PSYC 1315 1st Edition Lecture 18Outline of Last LectureMemoryCurrent Lecture Memory How is memory organized?Hierarchies A system in which items are organized from general to specific classesSchema A preexisting mental concept or framework that helps people to organize and interpret information E.g. what a house contains, going out to eat, driving to school Schemas from prior encounters with the environment influence the way we encode, make inferences about, and retrieve information False memories Sometimes reliance on a schema can cause an individual to “remember” something incorrectly Leads to problems with eyewitness testimony! Connectionist Networks Parallel distributed processing (PDP) Memory is stored throughout the brain in connections among neurons, several of which may work together to process a single memory Memories are like electrical impulses Retrieval The memory process of taking information out of storage Serial position effect The tendency to recall the items at the beginning and end of a list more readily than those in the middle Factors involved in retrieval Recall and Recognition Retrieve information (essay) vs. Recognizing information (multiple-choice) Encoding Specificity - Information present at the time of encoding is important. Your memory might fail because the cues you encoded are not available for use. - E.g. seeing me at Target and not recognizing me Context and State at Encoding and Retrieval - Context dependent: You can remember things better if they’re in the same context in which they were learned (e.g. study in a quiet place) - State dependent memory: You can remember things better if you are in the same psychological state or mood as when you learned it (e.g. if you are in a happy mood, you will remember things from a time you were happy) Why do we forget? Interference theory: People forget not because memories are lost from storage, but because other information gets in the way Proactive interference: Old memories interfere with the establishment and recovery of new memories (e.g. ‘death’/’happy’) Retroactive interference Information of new memories hurts the retention of old memories (e.g. phone number) When to do something Retrospective memory: Remembering the past Prospective memory: Remembering information about doing something in the future Timing: when to do something Content: what to do Amnesia Loss of memory Anterograde amnesia: Memory loss for events that happen after the point of physical damage Korsakoff’s syndrome Retrograde amnesia: Memory loss for events that happened prior to the point of
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