Memory Encoding

Cognitive Psychology Class 7

NBC Anchor Brian Williams

NBC Nightly News anchor Brian

Williams was criticized last year for a
dramatic first-person story he’d told
and retold since 2003 of being in a
helicopter hit by a rocket-
propelled grenade in Iraq. After
questions were raised about the
truthfulness of his account and how it
had changed over time, Williams
apologized.
Hurricane Katrina: Witnessing a
suicide at the Superdome, watching a
body float past the Ritz-Carlton,
Armed gangs at the Ritz-Carlton.

Three separate individuals told

reporters no gangs infiltrated the Ritz-
Carlton.

There is no evidence these things

happened.
Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford
each were 100% certain of what happened 40
years ago when they were in high school.

Were they both right?

 Memory

‣ What is memory?
‣ How are memories acquired
‣ How (and where) are memories stored?
‣ How are memories retrieved (next week)
‣ Can you trust your memory (next week)
“We sometimes fail to realize that memory is not designed
to remember specific facts and details. There is very
little adaptive significance for that behaviour. Memory is
designed to generalize, to categorize, and to predict. The goal
of memory is to subserve other functions and behaviours, like
the creation of behavioural equivalence classes and the
creation of inductive inferences. We need our memories to
be flexible and to stretch the truth: that's learning.”

-Minda, 2015
Schacter’s (1999) Seven Sins of Memory
 Basic Operations

‣ Encoding
‣ Storage
‣ Retrieval
Basic Operations of Memory

‣ Encoding
- Putting things in your memory
- The research focus is on attentional
and/or processing limits
Basic Operations of Memory

‣ Storage
- knowledge representation (spreading
activation)
- memory for procedures, facts, etc.
Basic Operations of Memory

‣ Retrieval
- Remembering things
- Recalling things
- Using information that was stored
 Kinds of Memory

‣ Memory is not a single process

- There are different ways to divide and
analyze memory.
- What are these divisions?
 Memory Types

Divisions of: Content, Encoding,

Retrieval, Effort, Duration
14
 CONTENT

‣ Declarative Memory (Endel Tulving)

- Semantic-- Facts
- Episodic -- Events
‣ Non Declarative Memory
- Procedural Memory & Motor memory
 Encoding

‣ Intentional
- Studying, trying
- Learning a list of words
‣ Incidental
- Learning by association/exposure
- Learning grammar rules, songs, etc.
 Encoding

‣ Requires attention.
- Cocktail party effect
‣ Without the focused attention?
- Try to draw you car’s dash or desktop
icons
- Number of points of the maple leaf
 Retrieval

‣ Explicit
- Trying to recall the information
‣ Implicit
- Information influences performance
without awareness
 Duration

‣ Sensory (less than a second)

‣ Short term/Working memory
- Short
- 7± 2 Chunks
‣ Long Term Memory
- No Limit
- Declarative memory
 A Basic Model of Memory

‣ The Modal Model of Memory

- Atkinson and Shiffrin
- Characteristics and design
‣ Acquisition of memories - Ecoding
The Modal Model

Primary Memory (PM) /

Short term Memory
(STM). Limited Capacity.
Information decays because
it is written over by new
information. Secondary Memory (SM) /
Long Term Memory
(LTM). Large store.
(Unlimited). Information
can enter from PM by
rehearsing it.
 Serial Position Effect

‣ Basic finding that shows short and long-

term memory
‣ Free recall
- subject is given list of 20 (or more)
words to memorize
- then recalls as many as they can
Primacy effect
Recency effect
 Two Memory Stores

‣ Serial Position Effect

- Primacy represents items transferred
into LTM
- Recency represents items still in STM
The Modal Model
 Short Term memory

‣ Short Term/Working Memory

- How short is it?
- How is information stored?
- coding
- rehearsal
- How is information transferred?
 Trace Decay

‣ Brown-Peterson Paradigm (Brown, 1958;

Peterson & Peterson, 1959; Murdock, 1961)

HLM 492 Recall Letters

Count Backwards by
3’s
 How is information
represented?
‣ Auditory
- Storing the auditory or acoustical
information
‣ Visual
- Storing visual information
 Chunking

‣ George Miller, 7+/-2

- STM is able to store between 5-9
chunks.
- Chunks are single digits, numbers, letter
words, names, etc.
 Chunking

‣ Remember this string:

- 149162536496481100121
- Not great..
 Chunking

‣ Remember this string:

- 149162536496481100121
‣ Better:
- 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, 49, 64, 81, 100, 121
 Chunking

‣ Best
- 12 22 32 ...
- Participants can represent the whole
series of 21 numbers as a single rule,
and one chunk.
 working memory

‣ Alan Baddeley
- Several brain and cognitive systems
- Temporary storage for information
‣ Modality specific
- visual working memory
- working memory
Working Memory
‣ Working memory
holds information
from perception.
‣ Information
retrieved from
permanent memory
‣ Central executive
co-ordinates the
systems
Working Memory
‣ Phonological store
- holds acoustic or speech
information for about 2
seconds
‣ Acoustical control
process.
- inner speech
- May be crucial for
acquiring language
Working Memory

Word Length effect

pen, day, hot, cow, tub vs
university, tuberculosis,
opportunity, hippopotamus,
refrigerator
memory performance declined
systematically with word length.
Working Memory

The phonological
similarity effect.
Immediate serial recall is
impaired when items are
similar in sound
Working Memory

Irrelevant sounds.
Immediate recall is
impaired by the concurrent
or subsequent
presentation of irrelevant
spoken material
Working Memory

A visual imagery system

spatial information system

Evidence from
neuropsychology
Working Memory

Allocates attention
to subsystems
Uses the output
from subsystems
Mediated by PFC
Cognitive control
Inhibition
 Encoding Expectations
‣ Expectations can affect retrieval
- Example – studying for an exam.
‣ Do you study differently for a multiple
choice exam than you do for an essay
exam?
Encoding Expectations
‣ What if you prepared to write a few
large essays and suddenly got a
multiple choice exam?
- Tversky (1973), students do best
when get take the exam they
expected.
 Encoding Expectations
‣ You will recall things better in the same
state or environment in which you
originally learned them.
 State-Dependent
Learning
‣ Mood
- Bower (1981) induced a happy mood in
half of the participants and an unhappy
mood in the other half.
‣ Background Music
- Smith (1979) People perform better
when the same music is playing during
the test as during the encoding.
 Rehearsal

‣ Keeping information in working memory

- in the modal model: transferring to
longer term memory
‣ Two basic kinds
- Maintenance rehearsal
- Elaborative rehearsal
 Elaborative Rehearsal
‣ Thinking about what the to-be-remembered items
mean.
- How they are related to each other
- How they are related to other things in their
surroundings
- How they are related to what you already know

‣ Requires more effort than simple maintenance

rehearsal.
- Better recall
https://goo.gl/forms/q094Gsk5ya8BIZwg2

https://goo.gl/forms/FXSb9uJfXqFrDcRT2

https://goo.gl/forms/zUWFrQNml3eTkRFw2
Levels of Processing (LOP)

‣ Craik and Lockhart (1972)

- Incoming stimuli are subjected to a

series of processes.
- Shallow, sensory level processes.
- Deeper, semantic processes.
- Deeper processing = better recall
 Summary

‣ Maintenance rehearsal doesn't seem to

help you put things in Long Term Memory.
‣ Number of exposures doesn't seem to
help
‣ Elaboration (creating associations) does
help you remember things.
‣ You can store things in your memory even
without trying.