375: Memory Distortions & Semantic Memory

MEMORY: NOT AS GOOD AS YOU THINK IT IS

We know that we forget stuff but of the stuff that we remember we generally think that we are remembering correctly.  Well that is not the case.  But first lets take a step back.  What is the point of memories?  From an evolutionary perspective we basically remember so that our genes can propagate themselves into the next generation so we remember what keeps us alive and what helps us get a mate.  Basically the whole point of memory is to influence our future behavior.  Having a vertical (accurate & truthful) memory is exceptionally useless.  We shouldn't need to remember specific dates but general information seems to be much more evolutionarily helpful.  So what we are really doing is modifying our memories.

MEMORY MODIFICATIONS

A study was done were subjects viewed a car accident and then asked questions about how fast they were going when they contacted each other and how fast they were going when they smashed into each other.  The harsher word choice of "smash" made speed predictions go up significantly and other things, like broken glass, also change.  So something as simple as word choice will alter a person's memory.

THE MISINFORMATION PARADIGM

Depending on your questions you can have people remember things that were actually never there.  For example if you ask someone how fast they were going at a yield sign or stop sign they will then remember a yield sign or stop sign depending on which one you ask.

Bartlett's Experiment
He gives kids ghost stories from different cultures.  Found that kids would add details to show continuity and take away some things they thought were illogical and they changed the terminology to be terms that they know better.  Because of this Bartlett was the first person to start promoting schemas, a sort of script for how things go.  This is was causes us to have false memories.  We remember things differently because it helps these things to fit our memory schemas.

SEMANTIC MEMORIES: REMEMBERING VS IMAGINING

There is not very much difference between the processes for remembering and for imagining.  If you have damage to the hippocampus you are not very good at imagining future events.  You need to be able to draw on past events to generate future events but it is also because this brain regions seems to be involved in imagining the future.

HOW IS SEMANTIC MEMORY ORGANIZED

One way to organize semantic memory is to take everything we know and through it into a large room.  But how efficient is this?  Not very efficient.  So really our memory probably isn't organized in this way since we are able to almost immediately recall information and answers to certain questions.  So this suggests that there is some sort of organization but how is it exactly that we organize this information.  One way to do this could be by using a system like the dewy decimal system and alphabetize things.  But again he is just giving us examples that is not the right answer.

382: Stress Management: Lifestyle

1. Take Home Message...
1. "We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." ~ Aristotle
2. Quadrant I, II, III, IV
1. Quadrant I
1. Urgent and important
1. crises
2. pressing problem
3. deadline-driven projects
2. Quadrant II
1. Not urgent and important
1. Prevention
2. relationship building
3. recreation
4. new opportunities
3. Quadrant III
1. Urgent and not important
1. Interruptions
2. some phone calls
3. some mail
4. some meetings
5. popular activities
4. Quadrant IV
1. Not Urgent and Not Important
1. Trivia
2. Some mail
3. Some phone calls
4. Time wasters
5. Pleasure activities
3. Exercise and Diet
1. Exercise and diet are key elements of our stress management.

304: Interviewing Techniques

1. Gave the example of Eliza the computer therapist
2. Responses to Avoid
1. Judgmental Statements
2. Evaluative statements
1. using terms such as good, bad, terrible, etc.
3. Probing Statements
1. appropriate only wit mental retardation, highly anxious or withdrawn persons, and kids
4. Hostile Responses
5. False Reassurance
3. Ping-pong transitional phrases
1. Verbatim playback
2. Paraphrasing and Restatement
3. Summarizing
4. Clarification response
5. Empathy & understanding
4. Structured vs Unstructured
1. Structured
1. Everyone gets the same questions in the same order
2. Disadvantages
1. requires cooperation
2. Relies exclusively on the respondent making the assumptions questionable
2. Unstructured
5. Sources of Interview Error
1. Largest source of interview error is JUDGING
2. Halo Effect
3. General standoutishness
4. Physical appearance
5. Cross-cultural considerations
1. Increase cultural awareness
2. know yourself
3. Be flexible
4. Look beyond yourself
6. Consider interview data as tentative
6. As a therapist, how much personal experience should you add?

304: Test Administration, Interviewing Techniques

1. Test Administration
1. Halo Effect
1. Ascribing positive attributes independently of the observed behavior
2. Dr. South thinks we are all fantastic (despite some observed behavior)

Interviewing Techniques

1. Interviewing Example
1. Dr. South brought up two students from the class.  He gave them some smarties and instructed them not to talk unless they had the smarties in their hand.  One student interviewed the other and we then discussed the different aspects of this interview.
2. Interview a neighbor assignment.  DON'T FORGET!!
2. The "ping-pong" theory of interviewing
1. The idea of keeping the interaction going and "hitting" responses back and forth
2. How are interviews and tests similar?
3. The reciprocal nature of interviewing
1. Social facilitation: we tend to act like the models around us
1. This is VERY important in interviewing
1. If you project a mood, then the interviewee responds in kind
2. You exhibit the qualities you want in your interview
3. Role of Attitude
1. Is interviewing more attitude or skill?
1. Interpersonal influence: the degree to which one person can influence another
2. Interpersonal attraction: the degree to which people share a feeling of understanding, mutual respect, similarity, etc.

370: Visual Attention

1. Attention (He gave this same lecture in 375. Check it out at http://smartpsych.blogspot.com/2012/02/375attention-pt1.html)
1. Varieties of Attention
1. External: attending to stimuli in the world
2. Internal: attending to one line of thought over another or selecting one response over another
3. Overt: directing a sense organ toward a stimulus, like pointing your eyes or turning your head
4. Covert: attending without giving an outward sign you are doing so
5. Divided: splitting attention between two different stimuli
6. Sustained: continuously monitoring some stimulus
2. Allocation
1. Attention is limited, so it must be allocated.
2. Is attention always allocated the way that you want?
3. Posner's Cuing Paradigm
1. Simple probe detection paradigm
2. Cues can be spatial or symbolic
3. Cues can be valid or invalid
1. Response Times are shorter on valid cue trials
2. Response Times are longer on invalid cue trials
2. Attention as a Spotlight
1. Neural basis of the beam
1. Disengage
1. If you damage the parietal cortex you have difficulty disengaging your attention
1. So what does that mean?
1. If you can't disengage then valid trials (in the posner's cuing test) will work well but invalid trials will make it extremely difficult to disengage your attention from a direction that the invalid cue directed you towards.
2. The beam metaphor works but...
1. Moving attention greater distances doesn't take a longer time
2. Moving attention isn't slowed down by intervening stuff
3. Beam implies attention selects space

370: Perceiving Depth and Size Pt 2

1. 3D Glasses "Why do the green lenses see red but not the green text and vice versa for the red?"

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.

375: Remembering Events Pt 3

1. Capacity & Forgetting Rates
1. Sensory memory
1. Relatively large capacity 
2. Immediate decay
2. STM
1. 7 or so chunkcs
2. ~30 seconds or longer
3. LTM
1. Infinite?
2. Lifetime?
2. Geneology
1. Ebbinghaus (1885)
1. He was an introspectionist
1. Served as his own subject
2. Had someone come up with a list of nonsense, one syllable words.
3. He would study them then test himself at different time intervals (immediately, a few hours later, a few days later, etc.)
1. He found that his memory would have a very rapid decay rate but then would bottom out
1. The difference between one week and four weeks was very negligible
2. This became known as the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
4. Following this curved seemed to suggest that forgetting is really just decay
1. This raised a problem...
1. McGoech (1932): Time itself doesn't cause anything, it is the processes occurring in that time that make things happen.
2. So what is the process that is going on during this decay period
3. Decay
1. What process is causing decay?
1. Thinking
1. We are constantly thinking about other things and this overlap can cause some interference 
2. Sleep
1. Sometimes we sleep which would create a time gap for decay
3. If it is just decay then have the same time lapse between a person being awake and a person being asleep then people would have the same rate of decay in either situation
1. What they actually found is that people remember better when they sleep as opposed to when they are awake with normal daily activities.
2. Sleep seems to help with consolidation
4. Consolidation
1. Takes memories from a malleable state and makes it fairly impervious (LTM)
2. Systems Consolidation
1. Going from hippocampal dependent to hippocampal independent
3. Ribot's Law
1. Found that the older a memory is the more impervious it is to forgetting from brain damage
2. a.k.a. "last in, first out" or "first in, last out" principle
5. Why do we forget?
1. Decay
2. Occlusion
1. Example: remembering your old phone number now that you have a new one can be very difficult
1. Tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
1. This is where you feel like you remember but it's just on the tip-of-your-tongue.  This could be what is happening but most of the time it is not
3. Unlearning
1. Not a very big difference between this and occlusion
2. Works for recall, not for recognition
4. Interference
1. This accounts for most forgetting
2. AB-AC design
1. This is where you have two lists of word pairs and the second pairs have one of the same words from the first pairs but paired with a novel word.  Usually the second list will cause interference on the recall of the first list
2. This type of interference is quite bad when it comes to two word lists but if you have one word list and the next the pairing is with a picture then memory interference is much less.
3. Muller & Pilzecker (1900)
4. The best time to study is right before you sleep or before you drink alcohol
5. Why does timing matter?
1. If you have time to consolidate information then it is much less susceptible to interference.  Specifically it protects from retroactive interference
6. Retroactive Interference
1. The new things that you learn interfere with the old things that you learned
7. Proactive Interference
1. The old things that you learned can interfere with consolidation of new information
5. We Never Forget
1. Another theory is that nothing is lost from LTM but this is not a falsifiable theory so it is not a very good theory
6. Summary
1. LTM is not infinite
2. Forgetting happens along a curve