PSYCH 207 Test 2 Lec + Textbook Notes

Attention (Chapter 4)
• There is a ton of sensory information available to you, but you only think about a very small
portion of it.
• The gorilla video: where you’re asked to count the number of passes between the players wearing
white. A gorilla passes through the scene. 42% of people did not see the Gorilla in the original
study. This particular video was an updated video where in addition to the Gorilla, a player left
the game and the curtain behind the players changed from red to gold. Note that white-shirted
people were used to avoid confusion between black shirts and the gorilla.
o This example demonstrates inattentional blindness – the phenomenon of not perceiving
a stimulus that might be literally right in front of you, unless you are paying attention to it
• If the task is harder, attentional focus is stronger, which means there is a higher chance of missing
the gorilla.
• We only perceive that which we attend to.
• How much of this information is actually processed? Attentional research became important
during the cognitive revolution because humans have limited mental capacity.
• How can we filter some information out in order to focus on other things? How much attention do
we spend on out-of-focus things? How do we decide what to pay attention to?

Selective Attention
• Refers to the fact that we usually focus our attention on one or a few tasks/events at any given
time
• How do we select info to attend to? What happens to all the info that we don’t attend to?
• Attention comes before perception (between retinal processing and actual percept processing).
• Attention determines which distal stimuli get turned into a percept.
• Attention can move around space without moving your eyes; attention is not the same as
perception
• The main theories of attention differ in relation to how deep information is being processed.
• Sensation is not the same as perception.
• We’re going to look at early selection and late selection, however we aren’t making any claims
about which is right and which is wrong.
• The key difference between early and late selection is where in the system the attention filter
occurs. These are very debatable models.
• The thing you try not to do is the thing that is the hardest not to do (try not to think about blinking
your eyes, for instance). This is an ironic process of cognition.
• Ironic processes of cognition – that thing you’re told not to do is what is processed through your
mind

Early Selection
• The filter occurs after physical characteristics, but before meaning (based on early studies)
• Broadbent’s Filter Model: selection is early because it is done on the basis of basic auditory
features. The filter must happen very early on.
o Type of filter model - Dichotic listening task: A person listens to an audiotape over a set
of headphones. On the tapes are different audios played simultaneously but each in a
different ear. Given an audio stream, ask the subject to repeat the audio (shadow) that was
 sent to one ear only. Info is presented quickly (150 wpm) making the task attentionally
demanding.
▪ This allows researchers to see how much processing is occurring for the contents
of the other ear.
▪ Due to its demanding nature, fewer resources are available to process information
from the non-shadowed, unattended message.
▪ Cherry (1953) found that people can accurately shadow a spoken message, even
when spoken rapidly.
• Participants could distinguish speech from noise and the gender of the
speaker in the unattended message.
• They noticed something odd about backward speech but couldn't recall
that it was backward.
▪ Moray (1959) showed that participants often failed to recognize simple words in
the unattended message, even after 35 repetitions.
• Language changes (English to German) in the unattended message went
unnoticed.
▪ According to Broadbent’s filter theory, it should not be possible to recall any of
the meaning in the unattended messag.
• Problems with Filter Theory:
o Cocktail party effect: if one’s own name is in either in- or out-of-focus content,
attention will be diverted to hear more.
▪ Certain things (such as our own names) have lower thresholds than other content,
in order to divert our attention. The filter is not occurring just at the physical
level.
▪ Perhaps there are lapses of attention explaining why sometimes you can pick up
your name
o Semantic leakage: story switched from shadowing one ear to the other as the meaning
continued on the other, unattended ear. You’re picking up meaning, to some degree, in the
unattended ear.
o Treisman’s experimental paradigm: information is being processed at deep levels even
if it is not at the forefront of attention
o Associations learned unconsciously: shock was paired with city names. Unattended city
names in the unshadowed ear triggered a GSR response (measures heightened level of
arousal) to ALL city names
▪ shows that despite being unconscious and ignored people process info deeply and
can retain it
• Treisman’s Attenuation Model: meaningful information in unattended messages might still be
available, even if hard to recover.
o Subject to three kinds of analysis
▪ Physical properties (pitch/loudness)
▪ Linguistic (breaking down the message into syllables and words)
▪ Semantic (meaning)
• 2 critical stages:
o 1st stage: “attenuator” instead of a “filter”:
▪ unattended messages are tuned down with attenuator, instead of by a filter.
▪ Analyzes for physical characteristics, language and meaning.
▪ Analysis is only done to the necessary level to identify which message should be
attended.
 ▪ Unattended messages are attenuated.
o 2nd stage: dictionary unit: contains stored words that have thresholds.
▪ Important items, such as your own name, have lower thresholds and thus even a
weak signal can cause an activation.
▪ We all have different dictionary units and thresholds based on personal
experiences and what matters to us. This explains things like the cocktail party
effect, since our own name has a lower threshold
• Different from filter theory which argues that unattended messages, once processed for physical
characteristics, are discarded and fully blocked. Attenuation theory argues that unattended
messages are weaking but the information they contain is still available.

Late Selection
• All information (both attended and unattended) is processed for meaning, and activates the
corresponding representation in long-term memory (LTM).
• Selection of what to pay attention to happens during the response output stage.
• Human limitation for processing two streams of information lies in making a conscious response
to each stimuli.
• The filter occurs very late. Meaning is determined for all information before the filtering process
occurs.

Automaticity
• Automatic processing much: occur without intention, without conscious awareness and must not
interfere with other mental activity
o Ex. walking, learning how to ride a bike; automatic unconscious level
o Word reading is thought by many to be automatic.
• Automated processing does not require attention.
• Things that are controlled require attentional resources
• Over time, the attentional capacity required for a given task decreases. At first, you think about
the mechanics of playing a guitar, for instance, but you stop thinking about the mechanics as time
progresses.
• Down side: automaticity could interfere with other tasks. If a word is presented, you cannot
prevent yourself from reading/processing the word for meaning. It’s very difficult to stop an
automatic process from happening.
• Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) investigated automatic processing in controlled lab settings.
o Participants were tasked with finding specific targets (letters or numbers) in arrays of
letters or numbers (frames).
o Different target-distractor relationships were explored: numbers among letters, letters
among letters, and numbers among numbers.
o In "consistent-mapping" conditions (where targets and distractors were of different
types), performance depended on frame display time, not on the number of targets or
distractors.
o In "varied-mapping" conditions (where targets and distractors could be of the same type
and alternate), performance was affected by memory set size, frame size, and frame
display time.
o Schneider and Shiffrin distinguished between two processing types: automatic and
controlled.
 o Automatic processing was suited for easy and familiar tasks, occurring in consistent-
mapping conditions.
o Controlled processing was used for difficult and unfamiliar tasks, operating serially,
requiring attention, being capacity-limited, and under conscious control. Controlled
processing was observed in varied-mapping conditions.
• The STROOP task: a series of color bars (or color words) are presented in conflicting colors.
The task is to name the color of the ink of each item as quickly as possible. The size of the
STROOP effect increases as you become more proficient at that task.
• Word reading is one of the most automatic processes
o Difficult for literate individuals to not read words which can lead to interference when the
task isn’t to read the words but name ink colours
o STROOP interference increases as we gain more automatic abilities.
▪ E.g., preschool children have lower interference since they have lower automatic
reading abilities in comparison to older children
• Capacity limitations are only applicable to tasks that require conscious attention, and do not apply
to automatic processes.
• Practicing a task leads it into being an automatic process over time.
• Controlled processing is serial, requires attention, has a limited capacity, is under conscious
control and is deliberate (intentional)
• Automatic processing is without intention, with no conscious awareness, does not interfere with
other mental activities, runs in parallel (do things at the same time), and does not constrain
capacity limitations

Disorders of Attention
• Visual neglect is a disorder of attention. It’s also known as heavy neglect, hemi-spatial neglect,
or unilateral neglect.
• An attentional deficit rather than a sensory deficit; the ability to attend stimuli and divert attention
is affected, but visual components are intact
• Occurs when the right parietal lobe is damaged, which affects your perception of your left
vision.
• Conscious experience isn’t felt on the left side (contralateral/opposite) side of the body is
neglected
o I.e., the patient “neglects” contralateral (opposite) hemi-space
o In extreme cases, patients even deny that some of their own limbs belong to them
• The visual components are there, but they cannot internally divert attention to the object.
• They can still see everything if an external cue helps them along.
• The left hemisphere has less specialization, which means it is not affected nearly as much as the
right hemisphere.
• Common in people who have had strokes
o Often not a life sentence, people can recover from this deficit
• Line bisection: a patient is asked to bisect the center of a line. Normal people will hit the middle
(almost; there is a slight right bias). Affected people would be far to the right because they see the
line as being shorter. This is a test that’s often used in diagnosis of visual neglect.
• If you had visual neglect, you wouldn’t be able to drive.
• No two patients will have the exact same behavior, because their lesions differ.
• Anton was a patient who started to attend to more details as time went on, as he was recovering
from his stroke. This illustrates that different patients can have varying degrees of severity.
 • We know that this is an attention disorder because you can point out visual inaccuracies and
they’ll notice them at that point. They just cannot notice these visual inaccuracies without an
external cue.
• Semantic priming: saying the word “doctor” and words like “nurse” will also be activated to
some degree. A word in a neglected field will not be noticed, however it can prime responses to
words in the attended field.
• Their visual perceptual system is not broken! This is purely an attention disorder.
• People with heavy neglect need to be conscious of their disorder but attention is generally
unconscious, so this is hard to do.
• They do not have conscious (explicit) knowledge of information in neglected fields but they do
show some unconscious (implicit) knowledge.

Attention in the Real World

• Strayer & Johnson study: participants performed a pursuit-tracking task where they used a
joystick to move a cursor on a computer, keeping it positions over a moving target. At various
intervals the target flashed either red or green, signaling the ‘driver’ to push a ‘brake’ button on
the joystick (red) or ignore the flash (green). Task was performed by itself and then also while
listening to a radio broadcast or having an engaged conversation with someone on the phone
(dual-performance condition of the study).
o Results showed that the talking with someone on the phone caused them to miss red
lights and react more slowly in comparison to the single-task and radio condition.
• Shows we have finite attentional abilities.

Memory Structures (Chapter 5)

• Encoding – acquiring information.
• Retrieval – the calling to the mind of previously stored information.
• Short-term memory records 20 seconds worth of information. If this information is rehearsed a
sufficient amount, it’ll be moved to long-term memory.
• Episodic memories form in long-term memory starting at 4-5 years old. Semantic meanings (like
word meanings) are learned earlier. You need a developed sense of self for episodic memories.

Sensory Memory
• The initial brief storage of sensory information, represents about one second of information. It’s
very brief, and only handles basic percepts.
• A sensory “after image” “hangs.”
o Ex. If you take light and spin it in a circle, it appears to be a circle, not a single point,
because of sensory memory.
• The Modal Model: Assumes that information is received, process and stored differently for each
kind of memory.
o We have a sensory store for each modality (1 second for iconic/visual and 4-5 seconds for
echoic/auditory).
o Iconic (visual) memory consists of < 1 second of information, containing the visual field
and the physical features within it.
▪ Sterling (1960) wondered how long information is stored in sensory memory, and
how much we can store in sensory memory. He displayed arrays of letters briefly
for only 50 milliseconds and found that, on average, people could recall only 4 or
 5 of the 12 letters, regardless of whether the display time was extended to 500
milliseconds.
• This limitation wasn't due to perception but was because the information
faded quickly from this sensory memory system.
• Sperling developed the partial-report technique to more accurately
measure the content in sensory memory. He used auditory cues (low,
medium, high pitches) to instruct participants to report a specific row of
letters after seeing the display.
• Sperling discovered that participants could remember approximately 9 of
the 12 letters when cued immediately, suggesting the visual store could
hold about nine items briefly.
• However, if the cue was delayed by 1 second, recall dropped to 4 letters,
similar to the whole-report method.
• This brief visual memory was termed the "icon" by Neisser (1967).
• Other researchers, like Averbach and Coriell (1961), demonstrated the
icon could be "erased" by subsequent stimuli in a phenomenon known as
masking, where new stimuli replaced the memory trace of the original
information.
• Multiple-choice exams are partial reports. They’re cueing 30 questions
out of (say) 500 possible questions.
• Full reports fail because sensory memory fades. Partial reports allow you
to report before the information fades because there is less information to
report.
o Echoic (auditory) memory while less capacity than iconic memory, consists of 4-5
seconds of information (larger storage) and contains categorical contents.
▪ Have you ever been in a situation where someone asked you a question, and you
say “what?” but then answer the question a second later. An example of its
duration capabilities
• In real experiments, more trials acts as a way to eliminate the bias of people guessing rather than
truly remembering.
• The 7 ± 2 pieces of information fact only applies to short-term memory, not sensory memory.
• Sensory memory is bigger than short-term memory. It’s just shorter.
• Information will be wiped out if something takes their place. This is known as the masking effect
for iconic percepts, and the suffix effect for echoic percepts.
• Ecological purpose – ensures that the visual system has some min. amount of time to process info
o integration of information across time
o processing of entire visual field for directing attention

Short-Term Memory (STM)

• STM is your active consciousness at a particular point in time.
• You can keep track of 7 ± 2 bits of information in STM, according to George Miller.
o You can increase capacity by chunking/reorganizing information into meaningful units
▪ Ex. memorizing N-F-L-C-B-S-F-B-I-M-T-V by chunking it into NFL – CBS –
FBI - MTV
• Short-term memory is where the real, conscious work happens, similar to RAM in your computer
(the number of active programs you can have is similar to your memory span).
Forgetting in Short-Term Memory
• If you don’t use information, it’ll fade away.
• There are two theories in terms of how forgetting works in STM. Both are likely occurring in
some way.
• Trace decay theory: This is the automatic fading of the memory trace as time goes on.
o Brown-Peterson Task: present some letters to a subject, then ask them to count
backwards by 3s from some number (for some period of time), then to recall the letters.
▪ Due to trace decay, they may have trouble recalling the letters.
▪ After 20-30 seconds, memory begins to fade due to trace decay, making it
difficult for them to recall the letters
• Interference theory: This is the disruption of the memory trace by other traces, where the degree
of interference that occurs depends on the similarity of the two memory traces (how similar the
old & new memories are). There are two kinds of interference:
o Proactive interference is where early information makes it hard to encode new
information. This is the type of interference that occurs in your mind from focusing on
several different classes at once, for instance.
▪ Wickens, Born & Allen used Brown Peterson’s paradigm but switched categories
after a few trials.
• Subjects were asked to remember and recall letters, with intervals
between the various trials of the experiment. There is a control group that
is given three letters to remember every time. The experimental group
has to remember letters for all trials except the last, at which point they
are asked to remember a set of numbers instead. Switching the last trial
like this causes a release from proactive interference! With the control
group, their performance suffered as the number of trials increased.
However, the experimental group jumped back up to maximum
performance on the final trial, since it was a different task that did not
experience proactive interference.

•
 o Retroactive interference is a more powerful kind of interference where new information
makes it difficult to retrieve old information. This has a bigger impact on long-term
memory than proactive interference does.

Working Memory
• More complex version of short-term memory
• Some researchers (Baddeley and Hitch) questioned whether the notion of short-term memory was
adequate, or too simplistic.
o They claimed that rehearsing digits out loud interfered with reasoning and
comprehension tasks, but the degree of impairment was far from dramatic. This task is
known as the syntactic verification task. The percentage of errors did not change, but
the reasoning time took longer and longer.
o The digit task takes up only one subsystem and the reasoning & comprehension tasks are
free to use the other (unused) subsystems. This suggests that short-term memory is not a
unitary system.
• Working Memory Model: We have a central executive, a visuospatial sketch pad, and a
phonological loop.
o The central executive coordinates resources between the visuospatial subsystem and the
phonological subsystem. The visuospatial subsystem handles visual information, and the
phonological loop handles articulation and other verbal information.
o The visuospatial sketchpad and the phonological loop are functionally independent
systems.
o You can do two different tasks at the same time if one is verbal and one is visual.
o It’s very hard to stop words from their obligatory access to the phonological loop. For
example: it’s hard to tune out music, TV, or a boring lecture, to study.
o A sentence is shown on the screen, and read aloud. It’s then hidden. You’re asked how
many words there were. Both of these tasks use the phonological loop, so you offload one
task (counting, in this case) to something visual, by counting on your fingers. If you
didn’t do this, this task would be very difficult (it’d have to be run serially).
• People have different strategies for encoding information (visually, through repetition, etc.).
• If these systems are independent (as they are), then articulatory suppression (repeating
nonsense like “the the the the”) should disturb memory for linguistic information but not for
visual information. Saying words out loud makes it harder for you to rehearse information in your
head.
• The act of saying something out loud makes it more distinctive, which means it’s generally easier
to retrieve that information from memory because there is a larger variety of cues for that piece of
information (your own voice saying it aloud acts as a cue).
• It’s generally easier to retrieve information that is more distinctive because cues are more unique
to that piece of information, and aren’t shared across multiple pieces of information in memory.

Long-Term Memory
• Episodic memory – personal, biographical
• Semantic – fast
• Procedural – automatized
• There is much evidence to show that we do actually have separate systems for working memory
and long-term memory.
• Episodic and semantic memories (etc.) are stored in long-term memory.
• Long-term memory is akin to a hard drive in a computer. Both store information indefinitely.
Information in LTM is stored forever, but it becomes harder to retrieve the information over time.
• Our conscious memories are also a reconstructive process.
• Serial Position Effect:
o You’re given 20 items to recall.
o You’ll remember the last couple of items because of the recency effect. These items are
stored in sensory or working memory, and will be wiped out over time (i.e. with a delay
between the items being presented and the time to recall them).
o You’ll also remember the first few items because of the primacy effect. These items are
stored in long-term memory and can be wiped out through subvocal rehearsal.
o Recency effect can be reduced/eliminated by delaying the period of time between recall
and the last bits of information processed.
o Primacy effect can be reduced by dividing attention, using articulatory suppression or
engaging in dual task; any interference to the phonological loop will inhibit ability to
rehearse info enough that it’s easier to recall from LMT
• You can have deficits in one memory system but not another.
• Clive Wearing:
o Has a severe case of amnesia because his temporal lobes are damaged (which contains
the hippocampus, etc.). These are the structures that are involved in remembering and
inserting new memories.
▪ Temporal lobes and hippocampus, amygdala etc. do not contain all memories,
but rather work as an indexing system or a Google search engine, allowing
people to more easily and functionally retrieve and pinpoint specific memories.
▪ The hippocampus can be wiped out but memories are still stored. They just can’t
be retrieved.
o He has moment-to-moment consciousness.
o He always feels like he’s awaking afresh, all the time.
o He writes a diary / log of things that happen, to act as long-term memory. However, he
doesn’t believe the things he wrote earlier so he crossed them out. He thinks he was
unconscious when he wrote earlier log entries.
o His short-term / working memory is intact, but his episodic long-term memory is not
working. He can still play piano well, so his procedural memories are intact.
• Episodic memories are stored all around the cortex.
• People with amnesia do not suffer a primacy effect because they do not have long-term memory.
• The capacity of long-term memory is very large or possibly infinite. It goes beyond what we can
actually measure.
o We have hundreds of thousands of synapses, each with the capacity to hold memories.
• Long-term memory is coded semantically (by meaning). The concept of an apple is connected to
seeds, fruit, pie, worm, food, pizza, and red. Some of those concepts are also connected to each
other, too.
• Long-term memory is a permastore, even without use. Retrieval cues just start failing over time
with no use.
• There are different types of retrieval. Recognition is when you’re asked “do you recognize X?”,
which provides a retrieval cue. Recall is when you’re asked “list all of the words you saw.”,
which clearly is a harder task and therefore has worse performance than recognition.
o One study showed that recall declined for the first 3 to 6 years in participants who had
taken or were taking a high school/university Spanish class.
 o There was not much forgetting over the next three decades and final declined occurred
after 30 – 35 years.
o Participants were able to recognize words more than they were able to recall, showing
that recognition is much less reliant of conscious recall.
• Forgetting memories typically is a very rapid dip, then it levels off.
• Interference is the main cause of forgetting in long-term memory. Concepts get difficult to
retrieve as competition builds for certain retrieval cues (having multiple usual parking spots, for
instance).
• The more cues you have for the same target, the easier it is to remember / retrieve it. The more
distinct these cues are (from cues for other concepts), the easier it becomes.
• The deeper you process something (processed for meaning), the more meaningful it’s going to be,
the easier it’ll be to retrieve later.
• Encoding can occur through two different types of rehearsal.
o Maintenance rehearsal: repetition. Repetition allows you to maintain or hold
information without transferring it into deeper code (deeper meaning). This is not a very
effective encoding method.
o Elaborative rehearsal: elaborate on meaning. This transfers the information to deeper
code, and provides richer multimodal codes as a result. It makes the memory more unique
and therefore easier to retrieve.
• Levels of Processing:
o “We soon forget what we have not deeply thought about.” Craik & Tulving
o People are more likely to remember words which can be semantically (meaningfully)
encoded.
▪ Ex. in a study were people are asked to make judgements in associated words
(whether they are upper/lowercase, they rhyme or fit in a sentence) people will
most often the remember the sentence words, followed by the rhyme and then the
case words.
• The Generation Effect: people are much better at remembering things that came from within.
You’re reliving the experience as part of the retrieval process.
o Generating words are more memorable than just reading them, you’re basically practising
the task you will be doing later on
• Encoding Specificity Principle:
o “Recollection of an event, or a certain aspect, occurs if and only if properties of the trace
of the event are sufficiently similar to the retrieval information.” –Endel Tulving.
▪ Basically: retrieving info is essentially reliving and reconstructing experience
o More cues at encoding time means you’ll store a more accurate representation.
o This principle is why witnesses to crimes are often taken to visit the scene of the crime
again.
o There is a slight benefit to writing a test in the same room you learned it in.
• Context Dependent Memory: information learned in a particular context is better recalled if
recall takes place in the same context. Memory is dependent on the context it was encoded in.
o Location: a perfect dissociation was seen in the scuba divers recall experiment (studying
one set of words underwater and the other on land, then asked to call on land and
underwater – each set was better recalled in the location it was encoded).
o Alcohol: information that was learned while intoxicated was retrieved well when
intoxicated again. Information learned while intoxicated but retrieved while sober was the
worst case.
 o Personality: an individual with dissociative identity disorder was asked to learn and recall
a list of words in each of four personalities. If the study personality matched the subject’s
personality, their own personality will have floored performance (less errors) and other
personalities were had ceiling performance (more errors). Jonah was the dominant
personality that did better than others, with “average” results for all personalities types
(not great at any, and not terrible at any).

Memory Processes (Chapter 6)

Reconstructive Nature of Memory
• Memory is an active reconstructive process. As we recall memories, we relive those experiences
and fill in gaps (as before). Memories are not accurate replays.
• Bartlett created an experiment where a story was read to participants, then they were asked to
recall the story at a later point in time. As time increased, people reported aspects of the story in a
culturally consistent manner. That is, they inserted details into the story without being aware that
they were doing so.
• A schema (pluralized as schemata) is a framework for organizing memory, they are developed
through years of experience and affect they way you reconstruct memories.
o Your mind will fill in gaps in order to make sense or to make it a better story.
• 80,000 court cases a year occur in the United States where eyewitness testimony is the only
evidence against the accused.
• Eyewitness testimony is very convincing (persuasive), however the validity of those memories is
inconsistent as memories are highly suggestible. To ways the accuracy of recalled memories can
be impacted are:
o Leading questions (misleading questions) can affect recall of the event.
▪ Study showed that when people are shown a video of a car crash and then asked
“How fast were the cars going when they __ each other?” their recollection of the
cars’ speed increased if the word smashed was used, followed by collided,
bumped, hit and contacted.
▪ Another study also showed how inconsistent memories can alter peoples
memories. When participants were given a photo with a car and a yield sign to
remember, many misremembered seeing a stop sign if asked if they saw a stop
sign despite being showed a yield sign originally.
• True memories can activate different areas of the brain than false/deceptive memories.
• The hippocampus cannot differentiate between true and false memories but the parahippocampal
gyrus can.
• As far as the person is aware, these are all real memories – they don’t consciously realize that
some memories are false, but the brain knows.

Amnesia
• Amnesia is caused by damage to the hippocampal system (which is composed of the
hippocampus and amygdala) and/or the midline diencephalic region. This damage could be
caused by a head injury, stroke, brain tumor, or a disease.
• There are two types of amnesia:
o Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new memories. It affects long- term memory
but not working memory. Memory for general knowledge remains intact, as is skilled
performance. Anterograde amnesia occurs for a period of time after a particular event.
 Mainly associated with episodic memory: that is memory of experiences as every day is a
“new day”
o Retrograde amnesia is the loss of memory of past events. It is always present with
anterograde amnesia. It doesn’t affect overlearned skills (such as general social skills and
language skills), or skill learning (like a minor tracing task). The retrograde period is a
period before a particular event that you cannot remember. In pure retrograde amnesia,
old memories can come back with time.
• You can find people with damaged episodic memory, but intact semantic memory. The reverse is
also true, but it’s much rarer.
• Participants were given lists of words followed by four memory tasks:
o Free recall (explicit task).
o Recognition (explicit task).
o Word fragment identification (e.g. participants had to identify visually degraded words)
(implicit task).
o Word stem completion (e.g. complete the stem: bo ) (implicit task).
• The control group did better for the explicit tasks, but the results were fairly even for the control
group and the amnesia group for the implicit tasks. Why is this? With explicit tasks, the
participant would have to place themselves in a situation consciously, which is harder for
amnesics because they can’t remember those situations.
• Explicit tasks are tasks that involve directly querying memory, whereas implicit tasks indirectly
assess memory.
• Amnesia causes a deficit with explicit (conscious) memory but not implicit (unconscious)
memory.
• Tulving claimed that long-term memory consists of two distinct but interactive systems:
o Episodic memory is memory for information about one’s personal experiences. These
memories have a date and time. For example: remembering where you were on March
11, 2020 (COVID-19 was declared a pandemic). Instead of pinpoint the exact place and
experience, you use different personal markers (what season it was, were you on break on
still in school etc.) to create a reconstruction of that experience/memory.
▪ Episodic memory commonly occurs in the left temporal lobe
o Semantic memory is general knowledge of language and world knowledge. For example:
shoes go on your feet.
▪ The left inferior prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the left posterior temporal areas are
other areas involved.
• Perception disorders like associative agnosia may overlap with attentional disorders; inability to
remember the meaning of common words or recall basic attributes of objects is a result of damage
in semantic memory.
• The hierarchical semantic network model is a model of semantic memory that argues our
knowledge of the world is store in a hierarchical fashion to minimize redundancy. Semantic
memory is organized as a network of nodes that are connected by pointers/links. This explains
why some memories are easier and faster to recall than others: those which are in the first “level”
of the network are more accessible than those which are in a second or third “level”
o The principle of cognitive economy refers to how properties and facts are stored at the
highest level possible, to recover information you use reference
o The collection of nodes associated with all the words and concepts one knows about is
called a semantic network.
o The typicality effect poses a problem for this model as some concepts may be recalled at
different speeds despite at the same “level” in the network.
• The spreading activation theory disagrees with a hierarchical structure of semantic memories,
instead concepts are represented in a web-like fashion, each identified by a node and
connected/spread across various related concepts. Argues that our experiences govern how
closely certain concepts are related to one another. Evidence of this comes from priming
experiments: when people are shown two items on a trial and asked to decide if the second item
spells a word (known as lexical decision task)
• To learn and remember things most effectively, you should regenerate the information learned
(active recall) and practise this in a distributive matter. Distributive practice likely makes you less
susceptible to interference because you are creating more retrieval cues. The more you can
distribute learn (both in amount of information and length of study sessions), the longer that
information with be easily accessible in memory.
• Levels of processing theory of memory challenges the modal model of memory by arguing that
memory isn’t dependent on different memory stores (such as STM and LTM) bur rather on the
initial encoding of information which later affects the retrieval of that information. The deeper
(more meaningful/semantic) processing improves memory retention more than rehearsal or
repetition.
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