Encoding involves the input of information into the memory system. Storage is the retention of the encoded information. Retrieval, or getting the information out of memory and back into awareness, is the third function. Figure 2. When you first learn new skills such as driving a car, you have to put forth effort and attention to encode information about how to start a car, how to brake, how to handle a turn, and so on.
Once you know how to drive, you can encode additional information about this skill automatically. What are the most effective ways to ensure that important memories are well encoded? Even a simple sentence is easier to recall when it is meaningful Anderson, How well did you do?
By themselves, the statements that you wrote down were most likely confusing and difficult for you to recall. Now, try writing them again, using the following prompts: bagpipe, ship christening shattering a bottle over the bow of the ship is a symbol of good luck , and parachutist. Next count backwards from 40 by fours, then check yourself to see how well you recalled the sentences this time.
You can see that the sentences are now much more memorable because each of the sentences was placed in context. Material is far better encoded when you make it meaningful. There are three types of encoding. The encoding of words and their meaning is known as semantic encoding. It was first demonstrated by William Bousfield in an experiment in which he asked people to memorize words.
The 60 words were actually divided into 4 categories of meaning, although the participants did not know this because the words were randomly presented. When they were asked to remember the words, they tended to recall them in categories, showing that they paid attention to the meanings of the words as they learned them. Visual encoding is the encoding of images, and acoustic encoding is the encoding of sounds, words in particular.
To see how visual encoding works, read over this list of words: car, level, dog, truth, book, value. Consider a lab experiment. Suppose you study items; 99 are words, and one is a picture—of a penguin, item 50 in the list. No one would miss it. This outcome shows the power of distinctiveness that we discussed in the section on encoding: one picture is perfectly recalled from among 99 words because it stands out.
Now consider what would happen if the experiment were repeated, but there were 25 pictures distributed within the item list. Watkins referred to this outcome as demonstrating the cue overload principle. That is, to be effective, a retrieval cue cannot be overloaded with too many memories.
To sum up how memory cues function: for a retrieval cue to be effective, a match must exist between the cue and the desired target memory; furthermore, to produce the best retrieval, the cue-target relationship should be distinctive. Next, we will see how the encoding specificity principle can work in practice. Psychologists measure memory performance by using production tests involving recall or recognition tests involving the selection of correct from incorrect information, e.
For example, with our list of words, one group of people might be asked to recall the list in any order a free recall test , while a different group might be asked to circle the studied words out of a mix with another , unstudied words a recognition test.
In this situation, the recognition test would likely produce better performance from participants than the recall test. We usually think of recognition tests as being quite easy, because the cue for retrieval is a copy of the actual event that was presented for study.
After all, what could be a better cue than the exact target memory the person is trying to access? In most cases, this line of reasoning is true; nevertheless, recognition tests do not provide perfect indexes of what is stored in memory.
For example, suppose you had the task of recognizing the surnames of famous authors. At first, you might think that being given the actual last name would always be the best cue. However, research has shown this not necessarily to be true Muter, When given names such as Tolstoy, Shaw, Shakespeare, and Lee, subjects might well say that Tolstoy and Shakespeare are famous authors, whereas Shaw and Lee are not.
But, when given a cued recall test using first names, people often recall items produce them that they had failed to recognize before. This strange fact—that recall can sometimes lead to better performance than recognition—can be explained by the encoding specificity principle. The point is, the cues that work best to evoke retrieval are those that recreate the event or name to be remembered, whereas sometimes even the target itself, such as Shaw in the above example, is not the best cue.
Which cue will be most effective depends on how the information has been encoded. Whenever we think about our past, we engage in the act of retrieval. We usually think that retrieval is an objective act because we tend to imagine that retrieving a memory is like pulling a book from a shelf, and after we are done with it, we return the book to the shelf just as it was.
However, research shows this assumption to be false; far from being a static repository of data, the memory is constantly changing. In fact, every time we retrieve a memory, it is altered.
Thus the act of retrieval can be a double-edged sword—strengthening the memory just retrieved usually by a large amount but harming related information though this effect is often relatively small. As discussed earlier, retrieval of distant memories is reconstructive. We weave the concrete bits and pieces of events in with assumptions and preferences to form a coherent story Bartlett, For example, if during your 10th birthday, your dog got to your cake before you did, you would likely tell that story for years afterward.
Say, then, in later years you misremember where the dog actually found the cake, but repeat that error over and over during subsequent retellings of the story. Over time, that inaccuracy would become a basic fact of the event in your mind. Just as retrieval practice repetition enhances accurate memories, so will it strengthen errors or false memories McDermott, Sometimes memories can even be manufactured just from hearing a vivid story.
Consider the following episode, recounted by Jean Piaget, the famous developmental psychologist, from his childhood:. He heard the tale told repeatedly, and doubtless told it and thought about it himself. A central theme of this module has been the importance of the encoding and retrieval processes, and their interaction.
To recap: to improve learning and memory, we need to encode information in conjunction with excellent cues that will bring back the remembered events when we need them. But how do we do this? Keep in mind the two critical principles we have discussed: to maximize retrieval, we should construct meaningful cues that remind us of the original experience, and those cues should be distinctive and not associated with other memories. These two conditions are critical in maximizing cue effectiveness Nairne, So, how can these principles be adapted for use in many situations?
Although it was not obvious, he applied these same general memory principles, but in a more deliberate way. In a typical case, the person learns a set of cues and then applies these cues to learn and remember information. It would probably take you less than 10 minutes to learn this list and practice recalling it several times remember to use retrieval practice!
In fact, this mnemonic device is called the peg word technique. If you then needed to remember some discrete items—say a grocery list, or points you wanted to make in a speech—this method would let you do so in a very precise yet flexible way.
Suppose you had to remember bread, peanut butter, bananas, lettuce, and so on. The way to use the method is to form a vivid image of what you want to remember and imagine it interacting with your peg words as many as you need.
For example, for these items, you might imagine a large gun the first peg word shooting a loaf of bread, then a jar of peanut butter inside a shoe, then large bunches of bananas hanging from a tree, then a door slamming on a head of lettuce with leaves flying everywhere.
The idea is to provide good, distinctive cues the weirder the better! If you do this, then retrieving it later is relatively easy. You know your cues perfectly one is gun, etc. This peg word method may sound strange at first, but it works quite well, even with little training Roediger, One word of warning, though, is that the items to be remembered need to be presented relatively slowly at first, until you have practice associating each with its cue word.
People get faster with time. In stage three, there is more activity in the left interior region of the brain. These activities are thought to access semantic memory which is elicited by meaningful information. Younger adults encode memories with relative ease. The processing speed, working memory, and ability to perceive things correctly is better in younger people. Brain activity has been seen at its peak in early life years and it declines in the later stages of life.
That is why younger adults can learn and encode new information, the process which is affected in older people. Older adults experience significant disturbances in encoding processes due to deficiencies in brain activities as compared to younger people. Older people may face difficulty with perceptual encoding and elaborative process of encoding. Differences between younger and older adults indicated that stage three of memory encoding is less efficient in older people, but no differences have been found in stage four.
The age difference is most prominent in stage five in which links are created between new and prior information. Older adults cannot encode information with elaboration. It is more challenging for older people to maintain information due to changes in the function of the frontal lobe. Perception and processing speed also decline with age. There are some effective strategies for old learners to better encode new information. Older adults retain adequate powers of plasticity, but they must engage themselves in self-initiating processing.
These strategies may lead them to achieve adequate memory encoding. Genetics plays an important role in memory encoding. Human memory is known as a heritable trait. It is polygenic, which means that it is controlled by more than one gene. Many proteins are directly linked to a molecular cascade of reaction which leads to the formation of memory.
Some of these proteins are encoded in the human by their genes. The memory capacity of humans is associated with variations in these genes.
False encoding is the processing of information in such a way that leads to the formation of false memories. The processes that lead to the formation of false memories may include self-referential encoding and construction of a gist trace. Perception and storage processes are also included in creating false memories during encoding. False memories can also be created at the consolidation state.
This usually happens due to post-event information and sleep. During sleep, reorganization and linking of memories with pre-existing representation takes place. This leads to the changing of memory representation that was originally encoded. Post-event information creates false memories due memory updating process. False information is retrieved due to the activity of the hippocampus. Hippocampus equally retrieves true and false information. The hippocampus leads to the creation of false memories due to incorrect recombination.
Mnemonics may be short acronyms of all the first letters of things in a list or a peg-word system in which items to be remembered are associated with the words that a person can easily remember.
Making mnemonics may be the best strategy to remember a list of things. But mnemonics do not help in encoding complex information. Chunking is a strategy in which information is organized into small and meaningful chunks. First, the information is divided into sections and then these sections are remembered as a unit. In this way, information becomes more meaningful and easier to digest. Imagination is associating images with words.
This is a well-known strategy for the better encoding of information. Strong imagination leads to strong memory encoding. Moreover, the information can be read fast from such encoding, in as little as 20 ms. In quantitative information theoretic studies, only a little additional information is available in temporal encoding involving stimulus-dependent synchronization of different neurons, or the timing of spikes within the spike train of a single neuron.
Feature binding appears to be solved by feature combination neurons rather than by temporal synchrony.
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