Review of Longterm Memory

1
Review of Long-term Memory

• Organizes and stores info
• Capacity unlimited
• Thought by some to be permanent
• Encoding transfers info from STM to LTM

2
Automatic vs. Effortful Encoding

• Automatic processing
• Unconscious encoding of information
• Examples
• What did you eat for lunch today?
• Was the last time you studied during the day or
  night?
• You know the meanings of these very words you are
  reading. Are you actively trying to process the
  definition of the words?

3
Automatic vs. Effortful Encoding

• Effortful processing
• Requires attention and conscious effort
• Examples
• Memorizing your notes for your upcoming
  Introduction to Psychology exams
• Repeating a phone number in your head until you
  can write it down
• Different levels of effortful processing

4
Levels of Processing Experiment

• Instructions
• A word will appear once a second
• Follow the instructions on your sheet
• Simply check yes or no in the appropriate column
• There will be 42 words total

Horse
Cabbage
Elephant
Gold
Trout
Rabbit
Uncle
Knee
Duck
Memory
Brain
Picnic
Grill
Earlobe
Carriage
Carrot
Aunt
Red
Dog
Mother
House
Indian
Bass
Patient
Ankle
Radio
Blue
Leaf
Boat
Cousin
Barn
Pheasant
Ink
Trunk
Teacher
General
Turkey
Child
Waist
Beach
Image
Book
5
Shallow processing

• Processing only superficial characteristics of a
  piece of information
• Examples
• visual encoding encoding of images
• Does a word contain the letter e?
• Does a word contain all capital letters?
• Was the word in italics?
• acoustic encoding sound-based encoding
• Does a word rhyme with gum?
• Maintenance rehearsal simple repetition

6
Deep levels of processing

• Elaboration focus on meaning of info to encode
  info into LTM
• dont simply repeat items over and over
• tie item to other info in memory
• also called elaborative rehearsal

7
Ways to use deep processing

• Actively question new info
• Think about its implications
• Relate info to things you already know
• Generate own examples of concepts
• Dont highlight passage as you read
• focus on the ideas in the text

8
Which level is more effective?
Deep processing leads to better recall than
shallow processing
9
More evidence for deep processing

• Positive correlation between grades and use of
  elaboration in 5th-grade students
• In an experiment, college students assigned to
  use elaboration received higher grades than
  students not taught elaboration

10
Enhancing encoding

• Dual coding theory
• Mnemonics
• visualization
• key word method
• method of loci
• peg word method

11
Method of Loci

• Imagine moving through a familiar series of
  locations
• the campus, your house, etc.
• Associate each place/room with a visual
  representation of the objects to be remembered

12
Method of Loci
For example, imagine this visual scenario
13
Ebbinghaus experiment

• Can boost memory through repetition
• The more time spent learning information, the
  more you retain
• Experiment
• Day 1 - memorized lists of nonsense syllables
  BAF, HAB, JUV, VEZ, etc
• varied number of repetitions
• Day 2 - examined how long it took to relearn the
  list studied on Day one

14
Ebbinghaus results