Chapter 5 Definitions
What is lexical memory
mental dictionary
Childhood amnesia
No episodic memory as adults of the age 3-5 and under.
prime word and the target word are in different languages
book primes for libro in spanish
Exemplar Theory
Categories are classified by maintaining a large number of specific instances of a category (exemplar) that are associated with each other in semantic memory
Brewers and Treyens 1981
In study participants: Waited in an office waiting room. Later when out of the room recalled items from that room
Results - Participants remembered more schema-consistent items (ex. chairs) than schema-irrelevant items (ex. picnic basket) - Also falsely recalled more schema-consistent items (meaning items you’d think are there but actually weren’t, like books) - Schema-violating items were also well remembered (ex. skull)
What is the meaning of scripts
Generalized knowledge about an event, a person, or a situation
Highly confident personal memories of surprising events
Lexical Decision Task
A task were participants are able to detect if the string of letters is or isnt a word as quickly as they can
Feature comparison theory
We define our categories by maintaining a list of features for any particular category
Willander and Larsson (2007)
Conducted a study on the role odors play in autobiographical memory - They tested 3 cueing conditions 1) odors alone2) word alone 3) smell and word.
Results odor alone produced the most and oldest autobiographical memories
Well-learned sequences of events associated with common activities
Working together with other people to remember information
Sentence verification task
In a sentence verification task, participants are asked to decide as quickly as possible if a sentence is true or false
The monitoring function that controls the retrieval of information from the levels of representation
Badham and Maylor
Asked participants to learn weakly related word pairs - participants were given a schema that helped them organize the items- In other conditions, participants relied on their own idiosyncratic encoding techniques
Results: Performance in the schema condition was lower
Knowledge about the world
Autobiographical Memory
Specific memories and self-knowledge
SEMANTIC PRIMING
A word or an idea can be start a relation of another word or idea
1. Event specific memories
2. General events
3. Lifetime periods
4. Jack, Simcock, and Hayne (2012)
Tracked down the children in the study when they were about 10 years old (6 years later)
20% still remembered the “magic shrinking machine ”
The older children continued to only recall what they had words for as younger children
Suggests that the researchers were producing an event that adequately captures the kind of events for which adults will have childhood memories
Storage of information in memory when that information is not in use
Disputed memories
When we feel a memory is our own when it actually corresponds to an event in another’s past
Schema forms the backbone upon which new information can be associated
–States that prototypes form the central characteristic in our representation of categories
Weaver 1993
conducted a study comparing -An ordinary memory (interaction with classmate) and a flashbulb memory (start of first Gulf War)
Results -Accuracy (that is, correspondence with original report) was equivalent for both memories. Some errors were seen in both Confidence remained high for flashbulb memory But not for ordinary memory