Memory (Encoding, Storage,

Retrieval)
By Kathleen B. McDermott and Henry L. Roediger III
Washington University in St. Louis

“Memory” is a single term that reflects a number of different abilities:

holding information briefly while working with it (working memory),

remembering episodes of one’s life (episodic memory), and our general

knowledge of facts of the world (semantic memory), among other

types. Remembering episodes involves three processes: encoding

information (learning it, by perceiving it and relating it to past

knowledge), storing it (maintaining it over time), and then retrieving it

(accessing the information when needed). Failures can occur at any

stage, leading to forgetting or to having false memories. The key to

improving one’s memory is to improve processes of encoding and to

use techniques that guarantee effective retrieval. Good encoding

techniques include relating new information to what one already

knows, forming mental images, and creating associations among

information that needs to be remembered. The key to good retrieval is

developing effective cues that will lead the rememberer back to the

encoded information. Classic mnemonic systems, known since the time

of the ancient Greeks and still used by some today, can greatly improve

one’s memory abilities.

Learning Objectives

 Define and note differences between the following forms of memory:

working memory, episodic memory, semantic memory, collective memory.
 Describe the three stages in the process of learning and remembering.
 Describe strategies that can be used to enhance the original learning or
encoding of information.
 Describe strategies that can improve the process of retrieval.
 Describe why the classic mnemonic device, the method of loci, works so well.

Introduction
In 2013, Simon Reinhard sat in front of 60 people in a room at Washington
University, where he memorized an increasingly long series of digits. On the first
round, a computer generated 10 random digits—6 1 9 4 8 5 6 3 7 1—on a screen for
10 seconds. After the series disappeared, Simon typed them into his computer. His
recollection was perfect. In the next phase, 20 digits appeared on the screen for 20
seconds. Again, Simon got them all correct. No one in the audience (mostly
professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students) could recall the 20
digits perfectly. Then came 30 digits, studied for 30 seconds; once again, Simon
didn’t misplace even a single digit. For a final trial, 50 digits appeared on the screen
for 50 seconds, and again, Simon got them all right. In fact, Simon would have been
happy to keep going. His record in this task—called “forward digit span”—is 240
digits!
 In some
ways memory is like file drawers where you store mental information. Memory is
also a series of processes: how does that information get filed to begin with and
how does it get retrieved when needed? [Image: M Cruz, https://goo.gl/DhOMgp, CC
BY-SA 4.0, https://goo.gl/SWjq94]
When most of us witness a performance like that of Simon Reinhard, we think one
of two things: First, maybe he’s cheating somehow. (No, he is not.) Second, Simon
must have abilities more advanced than the rest of humankind. After all,
psychologists established many years ago that the normal memory span for adults
is about 7 digits, with some of us able to recall a few more and others a few less
(Miller, 1956). That is why the first phone numbers were limited to 7 digits—
psychologists determined that many errors occurred (costing the phone company
money) when the number was increased to even 8 digits. But in normal testing, no
one gets 50 digits correct in a row, much less 240. So, does Simon Reinhard simply
have a photographic memory? He does not. Instead, Simon has taught himself
simple strategies for remembering that have greatly increased his capacity for
remembering virtually any type of material—digits, words, faces and names, poetry,
historical dates, and so on. Twelve years earlier, before he started training his
memory abilities, he had a digit span of 7, just like most of us. Simon has been
training his abilities for about 10 years as of this writing, and has risen to be in the
top two of “memory athletes.” In 2012, he came in second place in the World
Memory Championships (composed of 11 tasks), held in London. He currently
ranks second in the world, behind another German competitor, Johannes Mallow.
In this module, we reveal what psychologists and others have learned about
memory, and we also explain the general principles by which you can improve your
own memory for factual material.

Varieties of Memory

To be a good
chess player you have to learn to increase working memory so you can plan ahead
for several offensive moves while simultaneously anticipating - through use of
memory - how the other player could counter each of your planned moves. [Image:
karpidis, https://goo.gl/EhzMKM, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://goo.gl/jSSrcO]
For most of us, remembering digits relies on short-term memory, or working
memory—the ability to hold information in our minds for a brief time and work
with it (e.g., multiplying 24 x 17 without using paper would rely on working
memory). Another type of memory is episodic memory—the ability to remember
the episodes of our lives. If you were given the task of recalling everything you did 2
days ago, that would be a test of episodic memory; you would be required to
mentally travel through the day in your mind and note the main events. Semantic
memory is our storehouse of more-or-less permanent knowledge, such as the
meanings of words in a language (e.g., the meaning of “parasol”) and the huge
collection of facts about the world (e.g., there are 196 countries in the world, and
206 bones in your body). Collective memory refers to the kind of memory that
people in a group share (whether family, community, schoolmates, or citizens of a
state or a country). For example, residents of small towns often strongly identify
with those towns, remembering the local customs and historical events in a unique
way. That is, the community’s collective memory passes stories and recollections
between neighbors and to future generations, forming a memory system unto
itself.

Psychologists continue to debate the classification of types of memory, as well as

which types rely on others (Tulving, 2007), but for this module we will focus on
episodic memory. Episodic memory is usually what people think of when they hear
the word “memory.” For example, when people say that an older relative is “losing
her memory” due to Alzheimer’s disease, the type of memory-loss they are
referring to is the inability to recall events, or episodic memory. (Semantic memory
is actually preserved in early-stage Alzheimer’s disease.) Although remembering
specific events that have happened over the course of one’s entire life (e.g., your
experiences in sixth grade) can be referred to as autobiographical memory, we will
focus primarily on the episodic memories of more recent events.

Three Stages of the

Learning/Memory Process
Psychologists distinguish between three necessary stages in the learning and
memory process: encoding, storage, and retrieval (Melton, 1963). Encoding is
defined as the initial learning of information; storage refers to maintaining
information over time; retrieval is the ability to access information when you need
it. If you meet someone for the first time at a party, you need to encode her name
(Lyn Goff) while you associate her name with her face. Then you need to maintain
the information over time. If you see her a week later, you need to recognize her
face and have it serve as a cue to retrieve her name. Any successful act of
remembering requires that all three stages be intact. However, two types of errors
can also occur. Forgetting is one type: you see the person you met at the party and
you cannot recall her name. The other error is misremembering (false recall or false
recognition): you see someone who looks like Lyn Goff and call the person by that
name (false recognition of the face). Or, you might see the real Lyn Goff, recognize
her face, but then call her by the name of another woman you met at the party
(misrecall of her name).

Whenever forgetting or misremembering occurs, we can ask, at which stage in the

learning/memory process was there a failure?—though it is often difficult to answer
this question with precision. One reason for this inaccuracy is that the three stages
are not as discrete as our description implies. Rather, all three stages depend on
one another. How we encode information determines how it will be stored and
what cues will be effective when we try to retrieve it. And too, the act of retrieval
itself also changes the way information is subsequently remembered, usually aiding
later recall of the retrieved information. The central point for now is that the three
stages—encoding, storage, and retrieval—affect one another, and are inextricably
bound together.

Encoding
Encoding refers to the initial experience of perceiving and learning information.
Psychologists often study recall by having participants study a list of pictures or
words. Encoding in these situations is fairly straightforward. However, “real life”
encoding is much more challenging. When you walk across campus, for example,
you encounter countless sights and sounds—friends passing by, people playing
Frisbee, music in the air. The physical and mental environments are much too rich
for you to encode all the happenings around you or the internal thoughts you have
in response to them. So, an important first principle of encoding is that it is
selective: we attend to some events in our environment and we ignore others. A
second point about encoding is that it is prolific; we are always encoding the events
of our lives—attending to the world, trying to understand it. Normally this presents
no problem, as our days are filled with routine occurrences, so we don’t need to
pay attention to everything. But if something does happen that seems strange—
during your daily walk across campus, you see a giraffe—then we pay close
attention and try to understand why we are seeing what we are seeing.

A giraffe in the context of a zoo or its natural

habitat may register as nothing more than ordinary, but put it in another setting - in
the middle of a campus or a busy city - and its level of distinctiveness increases
dramatically. Distinctiveness is a key attribute to remembering events. [Image: Colin
J Babb, https://goo.gl/Cci2yl, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://goo.gl/jSSrcO]
Right after your typical walk across campus (one without the appearance of a
giraffe), you would be able to remember the events reasonably well if you were
asked. You could say whom you bumped into, what song was playing from a radio,
and so on. However, suppose someone asked you to recall the same walk a month
later. You wouldn’t stand a chance. You would likely be able to recount the basics of
a typical walk across campus, but not the precise details of that particular walk. Yet,
if you had seen a giraffe during that walk, the event would have been fixed in your
mind for a long time, probably for the rest of your life. You would tell your friends
about it, and, on later occasions when you saw a giraffe, you might be reminded of
the day you saw one on campus. Psychologists have long pinpointed
distinctiveness—having an event stand out as quite different from a background of
similar events—as a key to remembering events (Hunt, 2003).

In addition, when vivid memories are tinged with strong emotional content, they
often seem to leave a permanent mark on us. Public tragedies, such as terrorist
attacks, often create vivid memories in those who witnessed them. But even those
of us not directly involved in such events may have vivid memories of them,
including memories of first hearing about them. For example, many people are able
to recall their exact physical location when they first learned about the
assassination or accidental death of a national figure. The term flashbulb memory
was originally coined by Brown and Kulik (1977) to describe this sort of vivid
memory of finding out an important piece of news. The name refers to how some
memories seem to be captured in the mind like a flash photograph; because of the
distinctiveness and emotionality of the news, they seem to become permanently
etched in the mind with exceptional clarity compared to other memories.

Take a moment and think back on your own life. Is there a particular memory that
seems sharper than others? A memory where you can recall unusual details, like
the colors of mundane things around you, or the exact positions of surrounding
objects? Although people have great confidence in flashbulb memories like these,
the truth is, our objective accuracy with them is far from perfect (Talarico & Rubin,
2003). That is, even though people may have great confidence in what they recall,
their memories are not as accurate (e.g., what the actual colors were; where objects
were truly placed) as they tend to imagine. Nonetheless, all other things being
equal, distinctive and emotional events are well-remembered.

Details do not leap perfectly from the world into a person’s mind. We might say that
we went to a party and remember it, but what we remember is (at best) what we
encoded. As noted above, the process of encoding is selective, and in complex
situations, relatively few of many possible details are noticed and encoded. The
process of encoding always involves recoding—that is, taking the information from
the form it is delivered to us and then converting it in a way that we can make
sense of it. For example, you might try to remember the colors of a rainbow by
using the acronym ROY G BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). The
process of recoding the colors into a name can help us to remember. However,
recoding can also introduce errors—when we accidentally add information during
encoding, then remember that new material as if it had been part of the actual
experience (as discussed below).
 Although it
requires more effort, using images and associations can improve the process of
recoding. [Image: psd, https://goo.gl/9xjcDe, CC BY 2.0, https://goo.gl/9uSnqN]
Psychologists have studied many recoding strategies that can be used during study
to improve retention. First, research advises that, as we study, we should think of
the meaning of the events (Craik & Lockhart, 1972), and we should try to relate new
events to information we already know. This helps us form associations that we can
use to retrieve information later. Second, imagining events also makes them more
memorable; creating vivid images out of information (even verbal information) can
greatly improve later recall (Bower & Reitman, 1972). Creating imagery is part of the
technique Simon Reinhard uses to remember huge numbers of digits, but we can
all use images to encode information more effectively. The basic concept behind
good encoding strategies is to form distinctive memories (ones that stand out), and
to form links or associations among memories to help later retrieval (Hunt &
McDaniel, 1993). Using study strategies such as the ones described here is
challenging, but the effort is well worth the benefits of enhanced learning and
retention.

We emphasized earlier that encoding is selective: people cannot encode all

information they are exposed to. However, recoding can add information that was
not even seen or heard during the initial encoding phase. Several of the recoding
processes, like forming associations between memories, can happen without our
awareness. This is one reason people can sometimes remember events that did not
actually happen—because during the process of recoding, details got added. One
common way of inducing false memories in the laboratory employs a word-list
technique (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995). Participants hear lists of 15
words, like door, glass, pane, shade, ledge, sill, house, open, curtain, frame, view,
breeze, sash, screen, and shutter. Later, participants are given a test in which they
are shown a list of words and asked to pick out the ones they’d heard earlier. This
second list contains some words from the first list (e.g., door, pane, frame) and
some words not from the list (e.g., arm, phone, bottle). In this example, one of the
words on the test is window, which—importantly—does not appear in the first list,
but which is related to other words in that list. When subjects were tested, they
were reasonably accurate with the studied words (door, etc.), recognizing them 72%
of the time. However, when window was on the test, they falsely recognized it as
having been on the list 84% of the time (Stadler, Roediger, & McDermott, 1999). The
same thing happened with many other lists the authors used. This phenomenon is
referred to as the DRM (for Deese-Roediger-McDermott) effect. One explanation for
such results is that, while students listened to items in the list, the words triggered
the students to think about window, even though window was never presented. In
this way, people seem to encode events that are not actually part of their
experience.

Because humans are creative, we are always going beyond the information we are
given: we automatically make associations and infer from them what is happening.
But, as with the word association mix-up above, sometimes we make false
memories from our inferences—remembering the inferences themselves as if they
were actual experiences. To illustrate this, Brewer (1977) gave people sentences to
remember that were designed to elicit pragmatic inferences. Inferences, in general,
refer to instances when something is not explicitly stated, but we are still able to
guess the undisclosed intention. For example, if your friend told you that she didn’t
want to go out to eat, you may infer that she doesn’t have the money to go out, or
that she’s too tired. With pragmatic inferences, there is usually one particular
inference you’re likely to make. Consider the statement Brewer (1977) gave her
participants: “The karate champion hit the cinder block.” After hearing or seeing this
sentence, participants who were given a memory test tended to remember the
statement as having been, “The karate champion broke the cinder block.” This
remembered statement is not necessarily a logical inference (i.e., it is perfectly
reasonable that a karate champion could hit a cinder block without breaking it).
Nevertheless, the pragmatic conclusion from hearing such a sentence is that the
block was likely broken. The participants remembered this inference they made
while hearing the sentence in place of the actual words that were in the sentence
(see also McDermott & Chan, 2006).

Encoding—the initial registration of information—is essential in the learning and

memory process. Unless an event is encoded in some fashion, it will not be
successfully remembered later. However, just because an event is encoded (even if
it is encoded well), there’s no guarantee that it will be remembered later.

Storage

Memory traces, or
engrams, are NOT perfectly preserved recordings of past experiences. The traces
are combined with current knowledge to reconstruct what we think happened in
the past. [Simon Bierdwald, https://goo.gl/JDhdCE, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0,
https://goo.gl/jSSrcO]
Every experience we have changes our brains. That may seem like a bold, even
strange, claim at first, but it’s true. We encode each of our experiences within the
structures of the nervous system, making new impressions in the process—and
each of those impressions involves changes in the brain. Psychologists (and
neurobiologists) say that experiences leave memory traces, or engrams (the two
terms are synonyms). Memories have to be stored somewhere in the brain, so in
order to do so, the brain biochemically alters itself and its neural tissue. Just like
you might write yourself a note to remind you of something, the brain “writes” a
memory trace, changing its own physical composition to do so. The basic idea is
that events (occurrences in our environment) create engrams through a process of
consolidation: the neural changes that occur after learning to create the memory
trace of an experience. Although neurobiologists are concerned with exactly what
neural processes change when memories are created, for psychologists, the term
memory trace simply refers to the physical change in the nervous system (whatever
that may be, exactly) that represents our experience.

Although the concept of engram or memory trace is extremely useful, we shouldn’t

take the term too literally. It is important to understand that memory traces are not
perfect little packets of information that lie dormant in the brain, waiting to be
called forward to give an accurate report of past experience. Memory traces are not
like video or audio recordings, capturing experience with great accuracy; as
discussed earlier, we often have errors in our memory, which would not exist if
memory traces were perfect packets of information. Thus, it is wrong to think that
remembering involves simply “reading out” a faithful record of past experience.
Rather, when we remember past events, we reconstruct them with the aid of our
memory traces—but also with our current belief of what happened. For example, if
you were trying to recall for the police who started a fight at a bar, you may not
have a memory trace of who pushed whom first. However, let’s say you remember
that one of the guys held the door open for you. When thinking back to the start of
the fight, this knowledge (of how one guy was friendly to you) may unconsciously
influence your memory of what happened in favor of the nice guy. Thus, memory is
a construction of what you actually recall and what you believe happened. In a
phrase, remembering is reconstructive (we reconstruct our past with the aid of
memory traces) not reproductive (a perfect reproduction or recreation of the past).

Psychologists refer to the time between learning and testing as the retention
interval. Memories can consolidate during that time, aiding retention. However,
experiences can also occur that undermine the memory. For example, think of
what you had for lunch yesterday—a pretty easy task. However, if you had to recall
what you had for lunch 17 days ago, you may well fail (assuming you don’t eat the
same thing every day). The 16 lunches you’ve had since that one have created
retroactive interference. Retroactive interference refers to new activities (i.e., the
subsequent lunches) during the retention interval (i.e., the time between the lunch
17 days ago and now) that interfere with retrieving the specific, older memory (i.e.,
the lunch details from 17 days ago). But just as newer things can interfere with
remembering older things, so can the opposite happen. Proactive interference is
when past memories interfere with the encoding of new ones. For example, if you
have ever studied a second language, often times the grammar and vocabulary of
your native language will pop into your head, impairing your fluency in the foreign
language.

Retroactive interference is one of the main causes of forgetting (McGeoch, 1932). In

the module Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Biases http://noba.to/uy49tm37
Elizabeth Loftus describes her fascinating work on eyewitness memory, in which
she shows how memory for an event can be changed via misinformation supplied
during the retention interval. For example, if you witnessed a car crash but
subsequently heard people describing it from their own perspective, this new
information may interfere with or disrupt your own personal recollection of the
crash. In fact, you may even come to remember the event happening exactly as the
others described it! This misinformation effect in eyewitness memory represents a
type of retroactive interference that can occur during the retention interval (see
Loftus [2005] for a review). Of course, if correct information is given during the
retention interval, the witness’s memory will usually be improved.

Although interference may arise between the occurrence of an event and the
attempt to recall it, the effect itself is always expressed when we retrieve memories,
the topic to which we turn next.

Retrieval
Endel Tulving argued that “the key process in memory is retrieval” (1991, p. 91).
Why should retrieval be given more prominence than encoding or storage? For one
thing, if information were encoded and stored but could not be retrieved, it would
be useless. As discussed previously in this module, we encode and store thousands
of events—conversations, sights and sounds—every day, creating memory traces.
However, we later access only a tiny portion of what we’ve taken in. Most of our
memories will never be used—in the sense of being brought back to mind,
consciously. This fact seems so obvious that we rarely reflect on it. All those events
that happened to you in the fourth grade that seemed so important then? Now,
many years later, you would struggle to remember even a few. You may wonder if
the traces of those memories still exist in some latent form. Unfortunately, with
currently available methods, it is impossible to know.

Psychologists distinguish information that is available in memory from that which is

accessible (Tulving & Pearlstone, 1966). Available information is the information
that is stored in memory—but precisely how much and what types are stored
cannot be known. That is, all we can know is what information we can retrieve—
accessible information. The assumption is that accessible information represents
only a tiny slice of the information available in our brains. Most of us have had the
experience of trying to remember some fact or event, giving up, and then—all of a
sudden!—it comes to us at a later time, even after we’ve stopped trying to
remember it. Similarly, we all know the experience of failing to recall a fact, but
then, if we are given several choices (as in a multiple-choice test), we are easily able
to recognize it.

We can't know the entirety of

what is in our memory, but only that portion we can actually retrieve. Something
that cannot be retrieved now and which is seemingly gone from memory may, with
different cues applied, reemerge. [Image: Ores2k, https://goo.gl/1du8Qe, CC BY-NC-
SA 2.0, https://goo.gl/jSSrcO]
What factors determine what information can be retrieved from memory? One
critical factor is the type of hints, or cues, in the environment. You may hear a song
on the radio that suddenly evokes memories of an earlier time in your life, even if
you were not trying to remember it when the song came on. Nevertheless, the song
is closely associated with that time, so it brings the experience to mind.

The general principle that underlies the effectiveness of retrieval cues is the
encoding specificity principle (Tulving & Thomson, 1973): when people encode
information, they do so in specific ways. For example, take the song on the radio:
perhaps you heard it while you were at a terrific party, having a great, philosophical
conversation with a friend. Thus, the song became part of that whole complex
experience. Years later, even though you haven’t thought about that party in ages,
when you hear the song on the radio, the whole experience rushes back to you. In
general, the encoding specificity principle states that, to the extent a retrieval cue
(the song) matches or overlaps the memory trace of an experience (the party, the
conversation), it will be effective in evoking the memory. A classic experiment on
the encoding specificity principle had participants memorize a set of words in a
unique setting. Later, the participants were tested on the word sets, either in the
same location they learned the words or a different one. As a result of encoding
specificity, the students who took the test in the same place they learned the words
were actually able to recall more words (Godden & Baddeley, 1975) than the
students who took the test in a new setting.

One caution with this principle, though, is that, for the cue to work, it can’t match
too many other experiences (Nairne, 2002; Watkins, 1975). Consider a lab
experiment. Suppose you study 100 items; 99 are words, and one is a picture—of a
penguin, item 50 in the list. Afterwards, the cue “recall the picture” would evoke
“penguin” perfectly. No one would miss it. However, if the word “penguin” were
placed in the same spot among the other 99 words, its memorability would be
exceptionally worse. This outcome shows the power of distinctiveness that we
discussed in the section on encoding: one picture is perfectly recalled from among
99 words because it stands out. Now consider what would happen if the
experiment were repeated, but there were 25 pictures distributed within the 100-
item list. Although the picture of the penguin would still be there, the probability
that the cue “recall the picture” (at item 50) would be useful for the penguin would
drop correspondingly. Watkins (1975) referred to this outcome as demonstrating
the cue overload principle. That is, to be effective, a retrieval cue cannot be
overloaded with too many memories. For the cue “recall the picture” to be effective,
it should only match one item in the target set (as in the one-picture, 99-word case).

To sum up how memory cues function: for a retrieval cue to be effective, a match
must exist between the cue and the desired target memory; furthermore, to
produce the best retrieval, the cue-target relationship should be distinctive. Next,
we will see how the encoding specificity principle can work in practice.

Psychologists measure memory performance by using production tests (involving

recall) or recognition tests (involving the selection of correct from incorrect
information, e.g., a multiple-choice test). For example, with our list of 100 words,
one group of people might be asked to recall the list in any order (a free recall test),
while a different group might be asked to circle the 100 studied words out of a mix
with another 100, unstudied words (a recognition test). In this situation, the
recognition test would likely produce better performance from participants than
the recall test.

We usually think of recognition tests as being quite easy, because the cue for
retrieval is a copy of the actual event that was presented for study. After all, what
could be a better cue than the exact target (memory) the person is trying to access?
In most cases, this line of reasoning is true; nevertheless, recognition tests do not
provide perfect indexes of what is stored in memory. That is, you can fail to
recognize a target staring you right in the face, yet be able to recall it later with a
different set of cues (Watkins & Tulving, 1975). For example, suppose you had the
task of recognizing the surnames of famous authors. At first, you might think that
being given the actual last name would always be the best cue. However, research
has shown this not necessarily to be true (Muter, 1984). When given names such as
Tolstoy, Shaw, Shakespeare, and Lee, subjects might well say that Tolstoy and
Shakespeare are famous authors, whereas Shaw and Lee are not. But, when given a
cued recall test using first names, people often recall items (produce them) that
they had failed to recognize before. For example, in this instance, a cue like George
Bernard ________ often leads to a recall of “Shaw,” even though people initially failed
to recognize Shaw as a famous author’s name. Yet, when given the cue “William,”
people may not come up with Shakespeare, because William is a common name
that matches many people (the cue overload principle at work). This strange fact—
that recall can sometimes lead to better performance than recognition—can be
explained by the encoding specificity principle. As a cue, George Bernard _________
matches the way the famous writer is stored in memory better than does his
surname, Shaw, does (even though it is the target). Further, the match is quite
distinctive with George Bernard ___________, but the cue William _________________ is
much more overloaded (Prince William, William Yeats, William Faulkner, will.i.am).

The phenomenon we have been describing is called the recognition failure of

recallable words, which highlights the point that a cue will be most effective
depending on how the information has been encoded (Tulving & Thomson, 1973).
The point is, the cues that work best to evoke retrieval are those that recreate the
event or name to be remembered, whereas sometimes even the target itself, such
as Shaw in the above example, is not the best cue. Which cue will be most effective
depends on how the information has been encoded.

Whenever we think about our past, we engage in the act of retrieval. We usually
think that retrieval is an objective act because we tend to imagine that retrieving a
memory is like pulling a book from a shelf, and after we are done with it, we return
the book to the shelf just as it was. However, research shows this assumption to be
false; far from being a static repository of data, the memory is constantly changing.
In fact, every time we retrieve a memory, it is altered. For example, the act of
retrieval itself (of a fact, concept, or event) makes the retrieved memory much more
likely to be retrieved again, a phenomenon called the testing effect or the retrieval
practice effect (Pyc & Rawson, 2009; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). However,
retrieving some information can actually cause us to forget other information
related to it, a phenomenon called retrieval-induced forgetting (Anderson, Bjork, &
Bjork, 1994). Thus the act of retrieval can be a double-edged sword—strengthening
the memory just retrieved (usually by a large amount) but harming related
information (though this effect is often relatively small).

As discussed earlier, retrieval of distant memories is reconstructive. We weave the

concrete bits and pieces of events in with assumptions and preferences to form a
coherent story (Bartlett, 1932). For example, if during your 10th birthday, your dog
got to your cake before you did, you would likely tell that story for years afterward.
Say, then, in later years you misremember where the dog actually found the cake,
but repeat that error over and over during subsequent retellings of the story. Over
time, that inaccuracy would become a basic fact of the event in your mind. Just as
retrieval practice (repetition) enhances accurate memories, so will it strengthen
errors or false memories (McDermott, 2006). Sometimes memories can even be
manufactured just from hearing a vivid story. Consider the following episode,
recounted by Jean Piaget, the famous developmental psychologist, from his
childhood:

One of my first memories would date, if it were true, from my second year. I can
still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed until I was about 15. I
was sitting in my pram . . . when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the
strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and
the thief. She received various scratches, and I can still vaguely see those on her
face. . . . When I was about 15, my parents received a letter from my former nurse
saying that she had been converted to the Salvation Army. She wanted to confess
her past faults, and in particular to return the watch she had been given as a
reward on this occasion. She had made up the whole story, faking the scratches. I
therefore must have heard, as a child, this story, which my parents believed, and
projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory. . . . Many real memories
are doubtless of the same order. (Norman & Schacter, 1997, pp. 187–188)

Piaget’s vivid account represents a case of a pure reconstructive memory. He heard

the tale told repeatedly, and doubtless told it (and thought about it) himself. The
repeated telling cemented the events as though they had really happened, just as
we are all open to the possibility of having “many real memories ... of the same
order.” The fact that one can remember precise details (the location, the scratches)
does not necessarily indicate that the memory is true, a point that has been
confirmed in laboratory studies, too (e.g., Norman & Schacter, 1997).

Putting It All Together: Improving

Your Memory
A central theme of this module has been the importance of the encoding and
retrieval processes, and their interaction. To recap: to improve learning and
memory, we need to encode information in conjunction with excellent cues that will
bring back the remembered events when we need them. But how do we do this?
Keep in mind the two critical principles we have discussed: to maximize retrieval,
we should construct meaningful cues that remind us of the original experience, and
those cues should be distinctive and not associated with other memories. These
two conditions are critical in maximizing cue effectiveness (Nairne, 2002).

So, how can these principles be adapted for use in many situations? Let’s go back to
how we started the module, with Simon Reinhard’s ability to memorize huge
numbers of digits. Although it was not obvious, he applied these same general
memory principles, but in a more deliberate way. In fact, all mnemonic devices, or
memory aids/tricks, rely on these fundamental principles. In a typical case, the
person learns a set of cues and then applies these cues to learn and remember
information. Consider the set of 20 items below that are easy to learn and
remember (Bower & Reitman, 1972).

1. is a gun. 11 is penny-one, hot dog bun.

2. is a shoe. 12 is penny-two, airplane glue.
3. is a tree. 13 is penny-three, bumble bee.
4. is a door. 14 is penny-four, grocery store.
5. is knives. 15 is penny-five, big beehive.
6. is sticks. 16 is penny-six, magic tricks.
7. is oven. 17 is penny-seven, go to heaven.
8. is plate. 18 is penny-eight, golden gate.
9. is wine. 19 is penny-nine, ball of twine.
10. is hen. 20 is penny-ten, ballpoint pen.

It would probably take you less than 10 minutes to learn this list and practice
recalling it several times (remember to use retrieval practice!). If you were to do so,
you would have a set of peg words on which you could “hang” memories. In fact,
this mnemonic device is called the peg word technique. If you then needed to
remember some discrete items—say a grocery list, or points you wanted to make in
a speech—this method would let you do so in a very precise yet flexible way.
Suppose you had to remember bread, peanut butter, bananas, lettuce, and so on.
The way to use the method is to form a vivid image of what you want to remember
and imagine it interacting with your peg words (as many as you need). For example,
for these items, you might imagine a large gun (the first peg word) shooting a loaf
of bread, then a jar of peanut butter inside a shoe, then large bunches of bananas
hanging from a tree, then a door slamming on a head of lettuce with leaves flying
everywhere. The idea is to provide good, distinctive cues (the weirder the better!)
for the information you need to remember while you are learning it. If you do this,
then retrieving it later is relatively easy. You know your cues perfectly (one is gun,
etc.), so you simply go through your cue word list and “look” in your mind’s eye at
the image stored there (bread, in this case).

Example of a
mneumonic system created by a student to study cranial nerves. [Image: Kelidimari,
https://goo.gl/kiA1kP, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://goo.gl/SCkRfm]
This peg word method may sound strange at first, but it works quite well, even with
little training (Roediger, 1980). One word of warning, though, is that the items to be
remembered need to be presented relatively slowly at first, until you have practice
associating each with its cue word. People get faster with time. Another interesting
aspect of this technique is that it’s just as easy to recall the items in backwards
order as forwards. This is because the peg words provide direct access to the
memorized items, regardless of order.

How did Simon Reinhard remember those digits? Essentially he has a much more
complex system based on these same principles. In his case, he uses “memory
palaces” (elaborate scenes with discrete places) combined with huge sets of images
for digits. For example, imagine mentally walking through the home where you
grew up and identifying as many distinct areas and objects as possible. Simon has
hundreds of such memory palaces that he uses. Next, for remembering digits, he
has memorized a set of 10,000 images. Every four-digit number for him
immediately brings forth a mental image. So, for example, 6187 might recall
Michael Jackson. When Simon hears all the numbers coming at him, he places an
image for every four digits into locations in his memory palace. He can do this at an
incredibly rapid rate, faster than 4 digits per 4 seconds when they are flashed
visually, as in the demonstration at the beginning of the module. As noted, his
record is 240 digits, recalled in exact order. Simon also holds the world record in an
event called “speed cards,” which involves memorizing the precise order of a
shuffled deck of cards. Simon was able to do this in 21.19 seconds! Again, he uses
his memory palaces, and he encodes groups of cards as single images.

Many books exist on how to improve memory using mnemonic devices, but all
involve forming distinctive encoding operations and then having an infallible set of
memory cues. We should add that to develop and use these memory systems
beyond the basic peg system outlined above takes a great amount of time and
concentration. The World Memory Championships are held every year and the
records keep improving. However, for most common purposes, just keep in mind
that to remember well you need to encode information in a distinctive way and to
have good cues for retrieval. You can adapt a system that will meet most any
purpose.

Outside Resources

Book: Brown, P.C., Roediger, H. L. & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The
science of successful learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-
Learning/dp/0674729013
Student Video 1: Eureka Foong\\\\\\\'s - The Misinformation Effect. This is a student-
made video illustrating this phenomenon of altered memory. It was one of the
winning entries in the 2014 Noba Student Video Award.
Student Video 2: Kara McCord\\\\\\\'s - Flashbulb Memories. This is a student-made
video illustrating this phenomenon of autobiographical memory. It was one of the
winning entries in the 2014 Noba Student Video Award.
Student Video 3: Ang Rui Xia & Ong Jun Hao\\\\\\\'s - The Misinformation Effect.
Another student-made video exploring the misinformation effect. Also an award
winner from 2014.
Video: Simon Reinhard breaking the world record in speedcards.
Web: Retrieval Practice, a website with research, resources, and tips for both
educators and learners around the memory-strengthening skill of retrieval practice.
http://www.retrievalpractice.org/

Discussion Questions

1. Mnemonists like Simon Reinhard develop mental “journeys,” which enable

them to use the method of loci. Develop your own journey, which contains
20 places, in order, that you know well. One example might be: the front
walkway to your parents’ apartment; their doorbell; the couch in their living
room; etc. Be sure to use a set of places that you know well and that have a
natural order to them (e.g., the walkway comes before the doorbell). Now
you are more than halfway toward being able to memorize a set of 20 nouns,
in order, rather quickly. As an optional second step, have a friend make a list
of 20 such nouns and read them to you, slowly (e.g., one every 5 seconds).
Use the method to attempt to remember the 20 items.
2. Recall a recent argument or misunderstanding you have had about memory
(e.g., a debate over whether your girlfriend/boyfriend had agreed to
something). In light of what you have just learned about memory, how do
you think about it? Is it possible that the disagreement can be understood by
one of you making a pragmatic inference?
3. Think about what you’ve learned in this module and about how you study for
tests. On the basis of what you have learned, is there something you want to
try that might help your study habits?

Vocabulary
Autobiographical memory
Memory for the events of one’s life.

Consolidation
The process occurring after encoding that is believed to stabilize memory
traces.

Cue overload principle

The principle stating that the more memories that are associated to a
particular retrieval cue, the less effective the cue will be in prompting
retrieval of any one memory.

Distinctiveness
The principle that unusual events (in a context of similar events) will be
recalled and recognized better than uniform (nondistinctive) events.

Encoding
The initial experience of perceiving and learning events.

Encoding specificity principle

The hypothesis that a retrieval cue will be effective to the extent that
information encoded from the cue overlaps or matches information in the
engram or memory trace.

Engrams
A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event;
also, memory trace.

Episodic memory
Memory for events in a particular time and place.

Flashbulb memory
Vivid personal memories of receiving the news of some momentous (and
usually emotional) event.

Memory traces
A term indicating the change in the nervous system representing an event.
Misinformation effect
When erroneous information occurring after an event is remembered as
having been part of the original event.

Mnemonic devices
A strategy for remembering large amounts of information, usually involving
imaging events occurring on a journey or with some other set of memorized
cues.

Recoding
The ubiquitous process during learning of taking information in one form
and converting it to another form, usually one more easily remembered.

Retrieval
The process of accessing stored information.

Retroactive interference
The phenomenon whereby events that occur after some particular event of
interest will usually cause forgetting of the original event.

Semantic memory
The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have.

Storage
The stage in the learning/memory process that bridges encoding and
retrieval; the persistence of memory over time.

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