MEMORY Lecturer: Ms.

Aliza Zafar
 DEFINITION
Is it a dusty storehouse of facts?
Memory is an active system that receives, stores, organizes,
alters, and recovers information.
Like a computer, incoming information is first encoded, or
changed into a usable form like typing data into a computer.
Next, information is stored, or held in the system (three
separate storage systems.) Finally, memories must be
retrieved, or taken out of storage, to be useful.
Eg: If you’re going to remember all of the 9,856 new terms on
your next psychology exam, you must successfully encode,
store, and retrieve them.
TYPES OF MEMORY
SENSORY MEMORY
Information first enters sensory memory, which can hold an
exact copy of what you see or hear, for a few seconds or less.
Iconic memories (sensory images) typically last for about one-
half second.
When you hear information, sensory memory stores it as an
echoic memory for up to 2 seconds. An echoic memory is a
brief flurry of activity in the auditory system.
Sensory memory holds information just long enough to move
it to the second memory system, short-term memory.
 SHORT-TERM
MEMORY
Selective attention (focusing on a selected portion of sensory input)
controls what information moves on to short-term memory.
Short-term memory (STM) holds small amounts of information in
conscious awareness for a dozen seconds or so. Eg: By paying attention to
your friend, you will place her shopping list in short-term memory (while
you ignore the voice in the background).
Short-term memories can be stored as images. Often, they are stored
phonetically (by sound), especially in recalling words and letters.
Unless you rehearse information (eg. say it over and over to yourself ), it
is quickly “dumped” from STM and forever lost. STM is very sensitive to
interruption, or interference, as can handle only small amounts of
information. It is very difficult to do more than one task at a time in STM.
WORKING MEMORY
Short-term memory is often used for more than just storing
information. When STM is combined with other mental
processes, it acts more like a sort of “mental scratchpad,” or
working memory, where we do much of our thinking.
Working memory briefly holds the information we need when
we are thinking and solving problems.
Eg: when you do mental arithmetic, put together a puzzle, plan
a meal, follow directions, or read a book, you are using
working memory.
LONG-TERM MEMORY
Information that is important or meaningful is transferred to long-term
memory (LTM), which acts as a lasting storehouse for knowledge.
LTM contains everything you know about the world. Eg?
LTM can hold nearly limitless amounts of information; the more you
know, the easier it becomes to add new information to memory.
Long-term memories are stored on the basis of meaning, not sound. If
you make an error in LTM, it will probably be related to meaning.
SKILL AND FACT
MEMORY
Procedural memory (know-how) includes basic conditioned responses
and learned actions. Eg: riding a cycle, typing, driving, or swinging a golf
club.
Declarative memory (know-what) stores specific factual information,
such as names, faces, words, dates, and ideas, and are expressed as words
or symbols. Eg: knowing the actors of a movie or the latest season of
MasterChef. It’s further divided into:
I. Semantic memory serves as a mental dictionary or encyclopedia of
basic knowledge. Eg: names of objects, the days of the week or months of
the year, simple math skills, the seasons, words and language.
II. Episodic memory is an “autobiographical” record of personal
experiences. It stores life events (“episodes”) day after day, year after
year. Eg?
 PROCESSES AND
TECHNIQUES OF
IMPROVING
MEMORY
One way to improve your memory is to be sure to fully encode
information. That way you can avoid forgetting due to
encoding failure.
Once you have successfully encoded information, you still
have to retrieve it.
REHEARSAL
The more you rehearse (mentally review) information as you
read, the better you will remember it. But maintenance
rehearsal alone is not very effective.
Elaborative encoding, in which you look for connections to
existing knowledge, is better. Thinking about facts helps link
them together in memory.
SELECTION
The Dutch scholar Erasmus said that a good memory should be
like a fish net: It should keep all the big fish and let the little
ones escape.
If you boil down the paragraphs in most textbooks to one or
two important terms or ideas, your memory chores will be
more manageable.
Practice very selective marking in your texts and use marginal
notes to further summarize ideas. Most students mark their
texts too much instead of too little. If everything is underlined,
you haven’t been selective. And, very likely, you didn’t pay
much attention in the first place.
ORGANIZATION
Organizing class notes and summarizing chapters can be quite
helpful. You may even want to summarize your summaries, so
that the overall network of ideas becomes clearer and simpler.
Summaries improve memory by encouraging better encoding
of information.
Eg: Assume that you must memorize the following list of
words: north, man, red, spring, woman, east, autumn, yellow,
summer, boy, blue, west, winter, girl, green, south.
This rather difficult list could be reorganized into chunks as
follows: north-east-southwest, spring-summer-autumn-winter,
red-yellow-green-blue, man-woman-boy-girl.
WHOLE VERSUS PART
LEARNING
If you have to memorize a speech, is it better to try to learn it
from beginning to end? Or in smaller parts like paragraphs?
It is better to practice whole packages of information rather
than smaller parts (whole learning). This is true for fairly short,
organized information.
An exception is that learning parts may be better for extremely
long, complicated information. In part learning, subparts of a
larger body of information are studied (sections of a textbook
chapter).
To decide which approach to use, remember to study the
largest meaningful amount of information you can at one time.
SERIAL POSITION
Whenever you must learn something in order, be aware of the
serial position effect. As you will recall, this is the tendency to
make the most errors in remembering the middle of a list.
If you are introduced to a long line of people, the names you
are likely to forget will be those in the middle, so you should
make an extra effort to attend to them.
You should also give extra practice to the middle of a list,
poem, or speech. Try to break long lists of information into
short sublists, and make the middle sublists the shortest of all.
RECITATION
Learning proceeds best when feedback, or knowledge of
results, allows you to check your progress. Feedback can help
you identify ideas that need extra practice.
In addition, knowing that you have remembered or answered
correctly is rewarding. A prime way to provide feedback for
yourself while studying is recitation.
Recitation refers to summarizing aloud while you are learning.
Recitation forces you to practice retrieving information.
When you are reading a text, you should stop frequently and
try to remember what you have just read by restating it in your
own words.
REVIEW
Reviewing shortly before an exam cuts down the time during
which you must remember details that may be important for
the test.
When reviewing, hold the amount of new information you try
to memorize to a minimum. It may be realistic to take what
you have actually learned and add a little more to it at the last
minute by cramming.
But remember that more than a little new learning may
interfere with what you already know!
USING A STRATEGY TO
AID RECALL
Successful retrieval is usually the result of a planned search of
memory.
Eg: A study found that students were most likely to recall
names that avoided them if they made use of partial
information. Partial information that helped students remember
included impressions about the length of the name, letter
sounds within the name, similar names, and related information
(such as the names of other characters in the movie).
FORGETTING
 DEFINITION
Most forgetting tends to occur immediately after memorization.
Herman Ebbinghaus tested his own memory at various intervals
after learning. To be sure he would not be swayed by prior learning,
he memorized nonsense syllables; these are meaningless three-
letter words such as CEF, WOL, and GEX.
Words like VEL, FAB, and DUZ are no longer used on memory
tests. People who recognize these words as detergent names find
them very easy to remember. This is another reminder that relating
new information to what you already know can improve memory.
By waiting various lengths of time before testing himself,
Ebbinghaus plotted a curve of forgetting. This graph shows the
amount of information remembered after varying lengths of time.
NATURE AND CAUSES
Three processes involved in successfully remembering:
encoding, storage, and retrieval. Conversely, forgetting can
be due to the failure of any one of these three processes.
 ENCODING FAILURE
A memory was never formed in the first place. Eg: If you are
bothered by frequent forgetting or absentmindedness, it is wise
to ask yourself, “Have I been storing the information in the
first place?”
Dividing your attention between studying and other activities
can also lead to encoding failure.
 WHEN MEMORY
STORAGE FAILS
One view of forgetting holds that memory traces (changes in
nerve cells or brain activity) decay (fade or weaken) over time.
Memory decay appears to be a factor in the loss of sensory
memories.
Such fading also applies to short-term memory. Information
stored in STM seems to initiate a brief flurry of activity in the
brain that quickly dies out. Short-term memory operates like a
“leaky bucket”: New information constantly pours in, but it
rapidly fades away and is replaced by still newer information.
DISUSE
There is evidence that memories not retrieved and “used” or
rehearsed become weaker over time. That is, some long-term
memory traces may fade from disuse (infrequent retrieval) and
eventually become too weak to retrieve.
Disuse alone cannot fully explain forgetting. Disuse doesn’t
seem to account for our ability to recover seemingly forgotten
memories through redintegration, relearning, and priming.
It also fails to explain why some unused memories fade,
whereas others are carried for life.
 WHEN RETRIEVAL
FAILS
If you have encoded and stored information, that leaves
retrieval as a likely cause of forgetting. Even if memories are
available (stored in your memory), you still have to be able to
access them (locate or retrieve them) in order to remember.
Eg: you’ve probably had the experience of knowing you know
the answer to an exam question (you knew it was available),
but being unable to retrieve it during the exam (it was
inaccessible).
CUE-DEPENDENT
FORGETTING
One reason retrieval may fail is because memory cues (stimuli
associated with a memory) are missing when the time comes to
retrieve information.
Eg: if you were asked, “What were you doing on Monday
afternoon of the third week in May 2 years ago?” your reply
might be, “Come on, how should I know?” But, if you were
reminded, “That was the day the house was burned,” or “That
was the day Mr. A had a car accident,” you might remember
immediately.
STATE-DEPENDENT
LEARNING
The bodily state that exists during learning can be a strong retrieval
cue for later memory, an effect known as state-dependent learning.
Eg: drunk person will not be able to remember events. Being very
thirsty might prompt you to remember events that took place on
another occasion when you were thirsty.
Because of such effects, information learned under the influence of a
drug is best remembered when the drugged state occurs again.
Similar affect applied to emotions. Study showed that people who
learned a list of words while in a happy mood recalled them better
when they were again happy. People who learned while they felt sad
remembered best when they were sad
INTERFERENCE
Interference refers to the tendency for new memories to impair
retrieval of older memories (and the reverse). It apply to both
short-term and long-term memory.
TRANSFER OF
TRAINING
Two people begin mandolin lessons. One already plays the
violin. The other is a trumpet player. All other things being
equal, which person will initially do better in learning the
mandolin? If you chose the violin player, you have an intuitive
grasp of what positive transfer is. (The strings on a mandolin
are tuned the same as a violin.)
Positive transfer takes place when mastery of one task aids
mastery of a second task. The greater the similarity in the two
subjects studied, the more interference takes place.
In negative transfer, skills developed in one situation conflict
with those required to master a new task. Eg?