Memory and Attention

• Memory empowers the nervous system to gain and retain skills/knowledge for future use.

Acquiring Memories

• Occurs through encoding, storage, and retrieval.

Attention's Role in Encoding

• Attention requires focusing mental resources on information.
• Further processing for perception, memory, and response relies on attention.
• Multitasking is difficult/inefficient since attention is limited.

Types of Attention

• Visual attention allows simple searches for stimuli differing by one primary factor, occurring rapidly.
• Searching for objects with two+ properties happens slowly and serially.
• Auditory attention facilitates selective listening.

Selective Attention

• Filter theory allows important information through, preventing irrelevant information from getting through.
• More attention is paid to personally relevant details.
• Change blindness means visual changes in an environment go unnoticed.
• Laptops can negatively affect academic performance in the classroom.

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Three-Part Model

• Includes sensory storage, short-term storage, and long-term storage,

Sensory Storage

• Maintains information briefly through sensory stores for vision, audition, smell, taste, and touch.
• Sensory storage typically lasts only a few seconds.
• Extensive, yet brief information allows experiencing the world as continuous.

Working Memory in Short-Term Storage

• Short-term storage holds working memory.
• Working memory manipulates various information types to keep them available.
• Limited capacity of five to nine items, short duration.
• Chunking can improve short-term storage

Long-Term Storage

• Long-term storage maintains memories relatively permanently.
• Long-term storage has unlimited capacity.
• The levels of processing model says that deeper processing during encoding improves memorization.
• Elaborative rehearsal encodes information meaningfully and effectively, using deeper processing.
• Maintenance rehearsal repeats information over and over.
• Serial position studies differentiate short-term and long-term memory.
• The primacy effect means items at the beginning of a list are better remembered.
• The recency effect means items at the end of a list are better remembered.

Organization of Long-Term Storage

• Schemas are cognitive maps/structures that help organize information in the memory.
  • Culture affects schemas, making them prone to distortion and biased encoding.
• Association networks have nodes as basic units.
• Information arranges into categories for easier retrieval.
• The spreading of activation: memory nodes have multiple associations.
  • Activating a node may lead to activation of other networks

Amnesia

• Amnesia is a deficit in long-term memory.
• Henry Molaison (H.M.)
• Amnesia results from disease, brain injury, or psychological trauma.
• Retrograde amnesia is the loss of past memories.
• Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new memories.

Explicit vs. Implicit Memories

• Explicit/declarative memories are memories that can be verbalized.
  • The system underlies conscious memories.
  • Divided into episodic (personally relevant events) and semantic (general information) memories.
• Anterograde amnesia impacts ability to store new explicit memories.
• Implicit memory underlies unconscious memory.
  • Procedural memory stores memory for motor skills and behavior.
  • Classical conditioning involves associations made without deliberate effort.

Prospective Memory

• Prospective memory involves remembering to do something.
• It is related to future action, with both unconscious and conscious processes.

Brain Regions & Memory Processing

• Memory is stored in the hippocampus, cerebellum, amygdala, temporal lobes, and prefrontal cortex.
• Consolidation transfers memories into long-term storage.
  • Leads to formation and reinforcement of neural networks.
  • Sleep aids consolidation.
• Reconsolidation alters memories during retrieval.

Retrieval Cues

• Retrieval cues help access memories and recall information from long-term memory.
• Context of an event encodes with the memory, creating familiarity to aid retrieval.
• State-dependent memory occurs when internal states are the same during encoding and retrieval.
• Mnemonics are learning strategies to improve recall through retrieval cues.

Forgetting

• Forgetting is the inability to access memory from long-term storage.
• Three main ways we forget:
  • Interference: old information prevents remembering new information, and vice versa.
  • Blocking is a temporary inability to remember information
  • Absentmindedness is a failure to encode information effectively due to inattention or shallow encoding.

Persistence of Unwanted Memories

• Persistence is the unwanted remembering of traumatic memories.
• PTSD is a prominent example of unwanted memories.

Memory Distortion

• Distortion means memory is not a perfectly accurate representation of the past, but is flawed.
• Memory bias makes memories consistent with current beliefs/attitudes.
• Flashbulb memories are vivid but can be inaccurate memories of significant events.
• Misattribution misremembers the time, place, person, or circumstances of a memory
  • Cryptomnesia involves thinking an idea is new but retrieving a stored idea without source awareness.
• Suggestibility creates biased memories with misleading information, creating problems for eyewitness accounts and testimony.
• False memories occur because researchers can mislead into recalling events that didn't happen.