MEMORY
Zarina Katherine
OBJECTIVES
At the end of unit students will be able to understand:
➢ Memory
➢ Types of memory
➢ Components of memory
➢ Memory in children
➢ Different terminologies used in memory
➢ Process of forgetting
MEMORY
The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.
Memory is an important part of our cognitive processes.
Piaget suggests that for infants, the primary focus is on the world
which is immediately present to them, and that previously stored
information does not influence their behavior until late infancy or
early childhood.
It has been said that our individual identities are made up of the
sum total of all of our experiences.
TYPES OF MEMORY
There are five types of memory:
1. Autobiographical
2. Procedural
3. Script
4. Semantic
5. Episodic
TYPES OF MEMORY
Autobiographical Memory
Memories also contain knowledge about ourselves,
our past experiences and lives and things which have
happened to us. This is known as autobiographical
memory.
CONTINUE…..
Procedural Memories
Some of the memories are explicit, in that we
can talk about them and declare what we
remember. We also have implicit memories,
such as procedural memories for skills and
abilities, like riding a bike or driving a car.
Scripts
Memories also contain scripts for
procedures or events – for example, what
happens at a dinner party or a university
lecture.
Semantic Memory
Memories may contain factual information, such as the date of the Battle
of Trafalgar or how many players make up a football team. This kind of
stored knowledge is called semantic memory.
Episodic memory: memory for specific events or occurrences, including
details of time, place and emotions associated with it.
COMPONENTS OF MEMORY
Memory system consists of three major
component processes.
1. Encoding
2. Storage
3. Retrieval
COMPONENTS OF MEMORY
Information is taken in from the world around us, and this process is the part of
memory known as encoding.
That information then needs to be kept, which is the process known as storage.
Initially, information enters our short-term memory store, but may eventually pass on
to our long-term memory store. Finally, we need to be able to bring that information
back out of storage when it is required, and that process is known as retrieval.
Cognitive psychologists also talk about information being held in working memory –
this is the idea that new and existing information often needs to be manipulated, re-
organised and processed in various ways in order for us to understand things, solve
problems or make decisions. Our working memory may therefore determine how
successfully we can do these things.
CONTINUE…….
Memories also store episodic memories for events or occurrences which have
happened in the past.
Remembering your tenth birthday party or your first day at school would be
examples of episodic memories. So our memory systems enable the encoding,
storage and retrieval of very different types of information, all of which are vital for
our functioning in the human world. Yet memory is like an iceberg, in that the parts
which we can easily retrieve are often only a very small proportion of what there
actually is. Much of it is hidden from view or not easily accessible, and the problem
may be in trying to get to it.
MEMORY IN CHILDREN
In the 1950s and 1960s, Robert Fantz, a psychologist studying both
chimpanzees and infants, came up with a research technique which
would enable infant memory to be studied systematically for the first
time.
▪ Fantz noticed that when presented with pairs of stimuli, chimps spend different
amounts of time looking at each member of the pair.
▪ Secondly, he noticed that infants’ preferences for different stimuli change over periods
of time, so that eventually familiar stimuli are given less attention and new or
unfamiliar stimuli are given more attention.
▪ These influential observations by Fantz provided a method of judging whether infants
remember things which they have seen before, even before those infants are able to
talk, and is called the preferential looking method.
▪ This pioneering work on visual recognition memory led to the development of the
visual paired comparison (VPC) task, which has paved the way for a wealth of infant
memory research subsequently.
Stimulus (plural stimuli): anything which elicits or evokes a response,
such as a sound, a picture, a taste or a smell.
Preferential looking method: a procedure for testing infant perceptual
and cognitive skills by observing viewing preferences for two or more
items.
Visual recognition memory: memory for a visual stimulus which has
been seen before. This type of memory can be assessed from very early
in life and so is often used in infant memory research.
TERMINOLOGIES
Attention: the part of our cognitive processes which controls ability to focus efficiently
on specific things and ignore others.
Rehearsal: the repetition of information in a deliberate attempt to aid memory.
Top-down processing: when the processing of information coming in via the senses is
heavily influenced by prior knowledge.
Mnemonics: memory aids which are used to assist with the learning or memorization
of information.
Neuroimaging: techniques which provide images of the structure and/or
functioning of the brain.
Infantile amnesia: a phenomenon whereby memories from the first three or four
years of life are relatively scarce.
Encoding specificity principle: a principle which states that memory is improved
when contextual information present at the time of encoding is also available at
the time of retrieval.
Cues: stimuli which assist with the retrieval of information from memory by
providing a hint or by helping to recreate something of the original encoding
environment.
Repression: a psychological defense mechanism which allows uncomfortable
memories to be stored in the unconscious mind (Post traumatic amnesia).
Suggestibility: how susceptible someone is to ideas or information presented by
others.
Cognitive interview: a technique developed specifically for interviewing
witnesses in legal situations, using principles of memory from cognitive
psychology, to maximize the amount of information which is accurately recalled.
FORGETTING
When a child is unable to recall something, it is often difficult to separate
out the role of the three different memory processes in forgetting.
➢ It could be that information was never encoded successfully in the first
place.
➢ It could be that it has been lost from storage. Or
➢ It could be that the information is stored, but the child is unable to
retrieve it.
It could be that children’s developing working memory affects how
information is used and processed to solve problems or answer
questions, and that this holds the key to understanding what may seem
to be instances of ‘forgetting’.
The mystery of infantile amnesia shows us that it is possible for large
chunks of information to have been forgotten, and yet for us to have
only a limited understanding of why this might be the case.
There are certain instances of forgetting or incorrect remembering which
are worthy of some special consideration – post-traumatic amnesia and
false memories.
Post-traumatic amnesia is when memories are forgotten or repressed
following some traumatic event, and so it occurs when real memories
appear to be lost.
False memories occur when children report something which did not
actually happen