Good day. So this is our first memory lecture for Psych 1107. So what we have here is a sort of a nice demonstration or like illustration anyway of the memory system or one aspect of the memory system. And what it shows us is that we have one form of memory formation or intake, which is at a sensory level.
So whether it's sight. sounds, smells, touch. When we see that or experience that or feel that in the world, it's quickly represented psychologically and neurally and physiologically. And it can be quite extensive and detailed, and then we focus on it. And when we focus on it, we bring it into our mind, our short-term memory, or our sense of consciousness.
And then we look at it and use it and manipulate it and focus on it. And then gradually over time, if we encounter a stimulus over and over again and think about it and process it, it turns into a long-term memory. And so, yeah, so that's three components of the memory system.
And we'll talk about others as well that we'll be working with. But that's the beginning of the memory process. So now I'll talk about some memory basics.
And this first lecture should be relatively... Straightforward, I think. So we'll do memory basics, then we'll do encoding later, storage, retrieval, and forgetting. Okay, before I get to this talk, hopefully you have watched the memory capacity TED Talk link that I provided. It's by a Joshua Fowler.
He basically highlights the importance of memory historically. He talks about a specific memory strategy called the memory palace, which is sort of cool and useful way of remembering large amounts of information. And he generally highlights that with the use of technologies and books and resources and just the materials that we have available to us today, we don't really.
use our memory as extensively and as much as we used to in the past when we didn't have any of these devices. And he thinks that maybe we should try to use our memory a bit more, think a bit more deeply about things and exercise that memory muscle that we have and that it's much more substantial and powerful than you might imagine. So I would like you to watch that TED Talk.
It's motivating and it's also informative. Okay, I was going to tell you about two general types of memories, but I guess we'll begin with by saying memories are like a record, like a representation of everything we've experienced. Not just experienced on the outside world, like our perceptions and our actions. We can have motor memories and experiences and sights and smells and sounds and touches, but it also represents our patterns of thinking. and our patterns of feeling.
And that to the extent that we think about a past event, it's our memory of that event that defines our psychological experience of it. It may not be an exact replica of what we experienced. And that's really not the most important thing, some would argue.
Some people, researchers have started to argue that our memory is sort of defines our psychological experience. states of satisfaction or dissatisfaction and it's the it's our memories of an event rather than the objective reality of the event that are very important psychologically speaking so that's just sort of generally it's important uh two types of memory uh sort of basic explicit memory versus implicit memory or you can say explicit declarative memory you or implicit or procedural memory. So explicit or declarative memory is something that we're consciously aware of. You can declare what you know. You can say something, describe it, summarize it, write about it, or demonstrate it procedurally, like act it out.
So these explicit memories are something we're directly aware of. and we can share with somebody else. A simplest example of that would be studying. You know, you know what you remember about psychology and what you don't, or what you remember about your history class or what you don't. And maybe you intentionally tried to form those memories.
Maybe you studied and reminded yourself and tested yourself and asked yourself a series of questions, and you went through this process of ensuring that you could explicitly recall or recognize or declare certain bits of information that you learned previously. So that's one common form of memory is things you can bring up and talk about or demonstrate. Now, another very important form of memory, but probably doesn't get talked about as much, is implicit or procedural memory, or sometimes called motor memory if you're an athlete.
We often... learn things or detect patterns and that change our behavior and change how we respond to the world but we're not really aware of it we're sort of it's unconsciously expressed these memory formations and we may even have learned them not necessarily but we may have in it and learn these memories also unintentionally simply through repeated exposure over and over and over again and we develop a pattern of responding in the world classical conditioning was an example of that last term And advertisers use that all the time to pair their products with exciting imageries and sounds and sights. And so consistently doing that, you then start to respond almost automatically to having more positive feelings of excitement when you see this product. So it's a form of a memory. It's an unintentional, implicit memory.
And then a procedural memory would be motor memory. You've done something so many times that you just automatically do it and you respond. and behave in a certain way relatively automatically.
So those are the two types, explicit or declarative memory, what you typically think of if you ask somebody, test on a question, or if they know something, an implicit or procedural memory, where you're describing, like you're seeing evidence of learning, evidence of memory, evidence of changes in a person's behavior that's expressed almost unconsciously. One example of explicit memory might be just can you recall, say out loud, write down certain information. So can you retrieve it and express it? So here's an example.
Do you remember the three types of memory on the first slide? Do you? That would be recall.
So I'm not giving you any specific hints or anything. I'm just asking you. And you have to retrieve it from nothing, just from memory and alone. Recognition, on the other hand, is the ability to recognize or identify information when a set of patterns or information is shown to you. So an example of that would be which of the following words was on the first slide or forms of memory was on the first slide.
Was it semantic, episodic, sensory or encoded? So if you recognize sensory memory, then that would be you recognized. those three types of memory on the first slide.
If you recalled it in the first question, you would have said sensory, short-term memory, long-term memory. So hopefully this illustration makes it obvious, but recognition memory generally is easier than recall. And that would also be equivalent to me giving you a multiple choice question, which is recognition versus a fill in the blank, which is a recall. So you get to pick from something. Do you recognize it or not versus there's nothing there and you have to retrieve it purely from memory?
One thing about explicit memory lists that I wanted to mention is that we do know some things about which words in a list of items is remembered more easily or more consistently than others. So one thing about that list, though, is that if. you assume that they're similarly psychologically relevant or salient if you say something very strong and powerful and unique it's going to stand out more and you're going to remember it even if it's in the middle of the list like you know death stab you know something you know intense as opposed to rock battery chair tv car you know death stab it would stand out so as long as the items are similar in intensity or psychological relevance you tend to find the case it tends to be the case that the earliest items are remembered the best and the last items or the later items and this is called the primacy effect when you remember more items from the beginning and the recency effect when you remember more items from the end and this when you put these two things together uh when you get better memory on the first and the last items we call this the serial position effect and this is essentially because you have more time to practice both the early items and the later and the very last items. And you get less interference from more and more words being added to the system. In the very first items, you get, you know, rock, car, battery, you get the early ones right away.
And you have a bit more time and a little bit less interference. And the same thing for the last ones, the very last ones, you have more time to think about, because you're not getting a bunch of items following it immediately. So that's it for the memory basics.