Everyday Memory Chapter 8

Everyday Memory (Chapter 8)

• Autobiographical memory is a memory system for personal events and experiences, influenced by personal beliefs and emotions. It allows remembering past experiences like first day of school.

• Transition points are significant life changes marking shifts in memories, dividing life stages. Examples include childhood to adolescence or adolescence to adulthood.

• Childhood to Adolescence: This transition is marked by high school, independence, and new social relationships.

• Adolescence to Adulthood: This transition often includes college graduation, career starts, and marriage.

• Early Adulthood to Midlife: marked by having children, experiencing career changes, facing health challenges.

• Reminiscence Bump: A phenomenon where people remember events from adolescence and young adulthood (15-25) better than other periods—although not as distant as childhood or old age.

• Self-image theory proposes that events during the adolescence and young adulthood are better remembered because the person is actively forming their self-identity, establishing their beliefs and aspirations. These memories are crucial to personal narrative.

• Cognitive theory suggests that memory processing is better during the adolescence and young adulthood—the brain has full capacity and improves during this period.

Cultural Life Script Theory

• Suggests that memories are shaped by expected cultural life events and milestones, like graduating high school, getting married, or having children. Memories are culturally influenced.

Role of emotion in memory

• Emotional events are more memorable than neutral events, due to the hormonal response.
• Emotions enhance memory encoding, storage, and retrieval.

Flashbulb memories

• Vivid, detailed memories of significant, emotionally charged events (e.g. 9/11).
• Often feel like "snapshots in time" but not always accurate.
• The emotional state during encoding can influence memory.

Mood-congruent memory

• Recall of information congruent with one's current mood.
• Current mood activates emotional networks associated with memories.

Constructive nature of memory

• Memories are actively constructed and reconstructed each time they are recalled—rather than simply passively recording past events.

Source monitoring

• Determining the origin of memories (real or imagined).

Cryptomnesia

• Unconscious plagiarism of someone else's work, believing it as original. Happens in creative fields (music, writing, art).

Schemas and scripts

• Mental frameworks for organizing and interpreting information about the world.
• Schemas represent concepts, events, and objects.
• Scripts represent typical sequences of events in given situations.

Retroactive interference

• New information interfering with recall of earlier learned information.

Misleading post-event information

• Information presented after an event can change or distort memory of that event—related to false memories.

Categorization

• Definitional approach: Grouping based on criteria—like a "bird" having wings and feathers.
• Prototype approach: Idealized "best example"—for "bird", size, feathers, wings etc.
  • Comparisons are made vs. the prototype when trying to categorize.
• Exemplar approach: New items are compared to stored examples—more variations are considered

Make Sense of the world

• Categories summarize large volumes of information Category organization can allow predictions of actions and properties. Categories allow effective communication.

Hierarchy of categorization

• Categories organized in a nested structure, with broader categories encompassing narrower ones (example: super-ordinate, basic and subordinate).
• Super-ordinate: "furniture"
• Basic level: "chair"
• Subordinate level: "armchair"

Role of experience in categorization

• Prototypes are modified by experiences
• More exemplars create a richer library for comparison & fine-tuning.

Semantic networks

• Represents knowledge in a network of related concepts. Nodes are concepts (e.g., words or ideas). Connections between nodes show relationships. Cognitive economy: our brains use quick processes like categories and schemas.
• Visual and auditory retrieval of information when combining and using the concepts.
• Activation of related concepts by one concept—also causing retrieval related concepts, leading to activation chain.

Classical vs. Behaviorist vs. Cognitive view of language

• Classical view: Meaning and grammar rules combined
• Behaviorist view: Language learned by reinforcement and imitation
• Cognitive view: Understanding of the mind—interaction of mental representations and cognitive processes

Generative aspect of language

• Ability to form infinite number of new sentences with finite set of words.

Dynamic aspect of language

• Levels of analysis (phoneme, morpheme, words, phrases, sentences, discourse) demonstrate how sounds, meanings, and syntax affect language.
• How we perceive and produce language in different ways.

Perception before production

• Comprehending and understanding language before producing it.

Wug study

• Tests grammatical rules, using made-up words, to show children can apply rules even to unfamiliar words
• Evidence of implicit knowledge of language rules

Bilingualism

• Single system hypothesis: Bilinguals have one combined language system.
• Dual system hypothesis: Bilinguals use two separate systems for different languages.

Pidgins and Creoles

• Pidgins: Simplified language to aid communication between non-native speakers.
• Creoles: Elaborated, native language develops from pidgins

Language Impairment Aphasia

• Wernicke's aphasia: Comprehension difficulty, fluent but meaningless speech.
• Broca's aphasia: Production difficulty, stilted/grammatically incorrect sentences, but comprehension is relatively intact.
• Language impairments can result from damage—Brain regions responsible for language processing are critical for language use.
• Specific areas on Left hemisphere are critical

Hemispheric specialization

• Left hemisphere of brain dominates language processing for most people.

Brain lesions

• Damage to various language areas can impair comprehension, production, or other language aspects.