Human Memory

Human Memory

1. Encoding

   • The Role of Attention
     • Attention: Focusing awareness on a narrowed range of stimuli or events. Selective attention is critical to everyday functioning
   • Levels of Processing: proposes that deeper levels of processing result in longer-lasting memory codes
   • Enriching Encoding
     • Elaboration: Linking a stimulus to other information at the time of encoding
       • Visual Imagery
   • Self-Referent Encoding: deciding how or whether information is personally relevant

2. Storage: Maintaing information in memory

   • Sensory Memory: preserves information in its original sensory form for a brief time, usually only a fraction of a second
   • Short-Term Memory: limited capacity
     • Durability of Storage
       • Capacity of storage
         • Short-term memory as "Working Memory"
           • Working memory: limited capacity storage system that temporarily maintains and stores information by providing an interface between perception, memory, and action
   • Long-term Memory: Unlimited capacity store that can hold information over lengthy periods of time
   • How knowledge represented and organized in Memory
     • Schemas, Clustering and conceptual hierarchies, semantic networks, PDP models

3. Retrieval: Getting information out of memory

   • Using Cues to Aid Retreival
     • Tip of the tongue phenomenon: the temporary inability to remember something you know, accompanied by a feeling that its just out of reach
   • Source Monitoring and Reality Monitoring
     • Reality Monitoring: process of deciding whether memories are based on external sources or internal sources
       • Source Monitoring: making attributions about the origins or memories

4. Forgetting

   • Measures of Forgetting
     • Retention: refers to the proportion of material retained
     • Recall measure of retention requires subjects to reproduce information on their own without any cues
     • Recognition: measure of retention requires subjects to select previously learned information from an array of options
   • Why we Forget?
     • Ineffective Encoding, Decay, Interference, Retrieval Failure, Motivated forgetting

5. Systems and Types of Memory

   • Implicit VS. Explicit Memory
     • Implicit Memory: apparent when retention is exhibited on a task that does not require intentional remembering
     • Explicit: involves intentional recollection of previous experiences
   • Semantic VS. Episodic Memory
     • Episodic memory: made up of chronological, or temp. dated, recollections of personal experiences
     • Semantic Memory: contains generally knowledge that is not tied to the time when the information was learned