Memory

Chapter 6
Contents

• Types of Memory
• Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval
• Forgetting
Ebbinghaus’s Approach
• Memory: The retention of Information
• It includes skills such as riding a bicycle or tying your shoelaces. It also
includes facts that never change (your birthday), facts that seldom change
(your mailing address), and facts that frequently change (where you left your
keys). you remember your most important experiences and some of your
unimportant ones, many useful facts and much trivia that you cannot imagine
ever using.

• Herman Ebbinghaus ( 1850-1909): A German psychologist who pioneered

the experimental study of memory by testing his own ability to memorize and
retain lists of nonsense syllables.

• Ebbinghaus’s approach led to all the later research on memory.

Methods of Testing Memory
• Explicit (Direct) Memory: Someone who states an answer regards it as a product of
memory. Free recall, Cued recall, Recognition, and Savings are tests of explicit memory.

• Free Recall: To produce a response, as you do on essay tests or short-answer tests.

Basically, You are asked to say what you remember.

• Cued Recall: You are given signi cant hints about what you are asked to recall.
• Recognition: You are asked to choose the correct item among several options.
Example: A multiple choice test.

• Savings (relearning) method: Detects weak memories by comparing the speed of

original learning to the speed of relearning.

• Implicit (Indirect) Memory: Is an experience which in uences what you say or do even
though you might not be aware of the in uence. Reading or hearing a word temporarily
results in Priming that word and increasing the chance that you will use it yourself,
even if you are not aware of the in uence.
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Test Your Knowledge
For each of these examples, identify the type of memory test—free recall, cued recall,
recognition, savings, or implicit.

A) Although you thought you had forgotten your high school French, you do better in your
college French course than your roommate, who never studied French before.

B) You are trying to remember the phone number of the local pizza parlor without looking it
up in the phone directory.

C) You hear a song on the radio without paying much attention to it. Later, you nd yourself
humming a melody, but you don’t know what it is or where you heard it.

D) You forget where you parked your car, so you scan the parking lot hoping to nd your car
among all the others.

E) Your friend asks, “What’s the name of our chemistry lab instructor? I think her name starts
with an S.”

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Procedural Memories and Declarative Memories
• Procedural Memories: Also known as habit learning are Memories of how to do something, such as
walking or eating with chopsticks. These are a special kind of implicit memories.

• Declarative Memories: Memories we can readily state in words.

• Example: If you type, you know the locations of the letters well enough to press the right key at the
right time (a procedural memory), but can you state that knowledge explicitly? for example, which
letter is directly to the right of c? Which is directly to the left of p?

• Procedural memory, or habit learning, di ers from declarative memory in several ways.
• First, the two types of memory depend on di erent brain areas, and brain damage can impair one
without impairing the other.

• Second, procedural memory or habit learning develops gradually, whereas you often form a
declarative memory all at once. For example, you need much practice to develop the procedural
memories of how to play a piano. Whereas, you might very quickly form the declarative memory, “the
men’s restroom is on the left and the women’s restroom is on the right.”

• Habit learning is also well suited for learning something that is usually true or true only under certain
circumstances. For example, you might notice that certain dogs are unfriendly when they hold their
head, ears, and tail in certain postures.
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 Short Term and Long Term Memory
• Information Processing Model: Compares human memory to that of a computer: Information that enters the system is
processed, coded, and stored.

• According to the information-processing model, information rst enters short-term memory (a temporary store), and some
of the short-term memory transfers into long-term memory (like a hard disk). Eventually, a cue from the environment
prompts the system to retrieve stored information.

• Short Term Memory: Temporary storage of recent events.

• Long Term Memory: The memory process in the brain that takes information from the short-term memory store and
creates long lasting memories. These memories can be from an hour ago or several decades ago.

• There are two types of long term memory, Semantic and Episodic.
• Semantic Memory: Memory of principles and facts, like what you are taught in school.
• Episodic Memory: Memory for speci c events in your life.
• Example: Your memory of the law of gravity is a semantic memory, whereas remembering the time you dropped your
grandmother’s vase is an episodic memory. Remembering who is the current president of the U.S is a semantic memory,
and remembering the time you met the president is an episodic memory.

• Episodic memories are more fragile than semantic memories.

• People with certain kinds of brain damage loose most of their episodic memories but keep their semantic memories.
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Test Your Knowledge
Classify each of these as semantic memory or episodic memory:

(A) Naming the rst president of the United States.

(B) De ning “classical conditioning.”

(C) Describing your trip to Disney World.

(D) Remembering where you had dinner last night, who ate with you, and what
you ate.
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 Short Term and Long Term Memory
Continued
• Source Amnesia: Forgetting when, where, or how you learned something.
• You can store more information in short-term memory by Chunking- Grouping items
into meaningful sequences or clusters.

• Short term memory has a capacity of only a few items in normal adults, although
chunking can enable us to store much information in each item.

• Short term memory shows a trade-o between number of items stored and the precision
of storage.

• Long term memory has a huge capacity.

• Short term memories fade over time if not rehearsed, partly because of interference from
similar memories.

• Long term memories last varying periods, up to a lifetime.

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 Working Memory
• Consolidation: Converting a short term memory into a long term memory. However,
not all short-term memories become long-term memories, even after long rehearsal.

• Working Memory: A system for working with current information. Working memory is
almost synonymous with your current sphere of attention. It includes information you
use and then forget and Executive Functioning.

• Executive Functioning: Governs shifts of attention.

• The hallmark of good working memory is the ability to shift attention as needed among
di erent tasks. a hospital nurse has to keep track of the needs of several patients,
sometimes interrupting the treatment of one patient to take care of an emergency and
then returning to complete work with the rst patient.

• People who have a good working memory have less than average “mind wandering”
while they need to concentrate on a di cult task but more than average mind
wandering when performing easy tasks.
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Encoding
• Encoding is the rst step of the memory process. This is where our brain
takes in various sensory input and “stores” it into something manageable and
accessible for later use. Without proper encoding, our brains would not have
the opportunity to retrieve memories.

• One way we try to encode a memory is by Repetition. Although repetition

aids memory, other things being equal, repetition by itself is a poor way to
study.

• One in uence on how well you remember something is whether you try
to remember it! If you don’t expect to need certain information very often,
and you know you can easily nd it on the Internet when you do need it, you
put little e ort into remembering it.
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Encoding
Continued…
• Emotional arousal also enhances memory encoding. extreme panic interferes
with memory, but moderate emotion provides bene ts, largely by increasing the
release of the hormones cortisol and epinephrine (adrenaline) from the adrenal
gland. Those hormones stimulate brain areas that enhance memory storage.

• Memory is best for the rst Items (Primacy E ect) and last items ( Recency E ect)
of a list, anything that is unusual, and items familiar since childhood.

• When you encode (store) a memory, you form associations. If you form many
associations, many possible reminders, those reminders are called Retrieval Cues
and they help you later by prompting your memory.

• Encoding Speci city Principle: The associations you form at the time of learning
will be the most e ective retrieval cues later. Meaning,When you form a memory,
you link it to the way you thought about it at the time. When you try to recall the
memory, a cue is most e ective if it resembles the links you formed at the time of
storage.
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 Storage
• Whereas some memories are lost, others gradually strengthen over time
(remember Consolidation).

• Some memories consolidate much more easily than others. When you
hear, “Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia,” you might have to work at it to form
a lasting memory. If someone says, “yes, I will go with you to the dance on
Friday,” you store the memory almost immediately.

• Ways to enhance consolidation after learning something; 1) To take some

ca eine shortly after learning something. a study found that 200 to 300 mg of
ca eine, a little more than you would get from an average cup of co ee,
enhanced the detail of people’s memories when tested a day later 2) Sleep or
rest quietly shortly after learning.
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 Retrieval
• People sometimes imagine that memory is like playing back a recording of an event.
However, Memory di ers from recording in several ways.

• Di erence 1: Suppose you try to list all the cities you have ever visited. you describe all
you can, and then you come back a day or two later and try again. on your second try,
you will probably recall more than you did the rst time. This gain of memory over time is
called Hypermnesia. On the second try, you recall most or all of what you said the rst
time, plus in the meantime something may have reminded you of something you left out
the rst time. for this reason, police sometimes interview a witness several times. It is
possible to omit something at rst and remember it later.

• Di erence 2: Focusing on one part of a memory weakens the rest of it, at least
temporarily. For example, suppose someone asks you to describe a particular part of an
experience—perhaps, “tell me about the meals you had on your beach trip.” Then
someone else asks you to describe the beach trip in general. Answering the rst
question strengthens your memory of the meals but weakens your memory of everything
else about the trip. Furthermore, someone who accompanied you on the beach trip and
heard you describing the meals will also tend to forget the events other than meals.
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 Retrieval
Continued…
• Di erence 3: When you try to remember an experience, you start with the details
you remember clearly and ll in the gaps with Reconstruction: During an
experience, you construct a memory. When you try to retrieve that memory, you
reconstruct an account based partly on distinct memories and partly on your
expectations of what must have happened

• Reconstructions from a word list: If people read or hear a list of related words
and try to recall them, they often include related words that were not on the list.
They remember the gist and reconstruct what must have been on the list.

• Story memory: Someone whose memory of a story has faded relies on the gist,
omits details that seemed irrelevant, and adds or changes other facts to t the
logic of the story.

• Hindsight bias: People often revise their memories, saying that how an event
turned out was what they expected all along. Hindsight Bias is also known as the
knew-it-all-along e ect or creeping determinism
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Forgeting
• If you learn several sets of related materials, they interfere with each other. The old
materials increase forgetting of new materials by Proactive Interference. The new
materials increase forgetting of old materials by Retroactive Interference.

• Interference is a major cause of forgetting. You forget where you parked your car today
because of proactive interference from the previous times you parked your car. You forget
last week’s psychology chapter because of retroactive interference from this week’s chapter.

• Reports of long lost memories, prompted by clinical techniques, are known as Recovered
Memories.

• False Memory: An inaccurate report that someone believes to be a memory.

• Repression (Freud): The process of moving an unacceptable memory or impulse from the
conscious mind to the unconscious mind.

• Many clinicians now prefer the term Dissociation, referring to memory that one has stored
but cannot retrieve.
Amnesia
• Amnesia is a loss of memory.
• Even in the most severe cases of amnesia,
people don’t forget everything they ever learned.
They don’t forget how to walk, talk, or eat.

• In many cases they remember most of their

factual knowledge. What they most often forget
is their personal experiences.

• Amnesia results from many kinds of brain

damage, including damage to the hippocampus.

• Hippocampus: A large forebrain structure in the

interior of the temporal lobe.
Amnesia
Continued…
• The hippocampus is critical for remembering the details and context of a
memory. It connects to many areas of the cerebral cortex and synchronizes
their activity, enabling them to combine their information in recalling an event.

• When you recall something you did yesterday, your memory is rich in details,
including who, what, where, and when. Those details depend on the
hippocampus. As time passes, your memory consolidates, but as it
consolidates, it changes. You remember the “gist” of what happened but
fewer details.

• Anterograde Amnesia: Inability to store new long-term memories.

• Retrograde Amnesia: Loss of memory for events that occurred shortly
before the brain damage.
 Amnesia After Damage to Prefrontal Cortex
• Damage to the prefrontal cortex also produces Amnesia.
• The prefrontal cortex receives extensive input from the hippocampus, resulting in symptoms of prefrontal
cortex damage overlapping those of hippocampal damage. However, some special de cits also arise.

• Prefrontal cortex damage can be the result of a stroke, head trauma, or Korsako ’s Syndrome, a
condition caused by a prolonged de ciency of vitamin B (thiamine), usually as a result of chronic
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alcoholism.

• This de ciency leads to widespread loss or shrinkage of neurons, especially in the prefrontal cortex.
Patients su er apathy (lack of interest, enthusiasm, or concern), confusion, and amnesia. If given a list of
words to remember, they forget those at the beginning of the list before they reach the end and they
soon forget those at the end also.

• Patients with prefrontal cortex damage answer many questions with Confabulation, which are
attempts to ll in the gaps in their memory. Most often they answer a question about what’s
happening today by describing something from their past.

• One important conclusion emerges from all the studies of brain damage and amnesia: We have several
di erent types of memory. It is possible to impair one type without equally damaging another.
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 Alzheimer’s Disease
• A condition occurring mostly in old age, characterized by
increasingly severe memory loss, confusion, depression,
disordered thinking, and impaired attention.

• Alzheimer’s disease is marked by accumulation of harmful

proteins in the brain and deterioration of brain cells,
impairing arousal and attention.

• The memory problems include both anterograde and

retrograde amnesia. performance varies from one time to
another, depending on alertness. Sometimes a cup of co ee
or a brisk walk helps by increasing blood ow.

• Because the areas of damage include the hippocampus and

the prefrontal cortex, memory de cits of people with
Alzheimer’s disease overlap those of hippocampus damage
and patients with Korsako ’s syndrome.

• However, as a rule they can learn new skills, such as how to

use a cell phone.

• If interested: https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-dementia/
di erence-between-dementia-and-alzheimer-s
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Reference

• “Introduction to Psychology” by James Kalat.