History of Memory Research

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History of Memory Research
Lecture 1
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History of Memory Research

• Powerfully influenced by prevailing zeitgeist of
  the times
• Zeitgeist - Time Spirit
• The ideas prevalent in a period and place
• Examples of Zeitgeists

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Mental Set

• A perspective and/or set of assumptions that
  define how people view a problem, often
  constraining alternative approaches in some
  fundamental manner.

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Examples of mental sets
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IMAGE1 Easy
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Nine Dot Problem

• Connect all 4 dots with 4 lines

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Insight Problems

• 6 coin problem
• 6 matchstick problem
• Lilly pond problem
• Elevator problem
• 56 BC problem
• Twin problem
• Marsha and Marjorie were born on the same day of
  the same month of the same year to the same
  mother and the same father yet they are not
  twins. How is that possible?
• Goat problem
• Main point. Mental set defines how you see the
  problem and what type of solutions you attempt

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What are some examples of Zeitgeists in
Psychology?

• Behaviorism
• Cognitivism
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Material reductionism
• Provides a mental set that defines how people see
  the issues

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Ebbinghaus- 1885

• Mind-set- Reductionistic
• believed that an understanding of memory could be
  reduced to the formation of simple associations
  among nonsense syllables
• Procedure
• careful experimentation
• developed first experimental examination of
  memory
• quantified his results
• demonstrated the viability of an experimental
  examination of memory
• Nonsense syllable procedure
• Consonant Vowel consonant list
• Repeat until two perfect reproductions
• Measures of retention
• Recall
• Free Recall- order not important
• Serial Recall- recall in order studied
• Recollection
• Try to distinguish studied from non-studied
• Savings
• Number of repetitions required to re-memorize list

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Ebbinghaus findings

• Serial Position Curve
• Tend to remember the first and last items studied
  the best
• Forgetting-
• Forgetting curve, rapid then more slow
• Overlearning- additional rehearsals past mastery
  results in
• Slower forgetting
• Greater savings in relearning

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Behaviorists

• exclusive focus on behavior
• believed that internal representations were
  beyond the scope of science
• limited to operationally defined behaviors
• all behavior can be understood in terms of a set
  of relatively basic learning principles
• all behaviors are learned
• classical conditioning
• associate biological responses to learned stimuli
• bell causes saliva
• operant conditioning
• associate learned response to learned stimuli
• Approach dominated psychology from the 30s-60s

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Verbal Learning Tradition (continued)

• ABAC list learning
• Experimental group
• Learn AB pair
• Learn AC pair
• Control
• Learn AB
• Learn CD
• Test
• AB (retroactive interference)
• AC (proactive interference)
• Explanations
• Mcgeogh- response competition-
• AC competes with AB (both associations exist)
• Melton and Irwin
• Response to AC causes the extinction of AB
• long debate we will return to later

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Principles of Associationism

• Ebbinghaus and the behaviorist tradition defined
  and constrained by this perspective.
• three basic principles
• connectionistic
• associated through experience
• reductionistic
• can be decomposed into basic bits
• additive
• all knowledge can be understood as the additive
  consequence of relatively straight forward
  principles

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Rationalist Approach

• Basic premises
• nativism-
• people are born with concepts and proficiencies
• Holism-
• the whole is more than the some of its parts
• emergent properties
• Intuitionism-
• focus on the importance of subjective experience
• what does the tip of the tongue experience feel
  like
• Minority perspective in psychology up until the
  cognitive revolution

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William James

• American philosopher psychologist at the turn of
  the century
• master of characterizing subjective experiences
• Coined the term stream of consciousness
• Identified different types of subjective
  experiences
• differentiating different types of non-recall
  states
• Suppose we try to recall a forgotten name. The
  state of our consciousness is peculiar. There is
  a gap therein, but no mere gap. It is a gap that
  is intensely active. A sort of a wraith of the
  name is in it, beckoning us in a given direction,
  making us at moments tingle with the sense of our
  closeness, and then letting us sink back without
  the longed for term. If wrong names are proposed
  to us, this singularly definite gap acts
  immediately so as to negate them. They do not
  fit into its mold. And the gap of one word does
  not feel like the gap of another, all empty of
  contents as both might seem necessarily to be
  when described as gaps.

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Gestalt Psychologists

• developed theories of perception based on the
  notion that the whole is more than the sum of its
  parts (Gestalt)
• phi phenomenon
• Wertheimer on the train
• perceptual clustering involves goodness of
  organization

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Gestalt theory of memory

• assumed a memory trace
• internal representation
• assumed that memory was dynamic
• changed according to principles of goodness
• more symmetrical
• more simple
• etc.

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Alternative account of gestalt findings

• verbal labels
• Carmichael , Hogan and Waters
• Peoples memories change to fit labels

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Bartlett

• Emphasized dynamic nature of memory
• Introduced notion of schemas
• Knowledge structure that influences how one
  interprets and remembers a situation
• War of the Ghosts
• One night two young men from Egulac went down to
  the river to hunt seals, and while they were
  there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard
  war-cries, and they thought "Maybe this is a
  war-party". They escaped to the shore, and hid
  behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard
  the noise of paddles, and saw one canoe coming up
  to them. There were five men in the canoe, and
  they said
• "What do you think? We wish to take you along. We
  are going up the river to make war on the
  people".
• One of the young men said "I have no arrows".
• "Arrows are in the canoe", they said.
• "I will not go along. I might be killed. My
  relatives do not know where I have gone. But
  you", he said, turning to the other, "may go with
  them."
• So one of the young men went, but the other
  returned home.
• And the warriors went on up the river to a town
  on the other side of Kalama. The people came down
  to the water, and they began to fight, and many
  were killed. But presently the young man heard
  one of the warriors say "Quick, let us go home,
  that Indian has been hit". Now he thought "Oh,
  they are ghosts". He did not feel sick, but they
  said he had been shot.
• So the canoes went back to Egulac, and the young
  man went ashore to his house, and made a fire.
  And he told everybody and said "Behold I
  accompanied the ghosts, and we went to fight.
  Many of our fellows were killed, and many of
  those who attacked us were killed. They said I
  was hit, and I did not feel sick".
• He told it all, and then he became quiet. When
  the sun rose he fell down. Something black came
  out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The
  people jumped up and cried.
• He was dead.
• Observed
• Sharpening Some details are remembered extremely
  well.
• Rationalizing Some details are altered in the
  direction of cultural expectations.
• Omissions Some information is recalled very
  poorly.

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Problems with Behaviorist approach

• focused exclusively on contiguity ignored all
  sorts of associations
• meaning
• logic
• Ignore the relationship between items
• concept of chunking became a central component
  of subsequent information processing approaches
• Ignored the role of perception in characterizing
  what is encoded and what is retained
• Cannot deal with semantic meaning
• Chomskys scathing review of Skinners verbal
  behavior
• grammar and syntax cannot be reduced to
  associations
• need to conceptualize the underlying meaning and
  rules
• bring, brang, brung
• simply failed to explain many phenomenon

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Sources of the cognitive revolution continued

• Information processing
• George Miller and chunking
• borrowed from information processing theory
• Can think of information flowing through the mind
  like information flowing through a computer or a
  telephone system
• channel capacity- upper limit on the amount of
  information that can be transmitted
• led to the notion of capacity in human memory
• 7 plus or minus 2
• Chunking
• group input events
• apply new name
• remember name rather then input

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Sources of the Cognitive Revolution cont.

• Linguistics
• Chomsky
• Transformation rules
• Deep structure
• Computer science
• Key figures
• Simon and Newell
• Miller, Galantner and Pribram
• Important concepts
• Goals- an explicit definition of the desired end
  state
• Means/ends analysis
• Given a current state and a goal state, an action
  is chosen which will reduce the difference
  between the two.
• Subroutines
• is a portion of code within a larger program,
  which performs a specific task and can be
  relatively independent of the remaining code.
• Symbolic representation- an arbitrary symbol that
  corresponds to something else

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Sources of the Cognitive Revolution cont.

• Psychology
• Ulric Neisser defined cognitive psychology
• Emphasis on the analogy to perception
• Dynamic quality of memory