psyc 289: Unit 7, 8 and 9

• Semantic memory


  Memory for general information
• Episodic memory


  Memory for personal events
• Tulving's well-known patient K.C. suffered serious brain damage in 1981 after a motorcycle accident
• K.C.'s semantic memory for facts was unimpaired
• K.C.'s episodic memory was impaired - he cannot remember anything that has ever happened to him
• K.C. depends on a personal digital assistant to remind him to eat
• Research with K.C. has contributed to our knowledge about the distinction between semantic and episodic memory, the distinction between implicit and explicit memory, and new learning in amnesia
• Memory involves


  • Taking information in and storing it
  • Maintaining information in memory over time
  • Pulling information back out of memory
• Encoding


  Forming a memory code, e.g. emphasizing how a word looks, sounds, or means
• Encoding usually requires attention
• Storage


  Maintaining encoded information in memory over time
• Retrieval


  Recovering information from memory stores
• Research issues concerned with retrieval include how people search memory and why some retrieval strategies are more effective than others
• Characteristics distinguishing implicit and explicit memory

  • Types of knowledge stored - perceptual/motor skills vs facts/events
  • Primary brain sites for storage - reflex pathways/cerebellum vs hippocampus/temporal lobe
  • Recall strategies - unconscious/unintentional vs conscious/deliberate
• Declarative memory


  Memory system that handles factual information
• Nondeclarative/Procedural memory


  Memory system that houses memory for actions, skills, operations, and conditioned responses
• Episodic memory


  Memory system that contains personal facts and chronological recollections of personal experiences
• Semantic memory


  Memory system that contains general facts not tied to the time when the information was learned
• Some amnesiacs forget mostly personal facts, while their recall of general facts is largely unaffected
• Patient K.C. retained much of his general knowledge of the world but was unable to remember any personally experienced events
• Autobiographical memories


  Specific memories that represent a combination of episodic and semantic memories
• Prospective memory


  Memory for remembering to perform actions in the future
• Retrospective memory


  Memory for recalling events from the past or previously learned information
• Attention


  Focusing awareness on a narrowed range of stimuli or events
• Selective attention


  Screens out most potential stimuli while allowing a select few to pass through into conscious awareness
• The cocktail party phenomenon suggests that attention involves late selection, based on the meaning of input
• Studies have found ample evidence for both early selection and late selection as well as for intermediate selection, leading some theorists to conclude that the location of the attention filter may be flexible rather than fixed
• When participants are forced to divide their attention between memory encoding and some other task, large reductions in memory performance are seen
• Divided attention can have a negative impact on the performance of quite a variety of tasks, especially when the tasks are complex or unfamiliar
• The human brain can effectively handle only one attention-consuming task at a time. When people multitask, they are really switching their attention back and forth among tasks, rather than processing them simultaneously
• Cell phone conversations undermine people's driving performance, even when hands-free phones are used
• Texting while driving is substantially more dangerous than cell phone conversations
• Those who report that they engage in more multitasking tend to be those who are least able to juggle multiple tasks
• Levels of processing


  • Structural encoding
  • Phonemic encoding
  • Semantic encoding
• Retention of stimulus words increases as subjects move from structural to phonemic to semantic encoding
• It is easier to form images of concrete objects than of abstract concepts
• Elaboration


  Linking a stimulus to other information at the time of encoding
• Visual imagery


  Creating visual images to represent the words to be remembered
• Dual-coding theory


  Memory is enhanced by forming semantic and visual codes, since either can lead to recall
• Self-referent encoding


  Deciding how or whether information is personally relevant