Memory

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I. Early History

A. Ebbhinghaus

used nonsense syllables with the goal of studying the formation of new associations "uncontaminated" by prior knowledge

study--subjects presented with material to learn

retention interval--time elapsed

test--testing of the material learned

presented himself with a stack of nonsense syllables and studied to learn them, tried to recall them in order and repeated this until he could do it perfectly; allowed various amounts of time to pass then repeated the study and recall

savings measure = (# of trials to learn) - (# of trials to relearn)

saving measure is useful because it helps measure memory that we may not have a conscious recollection of

Bahrick's permastore--took alumni that learned a foreign language and those that didn't; no difference between the groups on performance of foreign language test; then both groups learned some of the foreign language, the former students did much better than the control group; demonstrates savings

B. William James

primary memory--short-term memory; conscious information; easily disrupted

secondary memory--long-term memory; information that you can bring to mind but are not consciously thinking of; not easily disrupted

II. Modern Models of Memory

A. Adkinson and Shriffrin: Stores Model

1. Structures

sensory reigster--the first memory system, captures raw sensory information; different places for different information (iconic/echoic memory); raw and unanalyzed sensory information; doesn't help with recognition of a stimulus

short-term store--information is moved from the sensory register to the short-term store through a selective attention filter; information here is analyzed somewhat; mostly sound based representation; has a limited capacity (7 +/- 2) and short duration (15-30s); rehearsal can keep information in the short-term store for an indefinite amount of time; forgetting occurs here in two ways: 1)decay--passive; in the absence of rehearsal, information gradually fades away after about 15-30s 2)displacement--as new information comes in, capacity is reached, older information is forced out

long-term store--encoded from short-term into long-term; rehearsal and encoding are the same process with two different effects, rehearsal keeps info in short-term, encoding puts it into long-term; forgetting dictated by retrieval failure

2. How Information Flows Through the System (control processes)

what's in short-term is often under our control, we can choose to attend/rehearse

3. Memory/Structure Distinction

structures cannot be observed directly

4. Example Explanation: Primacy/Recency Effects

given a list of words to remember, people are more likely to recall the first and last items in the list rather than the items in the middle

primacy effect due to the first words in the list getting encoded into the long-term store; rehearsed more

recency effect due to the last words still being in the short-term store

in the delayed condition, there is not recency effect because the items are ejected from short-term store