MEMORY

LECTURE 5
 WHAT IS MEMORY?

The processes involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about

stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer
present.

• This “mental time travel” afforded by memory can place you back in a situation, so
you feel as though you are reliving it, even to the extent of experiencing feelings
that occurred long ago.
• Create a list of top 5 things you use memory for!
 3 PROCESSES

Retaining Retrieving
Encoding • Storing and • Bringing back to
• Initial processing maintain over conscious
time awareness
 STUDYING MEMORY
• Through models like Donald Broadbent’s filter model
• Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968) proposed a model called the modal model of
memory because it included many of the features of memory models that were being proposed
in the 1960s.
• The stages in the model are called the structural features of the model i.e;
• Sensory memory is an initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of
a second.
• Short-term memory (STM) holds 5–7 items for about 15–30 seconds.
• Long-term memory (LTM) can hold a large amount of information for years or even decades.
 MODAL MODEL OF MEMORY
(ATKINSON & SHIFFRIN, 1968)

Rehearsal
(control processes)
Encoding
Retaining
Sensory Short-term Long-term
Input Memory Memory
Memory
Retrieving

Output
Atkinson and Shiffrin also described the memory system as including control processes, which
are active processes that can be controlled by the person and may differ from one task to
another.
An example of a control process is rehearsal—repeating a stimulus over and over.
Or strategies to help make a stimulus more memorable by relating it to things.
 SENSORY MEMORY

Sensory memory is the retention, for brief periods of time, of the effects of sensory stimulation.
We can demonstrate this brief retention for the effects of visual stimulation with two familiar
examples; The trail left by a moving sparkler and the experience of seeing a film.

• The lighted trail is a creation of your mind,

which retains a perception of the sparkler’s
light for a fraction of a second.
• This retention of the perception of light in
your mind is called the persistence of vision.
• DURATION VERY BRIEF – ALMOST LESS THAN 1
SECOND
• ACCURACY AND PRECISION AMAZING! – AROUND
82-100%
 TYPES OF SENSORY MEMORY

• A short-lived sensory memory registers all or most of the information that hits our visual receptors, but

that this information decays within less than a second (high capacity but short duration).

• This brief sensory memory for visual stimuli is called iconic memory or the visual icon (icon means

“image”), and corresponds to the sensory memory stage of Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model.

• Other research, using auditory stimuli, has shown that sounds also persist in the mind. This persistence

of sound, which is called echoic memory, lasts for a few seconds after presentation of the original

stimulus.
STM & WORKING MEMORY
LECTURE 6
 SHORT-TERM MEMORY (STM)

The system involved in storing small amounts of information for a brief period of
time.
• STM is our window on present
• Revise the Rachel’s pizza example
• Two questions are addressed
• What is the duration of STM?
• How much information can STM hold?
• These questions were answered in experiments that used the method of recall to test
memory.
 DURATION OF STM
John Brown (1958) in England and Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson (1959) in the United States used
the method of recall to determine the duration of STM.
• Trial 1 FZL 45
• Trial 2 BHM 87
• Trial 3 XCG 98
• Trial 4 YNF 37
• Trial 5 MJT 54
Peterson and Peterson found that their participants were able to remember about 80 percent of the letters
after counting for 3 seconds but could remember an average of only 12 percent of the three-letter groups
after counting for 18 seconds.
They interpreted this result as demonstrating that participants forgot the letters because of decay. That is,
their memory trace decayed because of the passage of time after hearing the letters.
 The Trace Decay Theory Of Forgetting

• Decay means to wash or wear away/wipe out or decline in power and quality
with time.
• When an individual learns something new, a neurochemical "memory trace" is
created.
• Trace decay theory states that forgetting occurs as a result of the automatic
decay or fading of the memory trace. Trace decay theory focuses on time and
the limited duration of short term memory. This theory suggests short term
memory can only hold information for between 15 and 30 seconds unless it is
rehearsed.
 The Interference Theory of Memory
• Keppel and Underwood suggested that the drop-off in memory was due not to decay of the memory trace but
to proactive interference (PI)—interference that occurs when information that was learned previously
interferes with learning new information.
• For example, what might happen when Rachel calls the number she has memorized for Mineo’s Pizza, 521-
5100, only to get a recording saying that the phone number has been changed to 522-4100.
• Although Rachel tries to remember the new number, she makes mistakes at first because proactive
interference is causing her memory for the old number to interfere with her memory for the new number.
The fact that the new number is similar to the old one adds to the interference and makes it harder to
remember the new number.
• Similar happened in this experiment
• The outcome of this constant interference is that the effective duration of STM, when rehearsal is
prevented, is about 15–20 seconds.
 CAPACITY OF STM

• Not only is information lost rapidly from STM, but there is a limit to
how much information can be held there.
• Estimates for how many items can be held in STM range from 4 to 9
• Digit Span - One measure of the capacity of STM is provided by the
digit span—the number of digits a person can remember.
2149
39678
7382015
482392807
• According to measurements of digit span, the average capacity
of STM is about 5 to 9 items—about the length of a phone
number
• This idea that the limit of STM is somewhere between 5 and 9
was suggested by George Miller (1956) in his famous paper
titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”
• More recent measures of STM capacity have set the capacity at
about 4 items (Cowan, 2001).
 CHUNKING

• Chunk - a collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another but are weakly
associated with elements in other chunks.
8 words- monkey, child, wildly, zoo, jumped, city, ringtail, young
Chunking - 4 pairs: ringtail monkey, jumped wildly, young child, city zoo
The ringtail monkey jumped wildly for the young child at the city zoo.
• The word ringtail is strongly associated with the word monkey but is not as strongly associated
with the other words, such as child or city.
• We can recall a sequence of 5 to 8 unrelated words but arranging the words to form a
meaningful sentence so that the words become more strongly associated with one another
increases the memory span to 20 words or more.
• It involves the interaction between STM and LTM
 HOW INFORMATION IS CODED IN STM
• Imagine that you have just finished listening to your cognitive psychology
professor give a lecture.
• We can describe different kinds of mental coding that occur for this experience
by considering some of the ways you might remember what happened in class.
• Remembering the sound of your professor’s voice is an example of auditory
coding.
• Imagining what your professor looks like, perhaps by conjuring up an image in
your mind, is an example of visual coding.
• Finally, remembering what your professor was talking about is an example of
coding in terms of meaning, which is called semantic coding
 AUDITORY CODING
Auditory coding- involves representing items in STM based on their sound.
• One of the early experiments that investigated coding in STM was done by
R. Conrad in 1964. In Conrad’s experiment, participants saw a number of target
letters flashed briefly on a screen and were told to write down the letters in the
order they were presented.
• Participants were most likely to misidentify the target letter as another letter that
sounded like the target such as “F” was most often misidentified as “S” or “X,”
but it was not as likely to be confused with letters like “E,” that look like the
target.
• Conrad concluded that the code for STM is auditory (based on the sound of the
stimulus), rather than visual (based on the visual appearance of the stimulus).
 VISUAL CODING

Visual coding- representing items visually, as would occur when remembering the
details of a floor plan or the layout of streets on a map.
• This use of visual codes in STM was demonstrated in an experiment by Sergio
Della Sala and coworkers (1999)
• Participants were able to complete patterns consisting of an average of 9 shaded
squares before making mistakes
 SEMANTIC CODING

Semantic coding is representing items in terms of their meaning.

• An example of semantic coding in STM is provided by an experiment by Delos Wickens and
coworkers (1976).
• On each trial, participants were presented with words related to either (a) fruits (the “fruit
group”) or (b) professions (the “professions group”).
• Participants in each group listened to three words (for example, banana, peach, apple for the fruit
group), counted backward for 15 seconds, and then attempted to recall the three words.
• They did this for a total of four trials, with different words presented on each trial.
• The basic idea behind this experiment was to create proactive
interference, the decrease in memory that occurs due to prior learning, by
presenting words in a series of trials from the same category.
• For the fruit group, banana, peach, and apple were presented on trial 1 and
plum, apricot, and lime were presented on trial 2.
• On the first trial the average percent recalled was 86 percent, but
performance dropped on trials 2, 3, and 4 as additional names of fruits
were presented.
• Evidence that this interference can be attributed to the meanings of the
words is provided by the results for the professions group.
• As with the fruits group, performance is high on trial 1 and
then drops on trials 2 and 3 because all of the words are
names of professions.
• But on trial 4, the names of fruits are presented.
• Because these are from a different category, proactive
interference is reduced, which results in an increase in
performance on trial 4.
• This effect is called release from proactive interference.
LONG-TERM MEMORY
LECTURE 7
 MEMORY DEFICITS

Korsakoff’s syndrome- A condition caused by a prolonged deficiency of vitamin B1,

usually as a result of chronic alcoholism. The deficiency leads to the destruction of
areas in the frontal and temporal lobes, which causes severe and permanent
impairments in memory.
Anterograde amnesia- the loss of the ability to assimilate or retain new knowledge.
Retrograde amnesia- the loss of memory for events that have happened in the past.
 DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN STM & LTM
• Long-term memory (LTM) is the system that is responsible for storing information for long periods of
time.
• One way to describe LTM is as an “archive” of information about past events in our lives and
knowledge we have learned.
• What is particularly amazing about this storage is how it stretches from just a few moments ago to as far
back as we can remember.
• An important question comes to mind that why we retain some information and lose other
information.
• STM & LTM interact.
• LTM and STM adds to his
understanding of what he is
hearing and his
interpretation of what it
might mean.
SERIAL POSITION CURVE
PRIMACY EFFECT AND RECENCY EFFECT
 SERIAL POSITION CURVE

• Memory is better for words at the beginning of the list and at the end of the list than for words in
the middle.
• Superior memory for stimuli presented at the beginning of a sequence is called the primacy effect.
• A possible explanation of the primacy effect is that participants had time to rehearse these words
and transfer them to LTM.
• According to this idea, participants begin rehearsing the first word right after it is presented;
because no other words have been presented, it receives 100 percent of the person’s attention.
• When the second word is presented, attention becomes spread over two words, and so on; as
additional words are presented, less rehearsal is possible for later words.
• Superior memory for stimuli presented at the end of a sequence is
called the recency effect.
• One possible explanation for the better memory for words at the end
of the list is that the most recently presented words are still in STM
• Many experiments were conducted to test these results and the results
were consistent across all of the studies.
 CODING IN LONG-TERM MEMORY
• We saw that auditory, visual, and semantic coding can occur for STM (with auditory and
visual coding being the most prominent). LTM can also involve each of these types of coding.
• For example, you use visual coding in LTM when you recognize someone based on his or
her appearance, auditory coding when you recognize a person based on the sound of his or
her voice, and semantic coding when you remember the general gist or meaning of
something that happened in the past.
• Although all three types of coding can occur in LTM, semantic coding is the predominant
type of coding in LTM.
• Semantic encoding is illustrated by the kinds of errors that people make in tasks that involve
LTM. For example, misremembering the word tree as bush would indicate that the meaning
of the word tree (rather than its visual appearance or the sound of saying “tree”) is what was
registered in LTM.
TYPES OF LONG-TERM MEMORY
 DECLARATIVE MEMORY

Also known as conscious/explicit memory - is the conscious,

intentional recollection of factual information, previous experiences,
and concepts.
It is further divided into two types i.e.
• Episodic memory - the memory of personal life events or experiences
• Semantic memory - general world knowledge (of facts and figures
etc.) that we have accumulated throughout our lives
 NON-DECLARATIVE MEMORY
Also known as unconscious/implicit memory - encompasses all unconscious
memories, as well as certain abilities or skills.
It is majorly divided into three types i.e.
• Procedural memory/skill learning - the memory of skills
• Classical conditioning - a type of learning that happens unconsciously. When
you learn through classical conditioning, an automatic conditioned response
is paired with a specific stimulus. This creates a behavior.
• Priming - a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a
response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.
For example, the word NURSE is recognized more quickly following the
word DOCTOR than following the word BREAD