Hello and welcome to PsychBoost, helping you with your psychological vocation one video at a time. This video is on memory and in this first video we'll be covering processes of memory. The very kind support of students and teachers who donate on Patreon help me help you by continuing to make these videos and resources. A very big thank you for your help guys. To join them, follow the link.
For everyone, you may want to check out the free worksheet for this video and the quiz. Now I imagine you're here to study GCSE Psychology. So here are the terms on the GCSE Psychology specification that we'll cover in this video. As we go through the video they'll be in red text and you need to be able to respond to questions on all of this. So this video will be a shortish video and a bit of an introduction to some of the key ideas in memory that we're going to cover in more detail in the next two videos.
Processes of memory. The whole idea of memory being a process is it's simply information flowing through a system. Think about it like this.
Your teacher tells you a fact. Your senses, in this case your ears, detect information from the environment, the words. After you detect that information you have to store it somewhere and then at some point, like your exam, you're going to need to take the information out of storage and actually use it. That's the process, that's the information flowing through the system. The type of psychologist who explain how information flows in mental systems are called cognitive psychologists.
We need to know the word encoding. This is simply changing the form of information as it comes in so it can be stored in the brain. So you have mental imagery that's stored visually. That inner voice? No, you're not crazy, everyone's got one.
That's acoustic memory. The last one, semantic, is a little tricky. The information is in the form of meaning. Donald Trump.
It's just a name, right? Well, chances are that name has meaning to you. It's linked to a bunch of general knowledge facts.
Facts that jump to my mind are he has unusual hair, he wants to build a wall, and occasionally hugs flax. Oh, and he thinks ejecting bleach is kind of a good idea. Those are the general knowledge facts that link to my memory. They're semantic memories.
Storage is a word you're probably very familiar with, and in this context we're just applying it to how your brain, made of neurons, manages to keep all of that information sometimes for your entire life. Retrieval is getting that information stored by those neurons back and then using it which is output. Let's make a distinction between two types of memory short-term memory and long-term.
Now lots of information comes into the sensors every second but you don't pay attention to most of it. What you do pay attention to is held in your short-term memory. It doesn't last long, about 18 seconds. And when you're holding it there like a phone number, chances are your inner voice is repeating it. So acoustic encoding.
But information that's in short-term memory can be put into long-term memory. You can rehearse information in short-term memory by saying it again and again, and that's maintenance rehearsal. Or by giving it meaning, known as elaborative rehearsal.
What were the four words I put next to Donald Trump's name? Bleach, hair, wall, flag. Elaborative rehearsal. Now we need to break down long-term memory into three distinctive types. Episodic, semantic and procedural.
Episodic memories are how you remember your personal experience. Those things that have happened to you. So if I ask you to remember your first day at high school, you're recalling an episodic memory. You can tell it consciously and you could describe it to me in words. Semantic memory is memory for facts and meanings.
So if I asked you what the word elephant means, you could consciously recall what the word means and put it to me in words. A very different type of memory is procedural memory. These memories are for skills, like how to ride a bike or tie a shoelace.
These memories are actually really difficult to put into words, and we would call them non-declarative. So let's look at some evaluations for the types of long-term memory. Now we can find support for episodic and semantic memories being separate. processes with the work of a psychologist called Tolving. I'm going to go into detail on the study in a future video so let me just give you the basics.
Tolving injected people and himself with a radioactive form of gold. You can detect that gold in the brain on a PET scanner and that shows what part of the brain is active and what part of the brain is not active. Now when his participants thought of episodic memories, areas of the brain in the frontal and temporal lobe lit up.
When they thought of semantic memories, areas in the parietal and occipital lobes that are As different types of memory use different brain regions this suggests that they are separate processes. And then if we look at procedural memory, the case study of HM shows us it's separate from episodic and semantic memory. HM had his hippocampus removed to stop epileptic seizures.
He lost the ability to make new episodic and semantic memories after the surgery but not procedural. A final and critical evaluation is It might be a little simplistic to simply classify long-term memories as just one type. Often memories are complex combinations.
So a child remembering to tie his shoelaces because his mother told him so needs semantic memory for the word shoelaces, episodic memory to remember that he's been told and the procedural memory for how to actually tie them. So now we've covered the content you need to be able to use all that information to actually answer questions. So I'm going to do this for every video coming up. Here are 5 questions I've made to test your skills.
So pause the video and give them a go. For those of you who support me on Patreon though, I've put together an additional bonus video showing you how to answer these questions properly. For everybody else, thanks for watching, liking, subscribing and I'll see you in the next video on memory, structures of memory.