Cognitive Psychology: Memory Systems Notes PDF

# Cognitive Psychology Lecture Four - Memory Systems ## Content - Memory systems - What are the basic distinctions? - Short-term memory vs. long-term memory - 'Flashbulb memory' ## Memory is essential Imagine having no memory for: - What just happened a few moments ago - Any of your pa...

# Cognitive Psychology Lecture Four - Memory Systems ## Content - Memory systems - What are the basic distinctions? - Short-term memory vs. long-term memory - 'Flashbulb memory' ## Memory is essential Imagine having no memory for: - What just happened a few moments ago - Any of your past experiences - Anything about yourself, or the world Memory is essential for understanding ourselves and the world around us. "Life without memory is no life at all. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing." - Luis Buñuel The case of the amnesic patient Clive Wearing (e.g., Wilson and Wearing, 1995) ## Three separable processes - **Encoding** - entering information into the system - **Storage** - retaining memories over time - **Retrieval** - finding and recovering stored memories ## Basic distinctions in memory Sensory Input → Sensory Memory → Short-Term Memory → Long-Term Memory ### Sensory memory - Visual - iconic - Speech-based - echoic ### Experiment - **Fixation** - Display letters (1/20 second) plus tone - Pitch signals to report - high, medium, low - **Report** - If asked to recall all letters, performance was poor - around 4 items - When presented with a tone, participants' recall was excellent - If the tone was a second after the presentation of the letters, then performance was poor again - This tells us that rapid decay happens in the sensory store, especially in the iconic store. ## Short-term memory duration - Peterson and Peterson (1959), Brown (1959) - Study XRQ → Count backwards by 3 from 49 → Recall XRQ - Recall probability decreased as recall interval (seconds) increased - But this is possibly due to confusion between lists, e.g., Keppel and Underwood, 1962 ## Modal/stage model Sensory Input → Sensory Memory → Short-Term Memory ←→ Long-Term Memory - Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) - But learning depends on how material is processed, rather than time in short-term storage (Craik and Lockhart, 1972). - No. of patients have severe short-term memory deficits without clear long-term deficits. - Simple storage in unitary store does not tell the whole story. ## Levels of Processing - Craik and Tulving - Shallow grapheme task ~43% recognised - Intermediate phoneme task ~63% recognised - Deep semantic task ~90% recognised - Uppercase or lowercase? - Does it rhyme? - Does it fit in a sentence? ## Working Memory - Baddeley and Hitch, (1974); Baddeley, (2012) - Working memory = short-term memory plus processing - Important for huge range of abilities, e.g., educational attainment (Gathercole et al. (2008)) ## Fluid systems - Central executive - Visuo-spatial sketchpad - Episodic buffer - Phonological loop ## Crystallized systems - Episodic long-term memory - Visual semantics - Language ## Basic distinction in memory - Long-term memory has an extremely large capacity - no known limits in capacity or duration - Standing's 1970's work - Patients can even store details of 1000s of items (Brady et al., 1008) ## Memory as a unitary system? - Melton (1963) - "The duplexity theory of memory storage must, it seems to me, yield to the evidence favouring a continuum of short-term memory and long-term memory" **Strength of representation** → - Short-term memory - long-term memory - Short-term memory and long-term memory have the same characteristics and principles - So, what evidence exists to support the short-term memory - long-term memory distinction? ## Primacy and recency ### Primary and recency in immediate and delayed recall (Postman and Phillips, 1965) - Delay often doesn't eliminate the recency effect - Recency is observed in long-term memory too (Baddeley and Hitch, 1977; Pinto and Baddeley, 1991) - How might we explain the recency effect then? - Temporal discrimination (Crowder, 1976) ## Evidence from neuropsychology ### Neuropsychological double-dissociations - **Patient Group A** - Task 1 (STM) - Impaired - Task 2 (LTM) - Normal - **Patient Group B** - Task 1 (STM) - Normal - Task 2 (LTM) - Impaired - Can infer partial independence of cognitive function underlying two cognitive tasks - Helps to rule out task difficulty as an explanation ## Amnesia - **Patient HM (Scoville and Milner, 1957; Milner 1966)** - Bilateral damage to hippocampus and MTL - Severe anterograde amnesia - Limited, temporarily graded retrograde amnesia - Spared digit span, Peterson performance, recency in free recall - Would be in Group B (STM - normal, LTM - impaired) - **Jon (hippocampal amnesic)** - 'Item-location binding in working memory - is it hippocampus-dependent?' ## Short term memory patients - 'The selective impairment of auditory verbal short-term memory' - Patient KF and others showed opposite pattern of memory problems, completing double dissociation between short-term memory and long-term memory - Impairments in - Peterson task (STM) - Other short-term memory tasks - Recency in free recall - Spared ability for - Long-term memory tasks - Considerable evidence suggests short-term memory - long-term memory dissociation (though controversy remains) ## Long-term memory ### Explicit (declarative) - Endel Tulving (1972) - **Episodic (biographical events)** - E.g., remembering that the word 'elephant' was presented in a studied list of words - E.g., remembering getting your A-level results - **Semantic (words, ideas, concepts)** - E.g., knowing that elephants live in Africa - E.g., knowing your a-level results ### Implicit (non-declarative) - **Procedural (skills)** - E.g., learning to play the piano - Emotional conditioning - Priming effect - Conditioned reflex ## Flashbulb memory - 'Snapshot' memory of hearing about emotional and often public events - a 'live... almost perceptual quality' (Brown and Kulik, 1977) - Muzzulini et al. (2020) vivid and high confidence - Consider - Importance and distinctiveness of event - Consequentiality and surprise - Proximity and personal involvement - Finkenauer et al. (1998) studied the death of the King of Belgium - Proposed emotional-integrative model - surprise, emotionality, and personal importance of event determine efficient encoding and later rehearsal - Produces detailed and durable representations - **Novelty → surprise → flashbulb memory** - Novelty → surprise → emotional feeling state → overt rehearsal → memory for the original event → flashbulb memory - Affective attitude → importance/consequentiality → emotional feeling state → overt rehearsal → memory for the original event → flashbulb memory - Affective attitude → emotional feeling state → over rehearsal → memory for the original event → flashbulb memory - Affective attitude → overt rehearsal → memory for the original event → flashbulb memory - Perhaps flashbulb memories aren't that 'special' - Prone to information loss and error like any other memory (Schmolk et al., 2000; Wright et al., 1998) ## Hirst et al. 2015 - A ten-year follow-up of a study of memory for the attack of September 11, 2001: Flashbulb memories and memories for flashbulb events - Surveys at 1 week, then 11, 25, and 119 months later - Rapid forgetting only in the 1st year - Inconsistent memories often repeated in alter surveys, unless corrected by media - Hirst and Phelps (2016) and Gandolphe and El Haj (2017) - not a special memory, system event characteristics and rehearsal play a role - Pezdek (2003) and Ost et al. (2002) - recall of non-existent events as flashbulb memories ## Memory is - A broad term - Likely a collection of separate but interacting systems - Crucial for understanding who we are and how to interact with the world.