1. PSYC 112 PSYCHOLOGY FOR EVERYDAY LIVING
Session 3 – Memory Part I
Lecturer: Dr. Paul Narh Doku, Dept of Psychology, UG
Contact Information:

2. Session Overview
From the previous session (session 3) it was understood that memory is the term given to the structures and processes involved in the storage and subsequent retrieval of information. This session will introduce you to how information is processed in the memory system, how information is retrieved from the memory system, reasons why forgetting occurs and how to enhance the human memory.

3. Session Outline
The key topics to be covered in the session are as follows:
Topic 1 – Encoding Information into Memory
Topic 2 – Effortful Processing Strategies
Topic 3 – Retrieving Information from Memory
Topic 4 - Forgetting
Topic 5 – Improving the human memory

4. Reading List
Refer to students to relevant text/chapter or reading materials you will make available on Sakai
Dr. Richard Boateng, UGBS

5. Topic 1: Encoding Information into Memory

6. What Do We Encode? Semantic Encoding Acoustic Encoding Visual Encoding
encoding of meaning
including meaning of words
Acoustic Encoding
encoding of sound
especially sound of words
Visual Encoding
encoding of picture images

7. Types of Processing
Automatic processing: memory processing that occurs subconsciously and does not require attention.
Example: How many of you can sing the theme song for Gilligan’s Island? How many learned it on purpose?
Effortful processing: memory processing that occurs consciously and requires attention
Example: How many of you can name all of the divisions of the nervous system? How many learned it on purpose?

8. Encoding: Getting Information In
Effortful
Automatic

9. Levels-of-Processing Theory
Levels-of-processing theory: a theory of information processing in memory that assumes that semantic processing leads to better long-term memory
Physical memory processing: encoding the word “birthday” by the way it is spelt, b – i – r – t – h – d – a – y
Acoustic memory processing: encoding the word “birthday” by the way it sounds
Semantic memory processing: encoding the word “birthday” by its meaning, “a day of joy and celebration commemorating the anniversary of one’s birth.”

10. Factors Affecting Encoding
Encoding specificity principle: the principle that the environmental cues present at the time information is encoded into long-term memory serve as the best retrieval cues for the information.
State-dependent memory: long-term memory retrieval is best when a person’s physiological state at the time of encoding and retrieval is the same.
Mood-dependent memory: long-term memory retrieval is best when a person’s mood state at the time of encoding and retrieval is the same. Also called Mood-congruence effect – long term memory retrieval is best for experiences and information that are congruent with a person’s current mood.

11. Example: Mood & Memory

12. Topic 2 - Effortful Processing/Encoding Strategies
Processing Strategies:
Chunking (grouping)
Mnemonics: images, maps, and peg-words
Hierarchies/categories
Rehearsal, especially distributed practice
Deep processing
Semantic processing
Making information personally meaningful
 Can you remember this list?
If we have short-term recall of only 7 letters, but can remember 5 words, doesn’t that mean we could remember more than 7 letters if we could group them into words?
This is an example of an effortful processing strategy, a way to encode information into memory to keep it from decaying and make it easier to retrieve.
Effortful processing is also known as studying.
Click to reveal bullets and examples.

13. Effortful Processing Strategies 1. Chunking
Why are credit card numbers broken into groups of four digits? Four “chunks” are easier to encode (memorize) and recall than 16 individual digits. This is chunking!
 Memorize: ACPCVSSUVROFLNBAQ XIDKKFCFBIANA
Chunking is organizing data into manageable units
Chunking - Grouping information to make it easier to remember
Chunking works even better if we can assemble information into meaningful groups
Recommended: Practice this slide!
As you click to reveal the second bullet, ask students to memorize it; it will disappear after 3.5 seconds. Ask them to write down what they can. The same will happen with the next two lines of letters, but they should get more correct (as they will see when you click to make all three lines of letters reappear), thanks to better chunking. They will also be helped by another effect; it’s the same row of letters but with the two halves reversed the first time, so by the third time, there is a small amount of rehearsal and retesting effect helping them out.

14. Effortful Processing Strategies
2. Mnemonics
A mnemonic is a memory “trick” that connects information to existing memory strengths such as imagery or structure.
Read: plane, cigar, due, shall, candy, vague, pizza, seem, fire, pencil
Which words might be easier to remember?
Write down the words you can recall.
Lesson: we encode better with the help of images.
A peg word system refers to the technique of visually associating new words with an existing list that is already memorized along with numbers. For example, “due” can be pictured written on a door, and door = 4.
Leave the first bullet visible only as long as it takes to read it; another click will make that bullet disappear as the next bullet appears. After the last bullet, the first bullet reappears along with some images.

15. 3. Rehearsal and Distributed Practice
Effortful Processing Strategies
3. Rehearsal and Distributed Practice
Massed Practice refers to cramming information all at once.
It is not time-effective.
The best way to practice? Consider the
testing effect. Henry Roediger (b. 1947) found that if your distributed practice includes testing (having to answer questions about the material), you will learn more and retain more than if you merely reread.
The spacing effect was first noted by Hermann Ebbinghaus in the late 1800s. You will develop better retention and recall, especially in the long run, if you use the same amount of study time spread out over many shorter sessions.
This doesn’t mean you have to study every day. Memory researcher Harry Bahrick noted that the longer the time between study sessions, the better the long-term retention, and the fewer sessions you need!
Click to reveal bullets.
Implication of the second bullet on Hermann Ebbinghaus’s result: review all your psychology notes once a week, and you’ll remember it throughout the major.
Implications of Harry Bahrick’s research: the subjects could use half as many study sessions if they started studying four times as early. Starting your exam study early may seem like studying more, but it’s actually a way to study LESS overall to get the same results.
Implication of the testing effect: do as many online quizzes and chapter-end questions as possible. Recent research seems to show that the testing effect works even if you don’t know most of the answers yet; it’s as if the questions create a placeholder in your mind for the information.
Regarding the spacing effect: learning is most effective if you start learning material in sessions closer together, and then further and further apart, NOT closer and closer together as exam time nears. This means reviewing new material a couple of hours after class, then a day, then a week, then a month… then at exam time, you’ll hardly need studying at all.

16. 4. Deep/Semantic Processing
Effortful Processing Strategies
4. Deep/Semantic Processing
When encoding information, we are more likely to retain it if we deeply process even a simple word list by focusing on the semantics (meaning) of the words.
“Shallow,” unsuccessful processing refers to memorizing the appearance or sound of words.
No animation.
Instructor: you can suggest an application of this study result as a study tip. Tell students they will recall more psychology terms by the time of a test if they ask deeper questions about the words rather than just looking over the words or echoing them.

17. 5. Making Information Personally Meaningful
Effortful Processing Strategies:
We can memorize a set of instructions more easily if we figure out what they mean rather than seeing them as set of words.
Memorizing meaningful material takes one tenth the effort of memorizing nonsense syllables.
Actors memorize lines (and students memorize poems) more easily by deciding on the feelings and meanings behind the words, so one line flows naturally to the next.
The self-reference effect, relating material to ourselves, aids encoding and retention.
Now try again, but this time, consider how each word relates to you.
The very first material to appear on the slide, even before the main title “Making information…” is “Memorize the following words” followed by the 12 words. After the word list appears, you read it slowly, then click to make it disappear. Ask students to write what they can recall.
Then click to reveal bullets.
After the final bullet and the word list appears again, slow down your reading of the words to give students time to come up with a personal story or other connection.
As some student might point out, the memorization results will be more different because of the practice/rehearsal, and even testing effects. However, this may compensate for the results being more similar, because students may have already known they were supposed to make personal connections.

18. Memory Storage: Capacity and Location
The brain is NOT like a hard drive. Memories are NOT in isolated files, but are in overlapping neural networks.
The brain’s long-term memory storage does not get full; it gets more elaborately rewired and interconnected.
Parts of each memory can be distributed throughout the brain.
 Memory of a particular ‘kitchen table’ may be a linkage among networks for ‘kitchen,’ ‘meal,’ ‘wooden,’ ‘home,’ ‘legs,’ and ‘sit.’
Click to reveal bullets.
Instructor: see if students can recall the study mentioned in the book giving evidence for the distributed nature of memory.
Karl Lashley ( ) showed that rats who had learned a maze retained parts of that memory, even when various small parts of their brain were removed.

19. Topic 3: Retrieving Information from Memory

20. Measuring Retrieval
There are three means of measuring memory retrieval:
Recall: a measure of long-term memory retrieval that requires the reproduction of the information with essentially no retrieval cues.
Recognition: a measure of long-term memory retrieval that only requires the identification of the information in the presence of retrieval cues.
Relearning: the savings method of measuring long-term memory retrieval, in which the measure is the amount of time saved when learning information for the second time.

21. Measuring Retrieval
Recall: some people, through practice, visual strategies, or biological differences, have the ability to store and recall thousands of words or digits, reproducing them years later (“fill-in- the-blank”)
Recognition: the average person can view 2500 new faces and places, and later can notice with 90 percent accuracy which ones they’ve seen before (“multiple choice”)
Relearning: the savings method of measuring long-term memory retrieval, in which the measure is the amount of time saved when learning information for the second time.
Lessons from each of these demonstrations:
our storage and recall capacity is virtually unlimited
our capacity for recognition is greater than our capacity for recall
relearning can highlight that memories are there even if we can’t recall forming them
Click to reveal bullets and sidebar.
Another recognition example cited in the text: the elephant that people are more able to recognize in fragments if they had seen the whole picture before…even 17 years before.
Instead of showing that example, they will next get a chopped/partial image of the tree ring picture from the second slide.
Three behaviors show that memory is functioning.
Recall is analogous to “fill-in-the-blank.” You retrieve information previously learned and unconsciously stored.
Recognition is a form of “multiple choice.” You identify which stimuli match your stored information.
Relearning is a measure of how much less work it takes you to learn information you had studied before, even if you don’t recall having seen the information before.

22. Topic 4- Forgetting Forgetting can occur at any memory stage
As we process information, we filter, alter, or lose much of it

23. Figure 7.2
Remembering is thought to involve at least three steps. Incoming information is first held for a second or two by sensory memory. Information selected by attention is then transferred to temporary storage in short-term memory. If new information is not rapidly encoded, or rehearsed, it is forgotten. If it is transferred to long-term memory, it becomes relatively permanent, although retrieving it may be a problem. The preceding is a useful model of memory; it may not be literally true of what happens in the brain

24. Reasons Why Forgetting Occurs
Encoding failure theory
Motivated forgetfulness
Decay in Storage (Theory of Disuse)
Interference
Loss of Cues

25. 1. Forgetting due to encoding failure
Encoding failure theory: a theory that proposes that forgetting is due to the failure to encode the information into long-term memory. It holds that the memory was never formed in the first place. Information never enters the long-term memory
External
events
Sensory
memory
Short-
term
Long-
Attention
Encoding
failure leads
to forgetting

26. 2. Motivated Forgetting
Motivated forgetting is not common. More often:
recall is full of errors.
people try not to think about painful memories. If they fail to rehearse those memories, the memories can fade.
Memory is fallible and changeable, but can we practice motivated forgetting, that is, choosing to forget or to change our memories?
Sigmund Freud believed that we sometimes make an unconscious decision to bury our anxiety- provoking memories and hide them from conscious awareness. He called this repression.
New techniques of psychotherapy and medication interventions may allow us to “erase” (prevent reconsolidation of) recalled memories.
Click to reveal bullets.
Suppression is Consciously putting something painful or threatening out of mind or trying to keep it from entering awareness

27. 3. Forgetting due to Decay in Storage
Storage decay theory: a theory that proposes that forgetting is due to the decay of physical traces of the information in the brain; periodically using the information helps to maintain it in the brain. The “Use it or lose it” theory!
Material encoded into long term memory will decay if the memory is never used, recalled, and re-stored.
Decay tends to level off. Memory for both nonsense syllables and second language lessons decays rapidly.
However, what hasn’t decayed quickly tends to stay intact long-term.
Click to reveal bullets.
The first graph of the decay of nonsense syllables memorized by Hermann Ebbinghaus appears with the “decay tends to level off” bullet.
Another click brings the graph showing the decay of Spanish lessons, followed automatically by the last bullet.

28. 4. Forgetting due to Interference
Retroactive Interference: new information blocks out old information.
Proactive Interference: old information blocks out new information.
Getting a new bus number and forgetting old bus number.
Calling your new girlfriend by old girlfriends name.

29. Forgetting Due to Interference?
Interference theory: a theory that proposes that forgetting is due to other information in memory interfering
Proactive interference: old information interferes with the retrieval of newly-stored information
Retroactive Interference: newly-stored information interferes with the retrieval of previously-stored information

30. Forgetting as Interference

31. Retroactive vs. Proactive Interference

32. 5. Forgetting Due to Loss of Cues?
Also called Cue-dependent or Retrieval theory proposes that forgetting is due to the unavailability of the retrieval cues necessary to locate the information in long-term memory.
Sometimes, the memory itself does not decay. Instead, what decays are the associations and links that help us find our way to the stored memory. Forgetting can result from failure to retrieve information from long-term memory
As a result, some stored memories seem just below the surface: “I know the name...it starts with a B maybe…”
External
events
Attention
Encoding
Retrieval failure
leads to forgetting
Retrieval
Sensory
memory
Short-term
Long-term

33. Topic 5: Improving Memory

34. Applying what we’ve learned about memory Improving Memory to Improve Grades
Ways to save overall studying time, and build more reliable memory.
Think of examples and connections (meaningful depth).
Create mnemonics: songs, images, and lists.
Minimize interference with related material or fun activities; study right before sleep or other mindless activity.
Have multiple study sessions, spaced further and further apart after first learning the material.
Click to reveal bullets.
Spend your study sessions activating your retrieval cues including context (recalling where you were when learning the material).
Learn the material in more than one way, not just by rote, but by creating many retrieval cues.

35. Improve Your Memory Study repeatedly to boost recall
Spend more time rehearsing or actively thinking about the material
Make material personally meaningful
Use mnemonic devices
associate with peg words--something already stored
make up story
chunk--acronyms
Test yourself in study sessions: 1) to practice doing retrieval as if taking a test, and 2) to overcome the overconfidence error: the material seems familiar, but can you explain it in your own words?

36. Improve Your Memory rehearse determine what you do not yet know
Activate retrieval cues--mentally recreate situation and mood
Recall events while they are fresh-- before you encounter misinformation
Minimize interference
Test your own knowledge
rehearse
determine what you do not yet know

37. More Tips for Improving Memory
Pay attention, minimizing distractions
Do not cram for exams
Distributed is better than massed practice
Use elaborative rehearsal
Use overlearning
Use mnemonic devices
Acronyms (APA), acrostics(rhyme or saying)
Remember the major functions of memory: Ellen stopped remembering (encoding, storage, retrieval)

38. References
Coon, D. and Mitterer, O. J (2013). Introduction to Psychology (13th ed). Wadsworth Cengage learning. Pp
Feldman, S. R, Collins, J. E. and Green, M. J (2005). Essentials of understanding psychology (2nd ed). McGraw-Hill Ryerson. pp
Kosslyn, M. S, and Rosenberg, R. (2006). Psychology in context. pearson. Pp
Weiten, W. (2009). Psychology: Themes and variations (8th ed). cengage learning. Pp
Dr. Richard Boateng, UGBS