MEMORY (3 MEMORIES)

Table of contents

• 3 Terms Used to Describe Memories
• Visual Overview of the 3-Box Model
• Box 1: Sensory Memory
• Box 2: Short Term Memory
• Box 3: Long Term Memory (LTM)
• 2 Problems with LTM (encoding and retrieval)
• Solving Problem 1: Getting the information into LTM (the encoding problem)
• Reasons for Problem 2 (the retrieval problem)
• Solving both the encoding and retrieval problems: Mnemonics
• Two important similarities between LTM and a library
• Two important differences between LTM and a library
• Believing these 7 memory myths will hurt your test scores
• Review activities

3 Key Terms Relating to Memory's 3 Processes

To understand diamonds, you need to know about their four qualities: Cut, Carat, Clarity, and Color--what jewelers would call the 4 C's of diamonds.
To understand memory systems, you need to know about their three qualities: Encoding, Storage (container size and duration), and Retrieval (recovering)--what you could--but shouldn't--call the 3 c's of memory:*
 

*If you did call Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval "the 3 c's," how would you remember what the 3 terms are really called? Besides, what would people think? Probably that you are no different from those who talk about the 3  K's: Koding, Keeping, and re-Kollecting--except that you can spell.☺

1. Encoding: Putting information in to the memory (converting the information into a code that the memory will accept--as you will see, different memories use different codes. In a sense, different memories speak different languages.)
2. Storage: Keeping information in the memory (how much can be stored-- and for how long?)
3. Retrieval: Getting information that is in the memory out of the memory so we can use it (accessing/recovering what is in memory)

To help you understand what Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval are and to help you remember that they are memory's 3 active and independent processes, watch this short (26 second) animation.

Point not to overlook when focusing on memorizing definitions of each of the 3 processes: Rather than viewing your memory as just a storage space, realize that storing information is just 1 of  3 active processes that make up what we call memory.

Point that often trips up students: The 3 key qualities are independent--being good at one doesn't mean the memory is good at another. For example, a memory that has good storage capacity will not necessarily be good at retrieval.  To see why,  imagine two memories--one that is like a shoe box, and one that is like a poorly organized attic. The shoe box memory would be bad at storage (not much could be stored) but would be great at retrieval (if something is in the shoe box, it would be easy to find). The messy attic memory, on the other hand, would be great at storage (lots of stuff could be dumped in there) but would be poor at retrieval (it would be hard to sort through all the junk scattered throughout a dark, messy attic to find the one thing you needed). To reiterate, just as knowing a diamond's size doesn't tell you about its clarity, knowing that a memory has good sized storage space doesn't tell you that the memory is good at retrieval.

Take home lesson: If you are having a problem remembering names, class material, or some other information, the first step to solving that problem is to figure out which memory process is failing you. You may be able to pinpoint the source of your problem by asking 3 questions:

1. Did the information ever get it into my memory? (If not, you have an encoding problem.)
2. Did the information fall out of memory or get corrupted/damaged in my memory? (If so, you have a storage problem.)
3. Is the information still somewhere in my memory, but I am failing to find it? (If so, you have a retrieval problem.)

Take a short (just 4 multiple-choice questions) quiz over encoding, storage, and retrieval.

The 3-box model (Your 3 memories as 3 boxes)

Take home lesson: If you want to improve your memory for names or school material, you should figure out which memory is letting you down. Often, people will blame their long-term memory when the information never got to long-term memory. For example, many "memory problems" are really attention problems (i.e., inattention prevented information from getting into short-term memory, which then means the information couldn't get into long-term memory). So, to identify why you are not remembering something, not only do you have to determine whether the problem is at encoding, storage, or retrieval (as discussed in the previous take home lesson), but you also have to determine which memory box is the problem because encoding, storage, and retrieval are different for each box. To see how encoding is different for each box, watch this 22-second animation.

Terminology note: Synonyms for "memory" include "register" and "store."
So, you may hear sensory memory referred to as "sensory register" or as "sensory store."
Similarly, you may hear short-term memory referred to as "short-term register" or "short-term store."
Guess what two other terms you may hear for long-term memory (LTM)?

Box 1: Sensory Memory (abbreviated SM)-- a very brief, exact copy (a trace) of what you just sensed

Imagine that you are looking at the television, but not paying attention to the program because you are talking to a friend. Suddenly, your friend points to the television set. Thanks to your sensory memory, you can hit a rewind button in your mind that allows you to replay the last little bit of the program.
If you replay the audio from the program, you are using your echoic memory: the sensory memory for hearing that allows you to, in a sense, hear an echo what just happened. 
  Being able to use your echoic memory to replay the last 3-5 seconds of what your ears just sensed, allows you to

• Know whether a sound is coming from your right or your left because your echoic memory helps you figure out whether the sound hit your left ear or right ear first. You are so good at figuring out where sounds come from that you can learn to "see" with your ears--a little like a bat does!
• Effortlessly keep all the sounds of an entire word together. (If you don't believe me about how effortlessly you do this or you just want to see what a pain it is to understand spoken words without echoic memory, click the first link below--but remember, I did warn you! Then, to appreciate how effortless understanding speech is with echoic memory, click the second link below. After that, you will probably want to thank your echoic memory.)
  1. When speech is artificially slowed down so much that you can't use echoic memory to keep the sounds together, you can still understand words, but you will probably find the effort to understand the words both exhausting and unpleasant (demo#1).
  2. With speech presented at a normal rate, you can use echoic memory, so keeping the sounds together is much easier. (demo #2)
• Replay words or phrases that you initially misheard (e.g., you may have misheard "plan it" as "planet" or euthanasia" as "youth in Asia").
• Act like you were listening when you weren't. For example, suppose a teacher believes you were not listening. Although you weren't listening, you say you were.  The teacher responds by asking, "Well, then, what did I say?" You may have used your echoic memory to repeat the last few words of what the teacher said even though you weren't listening. Two practical implications:
  1. The next time someone says "what?" or "huh?" right after you said something, rather than repeating yourself, you could simply make them use their echoic memory to hear an "echo" of what you just said. 
  2. If your "listener" keeps repeating the last few words of your sentences, do not assume they are really listening to what you are saying.

If you replay the image that was on the television screen, you are using your visual sensory memory (typically called iconic memory). Iconic memory is, in a sense, a picture drawn in rapidly disappearing ink. See a very short (less than a second) demonstration of how quickly information decays from iconic memory Because pictures in  iconic memory are copies of what you just saw, are "drawn" automatically, and usually fade in less than half a second, it wasn't until

• 1740 that a scientist discovered iconic memory (the first 20 seconds of this youTube video resembles a re-enactment of that discovery). Iconic memory (persistence of vision) is usually easy to overlook because it is (1) an exact copy of what you saw, (2) automatic, and (3) fleeting.
• 1960 that a scientist discovered that sensory memory could hold more than a few items. Click on one of the links below to find out more about how that scientist--George Sperling--figured out that sensory memory was large but short.
• our one-minute animation explaining how George Sperling's classic, clever experiment showed how large iconic memory really was
• a video discussing George Sperling's experiment (with audio)
• short (1 paragraph) description of George Sperling's experiment
• Today (probably) that you realized that if you watch a 2-hour (non-digital) movie in a movie theater, you are looking at a blank, dark screen for 1 hour (explanation).

If slides are projected on a screen at a rate of 12 slides or more per second,  the slide on the screen stays in your iconic memory during the gap between slides.
Because you don't see a gap between the slides, you see "moving pictures" (i.e., "movies" or "motion pictures"). 
If slides are projected at a rate slower than 12 a second, the previous image is gone from iconic memory before you see the next image. Because you see a gap between each slide, you see a slide show rather than a movie.

 Iconic memory does not seem to be related to what we consider intelligence:

• Some people have relatively long iconic memories (these people are called "eidetikers"). Their "photographic memory" can hold an image for seconds or even minutes. However, their superior iconic memory seems to be a worthless superpower: Most people who have it tend to be young children--and those children usually outgrow it. In addition, college students who are eidetikers seem to get, if anything, lower grades than other college students.
• Chimps do not do well on human tests of intelligence. However, young chimps have better iconic memories than we do. See chimps demonstrate their amazing iconic memory (Although many press reports credited the chimps' impressive performances to "short-term memory," the chimps' impressive performances were probably due to having impressively long iconic memories. That is, young chimps, like some young human children, seem to be eidetikers.)

Transition of information from Sensory Memory to Short Term Memory

Box 2: Short-Term Memory (abbreviated STM, also known as "Working Memory")

Short-term memory is small. To emphasize STM's limited capacity to hold information, STM is often compared to other objects that have limited capacity: small buckets,  small funnels, and small sponges. To further emphasize the fact that STM can't hold much information, STM is often referred to as "the bottle neck of the memory system."

• Take one minute to play a guessing game that will help you understand that STM's limited capacity is usually about 7 items. Two important points:
  1. By "about 7 items," we mean that not everybody would hold 7 items: Some can't hold that many; others can hold more. If you were to ask 10 people to repeat back random digits back to you, chances are pretty good that all of them could repeat back at least 5 items and that none could repeat back more than 9.  Consequently, psychologists say that most people can hold between 5-9 items in STM. To show off that psychologists can do some math, rather than say that people can hold 5-9 items, psychologists like to say that most people can hold  7 plus or minus 2 items. Perhaps because people, on average, can hold 7 items, 7 seems to be a "magical number" that everyone sees a lot: 7 days of the week, 7 numbers in a phone number, 7-point rating scales, 7 wonders of the world, 7 primary colors, 7 musical notes, and 7 deadly sins (originally, there were 8 deadly sins).
  2. By usually, we mean that people can hold about 7 items if they treat each item as a unit; that is, if each item is a separate chunk. People can hold more than 7 items by chunking: grouping two or more individual items into one unit. We will discuss chunking soon, but for now, just realize that STM's capacity is not 7 plus or minus 2 items; instead, STM's capacity is 7 plus or minus 2 chunks.  If visuals help you, mouse over this text.
     
     
      
• Because STM is so small, if you are reading while distracted, very little of what you read will get into STM, and, therefore, very little of what you read will have any chance of getting into LTM. Furthermore, what little gets into STM will probably be quickly bumped out--and therefore also have little chance of getting into LTM. One way to focus your attention is to read in a distraction-free environment and to read with the purpose of answering questions. To have questions to answer, you could turn the chapter headings into questions before reading the chapter.
• Because STM is so small, when you are introduced to a complex concept,  you may not be able to absorb it all at first. As a result, you may have an oversimplified version of the real concept. Unfortunately, students sometimes think they know the concept when they really only know one or two of the concept's several key features.
• An example of short-term memory being small:  a child trying to remember of phone message (from Candid Camera)
• An example of how criminals take advantage of the small size of short-term memory 

Short-term memory is short (it typically lasts about 20 seconds)

• If you need to remember certain information from lecture, you must transfer it to your notes or to your permanent memory within 20 seconds from the time you stopped rehearsing it. Otherwise, that information will be gone forever.
• One advantage of having a short STM is that you can quickly see if anything you read got beyond STM: If you try to summarize what you read 2 minutes ago, what you can recall is in permanent memory--whatever was only in STM left more than a minute ago.
• A fictional but humorous example of the problem of having an extremely short STM (from Monty Python)

• You can keep information in STM for longer than 20 seconds if you constantly pay attention to that information. For example, if you repeat a phone number for 5 minutes straight, you can keep that number in STM for 5 minutes. (Repeating information to yourself is called by three names: "Type 1 rehearsal," "Maintenance rehearsal," and "Rote rehearsal." As you will soon see, although repeating information to yourself is good for maintaining information in STM, repeating information is not very good for moving information to LTM.)
• You can't keep information in STM for even 20 seconds if your attention doesn't stay on that information. For example, if you try to remember 5408547 and then are also given 8416532--or are distracted by someone talking to you or by your own thoughts about something else--the original information will be pushed out (displaced) from STM because there isn't room for much in STM.  (Short demo: Experiencing extreme displacement)

Short term memory (also called working memory) is your conscious mind

• You are aware of everything in your STM. Without STM, you might do things, but not be aware that you were doing them. Right now, you often do many things without awareness, like breathing, balancing, and (sometimes) driving. Without STM, everything you did would be done without your being conscious of doing it. You would have no mental life, so you might act like a sleepwalking zombie robot, and you might feel nothing--as if you were always in a deep, dreamless sleep.

• Put another way, short term memory (STM) is not just a storage container for whatever you are aware of at the moment--It is your conscious mind. That is, STM is where you do your conscious thinking--where you silently speak to yourself.
• If you pay attention to something, it is in STM. However, paying attention to things is not easy.  Fortunately, however, there are easy things you can do to increase your ability to attend to lectures such as sitting up front and keeping your cell phone out of sight.
  • Simple attention test of one type of attention.
• Because short-term memory is the work space where you do much of your mental work, STM is often called "working memory." Because working memory is your conscious mind and because your conscious mind is complex, many psychologists break down STM into several parts (to learn about those parts, look at this diagram).

Although there are many aspects to STM, in this page, for simplicity's sake, we will focus on  two of STM's roles: (1) holding information in consciousness and (2) being the narrow, shaky bridge through which information goes in and out of  LTM.

Because working memory is limited (it holds, at most, 5-9 chunks [chunks are groups of items]), our thinking and our attention are limited. Specifically,

1. We can only pay attention to a few things at a time, so multi-tasking can't work.
Examples showing that we can only pay attention to a few things at a time:
• Color changing card trick
• See if this online magic trick works on you (or your friends)
• The greatest pickpocket in the world
Analogies to help you understand that we can't multi-task:
• Suppose you can barely juggle 2 balls. In that case, this is what would happen when you tried to juggle more than 2 balls.  Similarly, juggling too many things in STM means something will be dropped.
• You start up your computer and have a single program running. Then, you open up another program. Soon, you have seven programs working at once. At that point, your computer slows down and  may even crash because there are limits to how well your computer can multitask. (To free up your computer's short-term memory so that your computer works normally, you will need to close the extra programs-- and you may even need to restart your computer.) The problem with this analogy is that you aren't nearly as good at multitasking as your computer is.
2. Teachers and presenters may overwhelm their audience's STM by going too fast or by presenting too much information on a PowerPoint slide.
3. The complexity of the world can't fit in STM, so we oversimplify the world, leading to not seeing differences between people, to stereotyping, and to seeing things in terms of absolutes (i.e., seeing things in terms of black and white rather than in terms of shades of gray).

What is chunking and how does it allow us to keep more information in STM?

The way to get around the limits short-term memory's limited size puts on us is to chunk: group several different individual bits into one unit.  For example, U.S. citizens could group the twelve numbers "177  614  922  02  2"  into three chunks:
1776     1492     2022.

In the "1776, 1492, 2022" example, you grouped (re-grouped?) the information into chunks by connecting the presented information to organized units of information that you already had stored in your permanent memory. Specifically, instead of having to remember 12 numbers, you just had to "point" to 3 chunks of information you had stored in your permanent memory. If you can't connect new information to units you already have stored in permanent memory, you will not be able to chunk that information until you create those units (so, for Americans, "FBI" is one chunk, but "BFI" probably is not). You can create a new unit by cementing together isolated information bits and then storing those connected bits as one unit in your permanent memory. For example, you could link together the many individual words that define "iconic memory" and then store those words in your permanent memory as a single unit.  After you have done that, you will be able to hold the entire definition of that term as a single chunk in STM  by "pointing" to the place in your permanent memory where you have that definition stored. Note that when you first encountered iconic memory's definition, it was "too big" for your STM, but now--or soon--it will only take up one chunk of your STM's 5-9 chunk capacity.  So, once you learn a psychological term, you increase your ability to chunk psychological information.

• Paper clip analogy (photo)
• Computer analogy (screenshot)
• 33-second animation

But why chunk information? (Why are big chunks better?)

To see the power of chunking, consider experts. Experts have formed large chunks of information related to their field. As a result, they can hold a large amount of that information in their head while still having room in their working memory to think about that information. So, when thinking about their field, they can think about many things at once (e.g., chess experts, physicians, and football coaches can quickly absorb much more information about their fields than the average person can--if the experts can chunk that information). Note, however, that if experts are thinking about things outside of their field--where they can't chunk as well--their thinking is much more limited (one of many reasons why supposedly smart people do stupid things).

Some chunks that you may have learned that have made you more expert:

• Aspects of driving, like backing out of your driveway, no longer involve thinking through many separate steps. Instead, those steps have been connected and combined into one chunk.
• Reading is no longer a matter of sounding out each letter. Instead, you have learned to chunk letters into words and to chunk familiar words into phrases. As a result, you can read much faster and better than when you first learned to read. Under some conditions, you can even keep an entire paragraph in STM.
• You have learned key terms in a field (e.g., in psychology, "sensory memory"; in basketball, "zone defense") that contain a lot of information but take up only a single chunk in your STM. As a result, you can now think about these concepts in relationship to other concepts whereas, at first, just trying to know what the concept meant would overfill your STM. (You may have been in a class where some students were having no trouble keeping up with the pace of the professor's lecture whereas others were really struggling to keep up and were asking the professor to slow down and to repeat things. The students who were having an easier time keeping up may have been the ones who read the book before coming to class and so were able to process the professor's lecture in paragraph-sized chunks. In contrast, the students who couldn't keep up may have been processing the professor's lecture in word-sized chunks--i.e., one word at a time.)
• When you first are told about a complex term or concept, you may think you have grasped the concept when, in fact, your short-term has only allowed you to grasp one or two elements of the concept. If you don't realize that your STM has limited you, you may only find out that you do not understand the concept when  you are tested on it. If, however, you study the concept and understand that it has several aspects, you can form a chunk that captures those multiple aspects.

Since students who chunk information when studying get better grades in college (Gurung, 2005), you might wonder how to chunk information so that you could get better grades. One way is to study terms until each term's definition takes up only a single chunk in memory. In addition, you could turn the many terms you have to learn into a smaller number of groups of terms by

• Making an organized outline--note that such an outline is not merely a list of terms,
• Making concept maps, or
• Organizing your flashcards into piles and turning each pile into a large chunk. (Download a tutorial about making and using effective flashcards.)

Review STM

• 3 ways you can lose information from STM (24-second animation)
• Matching game testing your ability to tell the difference between short term and sensory memory (Play as many rounds as you wish; try to accumulate at least 9 points.)
• A short (5-question) quiz on short-term memory

Learn more about STM: To get a better understanding of what short-term memory is and how understanding short-term memory can help you think and learn better, read Scott Young's article on working memory (long, but useful!).

Reflect on STM's importance

Realize that STM, as the narrow bottle neck of the memory system, not only puts limits on how much information you can put into LTM at one time (so professors shouldn't speak to quickly or put too much information on a PowerPoint slide) but also limits how much information you can get out of LTM at one time (click to see visual analogy).  At one level, you know that STM limits how much information from LTM that you can bring up at once: You wouldn't ask your partner to name 20 things they love about you (unless you wanted to be depressed)--and you would certainly hope that a professor wouldn't call on you to name 10 important psychological discoveries. However, you may not have realized that, because all your relevant knowledge about a situation will sometimes be too big for STM to hold, all your relevant knowledge can't always come to mind when you  need it. As a result, you will make mistakes even though you knew--or at least your LTM knew--better.  Note that if you are distracted, preoccupied, emotional, sleep-deprived, or otherwise impaired, you will have less room in STM for information from LTM and thus will be even more likely to make mistakes due to not using what you know.

As you have seen, STM's limitations limit not only what you can keep in STM but also both what you can upload to LTM and  what you can download from LTM. How can you get around these limits of STM? One way is to offload information from your STM to your phone, to a small notepad, or to a 3 X 5 index card. Another approach is to chunk information.

BOX 3: LONG TERM MEMORY/MEMORIES; abbreviated LTM

You have 3 main long term memories:

1. Procedural memory: your memory of how to do things (text, talk, sing, dance, ride a bike, drive, etc.), primarily learned by practicing those skills. When people talk about "muscle memory," they are often referring to procedural memories for a motor skill. However, procedural memories are not limited to motor skills. A writing, speaking, pottery-making, musical performance, acting, critical thinking, or other "skills" class may try to add to your procedural memory--as might a senior-level capstone course, internship, or practicum.
• Habits are procedural memories, so you can blame your bad habits on your good procedural memory.
• In the moderate stage of Alzheimer's, people may lose procedural memory, resulting in losing good habits like brushing their teeth and getting dressed.
2. Semantic memory: your dictionary/encyclopedia of impersonal, factual knowledge (e.g., knowing what an elephant is or what short-term memory is). Most of your content courses in college focus on adding concepts to your semantic memory. Trivia games like Jeopardy also test your semantic memory. (Experts are alarmed by American's poor semantic memory for history--only about 1/3 of American adults could pass the U.S. citizenship exam.)  If your semantic memory was working very poorly, it would greatly affect your perception of familiar things. Specifically, you would sense familiar objects, but you would not recognize what they were. You might be like the music professor who mistook his own reflection for that of an ape, mistook parking meters for children, mistook his foot for his shoe, and mistook his wife's head for a hat (you can learn more about his case by reading "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"). To appreciate how much you depend on your semantic memory to understand what you hear, you might watch this 18-minute Twilight Zone episode  in which a person slowly loses his semantic memory for words. 
3. Episodic (autobiographical) memory: your diary of events in your personal life (what you did last week, your life as a reality show with many episodes). In a sense, episodic memory allows you to travel back in time. Note that, unlike semantic memory, episodic memories are often tied to a place and a time--and recall may feel like a "re-run" of the original episode. For example, when you recall a semantic memory like that George Washington was the first president of the U.S., you don't  recall where and when you learned that fact (it is almost as if you have amnesia for when and where you were when you learned it). However, when you recall an episodic memory like hearing that Trump lost his re-election bid, you may recall  details about where you were, what you were doing, and when it was that you heard that news. 

     Without your episodic long term memory, you would live only in the present plus the few seconds that short term memory would buy you. (To you, your life would be an empty book.) To see how challenging that would be, consider the case of Clive Wearing, a man without the ability to form new episodic long term memories (note that his procedural memory is fine: he can sing, conduct, read, write, etc.). For a thrilling fictional example that demonstrates the importance of episodic memories and the difference between episodic and other memories, watch "The Bourne Identity" in which the Matt Damon character has lost all episodic memories (he doesn't know who he was), but his procedural and semantic memories are intact. If you want to look at cases of extremely good episodic memories, you can watch this 13-minute segment from "60 Minutes" about the approximately 56 people who have been identified as having fantastic episodic memories for almost every day in their lives (from adolescence to now) If you watch that video, consider 5 points:

1. As would be expected from what episodic memory is, recall of these episodic memories often seems like reliving the past event. That is, these episodic memory wizards often seem to experience the same emotions and sensations they felt when they first experienced the event.
2. As would be expected from episodic memory being different from semantic memory and from episodic memory being primarily an autobiographical memory, these episodic memory wizards do not have superior memory for things they do not directly experience. Because their semantic memories are not better than the average person, they would not necessarily get better grades in college than other people.
3. Interestingly, memory wizards' superior episodic memory seems to be due primarily to slow forgetting--the average person's memory for yesterday's events rivals theirs. So, perhaps, with better retrieval strategies, we could all have impressive recall for our past experiences.
4. The video implies that being able to say what day of the week corresponds to a certain date is a great memory feat. It could be, but a person could also figure out the day of the week from the date without having a great memory. In fact, you can learn to calculate the day of the week from the date using the instructions here. Are these memory wizards using a formula on the date to compute the day of the week and then using the day of the week as a cue for triggering their memories?
5. Having a tremendous episodic memory can be a blessing (as the video suggests), but it can also be a curse.

* Terminology note #1: Since you can explicitly tell  (i.e., you can declare to ) others the contents of both your semantic memories (e.g., you can declare that George Washington was a president) and your episodic memories (e.g., you can declare that your high school graduation was held in the gym or on Zoom), semantic and episodic memory are often referred to as  types of  declarative memory (also called explicit memory). Since you cannot easily declare the contents of your procedural memories (e.g., you know how to ride a bike but can't tell others what you know that allows you to ride a bike), procedural memory is a type of  non-declarative memory. To make the distinction between declarative and procedural memories clear, psychologists often say that the difference between declarative and procedural memories is the difference between "knowing that" (e.g., knowing that George Washington was president [semantic memory] or knowing that your high school graduation was in the gym [episodic memory])  and "knowing how" (e.g., your ability to text, read, sing, or dribble a basketball). Because procedural memory is acquired through practice and is not verbal, those who can perform a skill often can't teach it. (For example, if you are learning a foreign language, a young child from that country might pronounce the language's sounds better than you do but be unable to tell you how to move your lips and tongue to pronounce those sounds.) Fortunately, you are not always completely on your own when it comes to learning a skill because a good teacher or coach can give you some pointers about what you should be doing. Actually doing it well, however, will still take extensive practice.

If visuals help you, mouse over this text to review STM and the two basic types of LTM: procedural and declarative.

* Terminology note #2: In addition to procedural memory, you have another non-declarative memory: implicit memory. Implicit memory involves, without trying, learning certain rhythms, sequences, or patterns through repeated experience: Your mind is automatically identifying patterns that allow you to know what will probably come next. The patterns that this "nexting" is based on can be simple (e.g., that thunder follows lightning) or can be complex (e.g., knowing grammatical rules such as knowing that when Yoda said "Ready are you?", he should have said "Are  you ready?"). Accurate intuitions, such as a fire chief sensing that a fire is not responding in a typical way, so he orders the squad to flee the building seconds before the building collapses; a wife knowing her husband's mood just from hearing him say "hello" when he answers the phone; or you knowing that a conversation is about to end, are due to implicit memory (for a review of the types of LTM, see this diagram).

Two Problems with Long-Term Memory

Problem #1 with LTM--Encoding: Getting information into LTM

Examples of encoding problems:

    An extreme example of encoding problems--anterograde amnesia: a type of amnesia in which there is an inability to form new memories.
Some people with severe anterograde amnesia are unable to form any new semantic or episodic memories. As a result, they are stuck in the past.
Two well-known severe cases of total anterograde amnesia are

              The case of HM (as you watch that video, note the difference between STM and LTM).  If you want a more dramatic depiction of his case, click here.

              The case of Clive Wearing that was linked to above in the section on episodic memory. If you saw that video but don't remember seeing it, you have probably experienced an encoding failure. Your encoding failure was probably due to not paying attention -- because unless you were black out drunk when you watched it, you are probably not experiencing anterograde amnesia.☺

Movies with relatively accurate depictions of the symptoms and effects of anterograde amnesia:

• The title character in the thriller:  Memento
• Dory in the animated comedy: Finding Nemo

1. How many red stripes are on the American flag? How many white stripes? (You can check your answer by looking at this picture of an American flag)
2. See the surprising thing that college students don't know about Apple
3. Where is the nearest fire alarm to your classroom?

  As you learned when we discussed STM, you don't pay attention to most of the information your senses pick up, so most of that information doesn't get encoded into STM. If information doesn't get into STM, it won't get into LTM. Unfortunately, research suggests that most students do not get important lecture content into STM. Fortunately, as mentioned earlier, research also suggests that most students can easily increase their ability to attend to lectures (and thus get lecture information into STM so that it has a chance to get into LTM) by sitting up front and by keeping their cell phones out of sight.

    *Besides not encoding information into STM, students may incorrectly encode information into STM. So, in addition to not hearing, students may mishear or misinterpret what is said. Sometimes, incorrect encoding is caused by "false friends": terms that sound like English words but have a different or more precise and technical meaning (e.g., statisticians use the words "random" and "significant" in ways that are very different from the way the average person uses those words).

Consolidation--Getting information from STM to LTM-- involves 2 steps: One mental, one physical

  But even if you pay attention to something and therefore encode that information into STM, you may not get that information into LTM. Getting the information from STM to LTM involves both your mind and your body. As you'll see, your mind will often have to do some mental work to encode information into LTM. After that, your brain will need some time to complete the encoding. In a sense, forming a solid memory is like making jell-o. To make jell-o, you do the work to assemble the ingredients, but the jell-o becomes solid only after setting in the refrigerator for a while. Similarly, to make a solid memory, your mind needs to do the work to integrate the information, but the memory becomes solid only after it has set in the brain for a while. The process of rewiring the brain to form a solid memory is called consolidation.  (An alcohol blackout--in which a person doesn't remember what happened while the person was drunk--is a case of alcohol disrupting consolidation, as is the inability of a concussion victim to remember what happened shortly before being hit in the head.) The need for consolidation has two implications for studying:

1. Your memory will  benefit by taking a 15-minute break after learning information.
2. Getting enough sleep is very important for consolidation and thus for being able to remember information.

Problem #2 with LTM--and the most serious problem with LTM --Retrieval: Getting information out of LTM.

Information is often available in long term memory (it is in the long term memory box), but not accessible (you can't get it out of the memory box at the moment you need it).

An extreme example of retrieval problems--some cases of retrograde amnesia: an inability, for a while, to retrieve what you once knew. Often, retrograde amnesia only affects episodic memory--it often only hurts the ability to remember some or all of one's personal past.  Retrograde amnesia is a key element in the plots of many soap operas and movies (e.g., "Overboard," "Bourne Identity," "Forgotten," "The Long Kiss Goodnight," "Regarding Henry," and "Who Am I?). Real life examples of severe retrograde amnesia are rare, but here's one a short newspaper report of someone who had retrograde amnesia:  Missing Delaware woman turns up in Toronto homeless shelter.

1. Retrograde amnesia is limited to failing to remember events that occurred shortly before a concussion or to events that occurred while drinking. In that case, suspect that the memory problem is due to disrupting consolidation (consolidation is the process of rewiring of the brain to form permanent memories). If consolidation was disrupted, the memories were never permanently stored.
2. There is extensive brain damage due to injury or illness. Brain damage may completely destroy memories. See below for two such cases:

•  A life "deleted"  Video of an unusual case in which the brain damage was so severe that memories seem to have been destroyed.
• For another rare case, if you have Netflix, you could watch "Tell me who I am."

Common examples of retrieval problems (of information being available [stored] but not accessible [retrievable]). Note that many of these examples involve being able to recognize the information but not being able to recall it:

• You probably can't name all of the 7 dwarfs, but you can probably recognize their names.
• The tip of the tongue phenomena, in which you can't come up with a name or word but you know you know it (if you want to experience the tip-of-the-tongue effect, try answering the questions next to the first 6 bullet points of this article).
• You can often recognize people's faces (which doesn't require retrieval) but fail to retrieve their names--even though you know their names.
• You may not come up with the answer to a trivia question even though you know the answer when you hear it.
• You may have more trouble with fill-in-the blank and short answer tests than with multiple-choice tests.
• You may blank on a question during a test but retrieve the answer later when it does you no good.

If you can solve the encoding and retrieval problems, long term memory, you can take advantage of LTM's virtually limitless storage capacity to do some amazing things--like this guy has done).

LTM Encoding: From STM to LTM

 Solving the encoding problem: How to get information from STM to LTM (Hint: The key is to actively transform the information).

The way to solve the encoding problem is not by using Type 1 (maintenance/rote) rehearsal: things over and over.

Check your answer!         attempts

Evidence that Type 1 rehearsal (also called maintenance rehearsal) is not effective for moving information to LTM: In some studies, repeating things over and over does not improve recall. For example, even though you have seen pennies thousands of times, you may not be able to draw one from memory. You may not even be able to pick the correct penny out of a line-up of fakes. (So, maintenance rehearsal is a tried--but not true--way of remembering information. To slightly overstate things, what some students call "memorizing" isn't memorizing!)

Reason that Type 1 rehearsal is not effective for moving information to LTM: It does not recode the information to make it meaningful or visual. (This short animation may help you remember that Type 1 rehearsal usually recycles information back into STM rather than moving that information into LTM.)

     To get information into LTM efficiently, you must connect the new information to information already in your memory. As psychologists would say, you should encode the information by using Type 2 rehearsal (also called elaborative rehearsal). 

• Short animation slightly exaggerating the difference between Type 1 (maintenance) and Type 2 (elaborative) rehearsal

Specifically, in elaborative rehearsal (Type 2 rehearsal), you think about the information to add to it (to elaborate on it) in one of two ways:

1. Make information 
attempt number    Check your answer!

Implications for aging and memory:

• As you get older, your semantic memory should improve because it should be easier to make information meaningful. It should be easier to make information meaningful because making information meaningful involves connecting new information to old information and, as you age, you should have more old information to which you can connect new information. Partly for this reason, some schools prohibit juniors and seniors from taking introductory courses.
• Similarly, studying hard in your introductory courses should make it easier for you when you need to learn new information in your advanced courses (because you have more "old information" to connect to the new information).

Implications for in-class behavior and note-taking:

• Because making information meaningful involves both (a) working to connect new bits of information to each other in a way that makes sense to you and (b) working to connect the new information to what you already know, borrowing someone else's notes (even the professor's!) is no substitute for being in class and taking your own notes. If you skip the mental work of elaborative rehearsal, you miss out on retaining the information.
• Because elaborative rehearsal involves thinking, unless the professor is going pretty fast, do not just copy down what the professor says. Instead, think, then write--and realize that what you do write down without thinking will be worthless until you think about it. So, if you skip thinking about something in lecture, be sure to make up for that lapse by thinking about that information especially deeply when you study it.
• To encourage elaborative rehearsal during class, be mentally active in class by trying to (1) think of the answer to any question the professor asks,  (2) think about how the information in the lecture relates to the information in the previous lecture, and (3)  think about how a professor's story, example, or demonstration connects to an important point.
• To make the information meaningful, relate the lecture's ideas and examples to yourself or to people you know.

Implications for studying:

• Because elaborative rehearsal involves making information meaningful, read through your notes shortly after class to make sure they make sense. If parts don't make sense, try to fill them in using the book, the internet, or a friend's notes.
• Because elaborative rehearsal is an active process that requires hard mental work, you should study in a place without distractions and at a time when you have energy and focus. So, studying in bed is a bad idea--and, for many students, studying during the day is much more effective than studying at night (However, a quick review of the information before going to bed may help consolidation). Similarly, studying right after you get up is usually not very effective--you will usually need  to be up for at least an hour before your mind fully wakes up.
• Because memorizing often involves making information meaningful, understand information before trying to memorize it. (To see an example of how making a paragraph meaningful makes it more memorable, read this short blog entry or try to memorize this story). In other words, a friend's well-meaning advice-- "Don't understand it, just memorize it"--is bad advice because meaningless information is very hard to remember: Imagine having to learn pages of  words from a language you didn't know (like this) or having to learn pages of "nonsense syllables" like these: "XOV" "BEF", and "KUQ". (For an example of how hard meaningless information is to memorize, see the man who couldn't remember his wife's name.)
• Should you listen to the lecture first or read the text first? To answer this question, realize that  (a) you need to understand information to make it meaningful and (b) you usually need to make information meaningful to memorize it. So, if you are having more trouble understanding the text than understanding the lectures, you may wish to hear the lectures before reading the text--although I would still advise at least skimming the chapter before before going to class. If, on the other hand, you are having more trouble understanding the lectures than you are understanding the text, you should definitely read the text before coming to class.
• Thinking critically about what you are studying will help your memory for that information because elaborative rehearsal is thinking.
• Skim the chapter before reading it so you can see how the chapter's information might be meaningful and so that you can activate memories for information already in your memory that you will be able to associate with information in the chapter.
• Because meaningful information tends to be specific rather than general (In some studies, participants are twice as likely to remember specific statements rather than general statements), refine your notes by converting abstract, general statements into concrete, specific examples.

 

3 general strategies for adding meaning to course material.

1.Come up with your own   as well as coming up with or finding analogies that make sense to you (e.g., think of LTM as being like a library).

Attempt number           Check your answer!

2. Ask questions such as how is the new information    to and how is it different from what you have already learned?
For example, ask "How is Sensory Memory similar to STM--and how it is different?" or "How does this information relate to the last lecture or last reading assignment?" You could also ask "Why is this information important?", "Why should I believe--or not believe--this?", or "Is there a better way to organize this information?" In general,  asking and answering "why" and "how" questions will help you--especially in more advanced classes.

Attempt number Check your answer!

3.  Make the information personally meaningful by putting the new information in your own words. One way to force yourself to put information in your own words is to tell other people what you have learned. So, the next time your parents ask you about school, you can study by telling them what meaningful things you learned in class. In addition to putting information in your own words, summarize it. Summarizing material forces you to think about what the most meaningful and important points are. 

 

2. Make the information
attempts = Check your answer!

Two implications for how you should study:

1. Making simple diagrams or even making almost illegible doodles of concepts can help your memory for course material (so don't be afraid to add doodles to your notes or flashcards). More elaborate visuals, such as cartoons, timelines, infographics, concept maps (also called "mind maps"), and sketchnoting can be even more helpful.
2. Do not skip diagrams and visuals in your text. Instead, go through the chapter at least once looking only at its visuals.

Quotes to motivate you to add pictures to what you are learning and to help you remember "picture power":

• "Hear a piece of information and three days later you'll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you'll remember 65%."  --Kevin Horsley, Memory Grandmaster
• "Our brain is mainly a image processor, not a word processor." -- Peter Hollis, SuperLearner
•  "A picture is worth a thousand words."

To impress yourself by seeing your own mind's amazing ability to remember images,

• spend 45 seconds learning the images in this video/slideshow and then
• test yourself with this quiz.

Other evidence for the power of images:

• People with naturally great memories use imagery
• Solomon Shereshevsky, who could remember practically anything word-for-word within minutes and who was frustrated by seeming to be unable to forget anything, had synesthesia: he not only heard words, he also saw images when he heard those words.
• Jill Price, who was the first person in the world documented to have hyperthymesia (remarkable episodic memory; as of now, only about 60 people in the world seem to have an episodic memory that is good enough to deserve that label) also has synesthesia.
• Using visual images is key to almost all mnemonic devices: systematic memory aides. For example, one mnemonic device is the method of loci (method of places): a system in which you first visualize putting the items you need to remember in places along a path, and then you retrieve those items by visualizing yourself revisiting those places by again walking along that path.
  • Video of a creative application of the method of loci to remembering a grocery list.
  • Ted Talk describing how a guy used mnemonics to go from having an average memory to being a memory world champion in less than one year.

(I will discuss mnemonic devices in more depth later, but you can skip ahead by clicking here. )

LTM Retrieval: Getting information to LTM from STM

 Like real banks, it is easier to make deposits into our memory banks than it is to make withdrawals (Much information is forgotten, but not gone). Below are 3 examples of retrieval--but not storage-- failures. In technical terminology, the following 3 examples illustrate that information available (stored) in memory is not always accessible (retrievable).

1. Tip-Of-the-Tongue (TOT) phenomenon (words are not actually on the tip of your tongue--they are in memory, but can't be retrieved)
2. Recognition is generally easier than recall (e.g., it is easier for you to recognize the names of the 7 dwarfs than it is for you to retrieve all 7).
3. Savings scores: Relearning is faster than learning (to revise an old saying, "You can quickly re-teach an old dog old tricks"). For example, suppose you needed 20 minutes to learn the 7 dwarfs the first time, but now you can't remember a single one. The good news is that it might take you only 5 minutes to learn them them all the second time-- a savings of  15 minutes (which, using the formula for savings scores as time saved/original time spent, results in a savings score of 15/20 which is 75%). Similarly, even if it seemed that you "forgot" everything you learned in a course, you  could  relearn that information much more easily than when you learned it the first time. Indeed, when taking advanced courses that have introductory courses as prerequisites, you will probably quickly relearn what you learned--but seemed to have totally forgotten--from those introductory courses. (So, although you can question whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if nobody is around to hear it, an encoded memory does leave a trace [detectable by recognition and savings] even when it cannot be retrieved.)

Because retrieval is such a big problem (and because tests ask you to take information out of memory rather than put information into memory), much of your study time should focus on retrieving--not merely recognizing!--information. Specifically, you should

• give yourself short answer and essay practice tests--the harder, the better--even if the actual test will be multiple-choice.
• use flashcards correctly (Don't just read and re-read your flashcards; instead test yourself aloud over the concepts). To make the best use of flashcards, download and go through this tutorial).
• retrieve information at least 3 times (and preferably more), spacing out your retrieval sessions over a long period of time. In other words, do the opposite of cramming!
• when studying for essay and short answer tests, don't just store the information--come up with a plan for how you will recall the stored information.

What causes retrieval failures?

Evidence that retrieval failures are not due to time alone:

1. Grandparents can have vivid and accurate memories for long ago events while having hazy and inaccurate memories for recent events.
2. Hypermnesia: Under certain conditions, people can have better recall for information a week or longer after they learned the information than they had shortly after they learned the information. Usually, those "certain conditions" involve being repeatedly tested on the same information without ever seeing the information again. In a typical study, a participant might be given a list of 24 words to remember. A few minutes later, when asked to recall the words, the participant may recall 18 of the words. A week later, participants return to the lab and are again asked to remember the words. On the first attempt, the participant may recall only 1 or 2 words. But, with more attempts, the participant will recall more words. Indeed, by the 6th time the participant tries to recall the words, the participant may recall all 24 words--even though the participant could only recall 18 words when tested right after being given the list! Hypermnesia is possible because some of the "forgotten" information doesn't go away; it is just hard to find. As a result, when participants keep looking, they find much of that "forgotten" information.

On the other hand, however,  retrieval failures are often linked to time as Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve illustrates (see the graph  below).

* If you just focused on the rapid drop during the first part of Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve, forgot about savings (that relearning is much faster than the original learning), and did not realize that meaningful information is retained much longer than the nonsense syllables that Ebbinghaus used in his forgetting studies, you might think that this comedian's idea for a 5-minute university was a great idea rather than just a great comedy routine.

After noting that the forgetting curve starts off as a sharply falling line, but then becomes a curve as forgetting levels off, answer the following three questions. Then, check your answers by clicking on the buttons below. 

1. What bad news about memory does the forgetting curve reveal?

Answer: You can forget a great deal of information in just an hour, and you can forget about 2/3 in less than a week. This is why you must continue to test yourself over the material even after you know it. So, you need to review your class notes regularly, and you can't assume that the information you knew for the quiz is information that you will remember for the final.
Show answer

2. What good news about memory does the forgetting curve reveal?
   Answer: After a week, for most practical purposes, you stop forgetting.

Show answer

3. Does the forgetting curve support or go against the idea that we should have year-round schools to prevent the forgetting that occurs over the long summer vacation?
   Answer: Since almost all forgetting occurs in the first week, it really doesn't matter whether summer break is 2 weeks or 12 weeks.
   Show answer
   

3 proposed reasons:

1. Interference: getting sidetracked by bumping into similar, but wrong information. This skit from SNL dramatizes how information that is perceived as similar to what you want to remember can interfere with retrieval of the desired information. 
2. Cue-related forgetting (lacking the right cues): not knowing where to look for the information (as you'll see, being without cues--being "cue less"-- may result in being clueless when it comes to recalling information).

3. Repression (unconscious motivated forgetting): unconsciously not wanting to remember the information.

We will now look at each of these three explanations for retrieval failures in more depth.

Really a problem when information is perceived as 
Attempt number   Check your answer!

So, when studying information, you should try to make the information different from what you already know before you try to memorize it. Similarly, if you are using imagery to memorize something, you might try to make your image unusual in some way, such as making it much bigger than such normal objects really are.

2 types of interference:

Proactive interference: Old (Previously learned) information hurts retrieval of new information.

Classic experimental set up for  demonstrating proactive interference:

Results: Group 1 does worse than Group 2 because proactive interference from List A acts to interfere with Group 1's recall of List B. How much worse? That will depend on how similar the two lists are-- the more similar, the worse Group 1's recall.

Think of other examples of proactive interference. Hints:

• Have previous misconceptions you had about how the mind works and what people are like acted to interfere with your recall of the newer information you have learned in psychology class?
• Can you remember an old password but can't remember your new one?
• Will learning about proactive interference hurt your ability to learn about retroactive interference?
• Has what you learned about sensory memory made it hard to remember what you learned about short-term memory?

Retroactive interference: Newly (Recently) learned information acts to hurt memory for old information ("retro" means "backwards").

Classic experimental set up for  demonstrating retroactive interference:

Results: Group 1 does worse than Group 2 because retroactive interference from the recently learned List B acts to interfere with Group 1's recall of List A. Will the act of learning about retroactive interference recently act to interfere with your memory of proactive interference? Have your more recent phone numbers, addresses, and passwords interfered with access to your old ones?

Animation to help you understand the difference between proactive and retroactive interference

Practice distinguishing proactive interference from retroactive interference

A phenomenon that shows both types of interference and also shows how passing of time can't account for forgetting--the serial position curve:
 

Graph Courtesy of Creative Commons License 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Questions to think about when looking at the serial position curve

Given that recall is good for the beginning and for the end, but poor for the middle (e.g., we can easily remember the first U.S. President [Washington] and, despite what repression would predict, the last former President [Trump], but may have trouble remembering middle presidents like Chester Arthur), what does this mean in terms of

• What sections of a lecture or chapter you should review?
• What parts of a presentation or paper should you polish the most?
• The importance of making a good first impression?
• The importance of making a good last impression?
• How we tend to remember past relationships?
• How could interference explain the serial position curve? Specifically, how could
  • the lack of proactive interference explain why recall is good for the first words? (good recall for the beginning of a list is called the primacy effect). Note that if forgetting were entirely due to time, recall would be worst for the first words on a list.
  • the lack of retroactive interference explain why recall is good for the last words? (good recall for the end of a list is called the recency effect)?
  • the combined effect of proactive and retroactive interference could explain why recall is poor for the middle words?

Your knowledge of interference can help you refute lies. The problem with trying to refute a lie is that to refute it, you usually repeat it--and repeating it may actually make people remember the lie. The solution is a "truth sandwich" in which you state the facts, refute the lie, and then state the facts again. That way, the lie is subjected to proactive interference from your first statement of the fact and retroactive interference from your final restatement of the fact. In short, just like with the serial position curve, people will remember the beginning and the end of what you said (the fact) rather than what you said in the middle (the lie).

Short (less than 1 minute) video to help you understand interference and the serial position curve.

Short (one minute) animation showing the implications of interference for how you should study.

Look at some terms that you might have trouble remembering because of interference

#2 Cue-Dependent Forgetting: Inadequate cues as a cause of retrieval failure

        Cues trigger memories. In a sense, the cues you have for retrieving the information are like hooks that help you fish for information: The more hooks, the more likely it is you will catch the information. Given the importance of cues, it is not surprising that much forgetting is due to not having the right cues. Not having cues, like not having the address of a person you want to visit or not having the file name for the computer file you want to access, makes it unlikely that you will find what you need.

Examples of retrieval failures due to lack of cues:

• Often, after you say you "don't remember" something, a friend reminds you by giving you a cue ("Remember, we talked about this on Wednesday") rather than by repeating the original information.
• Similarly, you may miss a test question even though you know the information because the relevant information doesn't come to mind while you are answering the question.
• Cues are often used to help people suffering from retrograde amnesia recover their lost memories.

    Implications for studying and test-taking:

• When studying, add cues to the information:  If you have essay, short-answer, or fill-in tests that rely on retrieving information, you may find it almost as valuable to memorize cues that will jog your memory for the information as it is to memorize the information itself. If you use flash cards correctly or if you use the Cornell note taking system, you are probably already learning both the information and cues for the information.
  Seven additional ways to remember both cues and information:
  1. Create acronyms. When you memorize an acronym, you  memorize a cue for the words you want to remember--the first letter of those words (e.g., "HOMES" to remember the great lakes [Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior], "RoyGBiv" to remember the colors of the rainbow [Red, orange, yellow, Green, Blue, indigo, violet], "ETC" to remember 3 tips for remembering [Elaborative rehearsal, Testing, Chunking], or "MOST" [Make meaningful, Organize, Select, Test], or POTS [Personalize, Organize, Test, Space out your practice], or FORCE [Focus, Organize, Retrieve, Create Cues, Elaborate], or ...). 
  2. Memorize at least one good example because examples can serve as cues. So, the more examples you connect to a concept, the more cues you will have, and thus the more likely you will be to retrieve the information. However, if you don't have many examples, one may do--especially if that example is vivid and specific.
  3. If, when you are testing yourself, you blank on an answer, ask yourself, "What cue can I use to recall this information if I blank on the actual test?"
  4. Organize material from your notes and text. You could put related concepts into groups (by putting your flash cards into piles, by making an outline, or by making a concept map) and then give each group a distinctive name. That way, you have at least two cues for the information: (1) the name you gave that category and (2) the other items in the group. Alternatively, you could integrate material from the text with your class notes or you could reorganize your class notes. Whichever organizing strategy you use will probably help: Compared to students who get low scores on tests, students who get high scores spend about 4 times as much time organizing course information.
  5. Put key terms on one sheet of paper. On that sheet, have four columns: one column for the term, a second column for the definition, a third column for an example, and a fourth column for a person associated with the term (for some courses, you may skip this fourth column). For each term, practice covering up all but one column and trying to recall the information in the remaining columns. Studying this way should give you three effective cues for each term:  its definition, your example, and the person associated with the term.
  6. As you study, think of a question for which the concept you are studying would be the answer. That question will be the cue for the information. If you are good at guessing what test questions will be, you will make the actual test questions good cues for your memory.
  7. During your final review sessions, imagine yourself in the classroom taking the test. That way, you have given yourself a cue (the classroom) for the information that will be present when you take the test.
• When  blanking on a test question, give yourself a chance to use cues by
  1. Looking at other questions to see if those questions cue your memory for the information.
  2. Leaving the question and then coming back to it. If you are not retrieving the information, the cues you are using are not taking you to the right place in your memory. Rather than continuing to use the same ineffective cues that are taking you to the wrong "address" in your memory, you are probably better off coming back to the question at which time different cues may come to mind. If it is an essay question and you are still blanking when you return to it, start writing: The act of writing may generate cues (especially if your study sessions included writing answers to questions). If you really can't think of anything to write, start writing by rephrasing the question, defining some key terms that might be relevant, or answering a related question. (Even if you don't end up recalling the relevant information, you may still get partial credit.)
  3. Realizing that you may have the information in a visual form, so close your eyes and try to picture a diagram, table, picture, or video related to the question.
  4. If you are failing to recall a word for a fill-in-the-blank type test question, go through the alphabet. The word must start with one of those 26 letters, so you will say the right word's first letter which may jog your memory for the right word.
  5. As you will see in the next section, because physical context is a cue, you could think back to where you were when you learned the information.

Physical context --where you were when  you learned the information--is a cue that helps retrieval. How do you jog a friend's memory? Often, by talking about where they were when the event occurred. How would you jog your memory for events that occurred when you were in fourth grade? You might go back--either physically or mentally--to your fourth grade classroom.
Everyone seems to know about the power of physical context except the police who have witnesses go down to the station to make a statement rather than having witnesses make their statements at the scene of the crime.  (To read a one-paragraph description of the  famous "jump in the lake" study demonstrating context-dependent learning in a fun way, click hereclick heree)
How can you take advantage of the physical context effect to do well in school?
As we just mentioned, if you are blanking on question, it may help to think back to where you were when you learned the information. The more vividly you can mentally recreate the context, the more likely you are to cue the memory. For example, you might try to see yourself studying at your desk in your sweats, drinking from your water bottle. As we also already mentioned, you might imagine yourself in the classroom while studying the information. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, realize that the more places you study certain material, the more places there are to cue that information, and the better your recall for that material should be. So, take your flashcards with you when you leave your room.

Mental state can be a cue. Your emotional and physiological state--happy or sad, drunk or sober--can be a cue. In fact, your physiological state can be such a strong cue that it may seem like you only know certain things when you are in the same physiological state you were in when you learned the information, a phenomenon called  state dependent learning (also called state dependent memory--but which should be called state dependent retrieval.
The evidence for state dependent retrieval is strong: State dependent retrieval has been demonstrated with alcohol, marijuana, stimulants, and barbiturates. The evidence for mood-dependent learning, on the other hand, is not strong--even though mood dependent retrieval "feels right"--what we remember when we are sad seems different from what we remember when we are happy; what we remember about someone when we are mad at them seems different from what we can remember when we are pleased with them. Because of state-dependent retrieval, you would want to be as caffeinated and happy when you study as you are when you take the exam. (If, however, you can't be as happy or as stressed during the exam as you were when you studied, don't worry: As we just mentioned, scientists lack conclusive evidence that mood dependent learning/retrieval exists, much less that it is a powerful phenomenon. )

#3 Repression: (unconsciously motivated forgetting).

Repression might possibly explain:

The Three Faces of Eve" and "Sybil" (however,  the real Sybil claims her multiple personalities were faked), as well as such classics as Hitchcock's "Spellbound."

Childhood amnesia (also called infantile amnesia):

Problems with explaining forgetting as being due to repression:

• There is little evidence that repression is common (although we do seem to remember positive events better than negative events, and some cases like the one in this podcast suggest that repression may exist.).
•  Repression is far from the only explanation for childhood amnesia. Indeed, from what you have already learned about memory, you could probably think of at  least 3 other explanations for "childhood amnesia":

1. Interference: your old memories have been buried by retroactive interference from the numerous more recent events have occurred since you were an infant.

2. Cue-dependent forgetting:  Even if, when you were 1 or 2,  you had cues that helped you recall information, those cues were probably very different from the ones you use now. For example, although, today, asking yourself, "What did I do last Friday?" could be a useful cue for triggering memories, such a cue would have been worthless to your 11-month-old self. 

3. Encoding failure: When you were 1 or 2, you often did not rehearse information, and when you did, you probably did not use. Ineffectively rehearsed information may never have gotten into LTM.

Using what we now know to understand how you can improve your memory by using mnemonic devices (systematic memory aides).

Most (memory systems) work by solving the 2 major problems with LTM:

1. They usually solve the encoding problem by using imagery, a way of doing Type 2 rehearsal. (They elaborate on material by adding pictures to it.))

2. They solve the retrieval problem by building in retrieval cues. Because the cues are built in, you don't have cue-related forgetting. Because you know where to look (you look where the cue is), you aren't bumping into the wrong information, so you may not have interference problems (Interference, however, can become a problem. To understand how, click on the following link:  Why aren't mnemonics used more often? ).

Two examples of mnemonic devices:

Example 1: The method of loci (the method of places) in which you (1) encode each piece of information by creating a mental picture that links the information to a place along a familiar path and then (2) retrieve the information by taking a mental walk along that path.

Example 2: The peg-word mnemonic: A method is which you

1. form mental images of and then memorize a list of "peg words" -- a list of words that are easy to visualize and that you can put in order (e.g., a common system ties each peg word to a number: "bun" for one, "shoe" for two, etc.), then
2. encode information by forming, for each new item, a picture that includes both the new item and the relevant peg word (e.g., for your first new item, you would form an image of the new item interacting with your first peg word),  and then
3. retrieve the information by going through your list of peg words in order.

Look at the table below to see an example of how you might go through the 3 steps to use a peg-word mnemonic.

Step 1 (Set up your cues)	Step 2 (Encoding--link the new information to your cues)	Step 3(Retrieval--Go to your cues)
Get an ordered list of peg words. Normally, your first word should be associated with "1", your second word with "2" etc. (examples of number-based peg lists) If, however, you hate numbers, you could choose a list of peg words in which the first word is associated with "A", the second with "B", etc. (examples of  some alphabetical lists of pegwords). Then, visualize your peg words and memorize them in either numerical or alphabetical order. .	Link new material to peg words using imagery. Picture the first new item interacting with first peg word,  the second new item with second peg word, etc. You may need to use some creativity to (1) make an image representing each new item and (2) getting each new image to interact with its corresponding peg word (ideally, in a vivid and bizarre way).	Go through the pegs (your cues) in order. Start by picturing the peg word associated with "1." Your first item should pop into your head. Keep going until you have gone through all your peg words.
Example "1" as "bun"	Example: Connect bun to your image of sensory memory (in this case, the image of "sensory register" is a cash register that senses with its ear). The interaction (not pictured) is that the sensory register wants to eat the bun.	Example: Visualize the peg word for "1" (bun) and you should see sensory register trying to eat the bun.

**Note that you only need to do Step 1 once. After you have set up all the pegs, you don't have to do that ever again. So, once your system is set up, you will be able to remember items in order by just doing Steps 2 and 3.

If mnemonic systems are so powerful, why aren't mnemonics used more often?

Two important similarities between LTM and a library:

1. Encoding: Getting information into either system requires effort and skill. Dropping books off at the library will not automatically get information into the library's collection. Instead, you will need to bring the book to the librarian's attention and convince the librarian that the book would be a meaningful addition to the library's collection (otherwise, the book will be thrown out or sold at the library's book sale). Similarly, to get information into LTM, you have to pay attention to the information, and you will probably need to make the information meaningful or visual.
2. Retrieval: Getting the right information out at the right time requires organization. Whether you are talking about a library or a memory, it is hard to find one particular item among many items unless the items are organized (organized information is stored with a cue so that having the cue gets you to the information).

1. Reconstruction: A book in the library is stored as a complete unit-- every word has already been written. All the pages of the book exist whether you check it out or not, and every time you check it out, you are checking out the same book. If and when a book is revised, we know the book has been revised: No librarian would mistake a 2nd edition for a 1st edition. An event stored in memory, on the other hand, can be revised without you knowing it--and is often not stored in its entirety. Instead, of an entire event being stored, often only a few bits and pieces of the original event make their way into memory. So, why does it seem like you remembered the whole thing when you only stored an incomplete outline of the event? Because when you recall an event, you  use what you know about how the world works (i.e., your semantic memory) to turn that bare bones outline into a vivid memory that seems complete.  (See 17-second animation)
   Four amazing facts about reconstruction: the process of using your knowledge of how the world works to take some bits of stored information to create a "complete" memory.
   
   1. When you reconstruct a memory, you don't realize that you are "writing" much of that memory: Instead, you think you are just copying what was already written in memory.
   2. You are not very good at knowing which bits of your recall of an event is what you copied from what was originally written in memory and which bits you just made up. Your not knowing which part you made up makes makes sense given you didn't realize that you made up any of it. However, it creates a problem: There is little relationship between how sure you are about a memory and the memory's accuracy (As you will discover when you and your partner both claim to be 100% sure of correctly remembering a detail of an event, but you both remember it differently. Warning: When your partner says, "I know I'm right because I'm sure," pointing out that science shows that their being sure doesn't mean they're right may not help you win the argument.).
   3. You may continue to rewrite your memory every time you recall it, so memories may get revised without you knowing it. One implication:  That 5-foot jump shot you made to win the game may, after telling the story numerous times, be remembered as  a 15-foot jumper.  Or, as basketball great Connie Hawkins said, "The older I get, the better I used to be."
   4. Memories are not copies of reality but instead are recreations, so memories aren't as accurate as we would like to think. 
   
   Experimental evidence for reconstruction
   • Four-minute video summarizing one of the first experiments to demonstrate that memories can be reconstructed incorrectly false memory (I recommend muting the sound.)
   • Watch a one-minute video about an experiment in which students were tricked into "remembering" seeing "Bugs Bunny" at Disney Land.
   The bad news about reconstruction: Because memory, rather than being like a video recorder, relies on reconstruction, memories that we are confident about can be wrong. Examples:
   • Eyewitness testimony is unreliable.
     • A true story of false memory (4 minute video about a case of an eyewitness making a terrible mistake)
     • False Memory Syndrome Foundation Website
     • The End of Eyewitness Testimonies (Newsweek Article)
     • Why science tells us not to rely on eyewitness accounts (Scientific American article)
   • Innocent people falsely "remembering" being murderers (fascinating magazine article)
   • Therapists causing false memories (3-minute video from Penn and Teller)
   • Your first "memory" may be a false memory (short blog entry)
   • Donald Trump reporting a false memory--or telling an awful lie.
   • Donald Trump trying to use reconstruction to make some people "remember" that Americans couldn't say "Merry Christmas" during the Obama presidency.
   • A memory error due to reconstruction may have cost Brian Williams millions of dollars.
   • If you want to read a fascinating autobiography in which false memories play a role, borrow or buy Tara Westover's best selling book: "Educated."
   • Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."; Captain Kirk never said "Beam me up, Scotty"; Shakespeare never wrote "A rose by any other name smells just as sweet"; Gandhi never said "Be the change you wish to see in the world"; and Tarzan never said "Me Tarzan, you Jane."
   • Even people with phenomenal memories are not human tape-recorders. To see for yourself, judge how well the memory of a "human tape recorder" matches a transcript of an actual tape recorder (In this case, John Dean's testimony against President Nixon about a meeting that was secretly taped).
   • Quotes to help you remember reconstruction's negative effects:
   • It isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can't remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so." --Josh Billings
   • "I remember things the way they should have been."--Truman Capote
   • "Memory is the great deceiver." --Neil Gaiman
   • "Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory" --Joseph Conrad

   The good news about reconstruction: By noting what you can reconstruct and memorizing only what you can't, it can seem like you have remembered everything without memorizing much. If visuals help you, mouse over this text.
   

   
   
   So, oddly enough, the key to seeming like you have memorized more is to memorize less! For example, imagine that a friend tries to memorize every word of a 30-page chapter whereas you boil down that chapter to less than a page of notes from which you can reconstruct the chapter. You will memorize less than a page of notes but appear to know much more than your friend. But can you really summarize an entire chapter in one page of notes? Yes. In fact, one highly paid memory expert advises his clients to finish the term with one page of notes from which they can reconstruct the entire term's information.
   How do you boil down a long chapter to less than one page of notes?
   1. Preview the chapter to start thinking about (1) what information in the chapter you could reconstruct from what you already know and  (2) what the main points are from which you can reconstruct the rest of the chapter.
   2. Keep in mind that you should be able to reconstruct most of the chapter, so either do not highlight anything--take notes instead--or highlight only the most important information on the page and go back later to try to reconstruct the rest of the page from the few words you highlighted. (Students who use highlighters to paint their books are obviously not being selective and thus are not taking advantage of reconstruction.)
   3. Realize that condensing a chapter down to less than one page of notes may not happen in one step. You may have to rewrite your summary several times, shortening it by (1) eliminating material in the previous summary that is either redundant (e.g., two examples of the same thing) or material that you could reconstruct and (2) replacing relatively narrow principles with broader principles.

    

2. Need for overlearning: In a well-organized  library, books don't get misplaced. So, if you retrieve a certain book once, you can always retrieve it (as long as the book is in the library). Your memory, on the other hand, is not so well-organized. As a result, even if you have retrieved a certain piece of information from your LTM before, you may not be able to retrieve that material later. The solution is to overlearn: Study after you already know it. Effective overlearning is practicing retrieval even after you have recalled the information perfectly (Since most people overestimate how much they know, you can't rely on thinking that you could recall the information:  The only way to know that you can recall the information is to actually recall it).

Why do you need to overlearn? You need to overlearn--which should be called "Super Reviewing"-- to defeat the forgetting curve. (Perhaps it was the forgetting curve and the power of overlearning that caused Quintilian to write, "Nothing is so much strengthened by practice, or weakened by neglect, as memory.") Put another way, since retrieval is the big problem in LTM, you need to practice retrieval. For students, this usually means taking practice tests and quizzing each other.  In a sense, practicing retrieval is like mowing the memory's retrieval path. Because of the need for overlearning, you should retrieve newly learned information at least 3 times after learning it (e.g., a day after learning it, a week after learning it, and a month after learning it).

 How can you use overlearning to do better in school? One way is to repeatedly write out answers to essay questions based on course material. If you tire of writing out answers, you could say your answers aloud to a critical friend or to a recording device. Alternatively, instead of writing entire essays, you could outline answers to essay questions or develop rubrics for grading answers to those essay questions (if you have a study partner, you could use your rubric to grade your partner's essays). If sample essay questions aren't available from your text, your professor, or online, you could create your own essay questions or you may be able to get them from the Psychology Problem Solver series.  

Another way to practice overlearning is to repeat parts of lectures to your parents, a stuffed animal, or a recording device. Tutoring also provides a chance to overlearn. Note that since everything you need to overlearn is already in  your head, you can practice overlearning almost any time. For example, you can recite answers to questions or recite the main points of a lecture while walking between classes or while waiting in line.

7 Memory Myths That Hurt Your GPA
(Myths that may explain the surprisingly weak relationship between time studied and exam scores)

10 Additional Review/Explore/Apply Activities

1. Match memories to their characteristics using this interactive table.
2. Master this interactive outline.
3. Take a fun memory test that will review key concepts and give you some studying tips.
4. Look at the study tips page and see how that page's tips apply the memory principles you have learned --or see how to apply memory principles to remembering names and jokes.
5. See how to be a better student by looking at this diagram.
6. Explore mnemonics at this site.
7. Take this short memory quiz
8. Read superlearner Scott Young's "The Complete Guide to Memory"
9. Listen to "Memory Tips" podcast or watch a "Discovering Psychology" video on memory or have some fun at this site.
10. Complete the study grid below.

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Copyright 2020-2021 Mark L. Mitchell