Getting Back Out of Long Term Memory

Psy315 - Class 13, Part 2

(This page last updated 12 October, 2006.)

 Our ability to retrieve information from LTM varies depending on how it was encoded.

Two Ways to Test Retrieval

• Recognition: See many examples, and choose those that were seen before.
• Recall: Produce list of items seen before without examples.

  See Experiment by Barbara Tversky, Fig. 6.1 in textbook.

State-Dependent Learning

See textbook pp. 165-169.

 

The Encoding Specificity Principle

When a piece of information is encoded in Long Term Memory, the context is encoded with it. Retrieval is aided when the original learning context is restored.

 

Episodic Memory

All of the Long Term Memory tests we have considered so far are of a particular type:

"What words were on the list that we showed you earlier?"

To do these tasks, you can't just recall the words. You knew the words before you started the experiment. You have to remember whether the words were part of a particular learning "episode".

Two Possible Types of Retrieval

• Familiarity
  • The stimulus seems familiar, but you do not remember the specific episode in which you were exposed to it before.
• Source Memory
  • Remembering the specific episode in which you were exposed to this stimulus.

• Recall generally requires source memory.
• Recognition can be triggered by either familiarity or source memory.

• Maintenance rehearsal will often be sufficient to produce familiarity later.
• Source memory is more likely to result from elaborative rehearsal than from maintenance rehearsal.

next class: Implicit Memory

Psych 315: Cognitive Psychology Kyle Cave Psychology Dept. U. Mass.