375: Remembering Events Pt 2

1. Which factors determine what gets into long term memory?
1. Thinking about meaning (depth)
1. This helps
2. Effort/desire to learn
1. This could help but not so much
3. Emotion
1. A way to test to see if memory helps people memory one way is to ask people if they remember emotional inducing objects (like a gun) in a scene
2. However, emotional scenes also tend to be a confound
1. For example, when a person holds a gun to your face it's been shown that people can remember the gun very well but cannot remember the face behind the gun.
3. Flashbulb Memory
1. This happens during high emotion. Memory is complete, accurate, and immune to forgetting (or is it?)
2. Flashbulb memory has a higher confidence rating but the memory decays at the same rate as a normal memory. However, this does not mean that emotion is meaningless. It does help with memory and it does matter.
4. Amygdala
1. The amygdala and the hippocampus are very close and connected. This is so you remember to be afraid of a tiger later in life.
4. Repetition
1. Mere repetition is not enough to get things encoded into memory. You have to do something else with it. It is not rehearsal, per se, that helps people remember.
5. Congruence
2. Theory
1. Definition of levels of circularity
1. This is a problem of the theory

LTM Pt3

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE AND MEMORY

Prior knowledge helps us remember details and makes things stand out. In class we were given the example of doing the laundry but at first we were only given a description of what a person does and it did not explicitly say that it was laundry. So when we only received the description it is difficult to know what is going on and remember the process but as soon as we knew that it was laundry we are able to remember the whole process easily.

ENCODING

Schemas affect our memories. For example, people were asked where they heard about the O.J. Simpson trial and people gave various responses such as a friend or TV or at work, etc. After a period of time had passed people all thought that they had heard it on TV because that was the common way to get info. This is a type of retrieval effect.

RETRIEVAL

Typically we use four ways to assess memory. Free Recall is where we you retrieve information on your own. Cued recall is where you are given a hint and then asked to recall (word pairs for example). Recognition is like a multiple choice test. Savings and relearning is when we talk about it again and you recode the information you will be faster at recoding the information indicating that you have at least partly remembered the information from before (you are faster at relearning information). These four ways are ordered in terms of difficulty. Free recall is the most difficult way to remember and savings and relearning is the easiest way to remember.

How much random information can I give you and expect you to remember? In a test of recognizing literally thousands of pictures they found that memory 3 months later is still significantly better than chance. It is important to remember that this type of memory is dependent on the strength of distractors.