MEMORY

MEMORY

1. the ability to encode, store, and retrieve info (NOT like a photograph - a constructive process)

   • Pichert & Anderson (1977) everyone should have remembered same story, but they didn't

2. ENCODING

   • Elaborative Encoding
     • actively relating new info to info already in LTM
     • left temporal lobe & lower left frontal lobe
       • more activity, better recall
     • experiment: semantic, rhyme, visual judgments
     • experiment: survival, moving, vs. pleasant
   • Visual Imagery Encoding
     • info stored by changing into mental pictures
     • occipital lobe
   • Organizational Encoding
     • identifying relationships or categorizing items
     • upper left frontal lobe

3. STORAGE

   • Storage Systems
     • Sensory Memory
       • duration < 2 seconds
         • unattended info gone forever
       • capacity extremely large
         • experiments: 3x4 letter grid
       • iconic memory
         • visual
       • echoic memory
         • auditory
     • Short Term Memory
       • duration few seconds to minute
         • recall - unreheareed info lost
       • capacity 7 +/- 2 pieces
         • chunking
       • Rehearsal
         • Maintenance
           • repetition, ineffective
         • Elaborative
           • analyzing, the way to LTM
     • Long Term Memory
       • duration minutes+
         • decays very slowly (if at all)
           • begins 2-5 min, lasts lifetime
       • capacity no known limits
         • contains everything you know
       • The Heirarchical Model
         • Implicit Memory
           • non-declarative (w/out awareness
           • Priming
             • enhanced performace as a result of previous experience
             • perceptual
               • cortex back of brain (e.g. occipital)
             • conceptual
               • frontal lobes
           • Procedural
             • an action or skill
         • Explicit Memory
           • Semantic Memory
             • facts, info, meaning
           • Episodic Memory
             • personal life events
             • imagining future
               • hippocampus, medial temporal lobe, precuneus/retrosplenial cortec, medial prefrontal, lateral parietal, lateral temporal
           • declarative (awareness)
           • Flashbulb memories
             • highly charged event
             • inaccurate
       • Autobiographical Memory
         • episodes and facts of one's life
           • semantic and episodic, changes with time
       • People
         • Engram - physical basis of memory somewhere in brain
         • Lashley looked for memories in rat brains
         • Eidetic Elizabeth
         • Maguire, Frackowiak & Frith (1997) taxi drivers, PET scan, provide route, describe landmarks, recall film plots
           • prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, amygdala
         • Olan radial arm maze
         • Morris water maze
         • Sacks Grateful Dead
         • Mitchell 17 years
     • Working Memory
       • active processes involved in maintaining info for short periods
       • "short term"
         • like a spotlight
     • How know STM and LTM different?
       • Primacy Effect
         • tend to remember initial info
         • doesn't dissappear
       • Recency Effect
         • tend to remember recent info
         • wait 5 min. and goes away
       • serial position curve
         • serial position vs. probability of recall
   • hippocampus
     • may act as index, brings together pieces of memory stored in diff. parts of cortex
     • seems important for LTM
       • HM removed, no new LTM
         • anterograde amnesia
           • retrograde amnesia
       • long-term potentiation (LTP)
         • + NMDA receptor (N-methyl-D-aspartate
           • + glutamate
             • Hebb Rule - fire together wire together
               • Donald Hebb: if a synapse becomes active at same time a post-synaptic neuron fires, chemical changes in the synapse strengthen this connection
         • better neural processing
   • Consolidation
     • helped by sleep
     • Disruption
       • each time memory retrieved, vulnerable to distruption
         • reconsolidation
     • hippocampus
   • Neurons
     • memories may be in the spaces between neurons
       • new synaptic conections strengthened -> LTM
     • Eric Kandel
       • Aplysia
         • producing a memory invovles physical changes in NS

4. RETRIEVAL

   • bringing stored info to mind (LTM -> STM)
   • Retrieval Cue
     • anything associated with info already in LTM that helps recall
     • Tulving & Pearlstone (1966)
       • recall improved if given category names
         • 40% vs. 62% recall
   • Retrieval and Encoding
     • Encoding Specificity Theory
       • retrieval cue most effective when recreates how info was encoded
       • context dependent memory
         • underwater
         • in a certain room
       • state dependent memory
         • happy
         • sad
       • transfer-appropriate processing
         • memory likely to transfer if same encoding context
           • "brain" and "train"
   • Automatic Retrieval
     • The Stroop Effect
       • inability to attend to the colour of words and not read the words
         • we tend to say the word, rather than the colour of the word
   • retrieval can improve subsequent memory
     • retrieving a story puts it into LTM better than studying it twice
   • can impair subsequent memory
     • Retrieval Induced Forgetting
       • retrieving an item from LTM causes impaired retrieval of related items
         • frontal lobe
           • suppresses competitores
   • brain
     • left frontal
       • trying to retrieve
     • hippocampus
       • successfully remember
         • auditory cortex (upper part of temporal)
         • occipital lobe

5. FORGETTING

   • NORMAL
     • Transience
       • Ebbinghaus
         • due to time itself
         • due to interference
           • retroactive interference
             • later learning impairs memory of earlier
           • proactive interference
             • earlier learning impairs memory for later info
     • Absentmindedness
       • lapse in attn causing memory failure
       • prospective memory (plan for future)
     • Blocking
       • Tip-of-the-tongue
         • temporal lobe
       • failure to retrieve despite trying
     • Misattribution
       • assigning recollection to wrong source
       • Donald Thomson mistakenly accused of rape
       • source memory
       • deja vu?
         • deja vecu?
           • temporal
       • frontal lobes
       • false recognition
         • similar brain activity to true recognition
     • Suggestibility
       • tend to incorporate misleading info from external sources into recollections
       • Loftus and Palmer
         • implanted misleading details in questionaire
     • Bias
       • present knowledge distorts memory
       • consistency
       • Change
     • Persistence
       • remembering what we're trying to forget
       • amygdala
   • ABNORMAL
     • motivated forgetting
       • repression of painful or unacceptable memroies
     • Amnesia
       • HM hippocampi and part of medial temporal removed
   • forgetting essential