Difference between conformity and obedience.

Psychology: Memory I

Multiple types of memory

Case study of a patient: Memory without awareness

Patient with severe seizures (1953) upwards of 11 a day.
Treatment then was surgery to remove the part of the brain
involved in seizures.
Often in the temporal lobe.
Bi-lateral temporal lobotomy.
Treatment was success but the patient was unable to make new
memories.
HM could not remember the name of the psychologist (Brendon
Miller)
Through careful observation and testing.
He was not able to recall his face from after 1953.
Miller found that the memories from before the surgery were fine.
Mirror-drawing task tracing in between the lines.
HM did not remember doing the task when asked after multiple
days of doing. (no conscious recollection).
However, the drawing he did improved over time. -> evidence of
multiple types of memory

Explicit / declarative memory tasks

An example is the mirror drawing task.
Missing specific parts of the brain can result in specific impairment.

Memory
Ability to store and use information
Also, the store of what has been learned and remembered
Can be: explicit or implicit
Explicit memory: asking participant to recall something
Implicit memory: demonstrated by asking participants to ride a
bike

Sensory memory
Holds information in its original sensory form for a very brief
period
Visual information iconic memory (duration of 1/3 second)
Stimuli presentation (50milli sec), blank screen presentation and
delay, musical tone,
Enough time for people to register ther0mula
Audio information echoic memory (duration 2 seconds)
Memory stores
1. Sensory memory
Large capacity, short duration
2. Working (short-term) memory
Small capacity, short duration
3. Long term memory
Very high capacity, long duration

Working memory
Required to attend to and solve a problem at hand
Working memory capacity
7 items on average, with a range of 5 to 9units
e.g. Local phone numbers
Chunking breaking down a list of items into a smaller set of
meaningful units 9

How working memory works?

Three stores (visuospatial, phonological, episodic)
Managed by central executive
Three processes: attending, storing, rehearsing,

Serial position effort

Primary effect: items in long-term memory
Recency effect
Effect items in working memory

Long term memory

Types
Implicit memory -> procedural memory, priming
Explicit memory -> semantic, episodic

Stages in long-term memory

1. Encoding
Using mnemonic devices etc.
Dual coding theory (making use of visual and auditory system,
particularly useful for language learning). Using pictures to
depict verbal information.
2. Consolidation
Sleep is important. Debate over various types of sleep for the
consolidation for different types of knowledge.
Practice of brain neurons where neuronal pathways appear to
be firing in the same pathways of maze crawling in mice.
3. Storage
Hierarchies and associative networks (like those in computer
science)
E.g. Associative network of the word Lemon: Sour yellow
citreous
4. Retrieval
Implicit recalled without conscious effort
 For example, riding a bike
Explicit requires effort e.g. remembering a birthday

Memory as a process
Automatic processing: we do not need to think about the steps of how to
do it
Effortful processing: we need to put in effort to process the information
we are studying
Levels of processing and recall:
- Depth of encoding
- Shallow level of processing: structural learning of the word
- Medium level of processing: Phonemic learning
- Deep level of processing: Semantic learning
- Greater level of processing, the higher the probability of recall

Encoding specificity
Memory strongest when conditions at recall = encoding
- Transfer-appropriate processing
Context dependent memory
- Memory enhanced when encoding and retrieval environments are
the same
Case study: Scuba diving memory study
Participants learnt and were tested on dry or wet land
Numbers of items recalled was highest for those learnt and recalled in
the same environment.

Emotional memory
Emotional memories easier to recal than factual ones
Emotions help encode and retrieve memories
Flashbulb memories eg. Deja-vu moments
Case study: the woman who cannot forget.