PSYC 5140

Cognitive Psychology

Lecture 6:
Long-Term Memory:
Structure

Fall 2020
Instructor: Urs Maurer
 Tree of Memory

Memory

Sensory Short Term Long Term

Implicit
Explicit
Classical
Declarative Procedural Priming Conditioning

Episodic Semantic
 Long-Term Memory

• “Archive” of information about past events and knowledge learned

• Works closely with working memory
• Storage stretches from a few moments ago to as far back as one can
remember
• More recent memories are more detailed
Long-Term Memory

This guy must

have been pretty
tired after
standing for ten
years straight…
 Distinguishing LTM from STM:
Serial Position

• Murdoch (1962) studied the distinction between short-term and long-

term memories using the serial position curve
• Read stimulus list
• Bed
• Clock
• Dream
• Night
• Turn
• Toss
• Artichoke
• Alarm

• Write down all words remembered, in any order

 Distinguishing LTM from STM:
Serial Position
[tens]

• Let’s count:

• Bed
• Clock
• Dream
• Night
• Turn
• Toss
• Artichoke
• Alarm
Serial Position Curve
 Serial Position Effect

1. Primacy effect – remembering words at beginning of list better than

middle because of rehearsal => Transfer to LTM
• The first word receives 100% of attention
• With the second word => attention gets split between two words
• …
• Less rehearsal for later words
 Serial Position Curve

Rundus (1971): tested the primacy effect

• Memory better for stimuli presented at beginning
– Primacy effect gave more time to rehearse info, more likely to enter LTM

Second experimental group:

Repeat words out loud during
5 seconds intervals between
words

How many times

words were
repeated
 Serial Position Effect

1. Primacy effect – remembering words at beginning of list better than

middle because of rehearsal => Transfer to LTM
• The first word receives 100% of attention
• With the second word => attention gets split between two words
• Less rehearsal for later words
2. Recency Effect – remembering words at the end of list better than
middle because of lack of interference => words still in STM
 Serial Position Curve

• Glanzer & Cunitz (1966): tested the recency effect:

– Memory better for stimuli presented at end of list
– Stimuli still in STM

Second experimental group:

Counted backwards for 30
seconds right after hearing the
last word of the list

=> Prevented rehearsal, also

information lost from STM
 Coding in short-term & long-term memory

• Another way to distinguish between LTM & STM: compare the way
information is coded by the two systems
– Coding refers to the form in which stimuli are represented
• Physiological approach: how a stimulus is represented by the firing of neurons
• Mental approach: how a stimulus is represented in the mind

• Visual Coding
– STM: Recalling visual patterns
– LTM: when visualizing a person from the past

• Auditory Coding:
– STM: Phonological similarity effect
– LTM: “hearing” the beginning of the next song on a playlist
 Coding in short-term & long-term memory

• Semantic encoding in short-term

memory
– Wickens et al. (1976)
– Subjects were presented with either
words from a or b
– They listen to three words, counted
backwards for 15secs, then recalled
 Coding in short-term & long-term memory

What does this effect tell us about coding in STM?

•Release from proactive interference depends on the words’ categories

•Placing words into categories involves the meaning of words
•Recall happened 15secs after hearing the words
•Semantic coding in STM
Sachs (1967) on the encoding of information into
LTM
 Coding in Long-Term Memory

• Semantic encoding in long-term memory

• Recognition memory: identification of a previously encountered stimulus

• Sachs (1967)
– Subjects listened to a tape recording of a passage
– Recognition memory was then measured
• Did they remember the exact wording, or the general meaning
 Coding in Long-Term Memory

– Recognition: The to-be-remembered information is presented, along

with other stuff (distractors) and the subject must distinguish new
from old.
• e.g. multiple choice questions

– Free recall: Minimal information from experimenter

• Experimenter simply says “Remember” and the context
is usually implied, occasionally described.
• e.g. feel in the blanks exam questions

– Cued Recall: Experimenter also gives part of the information, or some

related information.
 Sachs (1967)

• Which one of the following sentences is identical to a sentence in the

passage
1) Galileo, the great Italian scientist, sent him a letter about it.
2) He sent Galileo, the great Italian scientist, a letter about it.
3) He sent a letter about it to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.
4) A letter about it was sent to Galileo, the great Italian scientist.

1. We are good at detecting

changes in meaning
2. We are not as good in detecting
changes in sentence form
3. The ability to detect any change
declines with time
4. The decline is sharper for
syntactic changes (that don’t
effect meaning)
 Locating Memory in the Brain

• Neuropsychology
– The hippocampus is responsible for one’s ability to encode new long-
term memories
– Henry Molaison (H.M.) – surgery for epilepsy
• No hippocampus
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkaXNvzE4pk
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7akPs8ptg4

– Clive Wearing- Parts of his medial temporal lobe were destroyed

• medial temporal lobe: hippocampus, amygdala, and other structures in the
temporal lobe

– K.F. – brain injury in a motorbike accident

• Damage to parietal lobe
• Poor STM
 Neuropsychological
Approaches to the Study of STM

• Lesion Studies:
– Patient HM and other dense amnesics have a symptom profile,
suggesting, among other things, that STM and LTM are independent:

– Impairments in:
• Acquiring new episodic and semantic memories (explicit LTM
encoding)
• Primacy effect in free recall (explicit LTM encoding)

– Spared abilities:
• Recall events prior to the resection (explicit LTM retrieval)
• Learn new motor skills (implicit LTM)
• Digit span (STM)
• Peterson task (STM)
• Recency effect in free recall (STM)
 Neuropsychological Deficits in Verbal STM

• Patient KF and other patients showed the opposite pattern of memory

problems, completing the double dissociation between STM and LTM:
– Impairments in:
• Peterson task (STM)
• Recency in free recall (STM)
• Reduced digit span
– Spared ability for:
• LTM
 The Importance of Double-Dissociations

• Neuropsychological Double-Dissociations:

STM LTM
K. F. Impaired Normal
H. M. Normal Impaired

– Allows one to infer the partial independence of cognitive functions underlying

the two cognitive tasks

– Helps to rule out the possibility that a single patient group cannot perform
one task simply because it is more difficult than the other task
 Ranganath & D’Esposito 2001

• Participants viewed faces during a

working memory task (Experiment
1A)
• Instructions: Indicate whether the
second face is the same as the first.
• Then, viewed faces from the same
set in a long-term memory task (1B).
• Instructions: “Encode these
faces...”(then, after they’d seen the
whole list and had an anatomical
scan) “Did you see this face before?”

• Note very similar protocol, designed

to directly compare STM/WM
maintenance and LTM encoding…
Ranganath & D’Esposito 2001

Background:
Hippocampus is crucial for LTM. Is it
also important for STM?

Results:
Hippocampus increased strongly in
delay (WM maintenance) for novel
faces, but less so for familiar faces

Conclusion:
Hippocampus is also involved in STM
 Types of Long-Term Memory

• Tulving (1985) proposed that episodic and semantic information

handled different types of information.
– They can further be distinguished based on the type of experience
associated with each

• Episodic
– Memory for a specific instance or episode.
– Involves “mental time travel”
– No guarantee of accuracy

• Semantic
– Memory for conceptual information
– Does not involve mental time travel
 Types of Long-Term Memory

• Evidence for distinction

– Type of experience (previous slide)
– Neuropsychology
– fMRI responses
 Episodic vs. semantic LTM: Neuropsychology

• Episodic and semantic show a double dissociation

– K. C.:
• No episodic memory: he can no longer relive any of the events of his past.
• Intact semantic memory: He is aware of the fact that his brother died 2 years
ago, but does not remember any personal experiences with him
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXHk0a3RvLc

– “Italian woman”:
• Intact episodic memory: able to remember events in her life
• No semantic memory: had trouble remembering meaning of words, even
couldn’t remember that Italy was involved in WW2
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00wBirzwT9g (about encephalitis)
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAQs2pmN3Sg
Separation of Episodic and Semantic Memories
 Separation of Episodic and Semantic Memories

• Levine et al. (2004)

– Subjects kept diaries on tape describing everyday personal events
– Also provided tapes with facts from their semantic knowledge
• Compare detailed episodic autobiographical memories with semantic
knowledge
• Results:
– Yellow: increased activation for episodic memory
– Blue: increased activation for semantic memory

• Evidence from brain-imaging experiments that retrieving episodic and

semantic memories activate different areas of the brain
 Interactions Between Episodic and
Semantic Memories

• Knowledge affects experience

– Semantic memory guides experience => influences episodic memories
– Will you remember these great moments in curling?
https://youtu.be/iYcYaUBaEeI?t=30s
• Episodic memory can be lost, leaving only semantic
– Acquiring knowledge may start as episodic but then “fade” to semantic
(“source amnesia”)
• Semantic memory can be enhanced if associated with episodic
– Autobiographical memory: memory of specific experiences, includes
semantic and episodic
– Personal semantic memory: semantic memories that have personal
significance
 Familiarity and Recollection

• Familiarity: associated with semantic memory

– Not associated with circumstances under which memory was acquired
– e.g.: when a person seems familiar, you might remember his name, but not any
specific experiences
• That person looks familiar. Where did I meet him?
• There’s Roger. Where did I meet him?

• Recollection: associated with episodic memory

– Details about what was happening when the knowledge was acquired
• There’s Roger, who I met at the coffee shop last Monday. We talked about the weather.
 The Effect of Time

• Typical research findings are that forgetting increases with longer intervals
from the original encoding
– Remember/Know procedure
• Remember if a stimulus is familiar and the circumstance under which it was
encountered?
• Know if the stimulus is familiar but don’t remember experiencing it earlier?
• Don’t remember the stimulus at all
– Semanticization of remote memories
• Loss of episodic details for memories of long-ago events
 The Effect of Time
• Petrican et al. (2010)
• Presented descriptions of events that had happened over
a 50-year period to older adults
• Results:
– Complete forgetting increases with time
– Remember response decreased much more than know
response
• Conclusion:
– Memories from 40-50 years ago had lost much of their
episodic character
– Illustrates semanticization of remote memories

• Knowledge that makes up semantic memories is initially

attained through personal experiences, that are the basis
of episodic experiences
– Memory of these experiences fade, only the semantic
memories remain
 Mental Time Travel?

Using a cueing task, Addis et al.

(2007) asked people to
remember events associated
with specific key words, or to
imagine future events.

A widely distributed network of

areas associated with memory
processes (but also with
memory, visualization, and
social cognition) were active in
both tasks.

Constructive episodic simulation hypothesis:

- Episodic memories are extracted and recombined to construct simulations of future events
- Main role of episodic memory: simulate future scenarios (rather than remembering the past)
 Types of Long-Term Memory

So far we have considered memory for facts and events.

These are things we know explicitly.
What does it mean to know something implicitly?
 Implicit memory

• Implicit/non-declarative: memory
that unconsciously influences
behavior
– When learning from experience is
not accompanied by conscious
remembering
– Procedural (skill) memory
Professional cyclists often
– Priming: previous experience
brush up on their Newtonian
mechanics before big changes response without conscious
races…(kidding) awareness
 Implicit Memory: Procedural Memory

• Skill memory: memory for actions

• No memory of where or when learned* (or else
this memory doesn’t much influence
performance)
• Perform procedures without being consciously
aware of how to do them
• People who cannot form new episodic
memories can still learn new skills
– H.M. learned the mirror drawing task after a
couple of days of practicing
• Each day he couldn’t remember he had done the
task before
• Many cognitive skills involve procedural memory
Knowlton et al. (1996) tested Parkinson’s (PD) patients and
amnesics (AMN) on a probabilistic “weather prediction” task.

Whereas AMN patients learned well, PD patients did not.

In contrast, when asked a set of simple
multiple-choice questions about the
task they’d just performed, AMN
patients were close to chance, whereas
PD patients did as well as controls.

…this was a key finding dissociating

declarative and procedural memory...
 Priming

• Presentation of one stimulus changes the way a person responds to

another stimulus
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI0fFEffDd8
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g4_v4JStOU
 Repetition Priming

• Presentation of one stimulus affects performance on that stimulus when it

is presented again

• Graf and coworkers (1985): tested patients with amnesia to ensure that
people don’t remember the presentation of priming stimulus
– Texted explicit memory and implicit memory
– Tested three groups
1. Amnesia patients with Korsakof’s syndrome (do not have the ability to form any
explicit LTM)
2. Patients without amnesia being treated for alcoholism
3. Patients without amnesia who had no history of alcoholism
 Repetition Priming

Subjects were asked to read a 10-word list and rate how much they likes each word
They were then tested in one of the two following ways:
1. They were asked to recall the words they had read
2. A word completion test, which is a test of implicit memory
 Implicit Memory in Everyday Experience

• Perfect and Askew (1994)

– Propaganda effect: more likely to rate statements read or heard before as
being true, simply because they had previously been exposed to them
– More likely to rate advertisement they has seen in passing as “true”
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUA4Q5aoG74
 Implicit Memory: Classical Conditioning

• Pairing a neutral stimulus with a

reflexive response
• Remember poor Little Albert!

• Not remembering the name of a

familiar person, but having positive or
negative feelings about them
 Tree of Memory

Memory

Sensory Short Term Long Term

Implicit
Explicit
Classical
Declarative Procedural Priming Conditioning

Episodic Semantic