1. EXP6939 HUMAN MEMORY Focus and structure of course A brief personal history Some themes in the study of memory Prescientific perspectives on memory A Science of memory: methods and measures Assignments for next week

2. THEMES IN THE STUDY OF HUMAN MEMORY (Baddeley, Ch. 1) How should memory be described? –Phenomenological –Information processing –Biological What does it include? Is memory singular or plural? –Episodic versus semantic –Declarative versus procedural –Short term versus long-term –Implicit versus explicit How are lab studies related to “everyday memory?” –The issue ecological validity –Areas of “applied memory research”

3. SCHACTER’S THEMES: MEMORY’S “FRAGILE POWER” Memory is powerful –Who we are is what we remember –Its role in everyday tasks –Normally functions in the background Memory is fragile –Omissions, distortions and constructions in everyday life –These may be adaptive –It’s vulnerable to a host of impairments Memory is not singular –Differences based on duration, content, accessibility –Different processes can be selectively impaired –And tied to different brain regions –The search for “dissociations”

4. MEMORY’S FRAGILE POWER (cont’d) Remembering is an act of synthesis –Combining fragments of the past with present state and goals –Memory as an attribution –Different subjective states of memory (e.g., remember or know?) Memory has both automatic and effortful aspects –Most remembering as a mixture of the two –Different brain regions involved in automatic and strategic aspects of memory?

5. MEMORY THROUGH THE AGES Prescientific perspectives Ancient gods for memory Greek and Roman philosophy Plato (427-347 BC) –Innate concepts and memories –Metaphoric mechanisms for Encoding (a scribe; misencoding) Storage (wax tablet; distortable) Retrieval (aviary; retrieval failure) Aristotle (384-322 BC) –Retention & knowing versus “recollection” –Nature of representation –Individal differences in memory –Laws of association in recall Contiguity, similarity, contrast –Automatic and effortful retrieval –Potential for false memory and source amnesia

6. Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence (c. 350 bc) Memory vs. recollection –Memory is necessary, not sufficient for recollection –Recollection a form of inference (attribution?) placing ourselves in a certain time and space –Some phrases sound like implicit/explicit, some availability/accessibility Recollection and association –Retrieval as “movement” between related memories –Associative “laws” (contiguity, similarity) –Automatic cuing vs. effortful search Interesting comments about: –Rehearsal and practice –Concrete vs. abstract “codes” –Role of the “substrate” (hard/soft walls) –Recollection may be in error –Arousal hurts memory –Dwarfs have lousy memory

7. Cicero (106-43 BC) –Practical aspects of memory –“method of loci” for remembering order Augustine (354-430 AD) –Sensory vs. ‘intellectual” memories –Active nature of remembering –Potential for “false memories” –Importance of emotion in memory “Aristotle was the sort of universal Genius who makes three-paragraph summaries about him seem peculiarly lightheaded and perverse.” [Murphy & Kovach, Historical Introduction to Modern Psychology]

8. The Renaissance: Empirical observation Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) –Spanish humanist/empiricist –“Three Books on the Soul of Life” (1538) –Importance of rehearsal for retention –Utility of “memory exercise” and practice –Three sources of forgetting “image’ is erased or destroyed Smeared or fragmented Or “escapes our search” Francis Bacon (1561-1626) –British philosopher/humanist –Describes the “inductive method” –Basic skills of memory, fancy, reason –Mnemonic strategies Visual imagery Study prior to sleeping Varied encoding Selective memory search (“prenotion”)

9. British Empiricism and Continental Nativism Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) –Memory as “decaying sensations” –Knowledge results from experience –Founds British empiricist tradition (Locke, Hume, Hartley, Mill) Rene Descartes (1596-1650) –Mental laws vs. physical (dualism) –Importance of innate concepts and processes

10. A SCIENCE OF MEMORY Herman Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) –Prussian philosopher –Steeped in British empricist approach –“Uber das Gedachtnis” (1885) –First experimental work on memory –Introduces basic controlled methods –Describes basic memory phenomena Learning and forgetting functions List-length effects and STM span Serial position and spacing effects Remote and backward associations Importance of meaningfulness and organization –Contrasts effortful and automatic retrieval –Contrasts explicit and implicit memory

11. DESIGNING A MEMORY EXPERIMENT Manipulation versus control Whose memory will we study? –Effects of age, gender, disorders, expertise What state are they in? –Arousal, mood, motivation What is the object of memory? –Verbal or nonverbal material –Simple or complex structure –Learned in the lab or elsewhere What are the conditions of presentation? –Visual, auditory or other modality –Number of presentations –Sequence of presentations –Time between presentations –Context of presentations

12. What will they do with the material? –Intentional or incidental instructions –Special encoding tasks Who gets what conditions? –Between-group or within-subject How long is the retention interval? –Immediate (STM, seconds to tens of sec) –Recent (LTM, minutes to hours) –Remote (LTM, months to decades) What is the memory task? –Explicit tests of memory Free or cued recall Recognition –Implicit tests of memory Repetition priming, fragment completion What attribute(s) do we test? –Identity, frequency, position, sequencing of items

13. MEASURING MEMORY: THE DEPENDENT VARIABLES Performance measures –Accuracy, speed of response Potential for speed-accuracy trade-offs Attention Condition FullDivided RT(ms)620540 errors (%) 4 6 –Types of errors omission, commission, distortions in recall Hits and false alarms in recognition Proportion “old” words High Low Hits.80.40 False Alarms.30.05 d’1.37 1.39

14. Subjective judgments –Confidence Is confidence correlated with accuracy? –Qualitative judgments (remember-know) Physiological markers –Measures of CNS: Blood flow Positron emission tomography (PET) Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI, fMRI) –Measures of CNS: electromagnetic activity Electroencephalography (EEG, ERP) Magentoencephaolography (MEG) Optical imaging (EROS) –Measures of ANS activity Galvanic skin responses (GSR) Muscular activity (EMG) Heart, respiration rate

15. AN OBSESSION WITH MEMORY Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time –1908-1922; 8 volumes, 3,000 pages –Recollections, and meditations “I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.”

16. TWO CASES OF AMNESIA GR (from Schacter 96) –67-yr old Italian poet & artist –Stroke damages left thalamus –Almost complete amnesia for “episodic past” (retrograde amnesia) –Little ability to remember new events (anterograde amnesia) –Near-full recovery a year later Sheila (from Campbell & Conway 95) –32-yr old school teacher –Severe herpes encephalitis –Damage to temporal lobes, right frontal lobes –Mild RA, profound AA (the classic “amnestic syndome” –Little hope for recovery

17. A RECENT CASE OF “MEMORY THEFT” Binjamin Wilomirski’s “Fragments” –1995 book by Holocaust survivor –1999: Expose by Ganzfried –Was it fraud? Or misconstruction?

18. REMEMBERING VERSUS KNOWING The remember-know distinction (Tulving, 85) –Importance of contextual and sensory detail of episode Dissociations based on –Divided attention at study selectively reduces “remember” judgments (Gardiner & Parkin, 1995) –Elaborative encoding at study selectively enhances “remember” judgments, and –Study of pictures versus words selectively enhances “remember” judgments (Rajaram, 1993)