- how them form: assimilation, accommodation
- categories expand (living and non-living cats)
- dessert as an appetizer
- Piaget (1923)
- Bartlett (1932)
- War of the Ghosts
- Bransford & Johnson (1972)
- “Man serenading a woman”
- Conditions
- no context (3.6 ideas correct from 14)
- context before (8 ideas correct from 14)
- context after (3.6 ideas correct from 14)
- Conclusion: Right schema during encoding aids understanding & remembering
- Brewer & Treyens (1981)
- Schemas during incidental encoding
- Participants put in this “waiting room”
- Spent less than 1 minute there
- Most recalled a chair and a desk
- 1/3 remembered books
- No books
- Given surprise memory test
- average recall = 13.5 objects
- items with high schema expectancy & saliency more likely to be recalled
- 19/88 objects were inferred(i.e. not actually in the room)
- Distorting effects of schemas
- Constructive changes: occur during the encoding stage
- Reconstructive changes: occur during the retrieval stage
- Difficult to determine exactly when they occur – can even be at both stages
- 4 Impacts on memory
- Selection: keep most relevant information
- Abstraction: information stored in terms of its meaning
- Interpretation: use relevant information from LTM
- Integration: form & store a single integrated memory representation
- What Are Schemas?
- 3. Forgetting
- Some things are easier to forget than others
- How much you forget depends on the knowledge domain
- store things in various memory systems
- retrieve them with various levels of success
- Ebbinghaus
- Not good at remembering nonsense syllables or isolated words
- verbal learning is linear
- forgetting verbal learning is nonlinear
- Learning is a function of time spent
- longer you study the more you learn
- Forget the majority of facts very quickly
- within the first few hours
- after the first day, decline is more gradual
- McGeoch (1932)
- First to propose interference theory
- Time-based decay theories not valid explanations
- Iron rusts over time
- time does not cause rust
- oxidation causes rust
- Memories are forgotten over time
- time does not cause forgetting; caused by something else
- 2 kinds of interference
- Proactive interference
- previous info impacts new
- Retroactive interference
- new info impacts old
- retrieval errors occur because wrong memories found
- amount learned is a function of # of initial learning trials
- amount of forgotten is function of number of interfering trials
- 4. Hyped but Non-Existent Memory Systems
- Dissociative amnesia
- can’t remember because of psychological trauma
- Types:
- Repressed memory (psychogenic amnesia)
- inability to recall info about stressful or traumatic events
- probably doesn’t exit
- Dissociate fugue (psychogenic fugue)
- cannot recall some or all of past
- probably doesn’t exist
- Posthypnotic amnesia
- failure to remember suggestions made under hypnosis
- probably doesn’t exist
- Dissociative amnesia
- 5. Amnesia
- Memory loss
- Nearly all patients with amnesia show less loss of implicit memory
- Impact of recent experience on behavior
- even if not realize using memory at all
- Not good at deliberate recall
- Good at doing without knowing
- Usually normal working memory
- Nearly intact procedural memory
- retrograde amnesia = before accident
- anterograde amnesia = after accident
We clearly remember our favorite jeans, because they are in the closet. We somewhat remember what we had for lunch yesterday. We vaguely remember our childhood. Memory is tricky.
Here are 5 things we’ll cover:
- Memory Systems
- Memory Principles
- Declarative Memory
- Implicit Memory
- False Memories
There are five things we are going to look at:
- Memory Principles
- Memory Systems
- Ebbinghaus
- Encoding
- Forgetting
- Mnemonics
- False
Honores
We have multiple systems of memory. When we lose one, the others, for the most part, still work fine.
Outline
- 1. Memory Systems
- Types of memory
- Procedural Memory: what you can do
- Sensory Memory: buffers for vision & audition
- Prospective Memory: remember what going to do; sensitive to elderly
- Declarative Memory (things you know)
- Episodic Memory (life story of events); right hemisphere
- Semantic Memory (names and facts); left hemisphere
- Non-Declarative Memory: doesn’t use hippocampus
- Non-word learning
- Acquired slowly
- Includes
- conditioned responses
- skills
- habits
- priming
- 2 Views of Memory
- Short-term memory
- Memory of events just occurred
- About seven items (+-2)
- Rehearsal to get it in
- Once gone, lost forever
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory
- Memory of previous events
- Long-term memory is vast
- Difficult to estimate how big
- Rehearsal not needed
- May recall with hints
- STM can be moved to LTM
- Held in working memory
- If score changes, throw out old score
- Consolidation
- Varies widely between people & material
- Interesting facts more than boring
- Emotional items learned quickly
- cortisol activates amygdala
- storage of emotional events
- LTM not permanent
- Change, fade & vary in detail
- Reconsolidate a memory if:
- A reminder followed by similar experience
- New experiences during reconsolidation can modify memory
- Working Memory
- Temporary storage of tasks
- Attending to right now
- Delayed-response task
- Ss given signal
- Give response after a delay
- Damage to prefrontal cortex
- Impairs working memory tasks
- Older people often have impaired working memory
- Prefrontal cortex may change as age?
- 2. Schema
- What Are Schemas?
- cognitive structures
- categories
- mental models
- differ between people
- based on personal knowledge base
- As your knowledge base grows, your schemas expand
- How Schemas Develop
- Start with a simple schema for animals
- all animals are referred to as dog or cat or duck
- friendly cats, touchy cats
- Assimilation
- adding info to knowledge base
- like putting more things in your house
- small adjustments
- slight cognitive distortion
- thingamabobs = things in a box
- Accommodation
- large adjustments
- buy an additional house
- add new categories
- differentiate between categories
- add categories for live cats, fictional cats, cartoon cats, book cats, neighbor cats, etc.
- department store schema
- shopping mall schema
- bus schema
- librarian schema
- How Do Schemas Work?
- use schema to organize knowledge
- use schema to interpret new info
- it is hard to change schemas
- hardest to change schemas based on only a few samples
- Schema Characteristics
- develop over time; gradual build up
- product of our experience
- unique to us
- automatically triggered
- any sensory input can trigger a schema
- all the senses can be involved, individually or collectively
- context sensitive
- accessible & available
- Why Use Schemas
- organize your thinking
- plan your behaviors
- allow you to anticipate events and fill in missing details
- automatic
- When Are Schemas Used?
- activated by stimulus features
- the fewer the samples, the stronger the schema
- prejudices and stereotypes
- priming
- Types of Schema: person, self and script
- Person schema
- general knowledge and beliefs about other people
- traits, characteristics & behaviors
- helpful, friendly and honest?
- are generalizations about people
- Self-schemas
- person schemas about you
- general knowledge about who you are
- about your own personality, abilities and goals
- Person schema
- Scripts are event schemas
- knowledge of interpersonal behaviors
- what to do where
- restaurants
- someone says hello to you
- More Examples
- cultural schema (sports, personal distance, gestures)
- role schema (police officer, judge, professor, student)
- world view
- stereotypes
- prejudice
- Schema or Schemata?
- You can use schemata for an individual schema and schema for the plural. You can use schema for singular and schemata for plural. Or you can use schema for singular and schemas for plural. I use whichever the spellchecker won’t complain about. I have a pretty flexible schema for schemas.
- Evidence for schema
- Piaget (1923)
- first application of term to psychology
- how them form: assimilation, accommodation
- categories expand (living and non-living cats)
- dessert as an appetizer
- Piaget (1923)
- Bartlett (1932)
- War of the Ghosts
- Bransford & Johnson (1972)
- “Man serenading a woman”
- Conditions
- no context (3.6 ideas correct from 14)
- context before (8 ideas correct from 14)
- context after (3.6 ideas correct from 14)
- Conclusion: Right schema during encoding aids understanding & remembering
- Brewer & Treyens (1981)
- Schemas during incidental encoding
- Participants put in this “waiting room”
- Spent less than 1 minute there
- Most recalled a chair and a desk
- 1/3 remembered books
- No books
- Given surprise memory test
- average recall = 13.5 objects
- items with high schema expectancy & saliency more likely to be recalled
- 19/88 objects were inferred(i.e. not actually in the room)
- Distorting effects of schemas
- Constructive changes: occur during the encoding stage
- Reconstructive changes: occur during the retrieval stage
- Difficult to determine exactly when they occur – can even be at both stages
- 4 Impacts on memory
- Selection: keep most relevant information
- Abstraction: information stored in terms of its meaning
- Interpretation: use relevant information from LTM
- Integration: form & store a single integrated memory representation
- What Are Schemas?
- 3. Forgetting
- Some things are easier to forget than others
- How much you forget depends on the knowledge domain
- store things in various memory systems
- retrieve them with various levels of success
- Ebbinghaus
- Not good at remembering nonsense syllables or isolated words
- verbal learning is linear
- forgetting verbal learning is nonlinear
- Learning is a function of time spent
- longer you study the more you learn
- Forget the majority of facts very quickly
- within the first few hours
- after the first day, decline is more gradual
- McGeoch (1932)
- First to propose interference theory
- Time-based decay theories not valid explanations
- Iron rusts over time
- time does not cause rust
- oxidation causes rust
- Memories are forgotten over time
- time does not cause forgetting; caused by something else
- 2 kinds of interference
- Proactive interference
- previous info impacts new
- Retroactive interference
- new info impacts old
- retrieval errors occur because wrong memories found
- amount learned is a function of # of initial learning trials
- amount of forgotten is function of number of interfering trials
- 4. Hyped but Non-Existent Memory Systems
- Dissociative amnesia
- can’t remember because of psychological trauma
- Types:
- Repressed memory (psychogenic amnesia)
- inability to recall info about stressful or traumatic events
- probably doesn’t exit
- Dissociate fugue (psychogenic fugue)
- cannot recall some or all of past
- probably doesn’t exist
- Posthypnotic amnesia
- failure to remember suggestions made under hypnosis
- probably doesn’t exist
- Dissociative amnesia
- 5. Amnesia
- Memory loss
- Nearly all patients with amnesia show less loss of implicit memory
- Impact of recent experience on behavior
- even if not realize using memory at all
- Not good at deliberate recall
- Good at doing without knowing
- Usually normal working memory
- Nearly intact procedural memory
- retrograde amnesia = before accident
- anterograde amnesia = after accident
-
Paired associate tasks
- rely heavily on working memory
- bonds are stored in long term memory
- hold one item in memory while simultaneously retrieving its pair
Working memory
- Temporary storage; not a passive store
- Processing; where we do our mental work
Needed for:
- categorization
- reasoning
- weighing options
- self-direction
Uses:
- animals remember which arm of radial maze has already been visited that day
- children to remember the rules of a game while playing it
- video games to remember where you are and who to zap next
- keep track of a novel’s plot
Multiple component function together as a single entity
- brain trauma can disable one or more subparts
- others function on their own
- normally function together
Working memory is composed of four parts
Executive Process
Central Executive
- monitors and coordinates the activities of all the other processes
- coordinates current and long-term memories
- decides which information to use
- which activity is currently most important
Mental retardation
- my little brother, Jimmy
- sheltered workshops
- at one point in time, all retarded people were considered untrainable.
- found could be taught to do a specific task
- theory was that they could not learn other tasks
- found could be taught to learn a different simple task
- found can learn several simple tasks
- inability to easily switch back and forth between tasks
Central executive decides
- what needs attention
- which subunit should be activated
- switches back and forth between driving the car and talking to your passenger.
- doesn’t always get things right
- central executive doesn’t do the work
- assigns it to one of subunits: phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketch pad, or the episodic buffer
Phonological Loop
specializes in processing sounds
- intakes spoken and written inputs
- echoic memory
holds them for 2-4 seconds, or 1-2 or as long as 20
- capacity hard to assess: contents get looped
loop portion is an articulatory control process
amount of processing needed varies with content
- spoken word is processed quickly and easily
- written word must be converted into speech, which takes longer
music is processed by the phonological loop
- musicians might have addition tonal loop
Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad
tracks where you are in relation to your environment
- involves several parts of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe and temporal lobe
has both a store and a processor
- stored for about ½ second
- unclear if images are looped
visuo-spatial sketchpad receives two streams of info:
- where pathway (object in front of you)
- what pathway (it’s a tree)
Episodic Buffer
- communicates with long-term memory
- integrates the other functions
- adds a sense of time
- turns individual items into a cohesive sequence
- timing chain of working memory
- buffer is not the same as episodic memory (long-term memory for events)
When you want a bit more than general psych
Terms
- accessibility
- actively updated
- amnesia patients
- automatic
- availability
- cerebellum
- clustered
- complex skills
- continuous movements
- creative
- current
- declarative memory
- difficult
- discrete movements
- distinctive
- ease
- echoic memory
- episodic memory
- eye-witness testimony
- false memories
- foreign languages
- general information
- generative
- iconic memory
- implicit memory
- limbic system
- long-term memory
- meaningful
- misinformation
- mixed tasks
- multiple systems
- muscle memory
- nonsense syllables
- permastore
- photographs
- positive
- procedural memory
- prospective memory
- recipe
- recollection
- related to you
- resistance to forgetting
- semantic memory
- sensory memory
- smashed or bumped
- source monitoring
- vividness
- warm up trials
- working memory
Quiz
1. Knowing the capital of Texas is Austin is:
- a. semantic memory
- b. episodic memory
- c. working memory
- d. implicit memory
2. Remembering your trip to Austin, Texas is:
- a. semantic memory
- b. episodic memory
- c. working memory
- d. implicit memory
3. Remembering how to ride a bicycle is
- a. semantic memory
- b. episodic memory
- c. working memory
- d. implicit memory
4. Keeping a phone number in your head long enough to dial it is:
- a. semantic memory
- b. episodic memory
- c. working memory
- d. implicit memory
5. Remembering to go to the doctor is:
- a. prospective memory
- b. procedural memory
- c. deductive memory
- d. iconic memory
1. Knowing the capital of Texas is Austin is:
- a. semantic memory
- b. episodic memory
- c. working memory
- d. implicit memory
2. Remembering your trip to Austin, Texas is:
- a. semantic memory
- b. episodic memory
- c. working memory
- d. implicit memory
3. Remembering how to ride a bicycle is
- a. semantic memory
- b. episodic memory
- c. working memory
- d. implicit memory
4. Keeping a phone number in your head long enough to dial it is:
- a. semantic memory
- b. episodic memory
- c. working memory
- d. implicit memory
5. Remembering to go to the doctor is:
- a. prospective memory
- b. procedural memory
- c. deductive memory
- d. iconic memory
