Long Term Memory

(LTM)
Long-Term Memory
● What are some of the “types” of information we try to remember
long-term?
● Declarative vs. Nondeclarative
● Declarative memory: memories you are consciously aware of and
voluntary recall
● Nondeclarative: actions/behavior you can perform without
awareness
○ Procedural memory: motor/muscle memory
■ Riding a bike, you don’t actively remember how to do it
every time
Long-Term Memory
● Declarative memory takes two forms
● Episodic memory: personal memories, related to you
○ Remembering your past
○ Future thinking is also an episodic “memory”
● Semantic memory: memory of facts
Long-Term Memory
● Example: Riding a bike
○ Semantic memory is knowing what a bike is
○ Episodic memory is remembering when you learned how
to ride a bike
○ Procedural memory is your body remember how to ride
the bike
Storing Smart
● If I wanted you to remember a word, what would be the best way to
do it?
○ For example, remember the word COFFEE
● You may think that repeating it to yourself again and again will do
the trick
○ Maintenance rehearsal
● HOW you rehearse is going to impact how easily you can remember
it
Examples of LOP
● Levels of processing
● Context and State Dependent Learning
○ Context: retrieve best where you encoded the
information
○ State: retrieve best in the same psychological state as
when you encoded the information
● Flashbulb memory: extremely detailed memory about an
event
○ Any examples?
Forget Me Not
● Storage strength: effort put into rehearsing and encoding
● Retrieval strength: effort put into recalling information
● We can fight forgetting by using mnemonic devices
○ Strategies intended to improve memory of specific
information
● Make an acronym, dual coding
● Method of loci: connecting words to locations along a familiar
path or routine
Retrieval
● Focus of the rest of the unit
● How to measure memory retrieval?
Retrieval Types
● Intentional vs. Unintentional
● Intentional is also called explicit-memory tasks
○ Free recall
○ Cued recall
○ Recognition
● Unintentional memory?
○ Procedural memory
● Prospective memory: future intentions
Recall
● Most typical is a free recall test (no cue)
○ What is the capital of Illinois?
○ Short answer questions
● Cued-recall tests have a clue in them
○ What is the capital of California? It starts with an “S”
Recognition
● Not being asked to generate information
● Verifying whether you have experienced something before
○ Recognizing someone’s face
○ Multiple-choice questions on a test
● Tested in experiments with yes/no tasks
● Sometimes asked about how confident they are about the
memory
Prospective Memory
● Remembering to do a task in the future
○ Picking up something on your way home
○ Remembering to turn in assignments when they are due
● Not nearly as well understood as other forms of memory
● Intentional memory, and sometimes cued
○ For example, you might see characters celebrating a
birthday on TV and then remember to call a friend on
their birthday
○ Or you might be cued by time
● Difficult to research naturally in a lab environment
Ebbinghaus
(1885)
Why We Forget
● Brainstorm ideas
● Could it be a good thing?
● First theories thought memories decayed with time
● More popular is the role of interference
● Capital of Brazil is Brasilia
○ But later you learn Sao Paulo is the largest city in Brazil
● Doesn’t have to be competitive information, you have
enough going on everyday to get interference
Why We Forget
● Consolidation: process where memories are strengthened
and stored more permanently in the brain
● Starts in the hippocampus, but moves to cortex
○ Takes a long time (weeks or months)
● Synaptic consolidation happens more quickly; we can help it
● Sleep is very important to consolidation
● Best way to remember something? Sleep after you learn it
Spaced Practice
● Who crams for exams?
● Effective for short-term learning
● Total amount of time is equivalent
○ 5 hours in one night vs. 5 hours spread over a week
● Retrieval cues: hooks for your memories
○ Times, moods, situations
Testing Effect
● When you study/cram, how do you do it?
● Read notes or book, flashcards, practice quizzes
● Testing Effect: studying by using a test helps with
retrieval in the future
Space + Test
● The best study strategy is to test yourself over a long
period of time
● That doesn’t mean take a long test every night before a
test
● Interweaving the information is very helpful
Exam 1

● Online on Blackboard
● All short answer questions, one from each week
● Start the test any day you want, it is timed for 60
minutes