What is sensory memory?
- Registers information about the environment and holds it for a very brief period of time
- This memory is modality-specific
- Masking effect
What are the types of sensory memory?
- Iconic memory: Visual sensory memory
- Echoic memory: Auditory sensory memory
What is short-term memory?
An intermediate system in which information has to reside on its journey from sensory memory to long-term memory
- as information is rehearsed in a limited-capacity short-term memory, it is deposited in long-term memory
What is short-term working memory?
Items learned earlier and later tend to be better remembered
Damage to what lobe can cause severe impairment of long-term memory but it does not affect short-term memory?
medial temporal lobe
What is the short-term working memory model?
Visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer and phonological loop, go to and from the central executive
What are the types of long-term memory?
Declarative memory = memories of facts or events (explicit memory)
Non-declarative memory = memories that you cannot explicitly retrieve, e.g., motor skills (implicit memory)
What is memory encoding?
Sensory memory - (uses attention) - Short term memory - (uses information processing) - Long term memory
The way information is processed affects how well it is encoded in long-term memory
Information that is processed in a deeper and more meaningful manner will be better encoded
What factors may help us to memorise something?
Incidental vs intentional learning
network of memory traces
What information is associated with memory traces?
- Semantic information
- Episodic information
What effects whether we forget something?
Even when people appear to have forgotten memories, sensitive tests can find evidence of some of them
What is the decay theory for forgetfulness?
Memory traces decay as a function of time
What is the interference theory for forgetfulness?
- Memory traces become less accessible due to increasing interference from competing memories
- As time goes by, you learn more new things, thereby causing more forgetting
What are interference effects?
- Interference occurs only when one is learning multiple pieces of information that have no intrinsic relationship to one another
- Learning relevant material does not interfere with a target memory - It may even facilitate the target memory (Elaborative processing)
What are the types of retrieval? And what retrieval is most used?
- Exact
○ The heir married a lovely young woman who had seemed to love him - Plausible
○ The heir got his french fries from his family’s hamburger chain - False
○ The heir was very careful to eat only healthy food
People often judge what plausibly might be true instead of trying to retrieve exact facts
What is false memory?
Sometimes we are required to clearly separate what we actually learned from our inferences
- People confuse what they observe about an incident with what they learn from other sources
When cued, what is the reconsolidation of memories?
- A brief, labile stage where the memory can be reinforced, or altered
- traumatic memories (intrusions, in trauma survivors) could be reduced upon reconsolidation
Can non-declarative (implicit) memory be retrived?
Non-declarative memories cannot be consciously retrieved, but they manifest themselves in the form of improved performance
What is classical conditioning?
- Learning and remembering through association (pavlov’s dog - unconditioned and conditioned stimuli and conditioned response)
What is extinction learning?
- Repeated presentations of a conditioned stimulus without the unconditioned stimulus creates a competing memory trace that can supersede the conditioned memory
- The conditioned response can override the extinction memory at a later date, explaining clinical relapse even after successful treatment
What is procedural memory?
implicit knowledge about how to perform tasks
