Forgetting and Memory
This curve, introduced by Ebbinghaus, shows how quickly we forget newly learned information over time.
What is the Forgetting Curve?
Humans classify objects by grouping them based on shared features, often creating these "fuzzy" boundaries.
What are probabilistic categories?
This British study showed that postal workers mastered typing faster with shorter, spaced-out practice sessions.
What is the Baddeley and Longman study?
A cognitive framework helping us organize and interpret information based on prior experience.
What is a schema?
The concept that testing improves retention more than additional studying of the same material.
What is the Testing Effect?
The process where short-term memories transform into long-term memories, often enhanced by sleep.
What is memory consolidation?
Pigeons and young children demonstrated the ability to classify objects by shape similarity in studies like Wasserman's.
What is abstract categorization?
The Distributed Practice Effect demonstrates that longer inter-trial intervals lead to better retention than shorter intervals.
What is the Distributed Practice Effect?
These event-based schemas dictate expectations, such as the sequence of actions in a restaurant.
What are scripts?
This researcher demonstrated that repeated testing outperformed repeated study for long-term retention of word pairs.
Who are Karpicke and Roediger?
Ebbinghaus found that this type of practice, involving breaks between study sessions, leads to better retention than cramming.
What is distributed practice?
The theory stating that items in a category share a set of defining properties, like "a bachelor is an unmarried man."
What is classical categorization?
This principle states that the optimal spacing between study sessions depends on the delay before testing.
What is the 10–20% rule?
This experiment showed how prior knowledge (a title) can double recall for ambiguous text.
What is the Washing Clothes experiment?
Testing benefits memory because it engages this process, strengthening retrieval pathways.
What is active recall?
The method where items are tested after increasing intervals as recall improves, optimizing memory retention.
What is expanding retrieval?
Tversky's model explains category violations like why "Jamaica is similar to Cuba" and "Cuba is similar to the USSR," but Jamaica and the USSR are not.
What is the Contrast Model?
The phenomenon where people believe cramming is more efficient than spaced-out learning, despite evidence to the contrary.
What is the illusion of efficiency?
Schemas are powerful but can lead to this memory issue, where unrelated items feel familiar due to activation.
What is spurious recall?
In the Testing Effect experiment, which group showed the highest recall after two weeks?
What is the group that continued testing all pairs?
Bartlett demonstrated how cultural schemas affected the recall of this Native American story.
What is "War of the Ghosts"?
This test evaluates typicality by ranking items like "apple" and "olive" on how representative they are of their category.
What is the Typicality Ratings Test?
Testing Swahili-English word pairs, Karpicke & Roediger found this strategy most effective for long-term recall.
What is continued testing of all items?
Cultural and role differences influence what we recall from events, demonstrating the adaptability of these mental structures.
What are culturally specific scripts?
This testing approach avoids dropping learned items from rotations to maximize retention.
What is continued retrieval practice?