AP Psychology

Module 31 - Studying and Building Memories

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

Be thankful for memory. We take it for granted, except when it malfunctions. But it is our memory that accounts for time and defines our life. It is our memory that enables us to recognize family, speak our language, find our way home, and locate food and water. It is our memory that enables us to enjoy an experience and then mentally replay and enjoy it again. And it is our memory that occasionally pits us against those whose offenses we cannot forget.

In large part, we are what we remember. Without memory-our storehouse of accumulated learning-there would be no savoring of past joys, no guilt or anger over painful recollections. We would instead live in an enduring present, each moment fresh. But each person would be a stranger, every language foreign, every task - dressing, eating, biking - a new challenge. You would even be a stranger to yourself, lacking that continuous sense of self that extends from your distant past to your momentary present.

Studying Memory

FOCUS QUESTION: What is memory?

To a psychologist, memory is learning that has persisted over time; it is information that has been acquired, stored, and can be retrieved.

Research on memory's extremes has helped us understand how memory works. At age 92, my father suffered a small stroke that had but one peculiar effect. He was as mobile as before. His genial personality was intact. He knew us and enjoyed poring over family photo albums and reminiscing about his past. But he had lost most of his ability to lay down new memories of conversations' and everyday episodes. He could not tell me what day of the week it was, or what he'd had for lunch. Told repeatedly of his brother-in-law's death, he was surprised and saddened each time he heard the news.

At the other extreme are people who would be gold medal winners in a memory Olympics. Russian journalist Shereshevskii, or S, had merely to listen while other reporters scribbled notes (Luria, 1968). You and I could parrot back a string of about 7 - maybe even 9 - digits. S could repeat up to 70, if they were read about 3 seconds apart in an otherwise silent room. Moreover, he could recall digits or words backward as easily as forward. His accuracy was unerring, even when recalling a list as much as 15 years later. "Yes, yes," he might recall. "This was a series you gave me once when we were in your apartment. . . . You were sitting at the table and I in the rocking chair ....You were wearing a gray suit. ..."

Amazing? Yes, but consider your own impressive memory. You remember countless voices, sounds, and songs; tastes, smells, and textures; faces, places, and happenings. Imagine viewing more than 2500 slides of faces and places for 10 seconds each. Later, you see 280 of these slides, paired with others you've never seen. Actual participants in this experiment recognized 90 percent of the slides they had viewed in the first round (Haber, 1970). In a follow-up experiment, people exposed to 2800 images for only 3 seconds each spotted the repeats with 82 percent accuracy (Konkle et al., 2010).

Or imagine yourself looking at a picture fragment, such as the one in FIGURE 31.1. Also imagine that you had seen the complete picture for a couple of seconds 17 years earlier. This, too, was a real experiment, and participants who had previously seen the complete drawings were more likely to identify the objects than were members of a control group (Mitchell, 2006). Moreover, the picture memory reappeared even for those who did not consciously recall participating in the long-ago experiment!

How do we accomplish such memory feats? How does our brain pluck information out of the world around us and tuck that information away for later use? How can we remember things we have not thought about for years, yet forget the name of someone we met a minute ago? How are memories stored in our brains? Why will you be likely, later in this module, to misrecall this sentence: "The angry rioter threw the rock at the window"? In this and the next two modules, we'll consider these fascinating questions and more, including tips on how we can improve our own memories.

Memory Models

FOCUS QUESTION: How do psychologists describe the human memory system? Architects make miniature house models to help clients imagine their future homes. Similarly, psychologists create memory models to help us think about how our brain forms and retrieves memories. Infonnation-processing models are analogies that compare human memory to a computer's operations. Thus, to remember any event, we must

Like all analogies, computer models have their limits. Our memories are less literal and more fragile than a computer's. Moreover, most computers process information sequentially, even while alternating between tasks. Our dual-track brain processes many things simultaneously (some of them unconsciously) by means of parallel processing. As you enter the lunchroom, you simultaneously - in parallel - process information about the people you see, the sounds of voices, and the smell of the food.

To focus on this complex, simultaneous processing, one information-processing model, connectionism, views memories as products of interconnected neural networks. Specific memories arise from particular activation patterns within these networks. Every time you learn something new, your brain's neural connections change, forming and strengthening pathways that allow you to interact with and learn from your constantly changing environment.

To explain our memory-forming process, Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968) proposed another model, with three stages:

  1. We first record to-be-remembered information as a fleeting sensory memory.
  2. From there, we process information into short-term memory, where we encode it through rehearsal.
  3. Finally, information moves into long-term memory for later retrieval.

Other psychologists have updated this model (see FIGURE 31.2) to include important newer concepts, including working memory and automatic processing.

WORKING MEMORY

Alan Baddeley and others (Baddeley, 2001, 2002; Engle, 2002) challenged Atkinson and Shiffrin's view of short-term memory as a small, brief storage space for recent thoughts and experiences. Research shows that this stage is not just a temporary shelf for holding incoming information. It's an active desktop where your brain processes information, making sense of new input and linking it with long-term memories. Whether we hear eye-screem as "ice cream" or "I scream" will depend on how the context and our experience guide us in interpreting and encoding the sounds.

To emphasize the active processing that takes place in this middle stage, psychologists use the term working memory. Right now, you are using your working memory to link the information you're reading with your previously stored information (Cowan, 2010; Kail & Hall, 2001).

The pages you are reading may enter working memory through vision. You might also repeat the information using auditory rehearsal. As you integrate these memory inputs with your existing long-term memory, your attention is focused. Baddeley (2002) suggested a central executive handles this focused processing (see FIGURE 31.3).

Without focused attention, information often fades. In one experiment, people read and typed new information they would later need, such as "An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain." If they knew the information would be available online, they invested less energy in remembering, and they remembered the trivia less well (Sparrow et al., 2011). Sometimes Google replaces rehearsal.

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: How have you used the three parts of your memory system (encoding, storage, and retrieval) in learning something new today?

TEST YOURSELF: Memory includes (in alphabetical order) long-term memory, sensory memory, and working/ short-term memory. What's the correct order of these three memory stages?

Building Memories: Encoding

FOCUS QUESTION: How do explicit and implicit memories differ?

As we have seen throughout this text, our mind operates on two tracks:

Automatic Processing and Implicit Memories

FOCUS QUESTION: What information do we automatically process?

Our implicit memories include procedural memory for automatic skills (such as how to ride a bike) and classically conditioned associations among stimuli. Visiting your dentist, you may, thanks to a conditioned association linking the dentist's office with the painful drill, find yourself with sweaty palms. You didn't plan to feel that way when you got to the dentist's office; it happened automatically.

Without conscious effort you also automatically process information about

Our two-track mind engages in impressively efficient information processing. As one track automatically tucks away many routine details, the other track is free to focus on conscious, effortful processing. This reinforces an important principle introduced in Module 18's description of parallel processing: Mental feats such as vision, thinking, and memory may seen! to be single abilities, but they are not. Rather, we split information into different components for separate and simultaneous processing.

Effortful Processing and Explicit Memories

Automatic processing happens so effortlessly that it is difficult to shut off. When you see words in your native language, perhaps on the side of a delivery truck, you can't help but read them and register their meaning. Learning to read wasn't automatic. You may recall working hard to pick out letters and connect them to certain sounds. But with experience and practice, your reading became automatic. Imagine now learning to read reversed sentences like this:

.citamotua emoceb nac gnissecorp luftroffE

At first, this requires effort, but after enough practice, you would also perform this task much more automatically. We develop many skills in this way. We learn to drive, to text, to speak a new language with effort, but then these tasks become automatic.

SENSORY MEMORY
FOCUS QUESTION: How does sensory memory work?

Sensory memory (recall Figure 31.2) feeds our active working memory, recording momentary images of scenes or echoes of sounds. How much of this page could you sense and recall with less exposure than a lightning flash? In one experiment (Sperling, 1960), people viewed three rows of three letters each, for only onetwentieth of a second (see FIGURE 31.5). After the nine letters disappeared, they could recall only about half of them.

Was it because they had insufficient time to glimpse them? No. The researcher, George Sperling, cleverly demonstrated that people actually could see and recall all the letters, but only momentarily. Rather than ask them to recall all nine letters at once, he sounded a high, medium, or low tone immediately after flashing the nine letters. This tone directed participants to report only the letters of the top, middle, or bottom row, respectively. Now they rarely missed a letter, showing that all nine letters were momentarily available for recall.

Sperling's experiment demonstrated iconic memory, a fleeting sensory memory of visual stimuli. For a few tenths of a second, our eyes register a photographic or picture-image memory of a scene, and we can recall any part of it in amazing detail. But if Sperling delayed the tone signal by more than half a second, the image faded and participants again recalled only about half the letters. Our visual screen clears quickly, as new images are superimposed over old ones.

We also have an impeccable, though fleeting, memory for auditory stimuli, called echoic memory (Cowan, 1988; Lu et al., 1992). Picture yourself in class, as your attention veers to thoughts of the weekend. If your mildly irked teacher tests you by asking, "What did I just say?" you can recover the last few words from your mind's echo chamber. Auditory echoes tend to linger for 3 or 4 seconds.

CAPACITY OF SHORT-TERM AND WORKING MEMORY
FOCUS QUESTION: What is the capacity of our short-term and working memory?

George Miller (1956) proposed that short-term memory can retain about seven information bits (give or take two). Other researchers have confirmed that we can, if nothing distracts us, recall about seven digits, or about six letters or five words (Baddeley et al., 1975). How quickly do our short-term memories disappear? To find out, researchers asked people to remember three-consonant groups, such as CHJ (Peterson & Peterson, 1959). To prevent rehearsal, the researchers asked them, for example, to start at 100 and count aloud backward by threes. After 3 seconds, people recalled the letters only about half the time; after 12 seconds, they seldom recalled them at all (see FIGURE 31.6). Without the active processing that we now understand to be a part of our working memory, short-term memories have a limited life.

Working-memory capacity varies, depending on age and other factors. Compared with children and older adults, young adults have more working-memory capacity, so they can use their mental workspace more efficiently. This means their ability to multitask is relatively greater. But whatever our age, we do better and more efficient work when focused, without distractions, on one task at a time. "One of the most stubborn, persistent phenomenon of the mind," notes cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham (2010), "is that when you do two things at once, you don't do either one as well as when you do them one at a time." The bottom line: It's probably a bad idea to try to watch TV, text your friends, and write a psychology paper all at the same time!

EFFORTFUL PROCESSING STRATEGIES
FOCUS QUESTION:What are some effortful processing strategies that can help us remember new information?

Research shows that several effortful processing strategies can boost our ability to form new memories. Later, when we try to retrieve a memory, these strategies can make the difference between success and failure.

CHUNKING Glance for a few seconds at row 1 of FIGURE 31.7, then look away and try to reproduce what you saw. Impossible, yes? But you can easily reproduce the second row, which is no less complex. Similarly, you will probably find row 4 much easier to remember than row 3, although both contain the same letters. And you could remember the sixth cluster more easily than the fifth, although both contain the same words. As these units demonstrate, chunking information - organizing items into familiar, manageable units - enables us to recall it more easily. Try remembering 43 individual numbers and letters. It would be impossible, unless chunked into, say, seven meaningful chunks, such as "Try remembering 43 individual numbers and letters."(smiley emoji)

Chunking usually occurs so naturally that we take it for granted. If you are a native English speaker, you can reproduce perfectly the 150 or so line segments that make up the words in the three phrases of item 6 in Figure 31.7. It would astonish someone unfamiliar with the language. I am similarly awed at a Chinese reader's ability to glance at FIGURE 31.8 and then reproduce all the strokes; or of a varsity basketball player's recall of the positions of the players after a 4-second glance at a basketball play (Allard & Burnett, 1985). We all remember information best when we can organize it into personally meaningful arrangements.

MNEMONICS To help them encode lengthy passages and speeches, ancient Greek scholars and orators also developed mnemonics (nih-MON-iks). Many of these memory aids use vivid imagery, because we are particularly good at remembering mental pictures. We more easily remember concrete, visualizable words than we do abstract words. (When I quiz you later, in Module 33, which three of these words - bicycle, void, cigarette, inherent, fire, process - will you most likely recall?) If you still recall the rock-throwing rioter sentence, it is probably not only because of the meaning you encoded but also because the sentence painted a mental image.

The peg-word system harnesses our superior visual-imagery skill. This mnemonic requires you to memorize a jingle: "One is a bun; two is a shoe; three is a tree; four is a door; five is a hive; six is sticks; seven is heaven; eight is a gate; nine is swine; ten is a hen." Without much effort, you will soon be able to count by peg words instead of numbers: bun, shoe, tree ... and then to visually associate the peg words with to-be-remembered items. Now you are ready to challenge anyone to give you a grocery list to remember. Carrots? Stick them into the imaginary bun. Milk? Fill the shoe with it. Paper towels? Drape them over the tree branch. Think bun, shoe, tree and you see their associated images: carrots, milk, paper towels. With few errors, you will be able to recall the items in any order and to name any given item (Bugelski et al., 1968). Memory whizzes understand the power of such systems. A study of star performers in the World Memory Championships showed them not to have exceptional intelligence, but rather to be superior at using mnemonic strategies (Maguire et al., 2003).

Chunking and mnemonic techniques combined can be great memory aids for unfamiliar material. Want to remember the colors of the rainbow in order of wavelength? Think of the mnemonic ROY G. BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). Need to recall the names of North America's five Great Lakes? Just remember HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). In each case, we chunk information into a more familiar form by creating a word (called an acronym) from the first letters of the to-be-remembered items.

HIERARCHIES When people develop expertise in an area, they process information not only in chunks but also in hierarchies composed of a few broad concepts divided and subdivided into narrower concepts and facts. This section, for example, aims to help you organize some of the memory concepts we have been discussing (see FIGURE 31.9).

Organizing knowledge in hierarchies helps us retrieve information efficiently, as Gordon Bower and his colleagues (1969) demonstrated by presenting words either randomly or grouped into categories. When the words were organized into categories, recall was two to three times better. Such results show the benefits of organizing what you study - of giving special attention to the module objectives, headings, and Ask Yourself and TestYourself questions. Taking class and text notes in outline format-a type of hierarchical organization-may also prove helpful.

DISTRIBUTED PRACTICE

We retain information (such as classmates' names) better when our encoding is distributed over time. More than 300 experiments over the last century have consistently revealed the benefits of this spacing effect (Cepeda et al., 2006). Massed practice (cramming) can produce speedy short-term learning and a feeling of confidence. But to paraphrase pioneer memory researcher Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885), those who leam quickly also forget quickly. Distributed practice produces better long-term recall. After you've studied long enough to master the material, further study at that time becomes inefficient (Rohrer & Pashler, 2007). Better to spend that extra reviewing time later-a day later if you need to remember something 10 days hence, or a month later if you need to remember something 6 months hence (Cepeda et al., 2008).

Spreading your learning over several months, rather than over a shorter term, can help you retain information for a lifetime. In a 9-year experiment, Harry Bahrick and three of his family members (1993) practiced foreign language word translations for a given number of times, at intelvals ranging from 14 to 56 days. Their consistent finding: The longer the space between practice sessions, the better their retention up to 5 years later.

One effective way to distribute practice is repeated self-testing, a phenomenon that researchers Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke (2006) have called the testing effect. In this text, for example, the testing questions interspersed throughout and at the end of each module and unit offer such opportunities. Better to practice retrieval (as any exam will demand) than merely to reread material (which may lull you into a false sense of mastery).

The point to remember: Spaced study and self-assessment beat cramming and rereading. Practice may not make perfect, but smart practice - occasional rehearsal with self-testing - makes for lasting memories.

LEVELS OF PROCESSING
FOCUS QUESTION:What are the levels of processing, and how do they affect encoding?

Memory researchers have discovered that we process verbal information at different levels, and that depth of processing affects our long-term retention. Shallow processing encodes on a very basic level, such as a word's letters or, at a more intermediate level, a word's sound. Deep processing encodes semantically, based on the meaning of the words. The deeper (more meaningful) the processing, the better our retention.

In one classic experiment, researchers Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving (1975) flashed words at people. Then they asked the viewers a question that would elicit different levels of processing. To experience the task yourself, rapidly answer the following sample questions:



Which type of processing would best prepare you to recognize the words at a later time? In Craik and Tulving's experiment, the deeper, semantic processing triggered by the third question yielded a much better memory than did the shallower processing elicited by the second question or the very shallow processing elicited by question 1 (which was especially ineffective).

MAKING MATERIAL PERSONALLY MEANINGFUL

If new information is not meaningful or related to our experience, we have trouble processing it. Put yourself in the place of the students whom John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1972) asked to remember the following recorded passage:

The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do.. .. After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life.

When the students heard the paragraph you have just read, without a meaningful context, they remembered little of it. When told the paragraph described washing clothes (something meaningful to them), they remembered much more of it-as you probably could now after rereading it.

Can you repeat the sentence about the rioter that I gave you at this module's beginning? ("The angry rioter threw ...") Perhaps, like those in an experiment by William Brewer (1977), you recalled the sentence by the meaning you encoded when you read it (for example, "The angry rioter threw the rock through the window") and not as it was written ("The angry rioter threw the rock at the window") . Referring to such mental mismatches, researchers have likened our minds to theater directors who, given a raw script, imagine the finished stage production (Bower & Morrow, 1990). Asked later what we heard or read, we recall not the literal text but what we encoded. Thus, studying for a test, you may remember your class notes rather than the class itself.

We can avoid some of these mismatches by rephrasing what we see and hear into meaningful terms. From his experiments on himself, German philosopher Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) estimated that, compared with learning nonsense material, learning meaningful material required one-tenth the effort. As memory researcher Wayne Wickelgren (1977, p. 346) noted, "The time you spend thinking about material you are reading and relating it to previously stored material is about the most useful thing you can do in learning any new subject matter."

Psychologist-actor team Helga Noice and Tony Noice (2006) have described how actors inject meaning into the daunting task of learning" all those lines." They do it by first coming to understand the flow of meaning: "One actor divided a half-page of dialogue into three [intentions]: 'to flatter,"to draw him out,' and 'to allay his fears.'" With this meaningful sequence in mind, the actor more easily remembered the lines.

We have especially good recall for information we can meaningfully relate to ourselves. Asked how well certain adjectives describe someone else, we often forget them; asked how well the adjectives describe us, we remember the words well. This tendency, called the self-reference effect, is especially strong in members of individualist Western cultures (Symons & Johnson, 1997; Wagar & Cohen, 2003). Information deemed "relevant to me" is processed more deeply and remains more accessible. Knowing this, you can profit from taking time to find personal meaning in what you are studying.

The point to remember: The amount remembered depends both on the time spent learning and on your making it meaningful for deep processing.

Before You Move On

ASK YOURSELF: Can you think of three ways to employ the principles in this section to improve your own learning and retention of important ideas?

TEST YOURSELF: What would be the most effective strategy to learn and retain a list of names of key historical figures for a week? For a year?