Lecture 1 Psyco 350, A1 Fall, 2006

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Lecture 1 Psyco 350, A1Fall, 2006

• N. R. Brown

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Outline

• Introduction
• Memory Defined
• Memory in Context
• A very little bit of history
• Information Processing the Modal Model

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Memory as Everything -- I

• Memory is perhaps the most central aspect of
  human thought. Any question about human behavior,
  cognition, development, and nature requires an
  understanding of memory. Our memory makes us who
  we are, and it is one of the most intimate parts
  of ourselves Many feel that the study of human
  memory is the closest on can get to a systematic
  study of the human soul. -- Radvansky, p. 1

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Memory as Everything -- II

• "we owe to memory almost all that we have or
  are... our ideas and conceptions are its work,
  and ... our everyday perceptions, thoughts and
  movement is derived from this source. Memory
  collects the countless phenomena of our existence
  into a single whole..."
• "every waking moment is full of memories. Every
  thought, every learned response, every act of
  recognition is based on memory. It can be
  reasonably be argued that memory is the mind.
  
  -- Gray

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Memory as Everything A Simple Demonstration

• 84 57 ?

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Memory as Everything A Simple Demonstration

• (read ) store 1st 84
• (read ) store 2nd 57
• Retrieve-execute 2-digit addition strategy
• retrieve top ones digit 4
• retrieve bottom ones digit 7
• retrieve addition fact 4711
• store ones sum 1
• retrieve-execute carry operation
• retrieve top tens digit 8
• retrieve addition fact 819
• store new top tens digit 9
• retrieve top tens digit 9
• retrieve bottom tens digit 5
• retrieve addition fact 9514
• store tens sum 14_
• Retrieve, combine sums 14 1 ? 141
• State answer 141

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Memory is Everything

• Name all of Canadas provincial and territorial
  capitals.
• How many of Canadas provincial and territorial
  capitals have you visited?
• Recall the addition problem we just solved.

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Memory Dictionary Definitions

• memory       1.The mental faculty of
  retaining and recalling past experience.
• The act or an instance of remembering
  recollection spent the afternoon lost in memory.
  
• All that a person can remember It hasn't
  happened in my memory.
• Something remembered pleasant childhood
  memories.
• The fact of being remembered remembrance
  dedicated to their parents' memory.
• The period of time covered by the remembrance or
  recollection of a person or group of persons
  within the memory of humankind.
• Biology. Persistent modification of behavior
  resulting from an animal's experience.
• Computer Science.
• A unit of a computer that preserves data for
  retrieval.
• Capacity for storing information two gigabytes
  of memory.
• Statistics. The set of past events affecting a
  given event in a stochastic process.
• The capacity of a material, such as plastic or
  metal, to return to a previous shape after
  deformation.
• Immunology. The ability of the immune system to
  respond faster and more powerfully to subsequent
  exposure to an antigen.
• -- American Heritage Dictionary

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Memory A Dictionary Definition

• memory       1.The mental faculty of
  retaining and recalling past experience.
• The act or an instance of remembering
  recollection spent the afternoon lost in memory.
  
• All that a person can remember It hasn't
  happened in my memory.
• Something remembered pleasant childhood
  memories.
• The fact of being remembered remembrance
  dedicated to their parents' memory.
• The period of time covered by the remembrance or
  recollection of a person or group of persons
  within the memory of humankind.
• Biology. Persistent modification of behavior
  resulting from an animal's experience.
• Computer Science.
• A unit of a computer that preserves data for
  retrieval.
• Capacity for storing information two gigabytes
  of memory.
• Statistics. The set of past events affecting a
  given event in a stochastic process.
• The capacity of a material, such as plastic or
  metal, to return to a previous shape after
  deformation.
• Immunology. The ability of the immune system to
  respond faster and more powerfully to subsequent
  exposure to an antigen.
• -- American Heritage Dictionary

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Memory Definitions -- Psychologists

• First, memory is the location, where information
  is kepta memory store
• Second, memory can refer to the thing that holds
  the content of experience a memory trace
• Third, memory is the mental process used to
  acquire (learn), store, and retrieve (remember)
  information of all sorts. -- Radvansky,
  p.1

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Memory Definitions -- Psychologists

• "Memory is .. an individual's entire store of
  information and the set of processes that allow
  the individual to recall and use that information
  when need." -- Gray
• Mental capacity to store and later recognize and
  recall events that were previously experienced.
• -- Zimbardo
• Memory does not comprise a single entity, but
  rather consists of a range of different systems
  that have in common the capacity for storing
  information.
• Baddeley

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Memory Definition Some Basic Points

• Memory as container
• Memory as contents
• Memory as process
• encoding create contents (i.e. memory traces)
  from experience
• storage rehearse, organize/modify contents
• retrieval accesses content
• Contents reflect prior experience

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Memory in Context Who cares about memory
research why

• In Psychology -- (all of them)
• changes dev, aging, neursopsych
• contents social, clinical, cultural
• Outside of Psychology
• Education
• Law
• Marketing
• History
• Survey Methodology (Sociology Econ Pol Sci)

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A Very Little Bit of History
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Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)

• Father of Memory Research
• Memory stripped of meaning
• Inventor of the nonsense syllable (DAX, FOZ, KIR)
• Discoverer of
• Learning curve
• Forgetting function

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Fredrick Bartlett (1850-1909)

• Impact of prior knowledge and meaning on memory.
• Most important ideas
• reconstruction
• schemata

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Verbal Learning

• Emerged from Behaviorism
• Focus
• relationship between external variables and human
  memory performance
• forgetting and theories of forgetting
• Approach
• Rigorously conducted, list learning (often paired
  associate) experiments

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Historical Precedence
Ebbinghaus
Verbal Learning
Behaviorism
Contemporary Memory Research
Bartlett
Information Processing Cog Psych
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And Now
Cognitive Research
Memory Research
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Information Processing ?

• Core metaphor
• human mind as serial computer
• To understand/describe computer behavior,
  specify
• hardware
• software
• available data

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Information Processing

• To understand/describe human behavior, specify
• the cognitive architecture (hardware)
• identify components their general function
• characterize components in terms of
• capacity
• speed
• accuracy
• a cognitive task analysis (software data)