In class questions:
1. Why might you be able to score better on a multiple choice than an essay test?
2. What does confabulation reveal about the way we recall information?
3. How does recall for children with eidetic memory differ from recall used by most adults?
4. Why do professional football teams often play loud noises during practices to prepare for games in noisy stadiums?
5. Is relearning a measure of declarative or procedural memory? Why?
6. Do long-term memories ever decay? Support your answer.
7. Why might someone block a memory subconsciously?
8. What are some possible explanations of infant amnesia?
9. How does elaborative rehearsal differ from maintenance rehearsal?
10. Why should you avoid studying subjects such as history and political science together?
11. If you memorized your shopping list by memorizing the first letter of each item, what technique would you be using?
Introduction
The brain has tremendous capacity for storing and retrieving information.
Stored information is useless unless it can be retrieved from memory.
Once you have forgotten to send a card for your mother’s birthday, for example, it is not very consoling to prove that you have the date filed away in your brain.
We have all experienced the acute embarrassment of being unable to remember a close friend’s name.
There are few things in life more frustrating than having a word “on the tip of your tongue” and not being able to remember it.
The problem of memory is to store many thousands of items in such a way that
you can find the one you need when you need it.
The solution to retrieval is organization.
Because human memory is extraordinarily efficient, it must be extremely well organized.
Psychologists do not yet know how it is organized, but they are studying the processes of retrieval for clues.
Recognition
Human memory is organized in such a way as to make recognition quite easy–people can say with great accuracy whether something is familiar to them.
The process of recognition provides insight into how information is stored
in memory.
Recall
More remarkable than the ability to recognize information is the ability to recall it.
Recall is the active reconstruction of information.
Recall involves more than searching for and finding pieces of information, however.
Our recall seems to result from reconstructive memory.
Our memories may be simplified, enriched, or distorted, depending on our experiences and attitudes.
One type of mistake is called confabulation, which is when a person “remembers” information that was never stored in memory. If our reconstruction of an event is incomplete, we fill in the gaps by making up what is missing. Sometimes we may be wrong.
Occasionally our memories are reconstructed in terms of our schemas.
These are conceptual frameworks we use to make sense of the world.
They are sets of expectations about something that is based on our past experiences.
About 5 percent of all children do not seem to reconstruct memories actively.
They have an eidetic memory–a form of “photographic memory”–an ability shared by few adults.
Children with eidetic memory can recall very specific details from a picture, a page, or a scene briefly viewed.
State-dependent learning occurs when you recall information easily when you are in the same physiological or emotional state or setting as you were when you originally encoded the information
Interference refers to a memory being blocked or erased by previous or subsequent memories.
elaborate rehearsal the linking of new information to material that is already known
mnemonic devices techniques for using associations to memorize and retrieve information