Memory 2

Memory 2

1. Types of LTM

   • Explicit Memory (Declarative) 'Knowing That'
     • Episodic Memories - personal memories for events forming a sequence, contextual details, associated emotional tone, what you did yesterday, first day of school, holiday
     • Semantic Memories - knowledge shared by everyone, abstract and concrete. Acquired via episodic memories, shared memories, knowledge facts, capital cities
   • Implicit Memories (Procedural) 'Knowing How'
     • Procedural Memories - knowing how to do something, such as riding a bike or learning how to read. They become automatic through repetition and are disrupted if you think about them
   • Evaluation
     • - Episodic memory associated with temporal lobe (inc. hippocampus) plus frontal lobe - Semantic Memory associated with temporal lobe Procedural Memory associated with cerebellum and basal ganglia and limbic system
     • HM - new procedural memories could be formed but not semantic and episodic ones
     • Evidence from amnesia patients - semantic memories can form independently of episodic memories
     • Brain damage evidence unreliable because can't be certain that causal part of brain identified
     • Perpetual-representation system may be a kind of implies memory related to priming
       • Priming describes how implicit memories influence the responses a person makes to a stimulus

2. Explanations for Forgetting: Interference

   • Retroactive interference - new interferes with old. Current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning
     • Mulner & Pilzecker - recall of 6 nonsense syllables was less good if there was an intervening task (describing paintings)
   • Proactive Interference - old interferes with new. Past learning interferes with current attempts to learn something
     • Underwood - analysed many studies, the more lists learned, the lower the percentage of recall
     • McGeoch and McDonald - learn list of words + list of synonyms -> 12% recall, learn list of words + list of digits -> 37% recall. Similarity matters
     • Baddeley & Hitch - rugby players who played fewer games had better recall of teams played against (less interference)
   • Evaluation
     • Artificial Research - words and nonsense syllables, and low motivation, doesn't represent everyday memory
     • Limited to some situations of forgetting, where two sets of stimuli are quite similar
     • Ceraso - spontaneous recovery of recognition memory after interference suggests memories are available but not accessible
     • Real-world application - completing advertisements reduce their effect because of interference, better to show three in one day - Danaher
     • Individual differences - people with greater wokring memory span less susceptible to proactive interference - Kane and Eagle

3. Explanations for Forgetting: Retrieval Failure

   • Encoding specificity principle - material present at encoding is present at retrieval - Tulving & Thomson
     • Tulving & Pearlstone - category + word learned. Free recall was 40%, cued recall was 60%
   • Some cues are not meaningfully linked at encoding but also act as cues
   • Cues serve as a reminder, may meaningfully link to the material to be remembered or may not such as environmental cues (a room) or cues related to your mental state (being sad or drunk)
   • Context-dependent forgetting: Abernethy - recall best with same instructor in same room
   • State-dependant forgetting: Goodwin - recall best when initial state (drunk or sober) matched state at recall
   • Evaluation
     • High validity - wealth of supporting research evidence both in lab and natural environments
     • Real-world application - to revising and the cognitive interview
     • Cues don't always work - not useful when leaning meaningful material - Smith & Vela
     • Encoding specificity is circular - not a causal relationship (Nairne) and cannot be tested (Baddeley)
       • Retrieval failure can explain interference effects and thus is the more important explanation of forgetting