Short-Term Memory & Friends
Everything that our senses hear, see, taste, touch, and smell.
What is Sensory Memory?
Unlimited
What is the capacity of Long-Term Memory?
When new information interferes with old information.
What is Retroactive interference?
Refers to mental activities and processes associated with thinking, knowing, remembering, and communicating information.
What is a Cognition?
A mental grouping of similar objects, events, states, ideas, and/or people, etc.
What is a concept?
Records auditory information.
What is Echoic Memory?
A subdivision of declarative memory that stores memories of facts and general knowledge (like the Pythagorean theorem).
What is Semantic Memory?
When misleading or incorrect information exposure leads to distorted memories
What is the Misinformation Effect?
A short-cut, step-saving thinking strategy or principle which generates a solution quickly (but possibly in error).
What is a heuristic?
Refers to the thinking we do in order to answer a complex question or to figure out how to resolve an unfavorable situation.
What is Problem Solving?
This is how many items can be stored in Short-Term Memory.
What is 7 plus or minus 2?
Remembering information from the beginning better than the middle AND remembering information from the end better than the middle.
What is the Serial-Position Effect?
When information is not properly passed from STM to LTM (such as when attempting to multitask).
What is Encoding Failure?
Involves trying various possible solutions, and if that fails, trying others.
What is Trial & Error?
The tendency to think of an object as functioning only in its usual or customary way.
What is Functional Fixedness?
Approximately 30 seconds
What is the duration of Short-Term Memory storage?
Phobias and attitudes toward groups are part of these kind of memories
What is Procedural Memory?
Effortful retrieval of known information; can retrieve some information but not all.
What is Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon?
Tendency to use past successful or unsuccessful solutions when faced with a new problem.
What is a Mental Set?
Occurs when we feel that a new situation is familiar, even if there is evidence that the situation could not have occurred previously.
What is Déjà vu?
These are three methods of extending the capacity of Short-Term Memory.Chunking, Maintenance Rehearsal, Elaborative Rehearsal
What are Chunking, Maintenance Rehearsal, Elaborative Rehearsal?
A technique, developed by ancient Greek orators, in which the speaker memorizes the layout of a building and attaches key items to locations in the building.
What is the Method of Loci?
The "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon is a common example of this inability to pull memories from LTM.
What is retrieval failure?
Clinging to one’s initial conceptions after the basis on which they were formed has been discredited
What is Belief Perseverance?
States that when we learning something new, a neurochemical memory trace forms, but over time this trace disintegrates.
What is Decay Theory?