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In Feb. 2002, prison warden James Smith lost his set of master keys to the Westville Correctional Facility. As a result, 2, 559 inmates were kept under partial lockdown for eight days while the Indiana Department of Correction spent $53,000 to change locks in the effected area. It turned out that the warden had put his keys in his pocket when he went home, forgot he had done so, and reported the keys “missing” when they were not in there usual place in his office the next day. What went wrong? There are several possibilities.
Encoding • Encoding: as a visual or acoustic stimulus must be transformed, so to must information be transformed to a neural that memory can use. • Listening to a lecture is acoustical encoding. • Reading the power point slide of the same material is visual encoding. • If you remember the facts of a single slide, your are using visual and/or acoustical encodingencoding. If you remember there are other slides, and you integrate the current slide with the other slides, that is semantic encoding .
Storage Process • Keeping information in memory over time, some times over scores of years. • Two basic mechanisms of storage, short-term (18 seconds) and long-term, (a life time).
Long-term Memory • Procedural (mainly motor learning). • Autobiographical (episodic). • Semantic: instances that happen during daily life that were encoded into ones general knowledge.
Retrieval Process • Recall: brought from memory with out help of context • Recognition: aided by cues (context) using possible alternative answers on a multiple-choice question to gain the correct answer.
Explicit and Implicit memory • Explicit memory: When you intentionally try to remember something and you are consciously aware that you are doing so. Most of your formal college education is a form of explicit memory • Implicit: the unintentional recognition and influence of prior experience. Reading the current slide a second time, implicit memory of its content would help you to read it more quickly, than you did the first time. This occurs automatic without conscious effort. Episodic semantic and procedural memories can be implicit or explicit. But procedural usual operates implicitly.
Modes of memory • Level of Processing model. • Transfer-Appropriate Processing model. • Parallel Distributive Processing (PDP) model. • Information Processing model
Levels of Processing model • Suggests that the most important determination of memory is how extensively information is encoded or processed when it is first received. • Assume that one is trying to remember something by rehearsing it. Maintenance rehearsal vs Elaborative rehearsal.
Maintenance rehearsal • The repeating over and over that which you are trying to remember. Good for a very short time. Example one looks up a telephone number and wants to immediately dial that number.
Elaborative rehearsal • For long-term remembering it is better to think how you can contextualize the new material with other elements already stored in memory. The richer the elaboration, the deeper the information is stored in memory.
Transfer-Appropriate Processing model • How well the process of retrieving information match the way in which the information was first encoded. • Consider the following: Half the students in this class were told that an upcoming exam would be multiple-choice. The remaining half were told the test would be and essay exam. Only half of the students got the exam they were told they would get. The remaining students got and unexpected exam. Those students who got the expected exam did better than those students who got an unexpected exam. The two groups that studied for the expected exam encoded information appropriate to the expected exam. Those who encoded for a different exam than expected did poorer. Illustrates that the match between encoding and retrieval processes can be as depth of processing in memory
Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) • New experiences are integrated with existing knowledge or memories, changing our overall knowledge base and altering in a more general way our understanding of the world and how it operates. These theorist use “neural networks” (the modern replacement for artificial intelligence). Neural networks allow all parts to be interconnected.
When neural networks are applied to memory, each unit of knowledge is seen as connected to every other unit, and the connections between units are seen as getting stronger and stronger the more often the units are experienced together (called, Hebb’s rules). From this perspective the knowledge is distributed across the dense network of associations. When the network is activated, parallel processing begins. That is, different portions of the network operate simultaneously, allowing people to quickly draw inferences and make generalizations.
Information Processing model (the oldest of the modern memory models)
Sensory encoding • Main function of sensory memory is to hold the information in storage such that it can be moved to short-term memory. Each sensory modality has its own sensory storage capacity with acoustic information being the fastest. • These memories quickly fade if they are not processed further. Highy adaptive.
Short-term memory • The Magic Number Seven Plus or Minus Two • Chunking: grouping information into useable bites increases the ability to hold something into short-term memory.
Working memory • Working memory is the part of the memory system that allows one to mentally work with, or manipulate, the information being held in short-term memory. So short-term memory is a part of working memory. Together they enable us to do many kinds of mental work. An example of the two working together is your purchasing of food and paying at the counter.
Encoding in Short-term memory • Acoustic codes: seen when make mistakes of what they have heard. Mainly they involve substitution of similar sounds. C for D, P, or T • Visual codes: not as strong as acoustic codes • Kinesthetic codes;
Duration of Short-term Memory • Brown-Peterson study: What happens when people are prevented from rehearsing. • Subject is presented with a list of 3 letter groups, GRB after viewing the letter, they are asked to count backward by threes starting with different numbers. At a signal the subjects stop counting and try to recall the letter groups.
Long-Term Memory • Long –term memory can occur without conscious processing, but in the main, encoding in long-term memory is through conscious semantic encoding.
Sachs subjects to listen to tape recordings of people speaking. She next shoed the subjects sentences and asked them to say which contained the exact wording heard on the tape. The subjects did very well when they were tested immediately (using working memory). After only 20 seconds, retrieving from long-term memory, they could not determine which of two sentences was correct is the two sentences expressed the same meaning. The remembered the meaning of what they heard but not the exact words.
The errors occurred partly because people encode into long-term memory not only the general meaning of information but also what the think and assume about that information.
On the next slide there will appear some words. Set up an alarm clock, watch or cell phone to ring in 30 seconds. Study the words. • When the clock alarm goes off. Look aside and try and remember in any order the word list you saw on the slide.
Counterfeiters on the fact that people encode only the general meaning of visual, as well as, auditory stimuli. • In one study people viewed 2,500 pictures. It took 16 hours to view all of the pictures. In a later retrieval question the subject identified 90% of the pictures on which they were tested.
desk, chalk, pencil, chair, paperclip, book, eraser, folder, briefcase, essays.
Serial position learning • On average you learned the first word of the list and the last word on the list better than you learned the mid-word of the list. The first word on the list in is the prime position, the last word on the list is the last thing you were likely to see (see the curve bellow).
Forgetting We all forget
Ebbinghaus invented the nonsense syllable • A meaningless se of two consonants and a vowel, i.e. POF, XEM, QAL. • He read list of nonsense syllables out lout at a constant rate and then tried to remember them. • The method of savings = the number of trials to learn the list – the number of trials to relearn the list.
Ebbinghaus’s lasting discoveries • The shape of the forgetting curve. • Just how long-lasting savings in long-term memory can be.
Process of Forgetting • Decay: Over time the memory just diminishes like a worn out machine. • Interference: retrieval or storage is interfered with new knowledge.
