PSC 130

Hermann Ebbinghaus is a German psychologist who pioneered the study of Human memory through experimental methods, even on himself.

• He tested himsefl with a list of 3 letter groups called CVCs
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Ebbinghaus' experiments showed that after learning we usually forget most information within the first couple of hours. Whatever we still remember after a day or two will be stored in for later use.

Sir Frederic Bartlett studied human memory on meaningful things. He presented subjects with a story/fable then asked them to recall the story.

• Bartlett discovered that most patients couldn't remember details and that they reconstructed parts of the story from their own memory. This signified that people use schemas and reconstruction in their memory.
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The Three main forms of memory are:

• Sensory Memory; sensory information/ perceptive information
• Working Memory; memory being held in our minds for a short period of time
• Long Term Memory; memory that is stored in our brain for later recall and use.

The Two types of sensory memory are:

• Iconic Memory; Visual information
• Echoic Memory; Auiditory information

The Two types of Long Term Memory are:

• Declarative (explicit) Memory; the recall of past events and facts
• Nondeclarative (implicit) Memory: the skills and nonconcious abilities that we have

The Two types of declarative memory are:

• Episodic Memory; Memory related to past events, times, places and contextual knowledge
• Semantic Memory; the meaning and understanding/ knowledge of concepts that are not related to specific events

George sperling was the first Psychologist to prove that Iconic Memory exist in our human mind.

-using free recall he showed that people who were shown a list of 9 letters, could only remember 4-5 although their memory stored all 9 because of the short period that they were kept in memory. Using Cued recalled this was proven because he showed all nine letters to the subject along with a sound for ever row. In general most subjects did alot better in cued recall and Sperling also found out the amount of time before memory is lost in our mind.

Sperling's 3x4 matrix was a presented for 50miliseconds. Subjects could only report up to four times on the matrix but claimed that they could see much more that was lost while trying to report it.

Sperling hypothesized that they had the whole image in their visual (iconic) memory which was: visual, high capacity space, pre-catergorical, and quickly decaying

The Partial Report Technique is giving subjects a cue to recall one row of the Matrix presented to them.

In his experiment the cued helped increase recall but, dependin the delay between the presentation of the row and the actual cue. The longer the time between the row and the cue, the worse recall would be and vice versa.

When masking was used, recall was terrible, hypothesized due to visual distruption.

Sperling's results showed that our visual memory has capacity for 10 items and there was transfer into another type of memory system...

This second system later turned out to be Short -Term Memory

William James is an American Psychologist who distinguished memory into two types, Primary and Secondary.

• Primary Memory he defined as memory that is available at any given time, while Secondary Memory was more related to Short Term Memory. It lasted only several seconds and had a small capacity
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The Modal Model is a memory Model created by Atkinson &Shiffrin. It involed 3 stages of memory and stated that human memory works according to their interactions.

• Sensory Memory
• Short-Term Memory
• Long-Term Memory
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Short Term Memory is memory that is very limited in the amount of information that can be stored but has a very rapid input and retreival

Long Term Memory has a tremendous capacity for information storage, but its is very slow at retreival and input

• The STM memory span states that people's STM can only hold up to 7 items at a time. George Miller discovered this "
• Magic Number" and deduced that depending on the person it would be 7 items +/-2
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According to George Miller our STM span doesnt hold actual items in its capacity. Instead what our brain does is chunk information in to subgroups.

By organizing the information into Chunks our brain can hold 4+1 chunks, which potentially can be various amounts of items or loads of information.

Atkinson and Shiffrin's Modal Model introduced our focus on control processes.

• According to the model the more time we spend trying to store information, the better we would remember it later.
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The Serial Position Effect is when the position of items on a list affect our recall. There are two main effects that we experience:

Primacy Effect: The items at the begging of a list are remember best due to rehersal of the items

• Recency Effect: Items at the end of a list are remembered best because they are still in our working memory
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When Postman and Phillips added a delay before the actual recall of the list of items what subjects experienced was a lost of the Recency Effect.

• The loss of the Recency Effect was due to the fact that their STM was taken up by something else and the memory of the list of words was discarded.
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