Psychology 1
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Without memory, we are unable to ride a bicycle, tie our shoelaces, remember where we left our keys, details of events that we “witnessed.” But what goes on in memory? How is it stored?
Memory: The retention of information. Learning that has persisted over time–information that has been stored and can (in many cases) be recalled.
How is our memory accessed?
- Recall: You must retrieve information that you learned earlier. In free recall, you are expected to produce a response. “What did you do today?” In cued recall, you receive hints about the material. “Given this picture of your second grade class, name everybody.”
- Recognition: You must identify items that you learned earlier. Which of the following did you not eat today? A. Top Ramen B. Kimchi Fried Rice C. Pizza D.Banana Milk (the answer is D.)
- Relearning: You assess the amount of time saved when you learn the material again. Even if you couldn’t name everyone in your second grade class, learning them again now would take you less time than it did the first time. (See classical conditioning).
How do we create our memories?
We sense and perceive things, encode it into our short term memory (like a cache), rehearse it over and over again (this process is called consolidation), until it becomes part of our long term memory (like a database). Upon accessing our memory, we retrieve from our long term memory and place it into our short term memory. This is known as the information-processing model and it describes how information that enters the system is processed, coded, and stored just like a computer.
Without a lot of rehearsal, things only stay in our short term memory for ~30 seconds.
But short term memory didn’t really capture all of the ideas that go on in the process of your…short term memory. Psychologists later redefined the term as working memory, the conscious, active processing of incoming auditory and visual-spatial information, and of information retrieved from long-term memory. A system for working with current information.
Explicit Memory: a fact or experience that someone consciously knows and declares. Implicit Memory: an experience that influences what you say or do, even if you aren’t aware of the influence.
Our working memory constantly places both of these into our long term storage–whether we are conscious of the consolidation or not. For example, clasically conditioned associations are generally part of our implicit memory. We don’t need to retrieve or “pull up the file” on the last time we were shocked when we tried to touch the stupid fly swatter thing that looks like a tennis racket. ………..
How can we help the encoding process? (How can I better memorize things for my test better?)
- Mnemonics: Making acronyms ROYGBIV
- Chunking: Organizing and grouping things into familiar, manageable units. (916) 685-2150,
- Shallow Processing: Encoding on auditory or visual sound, structure, or appearance of the word/fact fonts, logos, what things sound like, etc.
- Deep Processing: Encoding semantically (actual meaning of the word.) Eddy Ham vs Eddy Ham, the guy who you accidentally pressured into buying your class pizza today. This is the best way to remember things, especially if you connect it to something really meaningful or personal.
The elaboration principle states that memory is a function of how much an event is related to pre-existing knowledge, while the organization principle states that memory is a function of how much the individual events are related to each other.
How about the recall process? (How can I better remember things during my test?)
Creating a trail of retrieval cues, the little bits and things that we consciously or unconsciously see help us along the way to describe the thing that we want in the end. This process is called priming, or “jogging your memory” or context dependent memory. Our states and emotions can also serve as retrieval cues for our memory, known as state dependent and mood congruent memory. If I had a bad day, I’m more likely to remember bad memories because I formed negative associations with the memory I encoded.
The Serial Position Effect combines the recency effect and the primacy effect, which basically just say that we tend to remember the beginning and end of a list because we studied the beginning the most times and because we most recently saw the end.
Why do we forget things?
- We failed to encode it: We only notice a small fraction of what we sense. What we fail to notice, we tend to not encode, so we don’t remember.
- We fail to retrieve it: It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t remember!!
- We experience storage decay: We just naturally forget things. As explained by the time-dependency princple, memory decays over time. Note that the rate that we forget tends to plateau after a while.
- Interference: New memories interfere with our old ones (retroactive interference) mixing up Mandarin words after you learn Japanese or old ones interfere with our new ones (proactive interference) changing your password, and your old password just keeps coming up.
The misinformation effect describes how giving different retrieval cues, say “the window was smashed” vs “the window was broken,” people will tend to report seeing bits of glass on the ground.
Amnesia
Amnesia is simply the loss of memory. This generally happens after you receive damage to the hippocampus. Patient H.M. suffered anterograde amnesia and was unable to store any new long term memories, so he would often cite outdated years. He also suffered from retrograde amnesia, where you lose memory that occur right before the brain damage.
Memory is a reconstruction and reproduction of our past events and can easily be influenced by our emotions, feelings, and thoughts. We can’t really be sure if the things we ‘remember’ are real. We also face hindsight bias, where we tend to mold the recollection of past events to fit how events turn out later out. Memory is dangerous.