Notes Chap 7
Notes Chap 7
HUMAN MEMORY
NATURE OF MEMORY
Memory refers to retaining and recalling information over a period of time, depending upon the
nature of cognitive task you are required to perform.
Memory is conceptualised as a process consisting of three independent, though interrelated stages.
These are encoding, storage, and retrieval. Any information received by us necessarily goes
through these stages.
(a) Encoding is the first stage which refers to a process by which information is recorded and
registered for the first time so that it becomes usable by our memory system. Whenever an
external stimulus impinges on our sensory organs, it generates neural impulses. These are received in
different areas of our brain for further processing. In encoding, incoming information is received and
some meaning is derived. It is then represented in a way so that it can be processed further.
(b) Storage is the second stage of memory. Information which was encoded must also be stored so that
it can be put to use later. Storage, therefore, refers to the process through which information is
retained and held over a period of time.
(c) Retrieval is the third stage of memory. Information can be used only when one is able to recover it
from her/his memory. Retrieval refers to bringing the stored information to her/his awareness so that
it can be used for performing various cognitive tasks such as problem solving or decision-making.
It may be interesting to note that memory failure can occur at any of these stages. You may fail to
recall information because you did not encode it properly, or the storage was weak so you could not
access or retrieve it when required.
This model was proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968. It is known as Stage Model.
According to the Stage Model, there are three memory systems : the Sensory Memory, the Short-
term Memory and the Long-term Memory.
i) Sensory Memory
The incoming information first enters the sensory memory.
Sensory memory has a large capacity.
However, it is of very short duration, i.e. less than a second. It is a memory system that registers
information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy.
Often this system is referred to as sensory memories or sensory registers because information
from all the senses are registered here as exact replica of the stimulus. \
ii) Short-term Memory
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Information that is attended to enter the second memory store called the short-term memory
(abbreviated as STM).
It holds small amount of information for a brief period of time (usually for 30 seconds or less).
Atkinson and Shiffrin propose that information in STM is primarily encoded acoustically,
i.e. in terms of sound and unless rehearsed continuously, it may get lost from the STM in less than
30 seconds.
STM is fragile but not as fragile as sensory registers where information decays automatically in less
than a second.
CONTROL PROCESSES
i) Only that information which is attended to enters the STM from sensory registers and in that
sense, selective attention, is the first control process that decides what will travel from sensory
registers to STM. Sense impressions, which do not receive attention, fade away quickly.
ii) The STM then sets into motion another control process of maintenance rehearsal to retain the
information for as much time as required. These kinds of rehearsals simply maintain
information through repetition and when such repetitions discontinue the information is lost.
iii) Another control process, which operates in STM to expand its capacity, is Chunking. Through
chunking it is possible to expand the capacity of STM which is otherwise 7+2. For example, if
you are told to remember a string of digits such as 194719492004 (note that the number exceeds
the capacity of STM), you may create the chunks as 1947, 1949, and 2004 and remember them as
the year when India became independent, the year when the Indian Constitution was adopted, and
the year when the tsunami hit the coastal regions of India and South East Asian countries.
iv) From the STM information enters the long- term memory through elaborative rehearsals. As
against maintenance rehearsals, which are carried through silent or vocal repetition, this rehearsal
attempts to connect the ‘to be retained information’ to the already existing information in long-
term memory. For example, the task of remembering the meaning of the word ‘humanity’ will be
easier if the meanings of concepts such as ‘compassion’, ‘truth’ and ‘benevolence’ are already in
place. The number of associations you can create around the new information will determine its
permanence. In elaborative rehearsals one attempts to analyse the information in terms of various
associations it arouses. It involves organisation of the incoming information in as many ways as
possible.
Experiments, which were carried out to test the stage model of memory, have produced mixed
results. While some experiments unequivocally show that the STM and LTM are indeed two
separate memory stores, other evidences have questioned their distinctiveness. For example, earlier
it was shown that in the STM information is encoded acoustically, while in LTM it is encoded
semantically, but later experimental evidences show that information can also be encoded
semantically in STM and acoustically in LTM.
Shallice and Warrington in the year 1970 had cited the case of a man known as KF who met with an
accident and damaged a portion of the left side of his cerebral hemisphere. Subsequently, it was
found that his long-term memory was intact but the short-term memory was seriously affected. The
stage model suggests that information is committed to the long-term memory via STM and if KF’s
STM was affected, how can his long-term memory be normal? Several other studies have also shown
that memory processes are similar irrespective of whether any information is retained for a few
seconds or for many years and that memory can be adequately understood without positing
separate memory stores.
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WORKING MEMORY
This mult i- component view of short-term memory was first proposed by Baddeley (1986) who
suggested that the short-term memory is not a passive storehouse but rather a work bench that holds a
wide variety of memory materials that are constantly handled, manipulated and transformed as
people perform various cognitive tasks. This work bench is called the working memory.
The first component of the working memory is the phonological loop which holds a limited
number of sounds and unless rehearsed they decay within 2 seconds.
The second component visuospatial sketchpad stores visual and spatial information and like
phonological loop the capacity of the sketchpad too is limited.
The third component, is the Central Executive, organises information from phonological loop,
visuospatial sketchpad as well as from the long- term memory. Like a true executive, it
allocates attentional resources to be distributed to various informations needed to perform a
given cognitive operation and monitors, plans, and controls behaviour.
LEVELS OF PROCESSING
The levels of processing view was proposed by Craik and Lockhart in 1972. This view suggests
that the processing of any new information relates to the manner in which it is perceived, analysed,
and understood which in turn determines the extent to which it will eventually be retained.
They proposed that it is possible to analyse the incoming information at more than one level.
One may analyse it in terms of its physical or structural features. For example, one might attend
only to the shape of letters in a word say cat - inspite of whether the word is written in capital or small
letters or the colour of the ink in which it is written. This is the first and the shallowest level of
processing.
At an intermediate level one might consider and attend to the phonetic sounds that are attached to
the letters and therefore the structural features are transformed into at least one meaningful word
say, a word cat that has three specific letters. Analysing information at these two levels produces
memory that is fragile and is likely to decay rather quickly.
However, there is a third and the deepest level at which information can be processed. In
order to ensure that the information is retained for a longer period, it is important that it gets
analysed and understood in terms of its meaning. For instance, you may think of cat as an
animal that has furs, has four legs, a tail, and is a mammal. You can also invoke an image of a cat and
connect that image with your experiences.
To sum up, analysing information in terms of its structural and phonetic features amounts to
shallower processing while encoding it in terms of the meaning it carries (the semantic encoding) is
the deepest processing level that leads to memory that resists forgetting considerably.
This view of memory will help you realise that while you are learning a new lesson, you must
focus on elaborating the meaning of its contents in as much detail as possible and must not
depend on rote memorisation. Attempt this and you will soon realise that understanding the
meaning of information and reflecting on how it relates to other facts, concepts, and your life
experiences is a sure way to long-term retention.
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TYPES OF LONG-TERM MEMORY
Episodic
Declarative memory
TYPES OF memory Semantic
LTM Procedural memory
memory
One major classification within the LTM is that of Declarative and Procedural (sometimes called
nondeclarative) memories.
All information pertaining to facts, names, dates, such as a rickshaw has three wheels or that India
became independent on August 15 1947 or a frog is an amphibian or you and your friend share the
same name, are part of declarative memory.
Procedural memory, on the other hand, refers to memories relating to procedures for
accomplishing various tasks and skills such as how to ride a bicycle, how to make tea or play
basketball. Facts retained in the declarative memory are amenable to verbal descriptions while
contents of procedural memory cannot be described easily. For example, when asked you can
describe how the game of cricket is played but if someone asks you how do you ride a bicycle, you
may find it difficult to narrate.
Tulving has proposed yet another classification and has suggested that the declarative memory can
either be Episodic or Semantic.
Episodic memory contains biographical details of our lives. Memories relating to our personal
life experiences constitute the episodic memory and it is for this reason that its contents are
generally emotional in nature. How did you feel when you stood first in your class? If such
incidents did actually happen in your life, you perhaps will be able to answer these questions with
reasonable accuracy. Although such experiences are hard to forget, yet it is equally true that many
events take place continuously in our lives and that we do not remember all of them. Besides, there
are painful and unpleasant experiences which are not remembered in as much detail as pleasant life
experiences.
Semantic memory, on the other hand, is the memory of general awareness and knowledge.
All concepts, ideas and rules of logic are stored in semantic memory. For instance, it is because of
semantic memory that we remember the meaning of say ‘non- violence’ or remember that 2+6=8 or
the STD code of New Delhi is 011 or that the word ‘elaphant’ is misspelt. Unlike episodic memory
this kind of memory is not dated; you perhaps will not be able to tell when you learnt the meaning of
non-violence or on which date you came to know that Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka.
i) Flashbulb memories: These are memories of events that are very arousing or surprising. Such
memories are very detailed. They are like images frozen in memory and tied to particular
places, dates, and times. Perhaps, people put in greater effort in the formation of these
memories, and highlighting details might lead to deeper levels of processing as well as offer more
cues for retrieval.
ii) Autobiographical Memory: These are personal memories. They are not distributed evenly
throughout our lives. Some periods in our lives produce more memories than others. For instance,
no memories are reported pertaining to early childhood particularly during the first 4 to 5 years.
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This is called childhood amnesia. There is a dramatic increase in the frequency of memories just
after early adulthood, i.e. in the twenties. Perhaps emotionality, novelty, and importance of events
contribute to it. During old age, the most recent years of life are likely to be well remembered.
However, before this, around 30 years’ of age, decline in certain kinds of memory starts.
Implicit Memory: Recent studies have indicated that many of the memories remain outside the
conscious awareness of a person. Implicit memory is a kind of memory that a person is not aware
of. It is a memory that is retrieved automatically. One interesting example of implicit memory
comes from the experience of typing. If someone knows typing that means s/he also knows the
particular letters on the keyboard. But many typists cannot correctly label blank keys in a drawing
of a keyboard. Implicit memories lie outside the boundaries of awareness. In other words, we are
not conscious of the fact that a memory or record of a given experience exists.
Concepts are mental categories for objects and events, which are similar to each other in one or in
more than one way.
Concepts once formed get organised in categories — a category itself is a concept but it also
functions to organise similarities among other concepts based on common features. For example, the
word mango is a category because different varieties of mangoes can be subsumed within it and it is
also a concept within the category of fruit.
Concepts may also get organised in schema. They are mental frameworks which represent our
knowledge and assumptions about the world. For example, think of a schema of a drawing room. It
will have different objects/things, like a sofa set, center table, paintings, etc., which are found in a
drawing room and where they are found in the drawing room.
In the year 1969, Allan Collins and Ross Quillian published a landmark research paper in which they
suggested that knowledge in long-term memory is organised hierarchically and assumes a network
structure. Elements of this structure are called nodes. Nodes are concepts while connections between
nodes are labelled relationships, which indicate category membership or concept attributes.
According to this view, we can store all knowledge at a certain level that ‘applies to all the
members of a category without having to repeat that information at the lower levels in the hierarchy’.
This ensures a high degree of cognitive economy, which means maximum and efficient use of
the capacity of long-term memory with minimum redundancy.
An image is a concrete form of representation which directly conveys the perceptual attributes of an
object. If you were to come across the word ‘school’, an image of your own school will get
generated. In fact, almost all concrete objects (and concepts) generate images and the knowledge
related to them is encoded both verbally as well as visually. This is known as dual coding
hypothesis, originally proposed by Paivio. According to this hypothesis, concrete nouns and
information related to concrete objects are encoded and stored in the form of images while
information related to abstract concepts assume a verbal and a descriptive code. For example, if you
are asked to describe a bird, the first thing that happens is that an image of a bird is generated and
based on this image, you describe a bird. But, on the other hand, the meanings of concepts like ‘truth’
or ‘honesty’ will not have such accompanying images.
So, any information which has been encoded verbally as well as in the form of images is recalled
with greater ease.
Information which has been encoded and stored in the form of images leads to the development of
mental models. There are many routine tasks which require mental models. For example, following
a road direction, assembling a bicycle or even preparing to cook an exotic dish from instructions
given in a cookery book require that spatial mental models are created from verbal descriptions.
Mental models, therefore, refer to our belief about the manner in which our environment is structured
and such beliefs are formed with the help of concrete images as well as verbal descriptions.
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(Read box 7.4)
Bartlett in the early thirties who contended that memory is an active process and all that we have
stored undergoes continuous change and modification. What we memorise is influenced by the
meaning we assign to the stimulus material and once it is committed to our memory system, it cannot
remain in isolation from other cognitive processes.
Bartlett used the method of serial reproduction in which the participants of his experiments recalled
the memory materials repeatedly at varying time intervals. While engaging in serial reproduction of
learned material his participants committed a wide variety of ‘errors’ which Bartlett considered
useful in understanding the process of memory construction.
His participants altered the texts to make them more consistent with their knowledge, glossed over
the unnecessary details, elaborated the main theme and transformed the material to look more
coherent and rational.
NATURE AND CAUSES OF FORGETTING
The first systematic attempt to understand the nature of forgetting was made by Hermann
Ebbinghaus, who memorised lists of nonsense syllables (CVC trigrams such as NOK or SEP etc.)
and then measured the number of trials he took to relearn the same list at varying time intervals.
(draw the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting from the book)
The rate of forgetting is maximum in the first nine hours, particularly during the first hour.
After that the rate slows down and not much is forgotten even after many days.
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the association formed while learning list B are interfering with the earlier association which were
formed while learning list A.
There are atleast two kinds of interferences that may result in forgetting. Interference can be
proactive (forward moving) which means what you have learnt earlier interferes with the recall
of your subsequent learning.
Retroactive (backward moving) which refers to difficulty in recalling what you have learnt earlier
because of learning a new material.
In other words, in proactive interference, past learning interferes with the recall of later
learning while in retroactive interference the later learning interferes with the recall of past
learning.
For example, if you know English and you find it difficult to learn French, it is because of proactive
interference and if, on the other hand, you cannot recall English equivalents of French words that
you are currently memorising, and then it is an example of retroactive interference.
ENHANCING MEMORY
There are a number of strategies for improving memory called mnemonics (pronounced ni-mo-
nicks) to help you improve your memory.
LIMITATION OF MNEMONICS
Mnemonic strategies for memory enhancement are too simplistic and perhaps underestimate
complexities of memory tasks and difficulties people experience while memorising.