Memory and Forgetting

John Henderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415186520
• eBook ISBN: 9781134663774
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

An explanation of the main models of memory and the various approaches used in its study. This is followed by a study of the theories of forgetting and practical applications of memory research.

PART I

THE STUDY OF MEMORY

1

Why do we study memory?

Pure and applied aspects of research

Progress exercise
Read the following instructions before you begin.

In Figure 1.1 are two sets of words, presented in rather different ways. randomly select one set of words, perhaps by the toss of a coin. Now give yourself 90 seconds to attempt to commit the woeds to memory, in any order. Then place the book out of sight and try to write down as many words as yuo can—again, give yourself about 90 seconds. When you have done this, repeat the procedure for nthe other set of words. Lastly compare the total you remembered in each case. What do you notice?

Figure 1.1 Word stimuli for progress exercise

With a few exceptions, students perform better when the words are arranged so that links are evident between them as opposed to when they are presented in ‘list’ fashion. Somehow, this linked ‘tree’ arrangement triggers the ability to reproduce information that was learned earlier. Also, there is evidence that memory lasts longer if the information is presented in this way—you may like to try remembering the two sets of words in a week’s time, say, to demonstrate this.

In the study of A- or AS-level psychology, and indeed in the study of any one area of the syllabus, you will be given many diverse pieces of information to learn: theories, studies, people’s names and dates. It is likely, too, that the study of psychology is quite new to you. Very quickly you will build up large quantities of notes from a variety of different areas. These may seem to have little or no connection with each other, a bit like the words in the list in Figure 1.1. As a result, when you come to memorise them for a class test or for a formal exam, you might find that this is quite a difiicult task.

How can the results of the experiment that you have just done help you to do well in your class test? One way is to think about how arranging words into a linked format aids remembering. It seems that people’s memories are set up to incorporate information in this way, to economise on the amount that has to be stored. If you remembered the item at the top of the ‘tree’, you probably then wrote down items that were joined to it on the diagram. In this way, the memory for one item cues the memory for other items. So you only have to be able to remember relationships between the items, and not all of the items individually.

Of course, this depends on the fact that such relationships exist! In the ‘tree’ in Figure 1.1, these were drawn in for you, and you probably didn’t have to work very hard to see how they were connected! To remember facts for a test, you might have to make your own connections—but, once you have made them, remembering the facts will be much easier. You can do this in each topic, as with the topic of memory—and you can do this with all of the topics you study in psychology. Indeed, you can do this with any of your A- or AS-level subjects!

Pure psychology

It is to be hoped that all of this will help you to develop certain strategies that will assist you with your revision: this is one reason for starting this book with the ‘list/tree’ exercise. But there is another reason why the above experiment is important. It builds on a number of theories put forward over the years that have all explored the importance of meaning in the ability to remember information. Later in this book, you will come across some of them, together with the studies upon which they are based, and the researchers’ names and dates. On your course, you too will have to conduct research to test theories, and (like the researchers) you will have to write a report of the study and its outcome. Areas of psychology that are based on theory, including laboratory experiments, are referred to as pure psychology.

At the end of your course, most of the notes that you have collected will contain pure psychology. It is possible that, in revising for your examination, you will only make use of this information, and that in writing examination answers, you will reproduce this information. Many students with whom I have had contact as a teacher and as an examiner have done this too.

Applied psychology

The vast majority of these students obtain passes in psychology, but only at the lower grades, like D and E. Obviously this is unfortunate for the student—and all the more so because, with a little more aware-ness of the reasons for the research, the grade could have been much better. For example, the paragraphs above describe a set of theories that relate how important meaningful links are to the remembering of information. But also, they give a reason why this is important—you yourself can put this into practice in revising for your examination! That is to say, the underlying research can be applied to the real world. Most, if not all, pure psychology is done for a reason—its findings have applications (i.e. uses) and implications (i.e some importance) in people’s lives. Revising for an examination is an application of a theory that should have importance in your life.

Methods for memory research

Memory research probably dates back to the laboratory experiments of Hermann Ebbinghaus at the end of the 1880s (Ebbinghaus, 1885). Influenced by the prevailing philosophies to keep research simple, his methods involved testing himself on his own ability to remember nonsense syllables, pronounceable three-letter non-word stimuli such as DOK and RUL. His argument was that by using such simple stimuli, he was studying raw memory, i.e. memory that could not be influenced by each person’s own experience. Many of the experiments still conducted today, though rather more sophisticated, are extensions of the methods Ebbinghaus used.

It was some years before the objection was raised that, by using such a simple reductionist approach, Ebbinghaus was not in fact studying everyday memory at all. Therefore it was difficult to extend the findings of his pure research in an applied way, and so his results told us little about people’s memory for real things. One such critic was Sir Frederick Bartlett. His solution was to test memory for text that was written in a conventional English style, but related to unfamiliar subject matter (Bartlett, 1932). Thus, he argued that he was testing memory in an everyday context and also without the different experiences of the participants affecting their interpretations. Try it for yourself.

Progress exercise

Read the following passage:

The War of the Ghosts

One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war cries, and they thought: ‘Maybe this is a war-party.’ They escaped to the shore, and hid behind a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles a log. Now canoes came up, and they heard the noise of paddles and saw one canoe coming up to them There were five men in the canoe, and they said:

‘What do you think? We wiseto tank you along. We are going up the river to make war on the people.’

One of the young man said: ‘I have no arrows.’

‘Arrows are in the canoe,’ they said.

‘I will not go alone. I might be killed. My relatives do not known where I have gone. But you,’ he said, turning to the other, ‘may go eith them.’

So one of the young men went, but you other returned home. And the warriors went on up the river to a down to the water, and they began to fight, and many were killed. But Presently the young man heard one of the Warriors say: ‘Quick, let us go home: that Indian has been hit.’ Now he thoughts: ‘Oh, they are ghosts.’ He did not feel sick, but they said he had been shot. so the canoes went back the to Egulac, adn the young man went ashore to his house, and made a fire. And he told every-body and said: ‘Behold I accompanied the ghosts, adn we went fight. Many of our fellows were killed and many of those that attacked us were killed. They said I was hit, and I did not feel sick,’

He told it all, and he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried.

He was dead.

Now cover the passage up and attempt to write doem as much of it as you can. When you have done this, compare your reconstruction with the original version.

Bartlett argued that the mechanisms that one uses in trying to remember such a piece—and the mistakes that one typically makes!—are much more representative of real-world remembering. When you try to remember a complex event, for example, you attempt to piece it together in much the same way as you did above. The result is a reconstruction which is shorter, reads better, has a more coherent story line, and contains quite a lot of extra detail inserted by the rememberer. Does all this apply to your reconstruction? If not, try reconstructing it after a longer time period—inevitably you will fill in ‘gaps’ in your memory, just as eyewitnesses do when they attempt to recount a crime they have just observed. Bartlett was the first to make use of a now common term in cognitive psychology—that of a schema. Each of us makes sense of new experience in terms of the relevant knowledge (the schema) one already has. So as you accumulate information throughout this book, you organise it and interpret it in terms of what you already know about memory, or cognitive psychology, or psychology, or real life. Each of these ‘packets’ of organised knowledge is a schema. Your reconstruction of the original text is therefore distorted because it is interpreted in line with the schemata which you already possess. (Keep a copy of what you remembered—it may be useful to you in Chapters 4 and 6.)

Most modern-day memory research with humans attempts to strike a balance between pure and applied approaches. However, there are some cases where, even though we wish to apply our findings to humans, it is not possible ethically. For example, if we were investigating the deterioration of the memory as in senile dementia, we would not be able to use human sufferers. In such instances, our normal focus of research would be non-human, and we might conduct research with, say, a laboratory rat. Whilst this research is more ethical, we would clearly have to recognise the likely limitations of drawing conclusions about human memory. Of course, it might be possible to make observations of clinical cases of memory disorder (such as senile dementia) if they occurred naturally, though such studies have other problems, such as making generalisations from atypical cases.

Review exercise

Explain the difference between ‘pure’ psychology and ‘applied’ psychology. Why will this distinction be important to you when you sit your examination?

Terminology

Certain terms recur in the area of memory. Since different texts use different words for similar processes, it is important now to set out the key terms that will be used in this book. These are described in the following paragraphs. But to begin with, it should be clear that, in an experiment on memory, the participant’s capacity for learning is being tested. In this book,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Part I The Study of Memory
• Part II The Structure and Processes of Human Memory Pure Aspects
• Part III Memory in Practice Applied Aspects
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index