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April 3, 2022Chapter 6
Long-Term Memory: Structure
Some Questions to Consider
- How does damage to the brain affect the ability to remember what has happened in the past and the ability to form new memories of ongoing experiences?
- How are memories for personal experiences, like what you did last summer, different from memories for facts, like the capital of your state?
- How do the different types of memory interact in our everyday experience?
- How has memory loss been depicted in popular films?
Long-Term Memory
- “Archive” of information about past events and knowledge learned
- Works closely with working memory
- Storage stretches from a few moments ago to as far back as one can remember
- More recent memories are more detailed
Long-Term Memory
Serial Position Effect
- Murdoch (1962) studied the distinction between short-term and long-term memories using the serial position curve
- He asked participants to read a stimulus list (usually a list of words), and write down all the words they could remember.
Serial Position Curve
- He found that memory is better for the stimuli presented at beginning which he called the primacy effect
- Believed this was because you have more time to rehearse info presented at the beginning, and it is more likely to enter LTM
Serial Position Curve
- Memory is also better for stimuli presented at end of list which he called the recency effect
- He hypothesized that this was because the Stimuli at the end of the list are still in STM
- Try it out:
Coding in Long-Term Memory
- Visual and auditory encoding in short- and long-term memory
- Some things are stored as visual memories and some as auditory.
- It’s easier to remember words of things you can visualize like “cat” as opposed to “hope”.
- It’s easier to remember words when they don’t sound similar to each other.
- Semantic encoding in short- and long-term memory (Wickens et al., 1976)
- If you look at group B to the right, interference is caused when fruits are surprisingly presented after a series of professions.
- The meaning and relatedness of words affects or short and long-term memories.
Coding in Long-Term Memory
Coding in Long-Term Memory
- Semantic encoding (memory for words) in long-term memory
- One way to test semantic coding is to look at recognition memory: how well can you identify a previously encountered stimulus
- Sachs (1967)
- Asked participants to read paragraphs. After a delay asked them to choose which sentence was written directly as an original sentence in the paragraph.
- The results showed that specific wording is forgotten but the general meaning of the sentence can be remembered.
- I always tell students that to avoid plagiarism, they need to read their source and then put it away and not look at it again while summarizing a paper or article.
- It is almost impossible to remember and rewrite exact sentences from the paper.
Locating Memory in the Brain
- Neuropsychology
- The hippocampus is responsible for one’s ability to encode new long-term memories
- We know this from several amazing case studies. Watch the videos for more information.
- Henry Molaison (H.M.) – hippocampus removed to treat his severe epilepsy
- Clive Wearing- lost his memory from encephalitis
Types of Long-Term Memory
- Episodic: memory for personal events
- First day of kindergarten
- Wedding day
- Graduation
- We generally have no episodic memories of things that happened before age 2
- Semantic: facts and knowledge not drawn from personal experience.
- Christopher Columbus discovered America
- George Washington was the first president.
Types of Long-Term Memory
- Episodic involves mental time travel
- No guarantee of accuracy
- Semantic does not involve mental time travel
- General knowledge
- Episodic and semantic show a double dissociation
Separation of Episodic and Semantic Memories
- K.C. damaged hippocampus in a motorcycle accident
- No episodic memory
- He cannot relive any events of his past
- Semantic memory remained intact
- He can remember general information about the past;
- This indicates that episodic and semantic memory are two different processes that have different origins in the brain.
Separation of Episodic and
Semantic Memories
- The opposite can also happen in which semantic memory is impaired but episodic memory is preserved
- Italian woman
- Had encephalitis
- Impaired semantic memory
- Couldn’t remember the meanings of words
- Couldn’t recognize people
- Episodic memory for past events was preserved
- Could remember things she had done herself
Separation of Episodic and Semantic Memories
Separation of Episodic and Semantic Memories
- Evidence from brain-imaging experiments indicates that retrieving episodic and semantic memories activate different areas of the brain.
- Alzheimer’s disease greatly affects episodic memory
- Semantic dementia tends to affect semantic memory
- People still remember their own past but forget facts
Interactions Between Episodic and Semantic Memories
- Episodic can be lost, leaving only semantic
- Acquiring knowledge may start as episodic but then “fade” to semantic
- Semantic can be enhanced if associated with episodic
- Autobiographical memory: memory of specific experiences, includes semantic and episodic
- Personal semantic memory: semantic memories that have personal significance
- Can influence what we experience (episodic) by determining what we attend to
The Effect of Time
- Typical research findings are that forgetting increases with longer intervals from the original encoding
- Remember/Know procedure
- Remember if a stimulus is familiar and the circumstance under which it was encountered?
- Know if the stimulus is familiar but don’t remember experiencing it earlier?
- Don’t remember the stimulus at all
- Semanticization of remote memories
- Loss of episodic details for memories of long-ago events
Types of Long-Term Memory
- Explicit memory (episodic and semantic) are conscious, in that we are aware that learning is taking place.
- Implicit memory is not conscious.
- memory that unconsciously influences behavior
- Repetition priming
- Procedural memory (often called “muscle memory”)
- Memory for processes like riding a bicycle, playing the piano, driving a car, tying your shoes
- Classical conditioning
Types of Long-Term Memory
Types of Long-Term Memory
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Types of Long-Term Memory
- Implicit/non-declarative: unconscious memory
- Procedural (skill) memory
- Priming: previous experience changes response without conscious awareness
- Explicit/declarative: unconscious memory
- Episodic: personal events/episodes
- Semantic: facts, knowledge
Implicit Memory: Procedural Memory
- Skill memory: memory for actions
- No memory of where or when learned
- Perform procedures without being consciously aware of how to do them
- People who cannot form new long-term memories can still learn new skills (e.g., H.M.)
- Clive Wearing, a famous musician and conductor, lost hislong-term memory but could still play the piano as well as ever.
Repetition Priming
- Presentation of one stimulus affects performance on that stimulus when it is presented again
- Graf and coworkers (1985)
- Texted explicit memory and implicit memory
- Tested three groups
Amnesia patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome
- Korsakoff’s syndrome is long-term memory loss due to alcoholism.
Patients without amnesia being treated for alcoholism
Patients with amnesia who had no history of alcoholism
Repetition Priming
Implicit Memory in Everyday Experience
- Perfect and Askew (1994)
- Propaganda effect
- We are more likely to rate statements read or heard before as being true even if they are not true.
- Implications for advertisements
Implicit Memory: Classical Conditioning
- Pairing a neutral stimulus with a reflexive response
- We and other animals are not intentionally learning. It is a subconscious, reflexive response.
- It is also used in advertising, to influence our feelings about products.
