1. Cognitive Processes PSY 334
Chapter 7 – Human Memory: Retention and Retrieval

2. Structure and Retrieval
Memory is helped by prompts that are closely associated with what is to be recalled.
We prompt ourselves when trying to recall.
Organized material is easier to learn because it provides a structure for prompting recall:
Trees for minerals, animals, clothing, transportation.

3. Context Effects
Recall is better if the physical context during learning is also present during testing.
Experimenter clothing, setting.
Under water.
Eich suggests that context effects depend on integrating context and the material to be learned.

4. Mood Congruence
Bower et al. – hypnotized subjects and induced positive or negative mood.
Recall better if hypnotized into the same mood during testing as during learning.
Again, the effect may depend upon integration of mood with material learned.
Mood congruence – easier to remember memories congruent with the current mood.

5. State-Dependence
Material is easier to recall if people return to the same emotional and physical state as during learning.
Drinking – some state dependence together with overall debilitating effect on memory.
Marijuana and tobacco.
Caffeine.
Studying when not intoxicated is better.

6. Encoding Specificity
The other items presented during learning provide a context too.
Presentation of cues in as close to the original learning context aids recall.
Encoding specificity principle:
The probability of recalling an item depends on the similarity of its encoding at test to its original encoding at study.

7. Test of Encoding Specificity
Watkins & Tulving:
Study pairs of words
Generate associates for words & indicate which were among studied words.
Cued with first word of pair.
61% recall in cued task, <54% in associate recognition task.
Recognition generally produces higher scores so result should have been the opposite of what occurred.

8. Amnesia
Studies of amnesics tell us how memory is organized in the brain.
Amnesia occurs with damage to the hippocampus (and some other areas).
Kinds of amnesia:
Korsakoff syndrome
Retrograde vs anterograde amnesia
Patient H.M.

9. What is Spared in Amnesia?
Memory for facts, knowledge of meanings of words, language.
Memory for how to do things (e.g., play the piano, tie shoes), skills.
Priming
Incidental learning – memory for experience that was not consciously attended to.
Working memory – short term memory.

10. What is Affected by Amnesia?
Episodic memory – memory for the details and experiences of one’s own life.
Learning and recall of new material --anterograde amnesia
Because conscious learning starts out as an episodic experience.

11. Implicit vs. Explicit Memory
Explicit memory – knowledge we can consciously recall.
Implicit memory – knowledge we cannot recall but which aids performance on a task.
Amnesics can do a word-completion task but not recall learned words.
Normal subjects also show an explicit-implicit dissociation.

12. Procedural Memory
Procedural memory can be for skills, but also for doing cognitive tasks.
Berry & Broadbent – control output of hypothetical sugar factory by changing size of workforce (computer simulation):
Non-obvious formula involved.
After 60 trials subjects were good at task but could not state the rule involved.
Amnesics can learn to do this too.

13. Squire’s Varieties of Memory
Declarative memory:
Semantic (facts)
Episodic (events)
Non-declarative memory:
Procedural skills
Priming (perceptual, semantic)
Conditioning – associative learning
Nonassociative learning (habituation,sensitization)