NCERT Class 11 Psychology Chapter 7: Human Memory: Stage Model

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Human Memory: Stage Model, Working Memory, LTM & Types|NCERT Class 11 Psychology Chapter 7 Part 1

Memory

  • Retain or recall information
  • encoding, storage, and retrieval
  • Encoding - information is recorded and registered for the first time so that it becomes usable & generates neural impulse
  • Storage – retained and held over period of time
  • Retrieval – bring stored memory to awareness for problem solving
  • The first systematic exploration of memory is credited to Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist of late nineteenth century - we do not forget the learned material at an even pace or completely.Initially the rate of forgetting is faster but eventually it stabilizes.
  • Frederick Bartlett (1932) who contended that memory is not passive but an active process. With the help of meaningful verbal materials such as stories and texts, he demonstrated that memory is a constructive process. Memory undergoes changes over time
  • Memory is not only a reproductive but also a constructive process. What we store undergoes change and modification within one՚s past knowledge and schema.

Information Processing Approach – Stage Model

Illustration: Information Processing Approach – Stage Model
  • Memory is capacity to store information by learning and experience – from vast storehouse of information
  • Computer has RAM (temporary) and ROM (permanent) - Based on the programme commands, the computer manipulates the contents of its memories and displays the output on the screen
  • Based on task to perform – human register information, store and manipulate it – for math calculations would be activated
  • Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968. It is known as Stage Model

Structural Components

  • Sensory Memory – information from senses are registered as replica of stimuli – visual after images (traces of light after it is switched off) or echoic or auditory as reverberations of sound when sound has ceased
  • STM is primarily encoded acoustically, i.e..in terms of sound and unless rehearsed continuously, it may get lost from the STM in less than 30 seconds & is fragile but less fragile than sensory memory. LTM- vast capacity – remember birthdays -encoded semantically, i.e..in terms of the meaning that any information carries

Control Processes

How information flows through various memory stores

Selective Attention

  • STM (silent or vocal) - Maintenance rehearsal - maintain information through repetition and when such repetitions discontinue the information is lost.
  • Chunking in STM – break in groups (chunks as 1947,1949, and 2004 and remember them as the year when India became independent, the year when the Indian Constitution was adopted, and the year when the tsunami hit the coastal regions)
  • LTM- elaborative rehearsals - remembering the meaning of the word ‘humanity’ will be easier if the meanings of concepts such as ‘compassion’ , ‘truth’ and ‘benevolence’ are already in place (associations with new information determine its permanence) – logical framework and link to create mental image
  • For example, earlier it was shown that in the STM information is encoded acoustically, while in LTM it is encoded semantically, but later experimental evidences show that information can also be encoded semantically in STM and acoustically in LTM

Working Memory Model – Baddeley

Illustration: Working Memory Model – Baddeley
  • Multicomponent view of STM 1st by Baddeley – memory is not passive but constantly handled as people perform various tasks as working memory
  • 1st component – phonological loop – limited number of sound and unless rehearsed decay in 2 seconds
  • 2nd component - visuospatial sketchpad
  • 3rd component - Central Executive – organizes information from phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad as well as from the long-term memory. Allocates attention resources for cognitive operations

Levels of Processing

  • Shallice and Warrington in the year 1970 had cited the case of a man known as KF who met with an accident and damaged a portion of the left side of his cerebral hemisphere. Subsequently, it was found that his LTM was intact but STM was seriously affected
  • The levels of processing view was proposed by Craik and Lockhart in 1972
  • Processing of any new information relates to the manner in which it is perceived, analyzed, and understood which in turn determines the extent to which it will eventually be retained
  • Analyze incoming information at more than one level –
  • Structural: physical or structural is first and shallowest level (just shape of letter cat)
  • Phonetic: Intermediate level – phonetic sounds attached to letters and letters to meaningful words
  • Semantic: deepest level – analyze meaning of words – retain for long think of it as cat as animal with 4 legs … .

Types of LTM

  • LTM is Declarative and Procedural (nondeclarative) memories
  • Declarative - All information pertaining to facts, names, dates
  • Procedural – how to ride a cycle
  • Facts retained in the declarative memory are amenable to verbal descriptions while contents of procedural memory cannot be described easily
  • Tulving - declarative memory can either be Episodic or Semantic
  • Episodic – biographical details of our lives, personal life experiences, hard to forget, sometimes happen continuously, emotional – how you feel when you came first in class
  • Semantic – memory of general awareness and knowledge -remember that 2 + 6 = 8 or the STD code of New Delhi is 011. It is affected neutral or not susceptible to forgetting

Other LTMs

  • Flashbulb memories- memories are very detailed, images frozen in memory and tied to particular places, dates, and times – greater effort in formation and deeper level of processing
  • Autobiographical Memory: These are personal memories. They are not distributed evenly throughout our lives. Some periods in our lives produce more memories than others. Childhood amnesia – no memory of 4 - 5-year-old is retained
  • Implicit Memory: many of the memories remain outside the conscious awareness of a person. Person is not aware about it and is retrieved automatically. Example, typist. we are not conscious of the fact that a memory or record of a given experience exists.
  • Contents of long-term memory get represented in terms of concepts, categories and images and are organized hierarchically.

Methods of Memory Measurement

  • Free Recall and Recognition (for measuring facts⟋episodes related memory) – recall in any order. The greater the number of recognition of ‘old items’ , better is the memory
  • Sentence Verification Task (for measuring semantic memory) : it embodies general knowledge that we all possess. Faster the participants respond, better retained is the information needed to verify those sentences
  • Priming (for measuring information we cannot report verbally) : play guitar – from implicit memory. Participants complete parts of seen words more quickly than parts of words they had not seen. When asked, they are often unaware of this and report that they have only guessed

Knowledge Representation and Memory Organization

Illustration: Knowledge Representation and Memory Organization
  • Depending upon how much time people take in responding to questions such as these, the nature of organization in LTM has been inferred
  • Concept – most important unit of representation of knowledge; mental categories of objects and events – similar to each other in one form or another
  • Categories – organized groups of concepts - functions to organize similarities among other concepts based on common features. word mango is a category because different varieties of mangoes can be subsumed within it and it is also a concept within the category of fruit
  • Concepts can be organized in schema – mental frameworks of knowledge and assumption about world – schema of drawing room with objects

1st Level of Concept Organization – Categories and Schemas

  • In the year 1969, Allan Collins and Ross Quillian published a landmark research paper in which they suggested that knowledge in long-term memory is organized hierarchically and assumes a network structure. Elements of this structure are called nodes. Nodes are concepts while connections between nodes are labelled relationships, which indicate category membership or concept attributes
  • According to this view, we can store all knowledge at a certain level that applies to all the members of a category without having to repeat that information at the lower levels in the hierarchy. Sparrow is a bird or animal. Need not repeat sparrow bird, just sparrow is fine – higher cognitive economy – maximum use of long-term memory with minimum redundancy
  • Bartlett – memory as constructive process – Serial reproduction - reading of such stimulus materials was followed by fifteen minutes break and then the participants of his experiment recalled what they had read.
  • Schema was an active organisation of past reactions and past experiences. Schemas refer to an organisation of past experiences and knowledge, which influence the way in which incoming information is interpreted, stored, and later retrieved.

Dual Coding Hypothesis – Paivio

  • An image is a concrete form of representation which directly conveys the perceptual attributes of an object. If you were to come across the word՚school , an image of your own school – both verbally and visually
  • Concrete nouns related to concrete objects coded as images (cow) – this creates mental models
  • Abstract concepts are verbal and descriptive code (truth)
  • Mental models, therefore, refer to our belief about the manner in which our environment is structured and such beliefs are formed with the help of concrete images as well as verbal descriptions – cooking exotic dish

Eyewitness and False Memories

  • Eyewitness Memory Court procedures followed in criminal trials, use the testimony given by the eyewitness of the offense. It is considered to be the most reliable evidence for or against the accused. Experiments carried out by Loftus and her colleagues during mid-seventies showed that the eyewitness՚s memory is susceptible to many flaws. A film clipping of an event (usually a car accident) was shown to the participants. This was followed by some questions, which interferes with encoding of the event. One of the questions was “how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other” .In another question the verb smashed was replaced with the verb contacted – nature of question changed the memory.
  • False Memory An interesting phenomenon called false memory can be induced by powerful imagination of events that did not take place at all. Study carried out by Garry, Manning and Loftus in 1996 and understand the features of false memory.Initially they presented before the participants of their experiments, a list of events that could have occurred in their lives.In the first phase of this experiment, they rated the likelihood that each of these events actually took place in their lives to the best of their childhood memories. Two weeks later, they were invited again to the laboratory and were asked to imagine those events and visualize as if they actually happened to them.In particular, events which were rated low in terms of their likelihood of occurrence, were chosen for the task of visualizing and imagining. This was the second phase of the experiment. Finally, in the third phase, the experimenters pretended that they had misplaced event likelihood ratings which they had obtained during the first phase and therefore requested the participants to respond to the list, once again.Interestingly, events which were rated low on likelihood in the first phase but were later visualized and imagined as real were now rated high. The participants reported that those events actually took place in their lives.

Repressed Memories

  • A traumatic experience emotionally hurts a person. Sigmund Freud - traumatic experiences are repressed into the unconscious and are not available for retrieval from memory. It is a kind of repression — painful, threatening, and embarrassing memories are held out of consciousness.
  • In some persons, traumatic experiences may give rise to psychological amnesia. Some individuals experience crisis and are utterly incapable of coping with such events. They close their eyes, ears and mind to such harsh realities of life, and take mental flight from them. It results in highly generalized amnesia. One of the results of such flights is the emergence of a disorder known as ‘fugue state’ . Persons who become victims of such a state assume a new identity, name, address, etc. They have two personalities and one knows nothing about the other.
  • Forgetfulness or loss of memory under stress and high anxiety (forget in exam even if they know due to nervousness)

Forgetting

Illustration: Forgetting
  • Information to LTM is lost – encoding error or misplaced
  • Ebbinghaus memorized lists of nonsense syllables
  • Rate of forgetting is maximum in the first nine hours, particularly during the first hour.
  • Forgetting due to Trace Decay: Trace decay (disuse theory) is the earliest theory of forgetting. The assumption here is that memory leads to modification in the central nervous system, which is akin to physical changes in the brain called memory traces. When these memory traces are not used for a long time, they simply fade away and become unavailable – due to disuse. Those who remain awake after memorizing (waking condition) show greater forgetting than those who sleep (sleeping condition) .
  • Forgetting due to Interference: Forgetting is due to interference between various information that the memory store contains. This theory assumes that learning and memorizing involve forming of associations between items and once acquired, these associations remain intact in the memory. People keep acquiring numerous such associations and each of these rests independently without any mutual conflict.
  • proactive (forward moving) which means what you have learnt earlier interferes with the recall of your subsequent learning – past learning interferes
  • retroactive (backward moving) which refers to difficulty in recalling what you have learnt earlier because of learning a new material – new learning interferes
  • For example, if you know English and you find it difficult to learn French, it is because of proactive interference and if you cannot recall English equivalents of French words that you are currently memorizing, then it is an example of retroactive interference.
  • Forgetting due to Retrieval Failure: Forgetting can occur not only because the memory traces have decayed over time as suggested by the disuse theory or because independent sets of stored associations compete at the time of recall as suggested by
  • the interference theory but also because at the time of recall, either the retrieval cues are absent, or they are inappropriate – by Tulving
  • Retrieval cues – all birds in one category.

Enhance Memory - Mnemonics

  • Use of image or self-induced organization of learned information
  • Mnemonics using Image - keyword method and the method of loci
  • Mnemonics using Organization – Chunking & First Letter Technique

Mnemonics Using Image

  • Keyword Method: Learn words of any foreign language - This method of learning words of a foreign language is much superior compared to any kind of rote memorization. Spanish Pato for pot – duck in pot full of water
  • Method of Loci: objects arranged in serial order as visual images. For example, suppose you want to remember bread, eggs, tomatoes, and soap on your way to the market, you may visualize a loaf of bread and eggs placed in your kitchen, tomatoes kept on a table and soap in the bathroom

Mnemonics Using Organization

  • Chunking: smaller units to form larger units; increase STM & memory
  • First Letter Technique: Pick 1st letter and arrange other words - VIBGYOR- that stands for Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red

Benefits of Mnemonics

  • Enhance deep level processing
  • Minimize interference (caused by similar content – give period of rest)
  • Give Yourselves retrieval cues (PQRST)
  • Preview, Question, Read, Self-recitation, and Test. Preview refers to giving a cursory look at the chapter and familiarizing oneself with its contents. Question means raising questions and seeking answers from the lesson.

Manishika