encoding failures

Question 1

what do we need to do to remember information?

Answer 1

consciously encode information

Question 2

what was Simon & Emmons (1956) study?

Answer 2

during sleep, participants hear questions and answers every five minutes

participants’ EEG recorded throughout the night to monitor their sleep

subsequently asked questions they heard overnight

scores divided by EEG sleep state at time the question and answer were played

Question 3

what were the results of Simons & Emmons (1956) study?

Answer 3

overall - performance above chance, learning had occurred

awake but relaxed - 80% learned

drowsy - 50% learned

drowsiness/light sleep transition - 5% learned

asleep - no effect

Question 4

what was Bruce, Evans, Fenwick & Spencer’s (1970) study?

Answer 4

present material to sleeping subjects then awaken them immediately

no evidence for memory

Question 5

what doesn’t the absence of learning about external events while asleep imply?

Answer 5

we can’t remember internal events such as dreams

sleep doesn’t play important role in consolidation of memories

Question 6

what was Levinson’s (1965) study?

Answer 6

memory during anaesthesia

10 dental surgery patients experience mock crisis during surgery

one month later patients were hypnotised

Question 7

what were the results of Levinson’s (1965) study?

Answer 7

four patients produced almost verbatim reports of the anaesthetist’s comments

4 produced partial reports

only 2 produced no recall at all under hypnosis

Question 8

what were the major problems of Levinson’s (1965) study?

Answer 8

serious ethical questions

no control condition

suggestibility under hypnosis

experimenter not blind to hypothesis/condition - Levinson was hypnotist

no measure of degree of anaesthesia

Question 9

what are the two issues the phenomenon Levinson (1965) raises?

Answer 9

anaesthesia may not be total (“cocktail issue”) - anaesthetic (hypnotic agent), analgesic (removes pain), muscle relaxant (allows surgery), amnesia agent (prevents memory?)

different tests of memory may reveal different evidence for memory from anaesthesia

Question 10

what is explicit memory?

Answer 10

requires conscious recollection of prior experiences

Question 11

what is implicit memory?

Answer 11

knowledge revealed by tasks that don’t require reference to a specific memory episode

Question 12

what are typical explicit memory tasks?

Answer 12

free recall

cued recall

recognition

Question 13

what is free recall?

Answer 13

participant attempts to remember target information without any assistance from the experimenter

Question 14

what is cued recall?

Answer 14

remember specific items based on some specific cue

participants attempts to remember the target information in the presence of some specific cue (e.g. associate of the word they’re trying to remember)

Question 15

what is recognition?

Answer 15

participant presented with a stimulus and must decide whether it’s the one they were asked to remember

Question 16

what are typical implicit memory tests?

Answer 16

word stem completion

word fragment completion

degraded picture naming

Question 17

when are participants better at implicit memory tasks?

Answer 17

if have recently encountered the correct/full item (priming)

but don’t need to be consciously aware of encounter at time of testing

Question 18

what was Iselin-Chaves et al (2005) study?

Answer 18

implicit memory under anaesthesia

depth of anaesthesia carefully monitored using EEG bispectral index - BIS ranges from 100 (awake) to 0 (minimal brain activity)

participants listen to two lists of 20 words, each presented 25 times

one word presented each 4 seconds - 70 minutes of presentation

words are all 6 letters long and each word shares a stem (first 3 letters) with at least 4 other (French) words

implicit memory tested by word stem completion

Question 19

what is Jacoby’s (1991) process dissociation procedure?

Answer 19

inclusion test - produce items from any source

exclusion test - only produce items that you didn’t study

R = conscious recollection
A = unconscious/automatic memory

inclusion = R + A(1-R)
exclusion = A(1-R)

R = inclusion - exclusion
A = exclusion / (1-R)

Question 20

what were Iselin-Chaves et al’s (2005) results?

Answer 20

as anaesthesia gets less deep, degree of automatic influence increases significantly

when anaesthesia is relatively light and testing is implicit, can get some information encoded during anaesthesia

Question 21

how good is memory for common objects?

Answer 21

often surprisingly poor

Question 22

who investigated weapon focus?

Answer 22

Loftus (1979)

Loftus, Loftus & Messo (1987)

Question 23

what is weapon focus?

Answer 23

stress (during a crime) causes attention focusing such that only “central information” is attended to (e.g. attacker’s knife rather than face)

Question 24

how can weapon focus be experimentally demonstrated?

Answer 24

change in attention (measured using eye-tracking) in stressful situations is relatively easy to demonstrate

memory changes can be more subtle

Question 25

what did Chase & Ericsson (1981) find as limitations of encoding strategies?

Answer 25

patient S.F. simple digit span task with 250+ hours of training/testing based on chunking doesn't improve memory generally - letter span still at 6 items

Question 26

what are dramatic memory failures easily observed for?

Answer 26

details that people have never attended to