Semantic means having to do with language and knowledge about language. For example, answers to the following questions are stored in your semantic memory:. Episodic memory is information about events we have personally experienced. The concept of episodic memory was first proposed about 40 years ago Tulving, Since then, Tulving and others have looked at scientific evidence and reformulated the theory.
Currently, scientists believe that episodic memory is memory about happenings in particular places at particular times, the what, where, and when of an event Tulving, Episodic memories are also called autobiographical memories. What were you wearing exactly five years ago today? What did you eat for lunch on April 10, ? You probably find it difficult, if not impossible, to answer these questions. Can you remember every event you have experienced over the course of your life—meals, conversations, clothing choices, weather conditions, and so on?
Most likely none of us could even come close to answering these questions; however, American actress Marilu Henner , best known for the television show Taxi, can remember. She has an amazing and highly superior autobiographical memory.
And although hyperthymesia normally appears in adolescence, two children in the United States appear to have memories from well before their tenth birthdays. Watch these Part 1 and Part 2 video clips on superior autobiographical memory from the television news show 60 Minutes. So you have worked hard to encode via effortful processing and store some important information for your upcoming final exam.
How do you get that information back out of storage when you need it? The act of getting information out of memory storage and back into conscious awareness is known as retrieval. Our ability to retrieve information from long-term memory is vital to our everyday functioning. You must be able to retrieve information from memory in order to do everything from knowing how to brush your hair and teeth, to driving to work, to knowing how to perform your job once you get there.
There are three ways you can retrieve information out of your long-term memory storage system: recall, recognition, and relearning. Recall is what we most often think about when we talk about memory retrieval: it means you can access information without cues. For example, you would use recall for an essay test. Recognition happens when you identify information that you have previously learned after encountering it again. It involves a process of comparison.
When you take a multiple-choice test, you are relying on recognition to help you choose the correct answer. Here is another example. You may not be able to recall all of your classmates, but you recognize many of them based on their yearbook photos. It involves learning information that you previously learned. Whitney took Spanish in high school, but after high school she did not have the opportunity to speak Spanish. Whitney is now 31, and her company has offered her an opportunity to work in their Mexico City office.
In order to prepare herself, she enrolls in a Spanish course at the local community center. Our memory has three basic functions: encoding, storing, and retrieving information.
Encoding is the act of getting information into our memory system through automatic or effortful processing. Storage is retention of the information, and retrieval is the act of getting information out of storage and into conscious awareness through recall, recognition, and relearning. The idea that information is processed through three memory systems is called the Atkinson-Shiffrin A-S model of memory. First, environmental stimuli enter our sensory memory for a period of less than a second to a few seconds.
Those stimuli that we notice and pay attention to then move into short-term memory also called working memory. According to the A-S model, if we rehearse this information, then it moves into long-term memory for permanent storage.
Other models like that of Baddeley and Hitch suggest there is more of a feedback loop between short-term memory and long-term memory. Long-term memory has a practically limitless storage capacity and is divided into implicit and explicit memory.
Finally, retrieval is the act of getting memories out of storage and back into conscious awareness. This is done through recall, recognition, and relearning. Both are types of long-term memory. Explicit memories are memories we consciously try to remember and recall.
Explicit memory is also called declarative memory and is subdivided into episodic memory life events and semantic memory words, ideas, and concepts. Implicit memories are memories that are not part of our consciousness; they are memories formed from behaviors. Implicit memory is also called non-declarative memory and includes procedural memory as well as things learned through classical conditioning. According to the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, name and describe the three stages of memory.
According to the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, memory is processed in three stages. The first is sensory memory; this is very brief: 1—2 seconds. Anything not attended to is ignored. The stimuli we pay attention to then move into our short-term memory. Short-term memory can hold approximately 7 bits of information for around 20 seconds. Information here is either forgotten, or it is encoded into long-term memory through the process of rehearsal.
Long-term memory is the permanent storage of information—its capacity is basically unlimited. Information is encoded through automatic or effortful processing. Automatic processing refers to all information that enters long-term memory without conscious effort. This includes things such as time, space, and frequency—for example, your ability to remember what you ate for breakfast today or the fact that you remember that you ran into your best friend in the supermarket twice this week.
Effortful processing refers to encoding information through conscious attention and effort. Material that you study for a test requires effortful processing. Describe something you have learned that is now in your procedural memory. Discuss how you learned this information. Encoding involves the input of information into the memory system. Storage is the retention of the encoded information. Retrieval, or getting the information out of memory and back into awareness, is the third function.
Figure 2. When you first learn new skills such as driving a car, you have to put forth effort and attention to encode information about how to start a car, how to brake, how to handle a turn, and so on.
Once you know how to drive, you can encode additional information about this skill automatically. What are the most effective ways to ensure that important memories are well encoded? Even a simple sentence is easier to recall when it is meaningful Anderson, How well did you do? By themselves, the statements that you wrote down were most likely confusing and difficult for you to recall.
Now, try writing them again, using the following prompts: bagpipe, ship christening shattering a bottle over the bow of the ship is a symbol of good luck , and parachutist. Next count backwards from 40 by fours, then check yourself to see how well you recalled the sentences this time.
You can see that the sentences are now much more memorable because each of the sentences was placed in context.
Material is far better encoded when you make it meaningful. There are three types of encoding. The encoding of words and their meaning is known as semantic encoding. It was first demonstrated by William Bousfield in an experiment in which he asked people to memorize words. The 60 words were actually divided into 4 categories of meaning, although the participants did not know this because the words were randomly presented. When they were asked to remember the words, they tended to recall them in categories, showing that they paid attention to the meanings of the words as they learned them.
Visual encoding is the encoding of images, and acoustic encoding is the encoding of sounds, words in particular. To see how visual encoding works, read over this list of words: car, level, dog, truth, book, value. You would probably have an easier time recalling the words car, dog, and book , and a more difficult time recalling the words level, truth, and value. Why is this?
Because you can recall images mental pictures more easily than words alone. When you read the words car, dog, and book you created images of these things in your mind. These are concrete, high-imagery words. On the other hand, abstract words like level, truth, and value are low-imagery words. High-imagery words are encoded both visually and semantically Paivio, , thus building a stronger memory. We encode the sounds the words make.
The basic idea is that events occurrences in our environment create engrams through a process of consolidation : the neural changes that occur after learning to create the memory trace of an experience. Although neurobiologists are concerned with exactly what neural processes change when memories are created, for psychologists, the term memory trace simply refers to the physical change in the nervous system whatever that may be, exactly that represents our experience.
It is important to understand that memory traces are not perfect little packets of information that lie dormant in the brain, waiting to be called forward to give an accurate report of past experience.
Memory traces are not like video or audio recordings, capturing experience with great accuracy; as discussed earlier, we often have errors in our memory, which would not exist if memory traces were perfect packets of information. Rather, when we remember past events, we reconstruct them with the aid of our memory traces—but also with our current belief of what happened. For example, if you were trying to recall for the police who started a fight at a bar, you may not have a memory trace of who pushed whom first.
When thinking back to the start of the fight, this knowledge of how one guy was friendly to you may unconsciously influence your memory of what happened in favor of the nice guy.
Thus, memory is a construction of what you actually recall and what you believe happened. In a phrase, remembering is reconstructive we reconstruct our past with the aid of memory traces not reproductive a perfect reproduction or recreation of the past. Psychologists refer to the time between learning and testing as the retention interval. Memories can consolidate during that time, aiding retention. However, experiences can also occur that undermine the memory.
For example, think of what you had for lunch yesterday—a pretty easy task. Retroactive interference refers to new activities i. But just as newer things can interfere with remembering older things, so can the opposite happen. Proactive interference is when past memories interfere with the encoding of new ones.
For example, if you have ever studied a second language, often times the grammar and vocabulary of your native language will pop into your head, impairing your fluency in the foreign language. Retroactive interference is one of the main causes of forgetting McGeoch, For example, if you witnessed a car crash but subsequently heard people describing it from their own perspective, this new information may interfere with or disrupt your own personal recollection of the crash.
In fact, you may even come to remember the event happening exactly as the others described it! This misinformation effect in eyewitness memory represents a type of retroactive interference that can occur during the retention interval see Loftus [ ] for a review.
Although interference may arise between the occurrence of an event and the attempt to recall it, the effect itself is always expressed when we retrieve memories , the topic to which we turn next.
Why should retrieval be given more prominence than encoding or storage? For one thing, if information were encoded and stored but could not be retrieved, it would be useless. As discussed previously in this module, we encode and store thousands of events—conversations, sights and sounds—every day, creating memory traces. Most of our memories will never be used—in the sense of being brought back to mind, consciously.
This fact seems so obvious that we rarely reflect on it. All those events that happened to you in the fourth grade that seemed so important then? Now, many years later, you would struggle to remember even a few.
You may wonder if the traces of those memories still exist in some latent form. Unfortunately, with currently available methods, it is impossible to know. Available information is the information that is stored in memory—but precisely how much and what types are stored cannot be known. That is, all we can know is what information we can retrieve— accessible information. The assumption is that accessible information represents only a tiny slice of the information available in our brains.
Most of us have had the experience of trying to remember some fact or event, giving up, and then—all of a sudden! Similarly, we all know the experience of failing to recall a fact, but then, if we are given several choices as in a multiple-choice test , we are easily able to recognize it. What factors determine what information can be retrieved from memory?
One critical factor is the type of hints, or cues , in the environment. You may hear a song on the radio that suddenly evokes memories of an earlier time in your life, even if you were not trying to remember it when the song came on. Nevertheless, the song is closely associated with that time, so it brings the experience to mind.
For example, take the song on the radio: perhaps you heard it while you were at a terrific party, having a great, philosophical conversation with a friend. Thus, the song became part of that whole complex experience. In general, the encoding specificity principle states that, to the extent a retrieval cue the song matches or overlaps the memory trace of an experience the party, the conversation , it will be effective in evoking the memory.
A classic experiment on the encoding specificity principle had participants memorize a set of words in a unique setting. Later, the participants were tested on the word sets, either in the same location they learned the words or a different one.
Consider a lab experiment. Suppose you study items; 99 are words, and one is a picture—of a penguin, item 50 in the list. No one would miss it. This outcome shows the power of distinctiveness that we discussed in the section on encoding: one picture is perfectly recalled from among 99 words because it stands out. Now consider what would happen if the experiment were repeated, but there were 25 pictures distributed within the item list.
Watkins referred to this outcome as demonstrating the cue overload principle. That is, to be effective, a retrieval cue cannot be overloaded with too many memories. To sum up how memory cues function: for a retrieval cue to be effective, a match must exist between the cue and the desired target memory; furthermore, to produce the best retrieval, the cue-target relationship should be distinctive.
Next, we will see how the encoding specificity principle can work in practice. Psychologists measure memory performance by using production tests involving recall or recognition tests involving the selection of correct from incorrect information, e.
For example, with our list of words, one group of people might be asked to recall the list in any order a free recall test , while a different group might be asked to circle the studied words out of a mix with another , unstudied words a recognition test. In this situation, the recognition test would likely produce better performance from participants than the recall test. We usually think of recognition tests as being quite easy, because the cue for retrieval is a copy of the actual event that was presented for study.
After all, what could be a better cue than the exact target memory the person is trying to access? In most cases, this line of reasoning is true; nevertheless, recognition tests do not provide perfect indexes of what is stored in memory. For example, suppose you had the task of recognizing the surnames of famous authors. At first, you might think that being given the actual last name would always be the best cue. However, research has shown this not necessarily to be true Muter, When given names such as Tolstoy, Shaw, Shakespeare, and Lee, subjects might well say that Tolstoy and Shakespeare are famous authors, whereas Shaw and Lee are not.
But, when given a cued recall test using first names, people often recall items produce them that they had failed to recognize before.
This strange fact—that recall can sometimes lead to better performance than recognition—can be explained by the encoding specificity principle. The point is, the cues that work best to evoke retrieval are those that recreate the event or name to be remembered, whereas sometimes even the target itself, such as Shaw in the above example, is not the best cue.
Which cue will be most effective depends on how the information has been encoded. Whenever we think about our past, we engage in the act of retrieval. We usually think that retrieval is an objective act because we tend to imagine that retrieving a memory is like pulling a book from a shelf, and after we are done with it, we return the book to the shelf just as it was.
However, research shows this assumption to be false; far from being a static repository of data, the memory is constantly changing. In fact, every time we retrieve a memory, it is altered. Thus the act of retrieval can be a double-edged sword—strengthening the memory just retrieved usually by a large amount but harming related information though this effect is often relatively small. As discussed earlier, retrieval of distant memories is reconstructive.
We weave the concrete bits and pieces of events in with assumptions and preferences to form a coherent story Bartlett, For example, if during your 10th birthday, your dog got to your cake before you did, you would likely tell that story for years afterward. Say, then, in later years you misremember where the dog actually found the cake, but repeat that error over and over during subsequent retellings of the story.
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