Memory Loss and Memory Feats

● Clarity of our memories that are surprising and significant events, called flashbulb

memories

○ You remember where you were on 9/11 because of this

○ Brain is saying "Capture this!"

Information Processing

● Analogy: Memory is like computer's information-processing system

○ To remember any event requires that we:

■ Get the information into our brain (encoding)

■ Retain that information (storage)

■ Later get back to it (retrieval)

○ Analogy:

■ Translates keystrokes (input) into an electronic language (just like brain

encodes sensory information into a neural language)

■ The computer permanently stores a lot of information on a desk, which can be

retrieved later

○ How it's not like a computer

■ Our memories are less literal and more fragile

■ Brain is slower but does many things at once

● Three-stage processing model (Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin)

○ Three stages

■ We first record to-be remembered information as a fleeting sensory memory

■ From which is processed into a short-term memory bin

■ Where we encode it for long-term memory and later retrieval

○ Problems of memory:

■ Limited and fallible

■ Bombarded with information, we cannot possibly focus on everything at once

■ We have to focus our attention on certain incoming stimuli - usually important

■ Get displayed on our mental screen as conscious short-term memories

■ Rapidly decay unless used or rehearsed

● Working memory

○ Focuses more on how we attend to, rehearse and manipulate information in

temporary storage

○ Analogy: Like RAM, integrates information coming in from our keyboard with that

retrieved from long-term storage on the hard drive

○ Includes a verbal and a visual component

■ We can talk (verbal processing) while driving (visual processing)

1

How We Encode

● Automatic Processing

○ Unconscious encoding of information (like space, time and frequency) and of

well-learned information (like word meanings)

○ Ex: Memory for the route you walked to your last class is handled

○ Occurs effortlessly, difficult to shut off

■ When you hear or read a familiar word in your native language, (insult or

compliment) it is virtually impossible not to register its meaning automatically

○ After practice, some effortful processing becomes more automatic (reading from right

to left)

● Effortful Processing

○ Learning of this chapter's concepts requires effortful processing

○ Encoding that requires attention and conscious effort

○ When learning novel information such as names, we can boost our memory through

rehearsal (conscious repetition)

■ The amount remembered depends on the time spent learning

■ Even after we learn material, additional rehearsal (overlearning) increases

retention

■ Rehearsal will not encode all information equally well, sometimes repeating

information isn't enough

○ Point to remember: for novel verbal information, practice (effortful processing) makes

perfect

○ Effortful processing helps explain these phenomena:

■ Next-in-line effect: seldom remember what the person said or done if we are

next

■ Information before sleep, is seldom remembered

■ Taped information that is played while asleep is registered by ears, but we

don't remember

○ Spacing effect is a phenomenon that explains that we retain information better

when our rehearsal is distributed over time

■ The longer the space between practice sessions, the better the retention is for

up to 5 years later

■ Spreading out learning (over a semester or a year) rather than over short terms

should also help

■ Spaced study does beat cramming, those who learn quickly also forget quickly

○ People given a list of words and immediately asked to recall demonstrate the serial

2

position effect

■ They remember the last and first items better than they do those in the middle

What We Encode (like typing info into computer)

● Encoding Meaning

○ Memory is affected by the way you stored it

■ When processing verbal information for storage, we usually encode its

meaning (we associate it with what we already know or imagine)

■ We tend not to remember things exactly as they were, but we remember what

we encoded

■ We recall not the literal text but the mental model we constructed from it

○ Visual encoding - the encoding of picture images.

○ Acoustic encoding - The encoding of sounds, especially the sound of words

■ Enhances the memorability and seeming truth of rhyming aphorisms

○ Semantic encoding - the encoding of meaning, including the meaning of words

○ Compared with learning nonsense material, learning meaningful material required

only one-tenth the effort

■ Rephrasing what we read and hear into meaning full terms benefits memory

○ We have excellent recall for information we can relate to ourselves

■ self-reference effect - we remember adjectives (that people tell us) about

ourselves better than we remember adjectives about other people

● Encoding Imagery

○ Imagery is a mental picture, a powerful aid to effortful processing, especially when

combined with semantic encoding

■ Earliest memories almost always involve visual imagery

○ We remember words that lend themselves to picture images better than we

remember abstract, low-imagery words

○ Encoding something visually and semantically is more easily remembered (two codes

are better than one)

○ Memories and emotions

■ We recall our experiences with mental snapshots of our best and worst

moments

■ rosy retrospection - people tend to recall events such as a camping holiday

more positively than they evaluated them at the time

○ Mnemonics are memory aids, especially those techniques that use vivid imagery and

organizational devices

■ Unusual associations made to aid memory, often not logi/cal

● Only use if you haven’t learned it yet

3

● Ex: ROY G. BIV, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

● Organization Information for Encoding

○ Meaning and imagery enhance our memory partly by helping us organize information

■ Mnemonic devices help organize material for our late retrieval

○ Chunking - organizing items into familiar, manageable units; often occur automatically

■ We more easily recall information when it's organized into meaningful units

■ Remember information best when it's organized into personally meaningful

arrangements

■ Aids our recall of unfamiliar materials

● By using the mnemonic technique of acronyms, we recall unfamiliar

materials better

○ Hierarchies

■ Hierarchies composed of a few broad concepts divided and subdivided into

narrower concepts and facts, we can retrieve information efficiently

○ Principle Learning (learning targets) - overall view of material to be learned is

developed so material is better organized

○ Elaboration - the process of attaching a maximum number of associations to an item

to be learned so that it can be retrieved more easily - attention grabbers- try to relate

to your own life

Storage: Retaining Information

● Sensory Memory

○ Sensory memory is the initial recording of sensory information in the memory system

○ Iconic memory is a momentary sensory memory of visual stimuli; a photographic or

picture-image memory lasting no more than a few tenths of a second

■ Our eyes register an exact representation of a scene and we can recall any part

of it in amazing detail - but only for a few tenths of a second

○ Echoic memory is a momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli; if attention is

elsewhere, sounds and words can still be recalled within 3 or 4 seconds

■ However, if partially interpreted, the auditory echo disappears more slowly

■ Example: You're in a conversation with someone and your attention veers to

the TV, if you conversation partner asks "what did I just say?" you will recover

the last few words from your mind's echo chamber

● Short-Term Memory

○ We only can illuminate some of the information registered by our sensory memory

with our “attention flashlight”

■ We also retrieve information from long-term storage for "on-screen" display

4

■ Quickly disappears if not rehearsed or meaningfully encoded

○ Short term memory is limited not only in duration but also in capacity

■ Typically stores just seven or so bits of information (give or take two)

○ Our short-term recall is slightly better for random digits (such as those of a phone

number) than for random letters, which sometimes have similar sounds

■ It is slightly better for information we hear than our images we see

■ With information chunks (letters meaningfully grouped as ABC, FBI, BBC, CIA)

and without rehearsal, the average person retains only about four chunks in

short-term memory

○ Basic principle: At any given moment, we can consciously process only a very limited

amount of information

● Long-Term Memory

○ Our capacity for storing long-term memories is essentially limitless

■ The average adult has about a billion bits of information in memory and a

storage capacity that is probably a thousand to a million times greater

● Storing Memories in the Brain

○ Wilder Penfield studied people that had brain surgery, thought people that said they

heard "long-lost memories"

■ Memory researchers Elizabeth and Geoffrey Loftus discovered that these

flashback were extremely rare, occurring in only a handful of a thousand

patients

■ Content suggested that they were being invented, not relived

■ We don't store most information with the exactness of a tape recorder,

forgetting occurs as new experiences interfere with our retrieval and as the

physical memory trace gradually decays

○ Cognitive psychologists study our memory "software", neuroscientists explore our

memory "hardware" (how and where we physically store information in our brains

○ Karl Lashley said that memories do not reside in single, specific spots

○ Ralph Gerard - even if your brain's electrical activity ceased, when revived, you can

still remember memories

● Stress Hormones and Memory

○ The hormones that we produce when excited or stressed boost learning and retention

■ By making more glucose energy available to fuel brain activity, the hormone

surge signals the brain that something important has happened

■ Amygdala (processes emotions) boosts activity in the brain's memory-forming

areas

■ People given a drug that blocks the effects of stress hormones will later have

5

more trouble remembering the details of an upsetting story

■ Explains why we long remember exciting or shocking events (like 9/11)

○ Point to remember is that stronger emotional experiences make for stronger, more

reliable memories

■ After traumatic experiences (wartime ambush, house on fire) vivid recollections

of the horrific event may intrude again and again

○ Prolonged stress (sustained from abuse or combat) acts like acid, corroding neural

connections and shrinking a brain area (hippocampus) that is vital for laying down

memories

■ When sudden hormones are flowing, older memories may be blocked

● Storing Implicit and Explicit Memories

○ Memory-to-be enters the cortex through the senses, then winds its way into the

brain's depths, depending on the information it is sent somewhere - people with

amnesia are unable to form new memories

○ Although incapable of recalling new facts or anything they have recently done, most

people with amnesia can still learn

■ They can be classically conditioned

■ They do all these things with absolutely no awareness of having learned them

○ Whatever destroyed the conscious recall in individuals with amnesia has not

destroyed their unconscious capacity for learning

■ They can learn how to do something - called implicit memory (procedural

memory)

● Retention independent of conscious recollection

■ but they may not know and declare that they know - called explicit memory

(declarative memory)

● Memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and

declare

■ They retain their past but do not explicitly recall it

○ The hippocampus

■ Scans of the brains in action reveal that new explicit memories of names,

images, and events are laid down in the hippocampus

● Hippocampus lights up when people recall words (using explicit

memory) and when creating a memory (certain areas of the frontal

lobes also light up)

■ Hippocampus is like a convergence zone where the brain registers and

temporarily stores the elements of a remembered episode (smell, feels, etc) but

migrate for storage elsewhere

6

■ Example: Calling a number and holding it in working memory activates a

region of the left frontal cortex; recalling a party scene would more likely

activate a region of the right hemisphere

■ Many brain areas are active as we encode, store and retrieve different kinds of

information

■ Damage to the hippocampus disrupts some types of memory

● The hippocampus is lateralized

● People with damage to the left hippocampus have trouble remembering

verbal information, but no problem recalling visual designs and

locations

● Damage to the right hippocampus causes trouble recalling visual

designs and locations but no problem remembering verbal information

○ The cerebellum

■ The pathway that connects the brain's reception of a tone with the blink

response runs to the brainstem through a part of the cerebellum (back of head)

and that if they cut this pathway, the learned response would be lost

● Like cutting the cords to your stereo speakers

■ Implicit memory in the cerebellum

■ Emotional memories involve the amygdala

● those with amygdala damage don't learn fear conditioning

Retrieval (getting information out) - finding and opening up the document

● General

○ Memory is any sign that something learned has been retained

■ Recognizing or more quickly relearning information also indicates memory

■ Our speed at relearning can reveal memory

● If you learned something and forget it, you will probably relearn it

quicker than you originally learned it

■ Tests of recognition and of time spent relearning reveal that we remember

more than we can recall

● Retrieval Cues

○ In recognition tests, retrieval cues (like photographs) provide reminders of

information (classmates’ names after not seeing them for 10 years) we could not

otherwise recall

■ Retrieval cues also guide us where to look

○ Think of memory as held in storage by a web of associations, to retrieve a specific

memory, you first need to identify one of the strands that leads to it, (called priming)

7

■ Priming is the activation, often unconsciously, of particular associations in

memory

■ Seeing or hearing the word rabbit primes associations with hare even though

we may not recall having seen or heard rabbit

○ Priming (aka memoryless memory) - memory without remembering, invisible

memory

■ Walking down a hallway and you see a poster of a missing child, you will be

primed to interpret an ambiguous adult-child interaction as a possible

kidnapping

● Don’t consciously remember the poster, but predisposes your

interpretation

○ Best retrieval cues come from the associations formed at the time we encode a

memory, and those cues can be experiences as well as sounds

■ Taste, smells, and sights often evoke our recall of associated episodes

● Context Effects (as retrieval cues)

○ Helps to put yourself back in the context where you experienced something

■ Recall more words when tested in the same place

■ Go to hometown after moving, get flooded with retrieval cues and memories

○ Being in a context similar to one we’ve been in before may trigger deja vu (“I’ve been

in this exact same situation before)

■ If we’ve previously been in a similar situation, the current situation may be

loaded with cues that unconsciously retrieve the earlier experience

● Moods and memories (as retrieval cues)

○ Events in the past may have aroused a specific emotion that later can prime us to

recall its associated events

■ Analogy An emotion is like a library room into which we place memory records.

We best retrieve those records by returning to that emotional room.

■ When we learn in one emotional state (joyful or sad, drunk or sober) is

sometimes more easily recalled when we are again in that state - called

state-dependent memory

● Depression disrupts encoding and alcohol disrupts storage

○ We seem to associate good or bad events with their accompanying emotions, become

retrieval cues

■ our memories are somewhat mood-congruent

● Tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with our current

mood

■ Currently depressed individuals remember their parents being rejecting,

8

punitive and formerly depressed remember their being the same

○ Moods also influence how we interpret other people’s emotions

■ in a bad mood, read someone’s look as a glare - good mood, someone looks

interested (passions exaggerate)

○ When happy, you recall happy events and see the world as a happy place (helps

prolong the happy period

■ Depressed, recall sad events- which darkens interpretations of current events

Forgetting

● Daniel Schacter seven ways our memories fail us

○ Forgetting

■ Absent-mindedness - our mind is elsewhere as we lay down the car keys

■ Transience - unused information fades

■ Blocking - may be on the tip of our tongue, retrieval failure and cannot get it

out

○ Distortion

■ Misattribution - putting words in someone else’s mouth

■ Suggestibility - a leading question later becomes a false memory

■ Bias - someone’s current feelings toward their fiance may color their recalled

initial feelings

○ Intrusion

■ Persistence - being haunted by images of sexual assault

● Encoding Failure

○ What causes us to forget? - Never encoded information

■ Never entered long-term memory

■ Much of what we sense we never notice

■ Without effort, many memories never form

● Storage Decay

○ Even after encoding something well, we sometimes later forget it

■ The course of forgetting is initially rapid, then levels off with time

■ Ex: after taking a Spanish class, first 3 years retention drops dramatically, then

for for the rest of the life it’s about straight

○ One explanation for forgetting curves is a gradual fading of the physical memory trace

- memories also fade because of the accumulation of other learning that disrupts our

retrieval

● Retrieval Failure

○ Ex: forgotten events are like books you can’t find in your campus library - some

9

because they were never acquired, others because they were discarded

■ Even if the book is stored and available, it may be inaccesible

● Perhaps don’t have the right information to look it up and retrieve it

● Interference (retrieval failures)

○ Learning some times may interfere with retrieving others, especially when the times

are similar

■ Proactive (forward-acting) interference occurs when something you learned

earlier disrupts your recall of something you experience later

● Example: If you buy a new combination lock or get a new phone

number, the old one may interfere

■ Retroactive (backward-acting) interference occurs when new information

makes it harder to recall something you learned earlier

● Ex: learning new students’ names typically interferes with a teacher's

recall of the names of previous students

● You can minimize retroactive interference by reducing the number of

interfering events - like going for a walk or to sleep shortly after learning

new information

○ Forgetting occurs more rapidly after being awake and involved

with other activities

○ “Forgetting is not so much a matter of decay of old impressions

and associations as it is a matter of interference, inhibition, or

obliteration of old by the new”

■ The hours before a night’s sleep (not minutes before) is a good time to commit

information to memory

■ Sometimes old information can facilitate our learning of new information

(knowing Latin may help us learn French) called positive transfer

■ When old information and new information compete with each other that

interference occurs

● Motivated Forgetting

○ People unknowingly revise their own histories

■ To remember our past is often to revise it - by recalling events as we wish, we

protect and enhance our self-image

○ repression is the basic defense mechanism that banishes from consciousness

anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories

■ Sigmund Freud proposed that our memory systems do indeed self-censor

painful information

■ More memory researchers think repression rarely occurs, if ever

10

Memory Construction

● General

○ We often construct our memories as we encode them, and we may also alter our

memories as we withdraw them from the memory bank

● Misinformation and Imagination Effects

○ Elizabeth Loftus showed how eyewitnesses similarly reconstruct their memories when

questioned

○ Situation: people see event, received or not received misleading information about it

and then take a memory test - result is misinformation effect

■ misinformation effect - after exposure to subtle misinformation, many

people misremember

■ As a memory fades with time following an event, the injection of

misinformation becomes easier

○ Nearly impossible to discriminate between memories of real and suggested events

■ As we recount an experience, we fill in memory gaps with plausible guesses

and assumptions

● After more retellings, we often recall the guessed details, which have

now been absorbed into our memories, as if we observed them

○ Repeatedly imagining nonexistent actions and events can create false memories

■ Imagined events later seem more familiar, and familiar things seem more real

● Thus, the move vividly people can imagine things, the more likely they

are to inflate their imagination into memories

● Source Amnesia

○ When we encode memories, we distribute different aspects of them to different parts

of the brain

■ Among the frailest parts of a memory is its source, thus we may recognize

someone but have no idea where we have seen the person

○ Source amnesia is attributing to the wrong source an event that we have

experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined (also called source misattribution).

Source amnesia and misinformation effect is the reason for many false memories

● Discerning True and False Memories

○ Can’t be sure whether a memory is real by how real it feels

■ Memories are perceptions of the past

○ We also can’t judge how real a memory is by how persistent it is

■ Memories of imagined experiences are more restricted to the gist of the

supposed event - the meaning and feels we associate with it

11

○ Hippocampus equally active in truly or falsely recalling a word

■ Other brain areas responded differently to true and false memories

● Only when correctly remembering a spoken word did the brain light up

in the left temporal lobe area that processes speech sounds

● Not said word, there was no sensory record to be activated from the

temporal lobe

○ Eyewitness testimony - most confident and consistent eyewitnesses are the most

persuasive, they often are not the most accurate

■ Memories of crime are easily able to incorporate errors from the hypnotist’s

leading questions

■ Explains why people who are asked how they felt 10 years ago about an issue

recall attitudes closer to their current views rather than what they actually

reported a decade earlier

○ Ex: Psychologist gets called into PD because he matched rape victim’s sketch/memory,

actually she saw him on TV earlier and remembered his face rather than the actual

person

● Children’s Eyewitness Recall

○ Credible if they don’t ask leading questions, and it’s a neutral person

■ Interviewers who ask leading questions can plant false memories of a story

they expect to hear

■ If questioned about their experiences in words they understand, children often

accurately recall what happened and who did it

○ Younger the person, more likely to give wrong/influenced memories/answers

● Repressed or Constructed Memories of Abuse

○ Traumatic events are sometimes forgotten, perhaps aided by the toxic effects of

sustained stress

■ Sometimes recall events that are similar to theirs, but different victims, etc.

○ Jennifer Freyd says that memories may remain vivid for life-threatening traumas such

as a hurricane or car accident, yet be dulled or blocked for traumas that involve

repeated betrayal

○ Many patients exposed to source amnesia and misinformation effect techniques do

form an image of a threatening person

■ Image grows more vivid, leaving the patient thinking it’s true and wanting to

sue, etc.

○ People that study abuse agree on the following

■ Injustice happens, incest happens, forgetting happens

■ Recovered memories are commonplace

12

■ Memories “recovered” under hypnosis or the influence of drugs are especially

unreliable

■ Memories of things happening before age 3 are unreliable

■ Memories (real or fake) can be emotionally upsettings

○ Without knowing a person’s initial experience, it is difficult to assess the validity of a

person’s memory

○ Most common response to a traumatic experiencing is not banishment of the

experience into an active but inaccessible unconscious, but typically etched on the

mind as vivid, persistent, haunting memories

Improving Memory

● Study repeatedly to boost long-term recall

● Spend more time rehearsing or actively thinking about the material

● Make the material personally meaningful

● To remember a list of unfamiliar items, use mnemonic devices

● Refresh your memory by activating retrieval cues

● Recall events while they are fresh, before you encounter possible misinformation

● Minimize interference

● Test your own knowledge, both to rehearse it and to help determine what you do not yet

know - without self-testing, one can easily become overconfident

13

Psychologists:

1. Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin - three-stage processing model of memory

2. Hermann Ebbinghaus - (the Pavlov of memory)

3. Karl Lashley - memories do not reside in single, specific spots

4. Ralph Gerard - even if your brain's electrical activity ceased, when revived, you can still

remember memories

5. Elizabeth Loftus - false memories, made children have false memories of stuff that happened to

them as kids. Proved Wilder Penfield findings that people were having long lost memories

6. Jennifer Freyd - memories may remain vivid for life-threatening traumas such as a hurricane or

car accident, yet be dulled or blocked for traumas that involve repeated betrayal

Vocab:

Memory - the persistence of learning over time via the storage and retrieval of information

Flashbulb memory - unusually vivid memory of an emotionally important moment in one's life

Encoding is the first step in memory; information is translated into some form that enables it to

enter our memory system

Storage is the process by which encoded information is maintained over time

Retrieval is the process of bringing to consciousness information from memory storage

Sensory memory is the immediate, initial recording of sensory information in the memory system

short-term memory is conscious memory, which can hold about seven items for a short time

Long-term memory is the relatively permanent and unlimited capacity memory system into which

information from short-term memory may pass

Automatic processing refers to our unconscious encoding of incidental information such as space,

time and frequency and of well-learned information

Effortful processing is encoding that requires attention and conscious effort

Rehearsal is the conscious, effortful repetition of information that you are trying either to maintain

in consciousness or to encode for storage

Spacing effect is the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention

than massed study or practice

Serial position effect is the tendency for items at the beginning and end of a list to be more easily

retained than those in the middle

Visual encoding is the use of imagery to process information into memory

Acoustic encoding is the processing of information into memory according to its sound

Semantic encoding is the processing of information into memory according to its meaning

Imagery refers to mental pictures and can be an important aid to effortful processing

Mnemonics are memory aids (the method of loci, acronyms, peg-words, etc.), which often use

visual imagery

Chunking is the memory technique of organizing material into familiar, meaningful units

14

Iconic memory is the visual sensory memory consisting of a perfect photographic memory, which

lasts no more than a few tenths of a second

● Memory aid: Icon means "image". iconic memory consists of brief visual images

Echoic memory is the momentary sensory memory of auditory stimuli, lasting about 3 or 4

seconds

Long-term potentiation (LPT) is an increase in synapse's firing potential following brief, rapid

stimulation. LPT is believed to be neural basis for learning and memory

Amnesia is the loss of memory

Implicit memories are memories of skills, preferences, and dispositions. These memories are

evidently processed by (a primitive part of the brain) the cerebellum. They are also called procedural

or nondeclarative memories

Explicit memories are memories of facts, including names, images and events. They are also

called declarative memories.

● Hippocampus is a neural center located in the limbic system that is important in the

processing of explicit memories for storage

Recall is a measure of retention in which the person must remember, with few retrieval cues,

information learned earlier

Recognition is a measure of retention in which one need only identify, rather than recall,

previously learned information

Relearning is also a measure of retention in that the less time it takes to relearn information the

more than information has been retained

priming is the activation, often unconscious, of a web of associations in memory in order to

retrieve a specific memory

Deja vu is the false sense that you have already experiencedd a current situation

Mood-congruent memory is the tendency to recall experiences that are consistent with our

current mood

Proactive interference is the disruptive effect of something you already have learned on your

efforts to learn or recall new information.

Retroactive interference is the disruptive effect of something recently learned on old knowledge

● Memory aid: Retro means "backward". Retroactive interference is "backward-acting"

interference

Repression is an example of motivated forgetting in that painful and unacceptable memories are

prevented from entering consciousness. In psychoanalytic theory, it is the basic defense

mechanism.

At the heart of many false memories, source amnesia refers to misattributing an event to the

wrong source

15