Learning Objectives
7-1
Describe levels of processing theory, including shallow and deep processing.
7-2
Describe the process of encoding information in long-term memory.
7-3
Apply some of the best ways to store information in long-term memory.
7-4
Explain how the results of memory research can be used to create more effective study techniques, including mnemonics and the testing effect.
7-5
Describe the process of retrieving information in long-term memory.
7-6
Apply some techniques that can be used to get information out of long-term memory when needed.
7-7
Explain how it is possible for a lifetime of experiences and accumulated knowledge to be stored in neurons.
7-8
Describe the role of the hippocampus and cortex in long-term memory.
7-9
Describe how remembering verbatim is different from remembering semantics.
Encoding
The process of acquiring information and transferring it into memory.
Notice that the term encoding is similar to the term coding that we discussed in relation to STM and LTM in Chapter 6.
We have used the term coding to refer to the form in which information is represented.
For example, a word can be coded visually or by its sound or by its meaning. We will use the term encoding to refer to the process of getting information into LTM.
For example, a word might be encoded when you repeat it over and over, when you think of other words that rhyme with it, or when you use it in a sentence.
One of the main messages in this chapter is that some encoding methods are more effective than others.
A common theme will be that encoding is more effective when the information is meaningful and when relevant connections are made.
Retrieval
The process of remembering information that has been stored in long term memory.
You can appreciate the importance of retrieval by imagining you just finished studying for an exam and are fairly certain you have encoded the material that is likely to be on the exam into your LTM.
However, the moment of truth occurs when you are in the exam, and you have to remember some of this information to answer a question.
No matter how much information you have attempted to encode, it will not help you do well on the exam unless you can retrieve it.
Interestingly, one of the main factors that determines whether you can retrieve information from LTM is precisely how that information was encoded when you attempted to store it.
Maintenance rehearsal
Rehearsal that involves repetition without any consideration of meaning or making connections to other information.
Typically, this type of rehearsal results in little or no encoding and therefore poor memory, so you are unlikely to remember the information when you want to recall it later.
Elaborative rehearsal
Rehearsal that involves thinking about the meaning of an item to be remembered or making connections between that item and prior knowledge.
which results in better memory than maintenance rehearsal.
Levels of processing theory
The idea that memory depends on how information is encoded, with better memory being achieved when processing is deep than when processing is shallow.
Deep processing involves attention to meaning and is associated with elaborative rehearsal.
Shallow processing involves repetition with little attention to meaning and is associated with maintenance rehearsal.
depth of processing
The idea that the processing that occurs as an item is being encoded into memory can be deep or shallow.
It involves attention to meaning and is associated with elaborative rehearsal.
Shallow processing involves repetition with little attention to meaning and is associated with maintenance rehearsal.
Shallow processing
Processing that involves repetition with little attention to meaning. Shallow processing is usually associated with maintenance reheasal.
when a number is rehearsed repeatedly or when attention is focused on a word’s physical features (such as whether it is printed in lowercase or capital letters)
Deep processing
Processing that involves attention to meaning and relating an item to something else. It is usually associated with elaborative rehearsal.
In an experiment testing memory following different levels of processing, Craik and Endel Tulving (1975)
presented words to participants and asked them three different types of questions:
A question about the physical features of the word. For example, participants see the word bird and are asked whether it is printed in capital letters (Figure 7.1a).
A question about rhyming. For example, participants see the word train and are asked if it rhymes with the word pain.
A fill-in-the-blank question. For example, participants see the word car and are asked if it fits into the sentence “He saw a blank 1 on the street.”
The three types of questions were designed to create different levels of processing:
(1)
physical features = shallow processing;
(2)
rhyming = deeper processing;
(3)
fill in the blanks = deepest processing.
After participants responded to these three types of questions, they were given a memory test to determine how well they recalled the words. The results, shown in Figure 7.1b, indicate that deeper processing is associated with better memory. Capital letters percent lowest, fill in blanks highest.
The basic idea behind levels of processing theory—that memory retrieval is affected by how items are encoded—has led to a great deal of research that has demonstrated this relationship
Paired-associate learning
A learning task in which participants are first presented with pairs of words, then one word of each pair is presented and the task is to recall the other word.
Gordon Bower and David Winzenz (1970) decided to test whether using visual imagery—generating images in your head to connect words visually—can enhance memory.
They used a procedure called paired-associate learning.
Bower and Winzenz presented a list of 15 pairs of nouns, such as boat–tree, to participants for 5 seconds each.
One group was told to silently repeat the pairs as they were presented, and another group was told to form a mental picture in which the two items were interacting.
When participants were later given the first word and asked to recall the second one for each pair, the participants who had created images remembered more than twice as many words as the participants who had just repeated the word pairs.
Self reference effect
Memory for a word is improved by relating the word to the self.
Eric Leshikar and colleagues (2015) demonstrated the self-reference effect
by having participants in the study phase of their experiment look at a series of adjectives presented on a screen for about 3 seconds each.
Examples of adjectives are loyal, happy, cultural, talkative, lazy, and conformist.
There were two conditions, the self condition, in which participants indicated whether the adjective described themselves (yes or no), and the common condition, in which participants indicated whether the word was commonly used (yes or no).
In a recognition test that immediately followed the study phase, participants were presented with words from the study phase plus words that were not presented and were told to indicate whether they remembered the words from before.
The results, shown in Figure 7.3, show that memory was better for the self condition than the common condition.
Why are participants more likely to remember words they connect to themselves?
One possible explanation is that the words become linked to something the participants know well—themselves. Generally, statements that result in richer, more detailed representations in a person’s mind result in better memory
Generation effect
Memory for material is better when a person generates the material him- or herself, rather than passively receiving
Norman Slameka and Peter Graf (1978) demonstrated generation effect
by having participants study a list of word pairs in two different ways:
Read group: Read these pairs of related words. king–crown; horse–saddle; lamp–shade; etc.
Generate group: Fill in the blank with a word that is related to the first word. king–cr blank 1; horse–sa blank 2; lamp–sh blank 3; etc.
After either reading the pairs of words (read group) or generating the list of word pairs based on the word and first two letters of the second word (generate group), participants were presented with the first word in each pair and were told to indicate the word that went with it.
Participants who had generated the second word in each pair were able to reproduce 28 percent more word pairs than participants who had just read the word pairs.
Retrieval cue
Cues that help a person remember information that is stored in memory.
Organizing Information
Folders on your computer’s desktop, computerized library catalogs, and tabs that separate different subjects in your notebook are all designed to organize information so it can be accessed more efficiently.
The memory system also uses organization to access information.
Look at the list you created and notice whether similar items (for example, apple, plum, cherry; shoe, coat, pants) are grouped.
If they are, your result is similar to the result of research that shows that participants spontaneously organize items as they recall them (Jenkins & Russell, 1952).
One reason for this result is that remembering words in a particular category may serve as a retrieval cue —a word or other stimulus that helps a person remember information stored in memory.
In this case, a word in a particular category, such as fruits, serves as a retrieval cue for other words in that category.
So, remembering the word apple is a retrieval cue for other fruits, such as grape or plum, and therefore creates a recall list that is more organized than the original list that you read. This phenomenon is also related to priming.
Remembering one item from a category primed you to keep thinking about other items from that category.
If words presented randomly become organized in the mind, what happens when words are presented in an organized way during encoding?
Gordon Bower and colleagues (1969) answered this question by
presenting material to be learned in a concept map that organized many words according to categories.
For example, one concept map organized the names of different minerals by grouping precious stones, rare metals, and so on.
One group of participants studied four separate concept maps for minerals, animals, clothing, and transportation for 1 minute each and were then asked to recall as many words as they could from all four concept maps.
In the recall test, participants tended to organize their responses in the same way the concept maps were organized, first saying “minerals,” then “metals,” then “common,” and so on. Participants in this group recalled an average of 73 words from all four concept maps.
Another group of participants also saw four concept maps, but the words were randomized, so that each concept map contained a random assortment of minerals, animals, clothing, and transportation.
These participants were able to remember only 21 words from all four concept maps.
Thus, organizing material to be remembered results in substantially better recall.
John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1972),
If presenting material in an organized way improves memory, we might expect that preventing organization from happening would reduce the ability to remember.
asked their participants to read the a passage.
What was that all about? Although each sentence makes sense, it was probably difficult to picture what was happening, based on the passage.
Bransford and Johnson’s participants not only found it difficult to picture what was going on, but they also found it extremely difficult to remember this passage.
To make sense of this passage, examine Figure 7.6 and then reread the passage.
When you do this, the passage makes more sense.
Bransford and Johnson’s (1972) participants who saw this picture before they read the passage remembered twice as much from the passage as participants who did not see the picture or participants who saw the picture after they read the passage.
The key here is organization.
The picture provides a mental framework that helps the reader link one sentence to the next to create a meaningful story.
The resulting organization makes this passage easier to comprehend and much easier to remember later.
This example illustrates once again that the ability to remember material depends on how that material is encoded into the mind.
Relating Words to Survival Value
James Nairne (2010) proposes that we can understand how memory works by
considering its function.
Through the process of evolution, memory was shaped to increase the ability to survive, especially in situations experienced by our ancestors, who would have been faced with basic survival challenges such as finding food and evading predators.
In an experiment designed to test this idea, Nairne had participants imagine that they were stranded on the grassland of a foreign country without any basic survival materials.
As they were imagining this scenario, they were presented with a list of words.
Their task was to rate each word based on how relevant it would be for finding food and water and providing protection from predators.
Later, participants were given a surprise memory test that demonstrated carrying out this “survival” task while reading the words resulted in better memory than other elaborative encoding procedures we have described, such as forming visual images, linking words to yourself, or generating information.
Based on this result, Nairne concluded that “survival processing” is a powerful tool for encoding items into memory.
Other researchers have, however, shown that memory is also enhanced by relating words to situations that our ancestors did not experience, such as being attacked by zombies, either in the grasslands or in a modern city or planning for an upcoming camping trip.
Therefore, it may simply be that imaging situations that involve survival can enhance memory.
retrieval practice effect
When practicing memory retrieval increases elaboration, which increases performance on memory tasks.
All the previous examples have shown that the way material is studied can affect memory for the material, with elaborative processing resulting in better memory.
However, we also can achieve this benefit by testing our memory, or, to put it another way, to practice memory retrieval.
Jeffrey Karpicke and Henry Roediger (2008).
The retrieval practice effect was demonstrated in an experiment.
In their experiment, English-speaking participants who did not speak Swahili studied a list of 40 Swahili–English word pairs, such as mashua–boat.
Then they were shown one of the words in each pair and asked to remember the other word.
There were three groups.
In the “first study and test” phase of the experiment (Column 1) all three groups studied all the pairs and were tested on all the pairs.
When tested, they recalled some pairs and did not recall others.
In the “repeat study and test” phase of the experiment (Column 2) the three groups had different study and test experiences.
Group 1 continued the original procedure.
In each study-test session, they studied all pairs and were tested on all pairs until their performance reached 100 percent.
For Group 2 the study part of the study-test sequence was changed.
Once a pair was recalled correctly in a test, it was no longer studied in the next study sessions.
However, all the pairs were tested during each test session until performance reached 100 percent.
This group therefore studied less of the pairs as the experiment progressed.
For Group 3 the test part of the study-test sequence was changed.
Once a pair was recalled correctly, it was no longer tested during the next test sessions.
This group was therefore tested on fewer of the pairs as the experiment progressed.
When tested a week later, Groups 1 and 2 recalled 81 percent of the pairs, but Group 3 only recalled 36 percent of the pairs.
This result shows that being tested is important for learning because when testing was stopped for Group 3 once items were recalled correctly, performance decreased.
In contrast, the results for Group 2 show that cessation of studying did not affect performance.
The enhanced performance due to retrieval practice is called the testing effect .
