Memory

Kinds of memory Declarative

Episodic-Semantic Non-Declarative The relationship between Conscious and

Nonconscious memory Declarative/Non-declarative revisited Implicit learning Explicit/Implicit memory Process Dissociation

Grounds for distinguishing types of memory Phenomenology of memory

Does it seem there are different types? Knowing how vs. knowing that Different kinds of mental experience

Autobiographical General knowledge

Flashbulb memories Tests for memory

Do the same manipulations of independent variables affect each the same?

E.g. episodic vs. semantic Neuropsychology and neuroscience of memory

Results of brain damage fMRI and PET

Declarative/Non-declarative

Declarative vs. Non-declarative (Procedural) Declarative

“Knowing that” Episodic Semantic

Non-declarative “Knowing how”

Episodic/Semantic

Episodic Memory for a specific instance or episode.

Semantic Memory for conceptual information

How are the two related? Overlap of functional similarity (meaning) of

examples (instances) is integrated into a single concept.

Lose the details and retain the gist.

Episodic memory

Memory for events Time and place “Where did you go for vacation last summer?”

Involves autonoetic (self-knowing) awareness Possibly unique to humans

Tests for episodic memory Free recall Serial recall Paired-associate recall Cued recall Recognition Absolute frequency judgments Relative recency judgments Source judgments Metamory judgments

Episodic memory

Factors affecting episodic memory: Levels of processing Generation effect

Generating information leads to better recall rather than just reading it (Slamecka & Graf)

Repetition Spacing Concreteness

As opposed to abstract E.g. pictures better than words

Distinctiveness Bizarre sentences Unusual faces Atypical category members

Episodic memory

Encoding/retrieval interactions affecting episodic memory Encoding specificity principle

Retrieval cues are effective to the extent that features extracted from the cue match up with those of the memory trace

Transfer appropriate processing Experiences during learning transfer to retrieval to the

extent that test requires appropriate cognitive functions Different expression of same idea (focus on cues

vs. processes)

Episodic memory

Autobiographical memory Diary studies

Linton (1978), White (1982), Wagenaar (1986) Focus on dates, distinctiveness, pleasantness, importance of

events Those recalled best were more unique, emotional, pleasant

Brewer (1988) Ss record events whenever beeper went off Given a cue (time, location, etc.) Those recalled had been rated as more significant, emotional

Episodic memory

Reminiscence bump People remember more events from certain

periods of their life Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes (1986)

Combined the results of four different experiments (N total = 285)

Found a reminiscence bump between 10 and 30 years, when older than 40 years.

Episodic memory

Childhood amnesia Preponderance of

‘firsts’ reminiscence bump

Episodic memory

Autobiographical memories tend to be slow Reconstructed

Good at recognition, but lose the details Barclay & Wellman (1986)

Grad students record everyday events for 4 months Recog test (5 times over 2½ years)

Originals Foils that changed descriptive (surface) details Foils that changed reactions to events Foils that did not correspond to recorded events

Episodic memory

Results Recog of duplicates 94% However… Accepted 50% of foils that changed info and 23%

of novel foils Got worse with time

Semantic memory

General world knowledge Memory for facts

Does not require time, place E.g. The constellation Orion contains the stars

Betelgeuse and Rigel

Initially new facts may contain episodic content, but will eventually become ‘sourceless’ over time

Semantic memory

Typical semantic network

Conceptual nodes Spreading

activation from one item to those associated with it

Semantic memory

How long do items stay in semantic memory?

Bahrick (1984) 50 years of second

language attrition Noticeable decrease first

3 years Leveling off Decrease begins again

after about 15 years

The episodic/semantic distinction Interdependence of two memory systems

makes finding evidence for distinction difficult Forgetting

Episodic memory is more prone to forgetting Bahrick

Good chunk of knowledge remains years later However, certain episodic events also appear

very resistant to forgetting Autobiographical “first time” events (reminiscence bump) “Flashbulb” memories

The episodic/semantic distinction Neuropsychology Patients with amnesia

Retrograde amnesia: loss of memory of events before brain injury

Anterograde amnesia: disruption of memory of events occurring after brain injury, especially a disruption in acquiring new long-term memories Cannot remember doing things five minutes later

Anterograde amnesia

H.M. Severe deficit in creating new memories Can learn procedural (non-declarative, anoetic)

tasks Mirror drawing/reading, tower of hanoi

Cannot learn with tasks requiring conscious remembering Where’s Waldo is a nightmare What am I looking for again?

Can’t keep track of what’s going on in the world

Retrograde amnesia

Korsakoff’s syndrome Test memory for TV

programs, famous people, famous events

P.Z. Recall of info from

autobiography Graded loss

The episodic/semantic distinction Episodic, not semantic memory is impaired in amnesia? Not necessarily Anterograde amnesia

Both episodic and semantic information hard to acquire Gabrieli et al (1988) found little learning in H.M.

“deficits observed here point to an association between semantic and episodic memory, and do not lend support to a distinction between them. The acquisition of semantic and episodic information, therefore, appears to depend upon a common memory system”

Korsakoff’s deficits are for both episodic and semantic PZ demonstrates poor recall of the names of scientists in his

discipline, along with his major life events.

So: amnesia = impairment for both episodic and semantic? If both affected with amnesics, is the distinction necessary?

The episodic/semantic distinction K.C.: frontal brain damage due to a

motorcycle accident Suffers both retrograde and anterograde

amnesia for episodic memory though semantic and procedural memory is intact Could remember how to play chess, knew father

taught him and that he and his father played chess

Couldn’t remember ever playing with anyone else or specifics of times played

Semantic Dementia

Progressive fluent aphasia (Hodges et al., 1992) Degenerative pathology inferolateral temporal cortex (relative sparing of

hippocampus in early stages)

Progessive, selective deterioration in semantic memory, affecting verbal and nonverbal aspects of knowledge about objects, people, facts, concepts and word meanings. E.g. Patients response when shown a picture of a giraffe Time 1: A giraffe Time 2: A tall African animal Time 3: A horse Time 4: An animal Time 5: Don’t know.

Episodic memory is relatively preserved (at least early in the course of the illness)

Brain imaging studies Compare pattern of brain activation when someone is

(1) thinking about astronomy (2) personal memory

Different brain regions were active in the two conditions with (1) activating more posterior regions (2) more frontal regions

The episodic/semantic distinction

The episodic/semantic distinction There is something that seems different (subjectively) about

remembering personal information vs. general world knowledge

However, there is little compelling evidence that the distinction reflects the operation of two completely distinct memory systems.

The debate is still active, and the terms are widely used, just not necessarily in the way in which Tulving proposes

Baddeley speculates that “semantic memories” result from an accumulation of similar episodic memories. They become “knowledge” when we are no longer able to retrieve individual learning episodes (sources)

Non-declarative memory

“Knowing how” Encompasses a broad range of human skills and

abilities Classical conditioning Priming Complex problem solving Motor skill learning

A key difference compared to declarative is the time it takes to enter into memory

Not necessarily verbalizable I don’t know, I just do it

Non-declarative memory

Acquisition of procedures Singley & Anderson 1988 Ss (experienced typists but

not with word processing) learned editing skills on a word processor

Planning time is the difference b/t total and execution time Decreases dramatically

over the six days Decrease in execution time

due to decrease in key strokes (not faster)

Skill Acquisition

“Proceduralization” 3 stages

Cognitive Associative Autonomous

Stages of Skill Acquisition

Cognitive Develop a “declarative” representation of the skill

Associative Transfer declarative knowledge to motor

performance Explore necessary motor skills

Refine representation of the task Declarative representation is incomplete or inaccurate. Add components to representation

Feedback

Stages of Skill Acquisition

Autonomous Procedure is further refined

Increase in speed and accuracy Practice effects

Fine-tuning Loss of declarative (verbal) representation

Sometimes experts make poor instructors

Non-declarative memory

Transfer Appropriate Processing With episodic memory, people retrieve more info when in

the same mood, place or state as initial learning takes place

Same can apply to procedural memory Kolers 1975, 1976 Inverted sentence reading Even after a year they were still better than when they

started out and better for those sentences from the first time around (allowed for the procedures from last time to be used again)

Kolers & Ostry 1974 Recognition better for inverted sentences if were previously

learned that way

Non-declarative memory

Expertise Highly practiced, domain-specific skills

Chess expert’s interrelated knowledge allows for very quick moves early on Memorized rules for best moves of known chess

board arrangements Expert knowledge

Domain-specific procedures + large amount of domain-specific declarative knowledge

Non-declarative memory

Summary: People’s initial knowledge is initially in a

declarative state Practice leads to automaticity Transfer of knowledge to procedural

Can occur with or without ‘awareness’ Curran & Keele (1993): visuospatial task Berry & Broadbent (1984)

Cognitive task (control sugar production) Ss improved without explicit knowledge of how

Conscious/Nonconscious Memory Most of our memory at any given time is

nonconscious E.g. who was your 6th grade English teacher?

Even recall itself can be conscious (explicit) or not (implicit)

What is the link between consciousness and memory?

Memory and Consciousness

Episodic

Semantic

Procedural

Autonoetic“self aware”

NoeticAware of info, not origin

Anoetic“Unaware”

Memory System Consciousness

The relationship between types of LTM and varieties of consciousness (Tulving, 1985).

Memory and Consciousness

Each memory system is characterized by a different kind of consciousness

Autonoetic: aware of the event as a part of one’s own past existence

Noetic: aware of and can cognitively operate on objects, events and their relations

Anoetic: temporally and spatially bound to the current situation; “awareness” unnecessary (automatization)

Man with no memory

N.N. No autonoetic consciousness

for before and after a car wreck Although remembers personal

events, knowledge of past is similarly detached as toward general knowledge (noetic consciousness)

Language skills and semantic memory relatively intact

“Let’s try the question again about the future. What will you be doing tomorrow?”

15 sec pause “I don’t know” “Do you remember the

question?” “About what I’ll be doing

tomorrow?” “Yes. How would you describe

your state of mind when you try to think about it?”

5 sec pause “Blank, I guess.” Regarding yesterday: “same

kind of blankness”

Autonoetic consciousness

The properties of autonoetic consciousness Encompasses personal time: past and future Necessary component of remembering events

Necessary for conscious recall of episodic information Appears later in development

Perhaps until early childhood Selectively impaired or lost in brain damage

N.N. Varies across individuals and situations

E.g. in terms of how much one ‘possesses’ or benefits from in daily life

Can be measured

Implicit Learning

Learn systematic (i.e. rules, organization, etc.) information without explicitly applying (or awareness of) knowledge. Categories Grammars Spatial relation

“’I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ …” Apply the rule (explicit) Behave as if you are applying the rule (implicit)

Behavior is shaped through experience with stimuli (words). Know that “v-i-e-w” is a word and “s-l-e-i-g-h” is a word and

“r-e-c-e-i-v-e” is a word (explicit)

Implicit Learning

Loosely defined as ‘learning without awareness’

Qualifications: Implicit learning of one task may not compare with

that of another Underlying mechanisms, representations could be

different Implicit learning of one task might be possible but

not for another

Implicit Learning

The problem of operationalizing implicit learning Defining awareness Support for IL depends on what is used to assess

awareness What about attention? Separating the mechanisms from the products of

learning One system or two?

Still not resolved

Frensch & Runger 2003

Implicit learning

A: No learning without awareness B: Single learning mechanism, contents may or may

not be accessible to consciousness C: Implicit learning process eventually leads to

explicit learning Tennis player notices improved serve, relates to higher

toss D: explicit learning process for control of behavior,

may then provide input for implicit learning mechanism

E: separate, unrelated systems for explicit and implicit learning

Learning Artificial Grammar Reber (1967) used an Artificial

Grammar defined by a series of rules about how letters may be related to one another Group A learned sequences of

letters generated by the grammar Group B learned random letter

sequences Both groups were shown letter

strings, half grammatical and half random letters

Subjects who learned grammatical sequences recognized 79% of the new grammatical sequences

Implicit learning

Other examples of implicit learning Conditioning Priming Anesthesia Subliminal learning Serial RT task

Learn to respond to spatial location of a stimulus which is presented according to some rule (Nissen & Bullemer 1987)

Complex repeating sequence

Implicit learning

Shanks and St. John (1994) Examine the possibility of dissociable

(implicit/explicit ) learning systems Subjects may know something about the task

they are acquiring, however, whether it is enough to give an explicit explanation is a different matter

Though explicit information is available, it may lack the merit for description

Implicit Learning

The subject must not be aware of the association at time of learning

Information Criterion Must show that the information sought in the awareness

test is really responsible for performance change Learning might reflect some other associations that are

explicit

Sensitivity Criterion Must have a measure of unconscious learning that has the

appropriate sensitivity to the learning Must have access to what all is consciously available

Implicit Learning

Subliminal leaning Much of it is too short-lived (maybe just

perception) Longer lasting effects

How determine threshold? Too many negative results in comparison

Classical conditioning Many studies do not address awareness directly Those that do suggest contingency is learned only

with awareness

Implicit learning

Grammar learning Is verbal report sensitive to test of conscious knowledge?

(Sensitivity criterion) If subjects learned something other than the rules

then asking about the rules may lead to erroneous conclusions (Information criterion)

Servan-Schreiber & Anderson (1990) Strings with gaps T PPP TX VS False alarms for PPPTXTVS 50% of the time Evidence that Ss are only learning particular instances

(explicitly), not unconscious learning of rules

Implicit learning

Anesthesia studies* Same problems with verbal report Different doses for different folks The only instances in which we know for certain in

which someone is UnC there is no learning Shanks & St. John

Although there are some unusual findings out there, the majority of the evidence suggests no learning without awareness

*FYI, it is possible to be conscious during surgery but not remember it afterward.

Explicit/Implicit Memory

Explicit Memory Specific attempt to recall and apply previous

experience Actively encode

Information is used without active encoding. Incidental Memory

Ability to recall information without actively encoding. e.g., Source Memory

Implicit Memory Previous exposure to information changes responses made

without direct retrieval

Explicit/Implicit Memory

Evidence from amnesiacs Damage to hippocampus produces profound deficit in ability to

consciously recollect one’s past No new memories? H.M.

Got better at mirror drawing but never knew he’d practiced it Completion tasks show previous influences

Converse situation Confabulation Awareness of memories for non-existent events

The two situations suggest a complex relationship between retention and expression of prior experience, and the awareness of that experience

What about normal folk?

Explicit/Implicit Memory Explicit test of memory

Visual/Auditory presentation Shallow vs. Deep LOP effect

Implicit test of memory E.g. stem completion

Just complete with whatever comes to mind

Modality effect No LOP

C and NonC forms of memory operate differently

Explicit/Implicit Memory

Divided attention at encoding Affects explicit memory

but not implicit memory Memory can occur in the

absence of reportable awareness

Conscious (explicit) memory of an event not necessary to affect performance

Implicit Memory

“Unrelated” exposure to information increases familiarity of item in a different context. Stem Completion Judgments

Frequency Pleasantness Recency

Priming Readiness to respond to stimuli Familiarity

Implicit Memory

Other Implicit Memory tests/phenomena Perceptual

Mere Exposure Exposure produces a preference.

Perceptual Identification Identifying degraded pictures or sounds

Word-Stem/Fragment Completion _ e m _ _ y

Conceptual Word association Object categorization

Procedural Tower of Hanoi

More Implicit Memory Jacoby

False Fame Effect Two- phase experiment

Phase 1 Read names of non-famous people

Bill Knott Mike Clark Stephen Malkmus

Manipulated attentional demands of participants Half got no manipulation Half had attention divided

Digit monitoring Note when 3 odd numbers in a row

False Fame Effect

Phase 2 Rate the “fame” of names

Old non-famous names from Phase 1 Bill Knott

New non-famous names Hal Hartley

Famous names George Orwell

Informed : “All of the names you read last time were non-famous people.

Some of the non-famous names on this test are names you read previously. If you recognize one of those names, you should respond ‘non-famous.’”

False Fame Effect

Data of interest Rate of misattributions for Old Non-famous items Compared between Full-attention Group and

Divided-attention Group (from Phase 1).

Stephen Malkmus

Famous Non-famous

False Fame Effect

Proportion rated as famous

Divatt group Despite tougher criterion

for calling a name famous (as evidenced by less likelihood of calling new nonfamous names as famous), still more likely to call previously seen names as famous

Fame test New

Famous

New

Non-famous

Old

Non-famous

Full .62 .31 .19

Divided .49 .17 .27

Recognition test

New

Non-famous

Old

Non-famous

Full .00 .63

Divided .11 .30

False Fame Effect

Results Divided-attention Group had more misattributions than Full-

attention Group Also when divatt at test rather than encoding

Full-attention Group could establish strong contextual details at acquisition. At recognition, the details provided for correct rejection. Recollection

Divided attention prevented contextual details. At recognition, undifferentiated information lead only to a feeling of

familiarity Familiarity is then misattributed to the task at hand (fame).

The False Fame Effect is product of using past experience without recollection. Implicit Memory

Separating Conscious and Nonconscious memory Process Dissociation Procedure (PDP)

Jacoby again Some conscious processes may influence

nonconscious processes and vice versa Typical explicit or implicit memory tests do

not address this

Another conceptualization of Implicit-Explicit distinction Recollection

Conscious detail-oriented aspect of experience Familiarity

Undifferentiated unconscious aspect of experience Feeling

Both processes can (and do) contribute to any memory task

PDP Assumes independent concious (C) and unconscious (U)

contributions to memory A means to estimate the relative contributions of conscious

(recollection) processes and nonconscious (familiarity) to some task Intentional vs. automatic

PDP

Two-phase Experiment Phase One

Expose to stimuli (list of words) Phase Two

Complete stems (IM task)

PDP

Uses instructional manipulation “Inclusion”

Recall from previous list or, if that fails, the “First thing that comes to mind”

Performance on the completion task can be the product of both conscious and unconscious processes.

“Exclusion” Participants are instructed to NOT use words from Phase One in

the completions. Participants should use conscious processing to exclude Phase

One words If included anyway, is based on nonconscious processes.

DV = Probability of including word from Phase One in completion task

PDP

Inclusion instructions Involves recollection

and familiarity. p(phase1item|inclusion)

= R +F – RF

= R + F(1 – R) Exclusion instructions

Result of familiarity p(phase1item|exclusion)

= F – RF

= F(1 – R)

PDP

Calculations Recollection (conscious)

process R = Inclusion - Exclusion

Familiarity (nonconscious) process F = Exclusion + RF F = Exclusion/(1-R)  1-R is the probability of

the failure of conscious process.

PDP

Results:

Probability that recollective processes contribute uniquely or in conjunction with familiarity

Recollection = .80-.29 = .51

Estimated probability of including a word due to familiarity or familiarity + recollection

Familiarity = .29/(1-.51) = .59

I .80

E .29

From Jacoby 1991 (anagrams)

PDP

Assumptions Independence Assumption

Recollection and familiarity are independent in the statistical sense. Invariance Assumption

Recollection and familiarity are not influenced by which instructions (inclusion or exclusion) the subject is given.

Problems Some have taken issue with both assumptions

E.g. Perhaps under the inclusion instructions subjects are more willing to respond based on familiarity.  If that were the case then familiarity would be higher in the inclusion condition than in the exclusion condition.

The model cannot take into account that conscious memory performance can be either voluntary or involuntary Items can be remembered as a result of conscious effort, or they may "pop up" in the

mind and are subsequently consciously judged to be study list items Does not take into account subjects’ response biases (and other possible

influences) Serves more as a descriptive device