Cognitive Psychology

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Cognitive Psychology Chapter 6 Learning and
Remembering
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11/16/2009

• Learning and Remembering
• Storing to Episodic Memory
• Encoding specificity
• Retrieval from Episodic Memory
• Decay and interference
• Encoding specificity
• Implicit /Explicit memory

Study Question. Why would it likely be better
for a student to write their exams in the same
classroom in which they attend lecture? Relate
Tulvings encoding specificity principle to this
phenomenon.
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Lab update

• Methods
• Lure words
• Chair, needle, mountain, rough, sweet, sleep.
• Results
• Inferential statistics, revisited.
• The t-test
• OLD items (74.7) vs. NEW (3.3)
• t(37) 24.7, p lt .05.
• LURE items (70.2) vs. NEW (3.3)
• t(37) 15.28, p lt .05.
• OLD items (74.7) vs. LURE (70.2)
• t(37) 1.07, p gt .05.

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Learning and Remembering

• Storing information in LTM
• Organization
• List as many things that you can eat as you
  can.
• Are your answers organized?
• Category clustering
• Organization in semantic memory (next week)
• Tulvings subjective organization
• Organization generated by the rememberer for
  structuring a list where no organization is
  supplied by the experimenter
• Imagery
• Paivios dual coding hypothesis
• Memory can be coded visually and verbally
• Words that can imaged can be stored twice

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Learning and Remembering

• Retrieving information from LTM
• Decay
• Thorndykes law of disuse (use it or lose it)
• Bartlett and the reconstructive nature of memory
• We remember only the gist, not details.
• Interference in memory recall
• Proactive Interference Previously learned
  material interferes with the learning of new
  material
• Retroactive Interference New material
  interferes with previously learned material.

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Learning and Remembering

• Retrieving information from LTM
• Accessibility vs. availability

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Learning and Remembering

• Retrieving information from LTM
• Accessibility vs. availability
• Tip-of-the-tongue (Brown MacNeil)
• 49 low-frequency words (e.g., apse, nepotism,
  sampan), prompted by brief definitions.
• 8.5 of trials -gt TOT
• Total of 360 TOT states
• 224 similar-sound TOTs (e.g., Saipan for sampan)
• 48 had the same number of syllables as the
  target
• 95 similar-meaning TOTs (e.g., houseboat for
  sampan).
• gt 50 can guess the first letter

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Learning and Remembering

• Retrieving information from LTM
• Encoding specificity
• When is recall better than recognition?
• Tulvings recognition failure experiment
• Step 1 Study list
• head LIGHT
• bath NEED
• pretty BLUE
• etc.
• Step 2 Free association and recognition

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Learning and Remembering

• Retrieving information from LTM
• Encoding specificity
• When is recall better than recognition?

• dark _______ ________ ________ ______
• want _______ ________ ________ ______
• sky _______ ________ ________ ______
• Etc.

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Learning and Remembering

• Retrieving information from LTM
• Encoding specificity
• When is recall better than recognition?
• When recall is cued.
• What makes a good cue?
• Encoding Specificity Hypothesis.
• A cue will be an effective aid to retrieval if it
  is stored as part of the original memory.
• An empirical example (Goddan Baddeley, 1975).
• Participants are assigned to one of four
  conditions and were presented with a list of
  words.
• Encoding Underwater or on land
• Retrieval Underwater or on land

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Learning and Remembering

• Retrieving information from LTM
• Encoding specificity
• Context-dependent memory.
• The context/ environment is stored as part of
  memories

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Learning and Remembering

• Amnesia and implicit memory
• Amnesia - loss of memory or memory ability due to
  brain injury or disease.
• Retrograde amnesia - loss of memory for events
  occurring before injury
• Anterograde amnesia - inability to form new
  memory for events occurring after injury

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Learning and Remembering

• Amnesia and implicit memory
• Anterograde amnesia
• H.M.
• Tools and objects, revisited
• Role of the hippocampus
• Dissociation of declarative and procedural memory
• Korsakoffs syndrome

Temperance !
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Learning and Remembering

• Amnesia and implicit memory
• Warrington Weiskrantz (1970)
• Amnesic patients and institutionalized controls
  study a list of words.
• Three memory tests
• Free Recall
• Yes/No recognition
• Word stem completion
• tab____?
• gar____?

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Learning and Remembering

• Amnesia and implicit memory
• Warrington Weiskrantz (1970)

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Learning and Remembering

• Amnesia and implicit memory
• Repitition priming - a previous encounter with
  information facilitated later performance on the
  same information.
• Does not require conscious recognition
• Is independent of level of processing
• Jacoby Dallas (1981)
• Three orienting tasks
• Physical (e.g., contains an L ?)
• Rhyme (e. g., rhymes with train?)
• Semantic (e. g., is it the center of the nervous
  system?)
• Two memory tests
• Yes/No recognition
• (Masked) perceptual identification

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Learning and Remembering

• Amnesia and implicit memory
• Repitition priming - a previous encounter with
  information facilitated later performance on the
  same information.
• Jacoby Dallas (1981)