General Psychology - Notes for Exam 1 | PSYCH 001, Exams of Psychology

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Our last class of perception allowed us out first glimpse at cognitive psychology, but what else do we study in this field?
Cognitive psychology- the scientific study of internal mental processes

In todays class, we are going to discuss the cognitive psychology topic of memory

Hermann Ebbinghaus  Sought to examine the concept of memory from a purely scientific viewpoint  Had only one subject in almost all of his studied on memory… himself  In these studies, he used lists of nonsense syllables in his attempts to examine how our memory work
His research was based on discovering how fast a normal individual can learn, and forget information. From From this, he was able to generate both  Learning curves  Forgetting curves
Ebbinghaus conducted experiments that varied in the  # of syllables in the list  length of time before checking his memory after “learning” the syllables  length of time before checking his memory after reading the syllables
This variation in timing and the fact that he measure memory after both introduction and memorization of information provided us with a great starting block when it came to examining memory

So What? What does that mean?
Ebbinghaus’ work led us to conclusions about how the mind functions when storing meaningless information that we are asked to recall. It also led other researchers to begin exploring memory in a more systematic way.
However, his work did not tell us about  Our ability to remember information when we are asked to reproduce it in a different manner(this class)  The different types of memory that we have (this class)  Our memories for meaningful information (next class)  How our reproduction of information might be altered(next class)
Free recall  Ebbinghaus’ work
Cued recall  Famous authors
Recognition  Name the dwarfs
Savings  Name the capitols
Implicit memory performance  Impaired memory example Different types of memory categorized by length of storage (temporal)

Sensory memory  Proposed first temporal category of memory  Capacity is thought to be infinite (or at least really large)  Most of this information is said to only last in our memory for a fraction of a second External events Sensory memory Short-term memory Long-term memory Sensory input Attention to important or novel information Encoding Encoding Retrieving

 After this fraction of a second, your brain breaks down the infoinformation and attends to/remembers only the information deemed relevant  Is thought to involve not only vision, but all of our senses
Sperlings sensory memory experiment  

sensory memory is really short

short term memory(aka working memory)
said to have a capacity of 7+ or -2 items  nonsense syllables example  baddeley’s added theory
contains info that out brain deemed relevant (at least for the time being)
info can be stored in this stage of memory from anyweher between 10 sends to a few days (some scientists even argue that this can last up to 6 years)

after that, most researchers propose that memories stored are either a)forgotten(info not regarded as important or pertinent, or b) placed in ou long-term memory

long term memory  A collection of information that we value, have time to remember, and/or deem of use in the future  Information in this part of our memory is often very complex, but also subject to distortions or complete fabrications  There is debate as to whether or not we actually ever forget information once it’s stored on long term memory o Permanent storage that sometimes needs cues to recall information o Mixture of memories that are sometimes forgotten or changed; This change/forgetting can be due to:  Decay of neural connections  Rewriting of neural connections (computer example)
An extra breakdown of memory types
Memories Explicit (declarative) With conscious recall Implicit (nondeclarative) Without conscious recall Facts-general knowledge (“semantic memory”) Personally experienced events (“episodic memory”) Skills-motor and cognitive Dispositions- classical and operant conditioning effects

• 09/17/
• 09/17/