Memory and Intelligence

Tanu Agarwal
Assistant Professor
Amity Law School
 Memory

✘ Memory refers to the processes that allow us to record,

store, and later retrieve experiences and information.
✘ Memory adds richness and context to our lives, but even
more fundamentally, it allows us to learn from experience
and thus adapt to changing environment.
 Nature of Memory

✘ Encoding, storage, and retrieval represent what our memory

system does with information

✘ Encoding refers to getting information into the system by

translating it into a neural code that your brain processes.
✘ Storage involves retaining information over time. Once in
the system, information must be filed away and saved.
✘ Retrieval refers to processes that access stored information.
Three-Stage Process of Memory
✘ Sensory memory briefly holds incoming sensory
information. It comprises different subsystems, called
sensory registers.
✘ Most information in sensory memory rapidly fades away.
But according to the original three-stage model, through
selective attention, some in formation enter short-term
memory.
✘ Short-term memory- a memory store that temporarily holds
limited information.
✘ Long-term memory is our vast library of more durable stored
memories.
 Memory codes

✘ Memory Codes Once information leaves sensory memory, it

must be represented by some code if it is to be retained in
short-term memory.
✘ Memory codes are mental representations of some type of
information or stimulus, and they can take various forms.
✘ We may try to form mental images (visual codes), code
something by sound (phonological codes), or focus on the
meaning of a stimulus (semantic codes)
 Capacity and Duration

✘ Short-term memory can hold only a limited amount of

information at a time. Depending on the stimulus, such as a
series of unrelated numbers or letters, most people can hold
no more than five to nine meaningful items in short-term
memory, leading George Miller (1956) to set the capacity
limit at “the magical number seven, plus or minus two.”
✘ Combining individual items into larger units of meaning is
called chunking, which aids recall.
✘ Short-term memory is limited in duration as well as capacity.
 Components of Working Memory

✘ Baddeley viewed short-term memory as working memory, a

limited-capacity system that temporarily stores and
processes information.
✘ Phonological loop- briefly stores mental representations of
sounds. The phonological loop is active when you listen to a
spoken word or when you sound out a word to yourself as
you read.
✘ Visuospatial sketch pad- briefly stores visual and spatial
information, as occurs when you form a mental image of
someone’s face or of the spatial layout of your bedroom.
✘ Episodic Buffer, provides a temporary storage space where
information from long-term memory and from the
phonological and/or visuospatial subsystems can be
integrated, manipulated, and made available for conscious
awareness.
✘ The episodic buffer also comes into play when you chunk
information. British psychologist Alan Baddeley (2002) notes
that despite the phonological loop’s very limited acoustic
storage capacity, people can routinely listen to and then
repeat novel sentences that are 15 or 16 words long.
✘ The central executive, directs the overall action.
 Encoding: Entering Information

✘ Effortful & Automatic Processing

✘ Effortful processing, encoding that is initiated intentionally

and requires conscious attention. When you rehearse
information, make lists, and take notes, you are engaging in
effortful processing.
✘ Automatic processing, encoding that occurs without
intention and requires minimal attention
✘ Levels of Processing

✘ POTATO “Is the word in capital letters?” – requires

structural encoding
✘ HORSE “Does the word rhyme with course?” requires
phonological encoding
✘ TABLE “Does the word fit in the sentence, ‘The man peeled
the ______’? Requires semantic encoding

✘ According to the concept of levels of processing, the more

deeply we process information, the better we will remember
it (Craik & Lockhart, 1972).
✘ Merely perceiving the structural properties of the words
(e.g., uppercase versus lowercase) involves shallow
processing
✘ Phonemically encoding words is intermediate.
✘ Semantic encoding, however, involves deepest processing
because it requires us to focus on the meaning of
information.
✘ Exposure and Rehearsal

✘ Mere exposure to a stimulus without focusing on it

represents shallow processing.
✘ Rehearsal goes beyond mere exposure. When we rehearse
information, we are thinking about it.
✘ Maintenance rehearsal, involves simple, rote repetition.
Maintenance rehearsal keeps information active in working
memory, as when someone tells you a phone number and
you repeat it to yourself as you place the call.
✘ According to Craik and Lockhart (1972), elaborative
rehearsal involves deeper processing
Types of Long- Term Memory
✘ Declarative and Procedural Memory

✘ Declarative memory involves factual knowledge and

includes two subcategories :
✘ Episodic memory is our store of knowledge concerning
personal experiences: when, where, and what happened in
the episodes of our lives.
✘ Semantic memory represents general factual knowledge
about the world and language, including memory for words
and concepts.
✘ Procedural (non-declarative) memory is reflected in skills
and actions (Cohen et al., 2005).
✘ Classically conditioned responses also reflect procedural
memory.

✘ Explicit memory involves conscious or intentional memory

retrieval, as when you consciously recognize or recall
something.
✘ Implicit memory occurs when memory influences our
behavior without conscious awareness
 Forgetting

✘ German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885/1964)

pioneered the study of forgetting by testing only one
person—himself. He created more than 2,000 nonsense
syllables and meaningless letter combinations.
✘ Ebbinghaus typically measured memory by using a method
called relearning and then computing a savings percentage.
 Cause of forgetting

✘ Encoding failure

✘ Many memory failures result not from forgetting information

that we once knew, but from failing to encode the
information into long-term memory in the first place.
✘ Even when we notice information, we may fail to encode it
deeply because we turn our attention to something else
✘ Decay of Memory trace

✘ Information in sensory memory and short-term memory

decays quickly as time passes.
✘ It proposed that with time and disuse the long-term physical
memory trace in the nervous system fades away.
✘ Decay theory’s prediction— the longer the time interval of
disuse between learning and recall, the less should be
recalled— is problematic.
✘ Moreover, when research participants learn a list of words
or a set of visual patterns and are retested at two different
times, they sometimes recall material during the second
testing that they could not remember during the first. This
phenomenon, called reminiscence
 Interference

✘ According to interference theory, we forget information

because other items in long-term memory impair our ability
to retrieve it (Postman & Underwood, 1973; Feredoes et al.,
2006).

✘ Proactive interference occurs when material learned in the

past interferes with recall of newer material.

✘ Retroactive interference occurs when newly acquired

information interferes with the ability to re call information
learned at an earlier time
✘ Motivated Forgetting

✘ Psychodynamic and other psychologists propose that, at

times, people are consciously or unconsciously motivated to
forget.
✘ Repression is a motivational process that protects us by
blocking the conscious recall of anxiety-arousing memories.
 Amnesia

✘ The term amnesia commonly refers to memory loss due to

special conditions, such as brain injury, illness, or
psychological trauma.

✘ Retrograde amnesia represents memory loss for events that

took place sometime in life before the onset of amnesia.
✘ Anterograde amnesia refers to memory loss for events that
occur after the initial onset of amnesia
✘ Dementia refers to impaired memory and other cognitive
deficits that accompany brain degeneration and interfere
with normal functioning.
✘ Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a progressive brain disorder
that is the most common cause of dementia among adults
over the age of 65.
✘ The early symptoms of AD, which worsen gradually over a
period of years, include forgetfulness, poor judgment,
confusion, and disorientation.
✘ However, memory is the first psychological function
affected, as AD initially tacks subcortical temporal lobe
regions—areas near the hippocampus and then the
hippocampus itself—that help convert short-term memories
into long-term ones