What is hyperthymestic syndrome?
Memory of life events that is highly accurate
What is cognitive psychology?
The study of cognitive processes, what is used in making sense of the world
- Attention, memory, langauge, thinking and rasoning
What is memory?
The retention of information over time
What is a memory illusion?
False but subjectively compelling memory
What are the major systems of memory?
Sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory
What is sensory memory?
Brief storage of perceptual information before it is passed to short-term memory
- Preserves information briefly (.5-2 seconds) in the original sensory format
i. e. visual, auditory, touch - Allows sensory information to linger briefly after the sensory stimulation is over
- Decays rapidly and cannot be maintained by rehearsal
What is iconic memory?
Visual sensory memory applying to vision
- photographic memory
What is echoic memory?
Describe the ultra-short-term memory for auditory stimuli, auditory sensory memory
- can last as long as 5-10 seconds
What is short term memory?
When information passes sensory buffers, it passes into short term memory, a second system for retaining information in memories for brief periods of time
- closely related to working memory
- Short term holds information in verbalised format
- Information in immediate consciousness
- Duration: decays within 20-30 seconds if unrehearsed
- Capacity: 7 +- 2 times
What is the multistore model of memory?
Assumes that:
- Different memory stores for memories of different durations
- Original assumption was that storing and retrieving information involves passing information from one store to the next
What is the distinction between primary and secondary memory?
William James
- Primary memory: information held in immediate consciousness = short-term memory
- Secondary memory: vast store of memory which gets called back into primary memory = long-term memory
What is the evidence for distinction between short and long term memory?
- Serial position effect in free recall
2. Neuropsychological data
What is the serial position effect?
Free recall
- Recall as many words from the list in any order
- Primacy effect is high and recency effect is high while middle is low
Primacy and recency components are affected differently
- Faster rate of presentation
- Less time for rehearsal
- Reduces primacy effect not recency component
- Filter task (e.g. mental arithmetic task after list: becomes like middle component (serial position not at the end) removes recency effect
What is the neuropsychological data for memory?
Henry Gustav Molaison:
- Hippocampus removed as a treatment for intractable epilepsy
- Intact remote memory and STM
- Unable to form new memories
What is long term memory?
- Memory that can be retrieved after attention has been diverted
- Duration: minutes to years
- Capacity: unlimited
What is chunking?
Grouping elements into meaningful units which improves performance on short-term memory tasks
- “short term meory” is affected by meaningful information in long term memory -> argues against strict serial organisation from STM to LTM
What are the memory processes?
- ENCODING: processing at the time of learning (levels of processing, schemas)
- RETRIEVAL: processing at the time of recovering memory from storage (retrieval failure, reconstructive processes)
What are the levels of processing?
Craik and Lockhart (1972) -> memory is a product of type of operations performed at encoding
- Orienting task:
» physical: word in capital letters?
» rhyme: does it rhyme with fate?
» semantic: does it fit the sentence ‘he dropped the __”
- Subjects given an unexpected test of memory with semantic orienting showing best results
How do we organise memory by schemas?
When encoding complex material (e.g. prose or everday events), existing knowledge is used to impose organisation
- Schemas/scenario: conceptual framework about events e.g. going to resaturant
What is flashbulb memory?
Extremely vivid and permanent memory of how one learned about a public event that produced high
level of emotion/arousal (e.g., where they were; what they were doing; )
- not necessarily accurate
- memory for detail decayed for everday and flashbulb memories
What causes forgetting in long-term memory?
- Retrieval failure
- Reconstructive process
What is retrieval failure?
- Not loss of information, but failure of access
- Due to mismatch in format between retrieval and encoding context
- Recognition failure of person out of context
- Childhood amnesia
What is the reconstructive process?
Memory is not reproductive but reconstructive
- Pseudomemory demonstration
- Elizabeth Loftus has work on implatining memory and recovering memory
What is organic amnesisa?
When memory is impared due to brain damage
- Anterograde amnesia: impaired learning of information since onset of amnseisa
- Retrodrade amnesia: loss of information learned prior to onset
