Test: Human Memory- 1

Priming describes the (often unconscious) effects of a past event. It is measured by comparing behaviour with and without the preceding event. For example, belief in previously encountered assertions may be primed by the preceding encounter. In this example, the degree to which belief is greater among people who have previously studied the assertions than among people who haven’t is a measure of the amount of priming.

Memory is often studied by comparing two groups of participants or information, organized such that the ‘past event’ occurs for one group but not for the other. Because the only known difference between the groups is the presence or absence of the event, differences observed at the later time are assumed to reflect memory for that event. It is therefore essential to determine that there are no other differences between the groups.

All of the behaviours indicated above can be observed in some form and indicate that human beings have memory for past events. People can recall information using specific and non-specific cues, identify past information when it is presented at a later time, experience feelings of familiarity and show priming effects of a previous encounter with some stimuli.

Another common distinction is between explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory involves conscious awareness of the original information or the situation in which the learning occurred, and recollection of the original information or experience that is subsequently recalled. As these experiences involve a recollective experience, Baddeley (1997), among others, prefers to refer to ‘recollective’, rather than explicit, memory. Implicit memory refers to an influence on behaviour, feelings or thoughts as a result of prior experience, but without conscious recollection of the original events.

Making generalizations about memory and the brain is difficult because remembering is a complex process, involving most other cognitive and emotional aspects of a person. So many parts of the brain will be active when someone is remembering. We cannot just remember something without also feeling and thinking, so it is very hard to isolate any neural activity that might be unique to remembering.

Schemas refer to the knowledge structures that help us make sense of familiar situations and guide our experiences within these situations. Sketches, schemes, episodes, and loops do not refer to these knowledge structures.

Bower and his colleagues (1969) found that presenting the words in meaningful hierarchies reduced the learning time to a quarter of that required for the same words when they were randomly positioned in the hierarchy. The organization of the hierarchy apparently emphasized aspects of the words’ meanings, which appeared not only to simplify the learning of the lists but also to provide a framework within which the participants could structure their recall.

Half of the participants were told that Nancy was pregnant, which lead to increased errors in recall and recognition of information from the passage. As expectations were the primary variable manipulated, this was identified as the cause of the errors in memory. The other answers given above were not associated with the memory errors.

Retrieval-induced forgetting refers to the improved memory for repeatedly tested or rehearsed information and the failure to remember less practiced or rehearsed information.

The better recall of items presented toward the end of a list is referred to as the recency effect. The other terms provided are not used to describe these observed differences in the recall of items based on their serial position.