PSYC 2501 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7.2: Synapse, Long-Term Potentiation, Free Recall
26 Apr 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Chapter 7
Organizing and Consolidating Memories
o Organizing information
• Group items together
▪ Retrieval cue
• A word or other stimulus that helps a person remember
information stored in memory
▪ Presented words to be remembered in organizational tree
• Studied separate trees of information
• In recall test, subjects tended to respond in same way trees
were organized
• If trees included random assortment of words, subjects
remembered MUCH less words than if they were organized
together
▪ Bransford & Johnson
• Asked subjects to read confusing passage that is difficult to
picture
• Other group asked to look at picture first then read passage
• Subjects who saw picture before remembered twice as much
information from passage as subjects who saw the picture
after reading
o Relating words to survival value
• We can understand how memory works by considering its function,
because memory was shaped to increase the ability to survive
• Linking words to survival created memory that was better than counting
vowels or elaborative tasks
o Retrieval practice
• Practice tests result in better memory
• Retrieval
o Retrieval cues
• Words or other stimuli that help us remember information from memory
• Free recall
▪ Subject is simply asked to remember stimuli
• Cued recall
▪ Subject is presented with retrieval cues to aid in recall of the
previously experienced stimuli
o Matching conditions of encoding and retrieval
• Retrieval can be increased by matching the conditions at retrieval to the
conditions that existed at encoding
o Encoding specificity
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
