L8 Episodic Memory

• Maintenance rehearsal:

  Keeping information active in the STM by relying on the phonological loop without considering the meaning.

  Study suggests that more rehearsal does not result in better episodic memory.
• Elaborative rehearsal:

  Encoding the meaning of information generally leads to better episodic memory.
• What are the levels of processing?

  Perceptual > phonological > conceptual
• Study for levels of processing:

  Three encoding conditions:

  Case: is the word in capital letters? TABLE = conceptual

  Rhyme: Does the word rhyme with WEIGHT? CRATE = phonological

  Sentence: Does the word fit in the sentence: ‘ He met a … in the street‘ FRIEND = perceptual

  Sentence condition - words recalled the best

  
• Elaborative encoding is best when information is:

  Organised and categorised.
• What we encode is affected by our background knowledge, interests etc. so people often remember quite different things
• What is the picture superiority effect and study?

  
We encode pictorial information better than verbal information.Ptps studied lists of pictures and words and tested on them. They were asked to attend to the names at encoding or the image, and were tested on pictures and words in a yes/ no recognition task.

  Results:

  
• What is the concreteness effect?

  Words like ‘car’ and ‘house’ are remember better than abstract words like ‘truth’ and ’betrayal’.
• What is dual code theory?

  We store information in at least two forms: verbal code and mental image code
• Study for episodic memory of visual information

  Ptps studied 2500 images every 3 sec (over 2 hrs)

  They recalled about 90% accurately in a recognition test.
• Methods to improve memory

  Mnemonic devices improve memory by improving the encoding of information

  Method of loci: imagine a journey through a familiar route an take the list of items you want to memorise and link them to the route through imagery.
• What is short-term consolidation?

  Converting short-term memories into a more enduring format.

  Involves the hippocampus linking information from all the various LTM systems via the hippocampus to form an episodic memory. Consolidation can also happen without the hippocampus where information is bonded across different systems located in different parts of the cortex.
• Long term consolidation

  Occurs over months and years.

  Observed in extended temporally graded retrograde amnesia e.g. HM remembered events better the further away from his injury - more consolidation occured to these memories.
• Hypothesis: initially, memory in the hippocampus links all the various types of LTM in order to store a record of the episode. Over time, memories in the various LTM systems are linked directly without requiring the hippocampus, to form an episodic memory.
• What is the multiple-memory trace hypothesis?

  Older memories are better coded within the hippocampus because they have been rehearsed more often - every time you reflect on the memory it is stored again, so older memories are more preserved.