MEMORY

Memory: Definition

● Memory is an active system

1. that receives information from the senses,
2. puts that information into a usable form,
3. organizes it as it stores it away,
4. then retrieves the information from storage
(adapted from Baddeley, 1996, 2003).
Memory: Stages

1. Encoding: The first process in the memory system

is to get sensory information (sight, sound, etc.) into a
form that the brain can use. This is called encoding.
● Encoding is the set of mental operations that people
perform on sensory information to convert that
information into a form that is usable in the brain’s
storage systems. For example, when people hear a
sound, their ears turn the vibrations in the air into
neural messages from the auditory nerve
(transduction), which make it possible for the brain
to interpret that sound.
Memory: Stages

Encoding is not limited to turning sensory

information into signals for the brain.
Encoding is accomplished differently in each of
three different storage systems of memory. In one
system, encoding may involve rehearsing
information over and over to keep it in memory,
whereas in another system, encoding involves
elaborating on the meaning of the information
 In the acquisition stage, information is encoded into memory. It
was felt initially that all experiences are encoded in the brain in the
form of a memory trace – the engram
The first process in the memory system is to get sensory
information (sight, sound, etc.) into a form that the brain can use.
This is called encoding.
Encoding is the set of mental operations that people perform
on sensory information to convert that information into a form
that is usable in the brain’s storage systems.
Memory: Stages

2. Storage: The next step in memory is to hold

on to the information for some period of time
in a process called storage. The period of time
will actually be of different lengths, depending on
the system of memory being used. For example,
in one system of memory, people hold on to
information just long enough to work with it, about
20 seconds or so. In another system of memory,
people hold on to information more or less
permanently
 Memory: Stages
3. Retrieval: Getting the information they know they have out
of storage.

There are two main types of memory retrieval: recall and recognition. In
recall, the information must be retrieved from memories. In recognition, the
presentation of a familiar outside stimulus provides a cue that the
information has been seen before. A cue might be an object or a
scene—any stimulus that reminds a person of something related. Recall
may be assisted when retrieval cues are presented that enable the subject
to quickly access the information in memory.
Patterns of Memory Retrieval

Memory retrieval can occur in several different ways, and there are many things that can affect
it, such as how long it has been since the last time you retrieved the memory, what other
information you have learned in the meantime, and many other variables. For example, the
spacing effect allows a person to remember something they have studied many times spaced
over a longer period of time rather than all at once. The testing effect shows that practicing
retrieval of a concept can increase the chance of remembering it.
There are three main types of recall studied in psychology: serial recall, free recall, and cued recall.

Serial Recall

People tend to recall items or events in the order in which they occurred. This is called serial recall and can
be used to help cue memories. By thinking about a string of events or even words, it is possible to use a
previous memory to cue the next item in the series. Serial recall helps a person to remember the order of
events in his or her life. These memories appear to exist on a continuum on which more recent events are
more easily recalled.

When recalling serial items presented as a list (a common occurrence in memory studies), two effects tend to
surface: the primacy effect and the recency effect. The primacy effect occurs when a participant remembers
words from the beginning of a list better than the words from the middle or end. The theory behind this is that
the participant has had more time to rehearse these words in working memory. The recency effect occurs
when a participant remembers words from the end of a list more easily, possibly since they are still available
in short-term memory.
Free Recall

Free recall occurs when a person must recall many items but can recall them in any order. It is
another commonly studied paradigm in memory research. Like serial recall, free recall is
subject to the primacy and recency effects.

Cued Recall

Cues can facilitate recovery of memories that have been “lost.” In research, a process called
cued recall is used to study these effects. Cued recall occurs when a person is given a list to
remember and is then given cues during the testing phase to aid in the retrieval of memories.
The stronger the link between the cue and the testing word, the better the participant will recall
the words.
What factors determine what information can be retrieved from memory? One critical factor is the type of
hints, or cues, in the environment. The general principle that underlies the effectiveness of retrieval cues is
the encoding specificity principle (Tulving & Thomson, 1973): when people encode information, they do
so in specific ways.
The third form of retrieval is relearning, and it’s just what it sounds like. It
involves learning information that you previously learned. Whitney took
Spanish in high school, but after high school she did not have the opportunity
to speak Spanish. Whitney is now 31, and her company has offered her an
opportunity to work in their Mexico City office. In order to prepare herself, she
enrolls in a Spanish course at the local community center. She’s surprised at
how quickly she’s able to pick up the language after not speaking it for 13
years; this is an example of relearning.
● Memory is often viewed as a kind of store-house of knowledge that is constantly
modified by experience.
● These researchers conceptualize memory as sensory, short term, and long-term
memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1971). Alternatively those who think of memory as a
dynamic process hold that there are various levels of processing information, and
that the deeper the level at which information is processed at the time of encoding,
the better our memory for it. They also believe that there are no separate
short-term and long-term stores (Craik and Lockhart, 1972).
Information Processing Model:
A Comprehensive model of memory that assumes the processing of information for memory storage
is similar to the way a computer processes memory in a series of three stages. The processes of
encoding, storage, and retrieval are seen as part of this model.
It was also information-processing theorists who first proposed that there are three types of memory
systems:
sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968).
 Sensory Memory
● Sensory memory is the memory for all the stimuli impinging upon the organism at
any particular time. It is the memory for all the sensations that an organism has at
any particular time
● Sperling (1960) devised the partial report method to study sensory memory.
● only three kinds of sensory memories have been identified and studied by the
researchers. Neisser (1967) names them iconic memory (related to vision),
echoic (related to audition), and haptic (related to the skin senses).
PSYCHOPEDIA 18
● iconic memory lasts for only about a second,
whereas echoic memory lasts for as long as 4
seconds.
 Characteristic of Sensory Memory

● It is very vivid – clear and detailed. Perhaps it contains information about all the stimuli
impinging on the sense organs.
● It lasts for a very short time. Iconic memory lasts for only about a second whereas
echoic memory lasts about four seconds.
● It is non – associative in nature. It is neither episodic nor semantic.
● Perhaps it processes only ecologically valid stimuli.
● It may be more implicit than explicit in nature.
Eidetic imagery:
the ability to access a visual sensory memory over a long period of
time. People with eidetic imagery ability might be able to look
quickly at a page in a book, then by focusing on a blank wall or piece
of paper, “read” the words from the image that still lingers in their
sensory memory.
Although it might sound like a great ability to have while in college, it
actually provides little advantage when taking tests, because it’s
just like having an open-book test. If a student can’t understand
what’s written on the pages, having the book open is useless.
It is unknown why some people have this ability, but it is more
common in children and tends to diminish by adolescence or
young adulthood (Haber, 1979; Leask et al., 1969; Stromeyer &
Psotka, 1971).
 Short Term Memory

⚫ Short term memory is that part of the memory structure in which

information is stored temporarily.
⚫ short-term memory is temporarily active and conscious. It is relatively
more permanent than sensory memory, but less enduring than long term
memory.
⚫ It is also called the working memory, because it contains information
that is currently in use by the individual, being acted upon, and in
consciousness (Anderson, 1985; Baddeley, 1983).
⚫ Evidence for STM also comes from the serial position effect, the fact that
the first few items in a serial task are recalled the best (primacy effect),
followed by the last few items (recency effect), and the middle items are
recalled the least. The graphical representation of the relationship
between a word’s position and its recall is called the serial position
curve.
Serial Position Curve:
■ Read a list of unrelated words. Recall: as many as possible in any order you wished.
■ Which words would you be most likely to remember?
■ Research findings indicate that you would be more likely to remember words at the
beginning and at the end of the list than words in the middle.
■ Working memory, which was introduced in a paper by Baddeley and Hitch (1974), is
defined as “a limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of
information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning.” The
italicized portion of this definition is what makes working memory different from the old
modal model conception of short-term memory.
■ Short-term memory is concerned mainly with storing information for a brief period of time
(for example, remembering a phone number), whereas working memory is concerned with
the manipulation of information that occurs during complex cognition (for example,
remembering numbers while reading a paragraph).
■ We can understand the idea that working memory is involved with the manipulation of
information by considering a few examples. First, let’s listen in on a conversation Rachel is
having with the pizza shop: Rachel: “I’d like to order a large pizza with broccoli and
mushrooms.” Reply: “I’m sorry, but we’re out of mushrooms. Would you like to substitute
spinach instead? Rachel was able to understand the pizza shop’s reply by holding the first
sentence, “I’m sorry, but we’re out of mushrooms,” in her memory while listening to the
second sentence, and then making the connection between the two. If she had
remembered only “Would you like to substitute spinach instead?” she wouldn’t know
whether it was being substituted for the broccoli or for the mushrooms. In this example,
Rachel’s short-term memory is being used not only for storing information but also for
active processes like understanding conversations.
Working Memory: Manipulating
Information

● Baddeley concluded that working memory must be dynamic and must also
consist of a number of components that can function separately. He
proposed three components: the phonological loop, the visuospatial
sketch pad, and the central executive.
Working Memory: Manipulating Information

● The phonological loop consists of two components: the phonological

store, which has a limited capacity and holds information for only a few
seconds, and the articulatory rehearsal process, which is responsible
for rehearsal that can keep items in the phonological store from decaying.
The phonological loop holds verbal and auditory information. Thus, when
you are trying to remember a telephone number or a person’s name, or to
understand what your cognitive psychology professor is talking about, you
are using your phonological loop.
● The visuospatial sketch pad holds visual and spatial information.
When you form a picture in your mind or do tasks like solving a puzzle or
finding your way around campus, you are using your visuospatial sketch
pad. As you can see from the diagram, the phonological loop and the
visuospatial sketch pad are attached to the central executive.
Working Memory: Manipulating
Information

● The central executive is where the major work of working memory

occurs. The central executive pulls information from long-term memory
and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and visuospatial
sketch pad by focusing on specific parts of a task and deciding how to
divide attention between different tasks. The central executive is therefore
the “traffic cop” of the working memory system.
■ Digit Span: One measure of the capacity of STM is provided by the
digit span—the number of digits a person can remember. You can
determine your digit span by doing the following demonstration.
■ According to measurements of digit span, the average capacity of
STM is about five to nine items—about the length of a phone
number. This idea that the limit of STM is somewhere between five
and nine was suggested by George Miller (1956), who summarized the
evidence for this limit in his paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or
Minus
■ The process of chunking, helps short-term memory to hold a larger
amount of information.
■ Miller (1956) introduced the concept of chunking to describe the fact
that small units (like words) can be combined into larger meaningful
units, like phrases, or even larger units, like sentences, paragraphs,
or stories.
■ Consider, for example, trying to remember the following words:
monkey, child, wildly, zoo, jumped, city, ringtail, young. How many units
are there in this list? There are eight words, but if we group them
differently, they can form the following four pairs: ringtail monkey,
jumped wildly, young child, city zoo. We can take this one step further
by arranging these groups of words into one sentence: The ringtail
monkey jumped wildly for the young child at the city zoo
information is retained in the STM for a very short
while. In fact the material is completely lost in about
20 – 30 seconds. Information may be retained in
STM if the subject uses maintenance rehearsal, i.e.,
repeats the cognitive activity on the information
again and again.

the information in STM can be transferred to the

LTM through elaborative rehearsal that involves a
deeper and more thorough analysis of the
information.
It lasts for only 20-30 seconds.

It has limited storage capacity. It can store / process only 7+2 chunks of
information at any time.

Information can be retained in STM indefinitely through maintenance

rehearsal.

Information is encoded in STM primarily in acoustic codes, though other codes

may also be used.

Retrieval of information from STM is through a serial, exhaustive search

process.

Forgetting in STM in due to both decay and interference.

 Long Term Memory

⚫ Information in long-term memory exists indefinitely. There is no time

limit in long-term memory.
⚫ LTM does not appear to be limited in storage capacity either. It has an
unlimited capacity.
⚫ Information is acquired into LTM through elaborative rehearsal
⚫ A major factor in encoding of information in LTM is activation or
arousal. Generally, greater the arousal level better is the memory.
⚫ Information in LTM is coded in at least three ways: semantic, visual, and
acoustic. Of these, maximum use is made of semantic codes.
⚫ Retrieval of information from the huge warehouse that is LTM is largely
with the help of retrieval cues. Retrieval cues prompt people to
remember by specifying the goal of memory search, and by directing
their generation and evaluation of possible answers.
 Characteristics of LTM

⚫ There is no time limit in long-term memory.

⚫ It has an unlimited capacity.
⚫ Information is acquired into LTM through elaborative rehearsal.
⚫ Information in LTM is coded in at least three ways: semantic, visual, and
acoustic. Of these, maximum use is made of semantic codes.
⚫ The information in LTM is stored in an organized manner.
⚫ The retrieval of information from LTM depends on retrieval cues and has to be
through a parallel, self-terminating search process.
⚫ Forgetting occurs due to interference – proactive as well as retroactive.
Interference increases due to similarity of the two tasks, greater amount of
learning, etc.
 TYPES OF MEMORY

⚫ Tulving (1972) distinguishes between episodic and semantic memory. Episodic

memory refers to knowledge about oneself – what did you have for breakfast,
how many brothers and sisters you are, etc. It can be usually dated as to when
the information was acquired.
⚫ Semantic memory is the general knowledge of the world – who is the president of
United States, the importance of Ganga in the Hindu religion, etc.
⚫ Tulving (1972) says, “Episodic memory receives and stores information about
temporally dated episodes or events, and temporal–spatial relations among these
events…Semantic memory is a mental thesaurus, organized knowledge a person
possesses about words and other verbal symbols, their meaning and referents,
about relations among them, and about rules, formulas, and algorithms for the
manipulation of these symbols, concepts, and relations”.
⚫ Another major distinction is between explicit and implicit memory
(Schacter, 1987). Explicit memory is memory with awareness. The
subject is instructed to remember material for which he is to be tested
later on. Traditional experiments in memory that tested recall,
recognition, etc. were all experiments in explicit learning. Implicit
memory does not involve explicit or conscious recollection of any
previous experience. It is tested by the change on various kinds of
memory tasks due to prior experiences outside the awareness of the
subject or due to something the subject had not been explicitly instructed
to learn for a future test.
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The levels of processing model (Craik & Lockhart, 1972)
focuses on the depth of processing involved in memory, and
predicts the deeper information is processed, the longer a
memory trace will last.
Unlike the multi-store model it is a non-structured approach.
The basic idea is that memory is really just what happens as a
result of processing information.
Memory is just a by-product of the depth of processing of
information, and there is no clear distinction between short
term and long term memory.
Therefore, instead of concentrating on the stores/structures
involved (i.e. short term memory & long term memory), this
theory concentrates on the processes involved in memory.
Shallow Processing
1. Structural processing (appearance) which is when we encode only the
physical qualities of something. E.g. the typeface of a word or how the letters
look.

2. Phonemic processing – which is when we encode its sound.

Shallow processing only involves maintenance rehearsal (repetition to help us

hold something in the STM) and leads to fairly short-term retention of
information.
Deep Processing
3. Semantic processing, which happens when we encode the meaning of a
word and relate it to similar words with similar meaning.

Deep processing involves elaboration rehearsal which involves a more

meaningful analysis (e.g. images, thinking, associations etc.) of information
and leads to better recall.

For example, giving words a meaning or linking them with previous

knowledge.
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