1. Ebbinghaus and Craik & Lockhart
Memory theroists:
Ebbinghaus and Craik & Lockhart

2. Ebbinghaus Influential early memory theorist
Amount remembered depends on the time spent learning
Overlearning increases retention
Spacing Effect: we retain information better when our rehearsal is distributed over time
Steady studying is better than cramming

3. Ebbinghaus Memory Test
Study these words, without writing them down, to remember as many as possible
Milk Tea Beef Coffee Raisins Juice Cheese Chicken Apples Pretzels Celery Bread

4. Ebbinghaus Memory Test
Now write as many of the items as you can on your list.
How many did you get? (there were 12)
How many people remembered Milk? Bread? Cheese? Apples?
Serial Position Effect: Recalling the first & last items on a list best

5. Encoding and Attention
If you are not paying attention to something now, you will not be able to remember it later.
It is difficult to pay attention to more than one thing at a time
Attention is like a filter which screens out most stimuli but focuses on a selected few

6. Craik & Lockhart memory test
Follow the directions on your slip of paper

7. Craik & Lockhart Levels of Processing (1972)
Incoming information can be processed at different levels:
Level of Processing
Type of Encoding
Example
Shallow
Structural
Is the word in capital letters?
Intermediate
Phonemic
Does the word rhyme with weight?
Deep
Semantic
Would the word fit in the sentence “He met a ______ on the street”?

8. Craik & Lockhart Levels of Processing (1972)
As in our experiment in class, Craik & Lockhart directed subjects to pay attention to different attributes of the stimulus words
They found that information processed at a deeper level will be remembered better
Criticisms: Too vague; not objective enough
What is a “level” of processing?
How do we determine whether one level is deeper than another?