2009年10月20日星期二

"Introduction to Psychology" Note (7) —— Memory


Lecture 7&8: Memory

Memory is a complex psychological process, a dynamic one, that's influenced by many factors:
  • how much you concentrate
  • how much you rehearse
  • the context in which you learn something and recall sth
  • motivation
  • physical state and biological condition
  • interference from other events and experiences
The complexity of memory could be dissected into its component processes:
  • encode
  • store and retain
  • retrieved on demand when it's needed.
Different kinds of memory:
  1. Sensory memory: a residue in your senses.
  2. Short-term memory: the transient working memory that holds all the knowledge currently in use, spans for a few minutes.
  3. Long-term memory: the storehouse of everything you know about the world and yourself, and is essentially unlimited. It is like a passive storehouse of information, and not an active information dispatcher.
  1. Explicit memory: what you have conscious access to.
  2. Implicit memory: more unconscious, what you might not be able to articulate and might not even be conscious of but still have access to.
  1. Semantic memory: is basically facts, what you know from the world of concepts, ideas, and things.
  2. Episodic memory: is autobiography, is what happened to you, each engram tagged with a time and a place, when and where it happened.
  3. The procedural knowledge behind every skilled action: forms the foundation of everything you know how to do.
Attention could be crudely viewed as a flashlight, a spotlight on experience that willingly zooms in on something and makes it memorable.
Change blindness: the phenomena is, we have a very narrow focus of attention and huge changes can happen that we are oblivious to.

Memory Mechanism:
  • Chunk: a basic memory unit, something you think of as a single, individual entity. People remember things in terms of chunks.
  • Standard memory storage of short-term memory is seven chunk, plus or minus two (George Miller).
  • Schema: frameworks of our basic ideas and preconceptions about people, objects, and situations.
  • All the new information we learn is organized by relating it to existing schemas, and many of our constructions of memory and distortions arise as we try to fit new information into old schemas.
  • To get things into long-term memory, rehearsal is usually not enough. You need to structure and organize information.
  • The best way to remember something is to give it meaning, to give it sense.
  • Expertise effects: How much you know or understand affects how much you memorize in long-term memory.
  • Context-dependent memory/State-dependent memory: you're much better to remember something in the context in which you have learned it. This is the general relationship between encoding and retrieval so-called "compatibility principle".
  • Elaborative rehearsal: the more you think about something the easier it is to remember.
  • Elaborative retrieval: a finding that when you want to get something back out of memory people tend to give up too soon. You keep retrieving and over the span of time things might come back.
Different explanations for forgetting:
  • Physical things decay: The memory traces that are laid onto your brain will just decay over time.
  • Interference: The more information that comes in that's similar to the stuff you're trying to remember, it blocks your recovery of original information.
  • Changes in retrieval cues: The more time goes by the more the world changes. And if your memory is to some extent dependent on cues bringing it back to life, then the change in retrieval cues can make it more difficult to recall certain things.
2 types of amnesia:
  1. retrograde amnesia: "retro" for past. Retrograde amnesia is when you lose some memory of the past.
  2. anterograde amnesia: you lose the ability to form new memories. And so you live in a perpetual present, unable to accumulate new memories.
Failures of memory:
  • everyday failure of memory when you forget
  • forgetting due to brain damage
  • memories can be implanted in people's minds through suggestion and through leading questions
  • Flashbulb memories: memories are so vivid but they can't really be trusted.

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