Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

1. Encoding: Forming a memory code

   • Attention: Focusing awareness on narrowed range of stimuli or events.
     • Selective attention critical to everyday functioning
       • Filter that screens out potential stimuli while allowing select few to pass to conscious awareness
         • Cocktail party phenomenon: attention involves late selection bases on meaning
         • Location of attention filter if flexible, depends on cognitive load
   • Levels of processing theory: deeper levels of processing result in longer lasting memory codes
   • Elaboration: linking stimulus to other information at time of encoding
   • Dual coding theory: memory enhanced by forming visual codes
   • Self referent encoding: deciding how information is personally relevant

2. Storage: Maintaining encoded info in memory over time

   • Sensory memory: preserves information in original sensory form for a brief time (fraction of a second)
     • Additional time to recognize stimuli
   • Short term memory: limited capacity store that can maintain info for about 20 seconds without rehearsal
     • Rehearsal - help store short term memories
       • Maintenance - maintaining info in consciousness
       • Elaborative - increasing probability you will retain info
     • Limited capacity (4 items plus/minus one)
     • Working memory: limited capacity storage system that maintains info by providing an interface between perception, memory, and action
       • Phonological loop - evolved to facilitate acquisition of language
       • Visuospatial sketchpad - temporarily holds visual images
       • Central executive system - controls development of attention
   • Long term memory: unlimited capacity store that can hold info over long periods of time
     • Flashbulb memories - vivid and detailed recollections of momentous events
   • Organization
     • clustering: tendency to remember similar or related items in groups
     • conceptual hierarchy: multilevel classification system based on common properties among items
     • schemas: organized cluster of knowledge about subject or event abstracted from previous experience
     • Semantic network: nodes representing concepts, joined together by pathways that link related concepts
     • Connectionist networks (how neural networks handle info) and parallel distributed processing (stimultanious processing same info spread across networks) assume cognitive processes depend on patterns of activation in highly interconnected networks

3. Retrieval: Recovering info from memory stores

   • tip of the tongue phenomenon - temporary inability to remember something you know accompanied by a feeling that its just out of reach
   • encoding specificity principle - memory for info would be better when conditions during encoding and retrieval were similar
     • Reinstating context can facilitate recall
   • Misinformation effect - recall an event they witnessed is altered by introducing misleading postevent info
   • Reality monitoring - process of deciding whether memories are based on external sources (perception of actual events) or internal sources (imagination)
   • Source monitoring - involves making attributions about origin of memories
     • Source monitoring error- occurs when a memory derived from one source is missattributed to another source
   • Destination memory - recalling to whom one has told what

4. Forgetting

   • forgetting curve - graphs retention and forgetting over time
   • Measures
     • retention - proportion of material retained
     • recall - measure of retention requires subjects to reproduce info on own without cues
     • recognition - measure of retention requires subjects to select previously learned info from array of options
     • relearning - requires subject to memorize info a second time to determine how much time are saved
   • ineffective encoding - info may have never been inserted into memory in the first place
   • Decay - forgetting occurs because memory traces fade with time
   • interference - people forget info because of competition from other material
     • retroactive interference - new info impairs retention of previously learned info
     • proactive interference - previously learned info interferes with retention of new info
   • retrieval failure
     • encoding specificity principle - value of retrieval cue depends on how it corresponds to memory code
     • transfer appropriate processing - initial processing of info is similar to type of processing required by subsequent measure of retention
   • repression - keeping distressing thoughts buried in unconscious
   • memories recovered spontaneously are more likely to be authentic compared to memories recovered in therapy
   • Schacter's seven sins of failed memory - transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence

5. Physiology

   • long term potential - long lasting increase in neural excitability at synapses along specific neural pathway
   • neurogenesis - formation of new neurons that may contribute to sculpting circuits that underlie memory
   • anatomy
     • retrograde amnesia - involves loss of memory for events that occurred prior to onset amnesia
     • anterograde amnesia - loss of memories for events that occur after onset amnesia
     • consolidation - gradual conversion of info into durable memory codes stored in long term memory

6. Types

   • implicit memory - apparent when retention is exhibited on a task that does no require intentional remembering
     • perceptual and motor skills
     • cerebellum
     • unconscious and unintentional
     • unaffected by amnesia, age, drugs, and manipulation of interference
   • explicit memory - intentional recollection of previous memories
     • facts and events
     • hippocampus and temporal lobe
     • conscious and deliberate
   • declarative memory - handles factual info (definitions, names, dates, etc)
     • conscious, effortful processes
     • medial temporal lobe
   • nondeclarative/procedural - memory for actions, skills, operations and conditioned responses
     • automatic
     • cerebellum and amygdala
   • episodic - chronological recollection of personal experiences
     • personal facts
   • semantic - general knowledge not tied to time
   • retrospective memory - remembering events from past
   • prospective memory - remember to do actions in the future

Imagens e arquivos do mapa