Studying Memory/Memory Retention
Memory: the storage and retrieval of information or skills, learned over time.
It is information that can be acquired, stored, and retrieved.
Three behaviors that show memory is functioning:
Recall: person must retrieve information learned in the past
Recognition: person needs to identify the items previously learned
Relearning: assesses the speed of when learning material again, once it has been forgotten.
Ebbinghaus’ Retention Curve: the more times he practiced on day 1, the less he had to relearn on day 2.
Overlearning of verbal information increases the continued possession, especially over time.
We remember more than we can recall.
Memory Models
Information-processing models are analogies used to compare
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Testing effect: Introduced by Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, testing yourself over the material you are learning helps you better retain information.
Levels of Processing
We process verbal information on different levels: shallow processing, and deep processing (semantic processing).
Shallow processing is processing things at a ground level while deep processing focuses on the meaning of the words being spoken.
Making Material Personally Meaningful
We memorize things more easily if it has a meaningful connection to you. For example, if you're trying to memorize a set of words that have empty meaning, you won't be as successful if you were memorizing words with meaning.
Self-reference effect: if asked to describe someone with adjectives, we are less likely to remember. If asked to describe ourselves, we remember more clearly since no one knows us better than ourselves. It happens more in western cultures since we are usually more selfish than other cultures.
The amount of information remembered all depends on how much time you spent memorizing and whether or not you semantically and meaningfully practiced
Amnesia affects the memory. People diagnosed with amnesia lose memories that occur before the onset of amnesia. Amnesia affects the memory, how well you can store long term memory. If amnesia occurs, one might have trouble with long term memory in the future, or simply forget most of their past. Due to the brains plasticity, the brain can use association areas to help build memory. Amnesia commonly comes in two forms that occur together: Retrograde amnesia and Anterograde amnesia.
Discuss the need for an explanation of human memory, which proposes that memory is a set of stages, rather than a single process.
...ormation that we know we'll need to use later, we try to memorize it by sending it to the long term compartment. Sometimes it stays there, and sometimes it dissolves. By understanding memory you will also know how you learn best. It will also help you to understand how your memory and how to make the best use of your memory. (How Memory Works. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://homeworktips.about.com/od/enhanceyourmemory/a/How-Memory-Works.htm)
Memory is a group of related mental processes that are involved in acquiring, storing, and retrieving information (Hockenberry and Hocenberry page 232). I will be addressing two specific types of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory holds temporary information transferred from sensory memory or long-term memory. Sensory memory is the first stage of memory and obtains information for a brief amount of time. Short-term memory is also called active memory and is stored in the prefrontal cortex which is the most active part of the brain during an activity. Short-term memory can hold information for roughly twenty seconds, but sensory memory holds information for a shorter amount of time. We usually store things such
In the article, “The Critical Importance of Retrieval For Learning” the researchers were studying human learning and memory by presenting people with information to be learned in a study period and testing them on the information that they were told to learn in order to see what they were able to retain. They also pointed out that retrieval of information in a test, is considered a neutral event because it does not produce learning. Researchers were trying to find a correlation between the speed of something being learned and the rate at which it is forgotten
Running head: THE GENERATION EFFECT 1 THE GENERATION EFFECT 6 The Generation Effect Name Institution affiliation The Generation Effect The generation effect is the impact of a stimulus that leads to enhanced memory performance and self-generating information, which is remembered and recalled easier than the one read (Salamoura & Williams, 2006). This memory phenomenon involves active production of certain data during the process of encoding that helps to improve the performance of the memory. The primary objective of this paper is to support the claim that the generation effect is an essential memory technique, which is used in social psychology, neuroscience, and neurobiology.
Mechanical or rote repetition of the information is a great way to remember this information. The more time you spend rehearsing the information the longer the information will be remembered. This is actually a poor way of remembering things because it doesn’t make the information meaningful; “surface processing”. Elaborative Rehearsal is a more effective way of remembering information through “deep processing”, which is relating the information to information you already know. This technique is used in more in the education system than maintenance rehearsal. Even with these two ways to store things we still run into filling errors. Filling errors are where your brain has filed information incorrectly. The final step in the memory process is retrieval. Retrieval is the locating of stored information and returning it into your conscious thoughts. There are a few cues that help us retrieve them, such as priming, context, and state. Priming is the nonconscious identification or words and objects, by referring in to particular representations or associations in the memory just before carrying out the action or task. The memories that come back to your conscious mind when you are in a certain place or area are called context, dependent memories. When you are in a certain emotional state you many retrieve memories of when you were also in that same emotional
Memory is defined as “the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information” (“Tmesis”, n.d.); and it is a purely mental process that always access to stored information. Memories can either be pleasant or unpleasant, but the fact is, they still exist either way. They are an essential part of who we are and without them, we would struggle to establish our identity. Besides being images of the past, memory is equally emotions too. Emotions are the main reason a memory is either stored or forgotten. They are a key factor in memory.
In daily life, memory is used all the time. When we go to buy things, we would remember the list of items what we are going to buy. At school, we would also need to have revision in order to remember the materials for examination. Or even, when we meet friends, we would also need to recall their names. Thus it is important to know and understand how we remember such things so that we can effectively recall them when necessary. Obviously, we do not need to remember the exact position or order of things in daily life. We would have our own pattern for remember and retrieve information (Ashcraft, 2010). This is named as free recall, which items recalled in any order (Francis, Neath, MacKewn and Goldthwaite, 2004). However, many researchers found that the probability of recalling items (such as words, letters, or numbers) does in fact depend on the items position in a list. The most striking finding is that words at the beginning and end of the list are often easier to recall than those words in the middle of the list. Thus, when the results of a free recall experiment are plotted on a graph; a u-shaped serial position curve can be obtained. This is often referred to as the serial position effect that is affecting our memory (Smith, n.d.).
The mechanism of human memory recall is neither a parallel nor a sequential retrieval of previously learned events. Instead, it is a complex system that has elements of both sequential and parallel modalities, engaging all of the sensory faculties of the individual. On an everyday level, issues about memory and recall affect everyone. It has a bearing on ramifications from the trivial to matters of life and death. Thus, a particular student might worry about his or her ability to remember 'memorized' material, a person might worry about losing his or her mind, and, there are the more troubling issue of diseases affecting memory such as Alzheimer's disease. According to Tulving, episodic memory represents only a small part of the much larger domain of memory (Tulving, 1992, p.1). Specifically, episodic memory is the process involved in remembering past events. This paper is a review of research findings on episodic memory with specific attention to episodic memory in adults and infants.
The human body is a complex structure. The brain being the most complex organ has the most work to do. The human memory consists of a process in which memories are stored and remembered. According to Intelegen Inc., there is this unique process of Memory in which the process only involves three stages. In the stages of this process, the memory is formed, retained, and retrieved. There are three stages of the five different types of Memory; the three stages are encoding, storage and retrieval.
Well to begin with there are many ways to improve ones memory when it comes to taking a an examination. One of them being the depth of processing. The depth of processing is basically the more deeply we process information the better we tend to remember it. There are three verbal levels, one being visual, phonological and semantic. Visual and phonological are the two most shallow. So, for me to study and remember the information it would need to go into my semantic. A good way semantic can help with remembering information is by emphasizing what you are reading and by doing so it helps you create deeper levels of processing and it would endure longer in your long term memory. A way that memory works is by following the three systems of memory. It has three parts, sensory memory, short-term
There have been many experiments done on depth of processing and the self reference effect. The Depth of Processing model of memory maintains that how deep something is encoded into a person's memory depends on using certain types of processing. This relates to the self reference effect because it is believed that people have the tendency to remember something better when they can relate it to themselves. People who can personally relate to something have the tendency to embed it deeper into their memory.
Learning to tie shoes and ride a bike requires the encoding, storing, and retrieving of past observations of the procedure. With a lot of practice, children master these skills so well that they are able to remember them the rest of their lives. Memory is the storing of information over time. It is one of the most important concepts in learning; if things are not remembered, no learning can take place. As a process, memory refers to the "dynamic mechanism associated with the retention and retrieval of information about past experiences" (Sternberg 260). We use our memory about the past to help us understand the present. The study or memory in psychology is used in different ways, as well as there are many different ways to study how memory works in humans. In psychology there are many tasks used to measure memory, and different types of memory storages that human's use, such as sensory storing, or short term storing. There are also a lot of techniques that humans use to improve their memory, which they can use to learn, such as mnemonic devices. All these things can be classified as important issues in the study of human memory and ways of learning.
Lieberman, D. A. (2000). Learning, Behavior and Cognition (3rd ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning. [Chapter 7]