Acronym
A made up word where each letter represents a word to be remembered
ie. Roy G. Biv for the colours of the rainbow
Acrostic
A poem where every line begins with a letter to represent a word to be remembered
ie. Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge for music notes
Amygdala
Critical component to the creation of memories of learned fears
Anterograde Amnesia
Inability to create new long term memories
Attention
Focusing in on specific events or stimuli
Chunk
Familiar stimuli being stored as a familiar unit
Clustering
Tendency to remember related items in groups
Conceptual Hierarchy
Classifications of things
ie. Dogs > Breeds
Connectionist Models
Consolidation
Context Cues
Retrieval cues based on the context that an event was encoding during
ie. Remembering what you did when you got out of bed by imagining your morning
Decay Theory
A theory that states memories are lost due to the passing of time
Declarative Memory System
Contains factual information
ie. grammar, faces, dog breeds
Destination Memory
Remembering who you told information to
Distributed Practice
Spreading study time across multiple sessions
Dual-Coding Theory
Elaboration
Relating information to other information while encoding
ie. “you have a dog? I have a dog!”
Encoding Specificity Principle
States that successful retrieval depends on how much the retrieval cues match up with the memory code
Episodic Memory System
Contains events or information that is personal to you and is normally dated
ie. Christmas of 2007 was when Tessie came around
Explicit Memory
Retention that occurs intentionally
ie. making sure to remember your dogs favourite snacks
Flashbulb Memories
Unusually vivid memories of a big event
ie. Knowing where you were and what you were doing when you heard about 9/11
Forgetting Curve
- A graph showing the rate at which people tend to forget information
Hindsight Bias
The tendency to reconstruct our view on an event after knowing how it ends
ie. saying “I knew it all along” when you find out your dog ate your cookies
Hippocampus
Critical in consolidation and long-term memory