Memory Acquisition and Retrieval Short term vs. long term memory - Classic experiment by BB Murdoch - Serial Position Curve - People remember things at the beginning (Primacy effect) b/c they have time to rehearse those early words long enough for transfer into LTM - People remember things at the end (Recency effect) b/c the latter words are still in working memory - Recency effect is better/stronger than Primacy effect - If asked to count back from 30, and then recall the words, their ability to remember the words drops significantly; they lose the Recency effect b/c the words aren't kept in working memory - Suggests two different systems for STM and LTM - Clinical cases: Double dissociation » when two related mental processes are shown to be independent - We can affect recency without affecting primacy and vice versa - Clive Wearing - Patient H.M. - Couldn't form new long-term memories, but could remember things from his past, had short-term memory - Patient K.M. - Digit span of 2, instead of typical 5-9 - Could still and form new memories for long-term events, but had very short working memory - Hippocampus: important for long-term memory Retrieving things from LTM - Memories form by making connections - Paths between memories (Memory A >> Memory B) - Context-Dependent Learning (Godden & Baddeley) - Remembering to take your lunch with you only when you enter the kitchen where you were thinking about it yesterday - Remember something when you're in the exact same place/context in which you made that memory - Divers tested on verbal learning 1) underwater and 2) on land - When tested in the same environment in which they learned the words, participants recalled more words - Better at recall when in the same context as learning - People don't need to be in the exact same place, they just need to imagine it, in order to be just as good - Not simply physical context but a psychological context too
- State-Dependent Learning: Remember better when your mood state during test is the same as your mood state while learning - Can cue this as well, doesn't need to be actual mood but could be imagined/induced - Benefit of context reinstatement; re-creating the original context - Thinking about meaning, especially when you learn w/ meaning, is more effective than thinking about rhyme - Greater benefit if the participant creates their own retrieval cues - Context is a type of retrieval cue - What is stored in memory = Material + all connections - E.g. "The man tuned the piano" cue = something w/ a nice sound - "The man lifted the piano" cue = something heavy - Cue is only effective if it matches how the word was placed into memory - Encoding specificity (memory+context) - Why do contextual cues make memories easier to remember - Detectors (memory network) - Memory nodes receive activation, reach threshold » fire! - Recently activated nodes are already 'warmed up' The Structure