Long-term memory contains
-Declarative memory “explicit memory”: One can only learn about declarative memory when the person declares that the memory exists, this means that you have to trust that the person actually remembers what they say they do because there´s no way to measure it.
Non declarative memory “implicit memory” : With non declarative memory, it can be measured without the person knowing that they have the memory.
Explicit memory
it´s available to the person
Implicit memory
it´s not available to the person
Non-declarative memory
Conditioned associations: response triggered by a (learned) stimulus; e.g. via classical or operant conditioning
Procedural skills and habits
- Memory on how to perform certain tasks, skills, and actions (including cognitive skills, e.g. “reading”)
- Once acquired it can be rapidly executed with little attention
“Paralysis by analysis” effect:
for many of these automatic functions you´ll perform worse if you actually start thinking about them
Priming
- When an encounter with a stimulus results in an unconscious alteration in our subsequent response to that stimulus or a related stimulus.
- e.g. If one group sees an image of a mouse first and another group sees a picture of a man and then both groups are shown an ambiguous picture, one will see a picture that resembles the first stimulus, the stimulus one has been primed to see.
This is an example of perceptual priming
Perceptual priming:
because you´ve seen the word before you´re more likely to pick that over others that would fit with those letters
Conceptual priming:
because you´ve seen envelope and you´re asked about stationery you´re more likely to pick that than e.g. A pen
Procedural skills, three stages of motor learning
Cognitive stage:
when you start performing a new task, you follow instructions, you use verbal codes to describe what you need to do
Associative stage: improvement in the performance and reduced usage of instructions Autonomous stage: you don´t need to think about the task anymore, you just perform the task e.g. Driving a car
Declarative memory
Sematic memory: the ability to recognise things like your uni building.
Episodic memory: an episode that´s based on personal experience, it will look different for each person e.g. How your university building looked the first time you saw it
Episodic memory
- Episodic memory is time-dependent, you can place it in time.
While semantic memory you can´t pinpoint when you learned an experience.
Episodic memory is more vulnerable to interference like age, or brain damage.
Mental time travel (Tulving)
It develops later than semantic memory e.g. infantile amnesia
Evolved from semantic memory, by putting semantic memory into episodes
Semantic memory
Factual knowledge about the world (e.g., name of a place)
Amnesic syndrome
Short-term memory is intact.
Memory for language and concepts in intact.
There is severe and lasting anterograde amnesia: impairment of memory for events that occurred after the onset of amnesia.
There will be retrograde amnesia of variable extent: impairment of memory for events that occurred before the onset of amnesia.
Skill- learning, conditioning and priming will be unaffected. The patient will also be able to engage in skills acquired prior to the onset of amnesia (e.g. Play a musical instrument)
Anterograde amnesia
Affects the episodic memory. The patient is unable to retain events from before the onset of the amnesia.
Retrograde amnesia
Affects the episodic memory. The patient is unable to retain events from after the onset of the amnesia.
Ribot´s law of retrograde amnesia
Recently formed memories are more susceptible to impairment than older memories.
Ribot´s law of retrograde amnesia
Recently formed memories are more susceptible to impairment than older memories.
Dissociation between episodic memory and others?
Since working memory, semantic memory and non-declarative memory are intact with amnesic syndrome one can conclude that there´s a dissociation between episodic memory and other memory times.
Misinformation effect
The misinformation effect is how our memory can be changed by post-event information.
“Memory is a reconstructive process”. Does the “Misinformation effect” support this statement?
- When we remember things - we reconstruct the memories in our minds - using information from before, during and after the time of the event.
- Barlett opposed the freudian belief that memory was unaltered traces.
- Barlett focused on schema in remembering pasat events.
- Schema: an active organization of past reactions, or of past experiences.
The misinformation effect is how our memory can be changed by post-event information.
Experiment: Misinformation effect (Loftus and Palmer)
- A car accident is shown to participants and then they´re asked about it afterwards.
- The wording of the questions affected how the participants remembered the accident itself.
- If the cars were described as “smashing into one another” the participants would give a higher speed estimate than if the question was worded as the cars “hitting one another”.
- They were also more likely to remember broken glass, even though there was none.
Loftus et al. Also found that memories become more susceptible to misinformation with the passing of time. An explanation for this can be that the original memory trace becomes weaker with time.
Experiment: Reconstructive process
- In an experiment when participants are asked to say what´s in an office many reported seeing books because of belief bias (their expectations).
- Schema: mental representation organizing categories of information, expectations about the world
- They will reconstruct the memory, the mental representation of a past event gets reconstructed based on preexisting cognitive schemata, belief bias and true information about the evnent.
- When you start retrieving you´ll include the reconstructed memory and change your memory bit by bit.
Autobiographical memory
- There´s no memory system for autobiographical memory.
- Memories for both personal episodic information (autonoetic memories) and personal semantic information (noetic memories)
Flashbulb memories
The ability to remember trivial details about one´s life that were happening at the same time as a shocking event.
Flashbulb memories are not immune to reconstruction or forgetting.
