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Acquisition of memory

Acquisition of memory. Stages of memory Strength of memory traces Elaborateness effects. Stages of memory. Acquisition Encoding and strengthening Retention Maintaining or storing Practice effects? Retrieval Accessing memory traces. Acquisition. Practice improves performance Accuracy

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Acquisition of memory

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  1. Acquisition of memory Stages of memory Strength of memory traces Elaborateness effects

  2. Stages of memory • Acquisition • Encoding and strengthening • Retention • Maintaining or storing • Practice effects? • Retrieval • Accessing memory traces

  3. Acquisition • Practice improves performance • Accuracy • Speed or latency of recall • Reliability or probability of recall • Savings in relearning • (Pirolli & Anderson, 1985) • Learn sentences, test foils • Access time decreases as practice increases

  4. The power law of learning • Logarithmic functions • Compress the scale • Log of time is a function of the log of practice • Time is a function of practice to a power • The power law of learning • The more you practice, the less you gain from each trial.

  5. Elaborateness of processing • The more elaborate the encoding and practicing, the better the retention • Start with depth of processing model (Craik and Lockhart, 1972) • Identify material to remember: • Rhyme? (Phonological processing) • Synonym? (Semantic processing) • Does it fit in this sentence? (Semantic process) • Is the word in capitals?

  6. The generation effect • Self-generation: Self-generated material is better recalled. • Generation uses the person’s own words, which are easier to recall • Generation produces more and better retrieval routes. • Elaboration methods improve memory by providing more and better retrieval routes, not by increasing trace strength.

  7. Incidental vs. intentional learning • Hyde & Jenkins (1973): Rate words for pleasantness vs. presence of letters e or g • Tell half of the participants in both groups that they will be tested (intentional group) • Difference in recall for rating task (deeper processing group recalled more) • No difference in recall for intentional vs. incidental groups.

  8. The Hyde and Jenkins (1973) results Pleasantness Letters e or g Incidental 68% 39% Intentional 69% 43% Recall rates

  9. Is intention of no effect? • Intention may focus attention and lead to elaborate processing. • Nonetheless, we learn incidentally just as well, as long as we pay attention and process elaborately. • Mandler (1967) and card-sorting of words • Are we unable to avoid learning if we pay attention and process information elaborately?

  10. Elaborative processing in education • Put material in your own words • Engage in collaborative learning • Make up questions about the material, and answer them • Make up your own organizational scheme • Connect to your strengths (MI)

  11. A bit of brain research • You have already learned that the hippocampus plays a role in forming permanent memories. • We saw that area 46 and other areas of the prefrontal cortex are involved in working memory. • But permanent memories are located in the relevant sensory or motor cortex.

  12. How are they connected? • All of the brain areas involved in memory are interconnected. • The hippocampus appears to repeatedly play patterns of information, gradually training the appropriate area of cortex to acquire permanent memory of the configuration.

  13. Chunking and coding • Verbal material: chunks of three • LQNRPDSZKGFBT • Visual material is also chunked, by proximity • Memory records consist of chunks of material (Johnson, 1970) • When one element of a chunk is recalled or primed, the other items in that chunk are more readily available than material from other chunks, even if equally close in space

  14. Dual code theory • Paivio (1971) : Concrete words can be encoded twice: Once as verbal symbols and once as images. • Dual coding increases the likelihood of recall, again because of dual retrieval routes--one for each code • Verbal symbols are stored as linear sequences of words, visual as pictures.

  15. Visual information • Amazing capacity • Meaningful material stored more accurately • Faces (74%) vs. snowflakes (30%) (Goldstein & Chance, 1970; cf. Humphrey, 1974) • Droodles • Salient information is recalled more accurately than trivial information (Mandler & Ritchey, 1977); we remember our interpretations of what we see.

  16. Meaningful memory • Sentences • Passive vs. active voice produces confusion • Changed meaning does not • Meaningful information decays more slowly than sensory information • Propositions: Kintsch, 1974 • Propositions are chunks of meaning in text • Propositions are what is coded into memory

  17. Distributed vs. localist representations • Lashley’s (1950) doctrine of equipotentiality • Distributed codes

  18. Comparing LTP and Power Law

  19. Sequential memory in pigeons • One of the paradigms to study memory is serial learning • Weisman, Wasserman, and Dodge (1980) • Two sequences of visual stimuli signalled that a peck would be reinforced • Another paradigm required the pigeons to produce a particular sequence of responses: peck four keys in a particular order.

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