Princeton Review Gre Psychology - Chapter 5 (Memory)

Front 1

Three Stages of Memory

Back 1

1) Sensory, 2) Short Term, 3) Long Term

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Sensory Memory

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- Lasts only for seconds.
- Forms the connection between perception and memory.
- Explains why, if you wiggle a pen back and forth, you see trails or a ghost pen in all positions. The sensory information remains briefly in your awareness, and because the pen moves quickly, the information all runs together.

Front 3

Iconic Memory

Back 3

The sensory memory for vision studied by GEORGE SPERLING. He found that people could see more than they remember. In his classic experiment, subjects were shown lines of three letters for a fraction of a second. Then they were instructed to write down the letters of a particular line. Although the subjects were able to do this, they invariably forgot the other letters. Tihis PARTIAL REPORT shows that sensory memory exists, but only for a few seconds.

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Ulric Neisser

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Coined the term ICON for brief visual memory and foudn that an icon lasts for about one second. In addition, he found that when subjects are exposed to a bright flash of light or a new pattern before the iconic image fades, the first image will be erased. This is BACKWARD MASKING, and it works for the auditory system as well. A mask is more successful if it is similar to the original stimulus.

Front 5

Echoic Memory

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The sensory memory for auditory sensations.

Front 6

Short-Term Memory (STM)

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Temporary; lasts for seconds or minutes. Is thought to be largely auditory, and items are coded PHONOLOGICALLY.

Front 7

George Miller

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Found that short-term meory has the capacidy of about seven items (+ or - two items).

Front 8

Chunking

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Grouping items. Can increase the capacity of STM.

Front 9

Rehearsal

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Repeating or practicing. Is the key to keeping items in the STM and to transferring items to the long-term memory (LTM). PRIMARY (maintenance) rehearsal simply involves repeating material in order to hold it in STM. SECONDARY (elaborative) rehearsal involves organizing and understanding material in order to transfer it to LTM.

Front 10

Interference

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When other information or distrctactions cause one to forget items in STM. Disrupting material that was learned before the new items were presented, such as a list of similar words, is PROACTIVE INTERFERENCE. This is problematic for recall and thus causes PROACTIVE INHIBITION. Disrupting information that was learned after the new items were presented is called RETROACTIVE INTERFERENCE. This is also problematic for recall and thus causes RETROACTIVE INHIBITION.

Front 11

Long-Term Memory (LTM)

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Capable of permanent retention. Most items are learned SEMANTICALLY, for meaning. Is not subject to primacy and recency effects but is subject to the same interference effects as STM.

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Recognition

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A measure of LTM. Simply requires subjects to recognize things learned in the past. Multiple-choice tests tap recognition.

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Recall

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Measure of LTM. Requires that subjects generate information on their own. CUED RECALL begins the task; fill-in-the blank tests are an example. FREE RECALL is remembering with no clue.

Front 14

Savings

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Measure of LTM. Measures how much information about a subject remains in LTM by assessing how long it takes to learn something the second time as opposed to the first time.

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Encoding Specificity Principle

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A principle of the LTM, which means that material is more likely to be remembered if it is retrieved in the same context in which it was stored.

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Episodic Memory

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Consists of details, events, and discrete knowledge.

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Semantic Memory

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Consists of general knowledge of the world.

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Procedural memory

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Knowing "how to" do something.

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Declarative memory

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Knowing a fact.

Front 20

Hermann Ebbinghaus

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Was the first to study memory systematically. He presented subjects with lists of nonsense syllables to study the STM. He also proposed a FORGETTING CURVE that depicts a sharp drop in savings immediately after learning and then levels off, with a slight downward trend.

Front 21

Frederick Bartlett

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- Found that memory is RECONSTRUCTIVE rather than rote.
- Using the story "War of the Ghosts," he discovered that people are more likely to remember the ideas or semantics of a story rather than the details or grammar of a story.

Front 22

Allan Paivio

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- Suggested the DUAL CODE HYPOTHESIS, which states that items will be remembered if they are encoded both visually (with icons or imagery) and semantically (with understanding).

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Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart

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- Asserted that learning and recall depend on DEPTH OF PROCESSING.
- Different levels of processing exist, from the most superficial PHONOLOGICAL (pronunciation) to the deep SEMANTIC (meaning level).
- The deeper an item is processed, the easier it is to learn and recall.

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Behaviorists and memory

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- Explain memory through PAIRED-ASSOCIATE LEARNING. One item is learned with, and then cues the recall of, another.

Front 25

Elizabeth Loftus

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- Found that memory of traumatic events is altered by the event itself and by the way that questions about the event are phrased.
- "How far were the cars going when they crashed?" will elicit higher speed estimates than "What was the rate of cars upon impact?"
- important for law-psychology issues

Front 26

Donald Hebb

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- Posited that memory involves changes of synapses and neural pathways, making a "MEMORY TREE."

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E.R. Kandel

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- Had similar ideas to Hebb about memory from studying the sea slug Splysia. Also, brain studies of young chick show that their brains are altered with learning and memory.

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Brenda Milner

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Wrote about patient "HM" who was given a lesion of the HIPPOCAMPUS to treat severe epilepsy. He could not add anything to his LTM.

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Serial learning

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- A list (i.e. presidents of U.S.) is learned and recalled in order.
- Is subject to PRIMACY and RECENCY effeccts - the first and last few items learned are easiest to remember, whereas the ones in the middle are often forgotten.
- First items are remembered because they benefit from the most rehearsal; last items have less time for decay.
- Serial-position curve shows this savings effect.

Front 30

Serial-anticipation learning

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A list is learned

Front 31

Paired-associate learning

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- The type of learning used in studying foreign languages-
- For example in Spanich coche means "car". Spanish words are paired with the English.

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Free-recall learning

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- A list of items is learned, and then must be recalled in any order with no cue.

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Factors that make items on a list easier to learn and retrieve

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1) Acoustic dissimilarity, 2) Semantic dissimilarity, 3) Brevity, 4) Familiarity, 5) Concreteness, 6) Meaning, 7) Importance to the subject.

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Decay Theory (Trace Theory)

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- Posits that memory fades with time
- This theory has been called to simplistic because other activities are known to interfere with retrieval.

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Interference Theory

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- Suggests that competing information blocks retrieval.

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Mnemonics

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- Memory cues that help learning and recall.
- For example OCEAN can be used to remember Big Five Factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism)

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Generation-recognition Model

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- Suggests that anything one might recall should easily be recognized. This is why a multiple-choice test is easier than an essay test.

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Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

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Being on the verge of retrieval but not successfully doing so.

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State-dependent memory

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- Like state-dependent learning
- Retrieval is most successful if it occurs in the same emotional state or physical state in which encoding occurred.
- This explains why depressed individuals cannot easily recall happy memories, etc.

Front 40

Clustering

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- The brain's tendency to group together similar items in memory, whether they are learned together or not.
- Most often they are grouped into conceptual or semantic hierarchies.