Constructive Processes in Memory

6 Key excerpts on "Constructive Processes in Memory"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Theoretical Issues in Reading Comprehension

  Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence and Education

  • Rand J. Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce, William F. Brewer, Rand J. Spiro, Bertram C. Bruce, William F. Brewer(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  The extent to which effort after meaning proceeds has broad ramifications for theory and practice related to reading comprehension. First, it can be assumed that in a given situation, some amount of effort after meaning will be optimal (sufficient extensions without diminishing returns on their value). Little is known, however, about the processes involved in initiating, directing, and terminating construction. It seems they are usually, but not necessarily, tacit. An initial guess is that there is some monitoring device which is tuned by the operative purposes or functions of reading at a given time and resonates to satisfied functions until a sufficient number are satisfied (given the level of tuning), at which time a click of comprehension occurs and effort after meaning ceases.

  A BRIEF NOTE ON REMEMBERING AS A CONTEXT-BASED CONSTRUCTIVE PROCESS

  A tradition in cognitive psychology, following Bartlett, has come increasingly to view remembering as a process similar to comprehending. I am referring to those who see memory as a reconstructive process (see Spiro, 1977, for a review of this literature). Rather than retrieving stored traces of past experience as the heart of remembering, the past is inferentially reconstructed in much the same manner as a paleontologist uses his knowledge of anatomy and physiology to reconstruct a dinosaur from its bone fragments. Similarly, the ingredients of reconstructive memory are stored fragments of the past (specific memories) and knowledge of the world. The assumption is made by the rememberer that the past is orderly, and an attempt is then made to enrich the fragmentary specific memories in such a way as to produce a complete and coherent account of that in the past which is the target of the activity. (The sparseness of specific memories is given considerable attention in the section on cognitive economy of representation.) In other words, part of the answer to the question “What is remembered?” is “What is needed.” The process is often below the level of conscious awareness: Under certain conditions (see Spiro, 1977 for a discussion of those conditions), reconstructed memories may be inaccurate, but when erroneous importations and distortions serve to produce coherence, individuals are unable to distinguish them from accurate memories (Spiro, 1980). The nature of what is remembered is as much affected by the variety of impinging contexts as is comprehension. Furthermore, remembering is usually subject to the influence of a richer context because all the contextual factors that influenced original comprehension will have an effect, but relevant additions to or alterations of the context can occur during the interval between initial exposure and subsequent retrieval. Further still, as specific memories are lost over time, other knowledge must be relied on more to fill out the picture of the past. Returning, then, to the similarity between remembering and comprehending alluded to at the beginning of this section, it is that both processes involve the combining of data (information in text for comprehension, specific memories for remembering) with contextual knowledge toward the goal of understanding—in the case of memory, an understanding of the past.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Real World Psychology

  • Catherine A. Sanderson, Karen R. Huffman(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Would you like personal proof of the constructive nature of your own memory? See the following Psychology and You. Memory The persistence of learning over time; process by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Constructive process The process of organizing and shaping information during encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories. remembered than those in the middle. Did you remember the word “artichoke” and “honey”? If you recalled “artichoke,” it illustrates the power of distinctiveness, whereas if you remembered seeing “honey” it’s because it was repeated two times. Both of these examples demonstrate how distinctive and/or repeated material are more easily encoded, stored, and recalled. Finally, did you see the word “sweet”? If so, look back over the list. That word is not there, yet most students commonly report seeing it. Why? As mentioned above, memory is not a faithful duplicate of an event; it is a constructive process. We actively shape and build on information as it is encoded and retrieved. Think Critically 1. Other than this example of seeing the word “sweet,” can you think of another example in which you may have created a false memory? 2. How might constructive memories create misunderstandings at work, and in our everyday relationships? Psychology and You—Understanding Yourself A Personal Memory Test Carefully read through all the words in the following list. Sour Chocolate Pie Bitter Nice Heart Honey Good Honey Cake Candy Taste Artichoke Tart Sugar Tooth Now cover the list and write down all the words you remember. Scoring: 15 to 16 words = excellent 10 to 14 words = average 5 to 9 words = below average 4 or fewer words = you might need a nap How did you do? Did you recall seeing the words “sour” and “tooth”? Most students do, and it’s a good example of the serial- position effect—the first and last words in the list are more easily Memory Models To understand memory (and its constructive nature), you need a model of how it operates.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  False-memory Creation in Children and Adults

  Theory, Research, and Implications

  • David F. Bjorklund(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)

  In this chapter, we attempt to integrate diverse empirical and theoretical observations concerning constructive memory phenomena from four different areas of research: cognitive studies of young adults, neuropsychological investigations of THE COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF CONSTRUCTIVE MEMORY 127 brain-damaged patients, studies of cognitive aging, and research using brain-imaging techniques. We will begin by sketching a general framework that places the study of constructive memory phenomena in a broader conceptual context. We then examine observations from relevant research domains concerning two major types of memory distortions: (a) false recognition, and (b) intrusions and confabulations. Finally we consider several recent studies concerned with whether false memories can be reduced or suppressed. CONSTRUCTIVE MEMORY: A GENERAL FRAMEWORK Our conceptualization of constructive memory functions, which we will refer to as the constructive memory framework (CMF), draws on notions put forward previously by Johnson et al. (1993), McClelland, McNaughton, and O’Reilly (1995), Moscovitch (1994), Norman and Schacter (1996), and Squire (1992), among others. We begin by noting that representations of new experiences can be conceptualized as patterns of features, with different features representing different facets of the experience: the outputs of perceptual modules that analyze specific physical attributes of incoming information, interpretation of these physical attributes by conceptual or semantic modules, and actions undertaken in response to incoming information (cf. Johnson & Chalfonte, 1994; Metcalfe, 1990; Moscovitch, 1994; Schacter, 1989). Constituent features of a memory representation are distributed widely across different parts of the brain, such that no single location contains a complete record of the trace or engram of a specific experience (Damasio, 1989; Squire, 1992).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Literature and the Metaphoric Universe in the Mind

  • Nicolae Babuts(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  2 Retrieval and Recall

  Clearly, the just-mentioned studies of memory in the neurosciences reveal the close correspondence between imagery and perception. This revelation is significant because it prepares us to understand the form in which memory preserves the perceptual information from the afferent signals and the way it can subsequently retrieve this information. One of the most glaring misunderstandings in some psychological and philosophical studies of memory is the notion, which appears to be popular nowadays, that “The apparently stable objects of memory—the representations of the things being recalled—are not retrieved from some Store-house of Ideas where they have been waiting intact, but rather are constructed on the fly by a computational process.” And further: “What we recall is not what we actually experienced, but rather a reconstruction of what we experienced that is consistent with our current goals and our knowledge of the world” (Westbury and Dennett, 19). Another example of this notion is that

  retrieval is almost always more a process of construction than one of simple retrieval. One creates the memory at the moment one needs it, rather than merely pulling out an intact item, image, or story. This suggests that each time we say or imagine something from our past we are putting it together from bits and pieces that may have, until now, been stored separately. Herein lies the reason why it is the rule rather than the exception for people to change, add, and delete things from a remembered event. (Susan Engel. Context is Everything: The Nature of Memory

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Psychology

  • Douglas Bernstein, , , (Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  196 Memory What do we still need to know? Studies such as this one make it clear that memory is constructive and that memory distor-tion and inaccuracy are very common (e.g., Arndt, 2012; Otgaar et al., 2012; Zhu et al., 2012). In fact, even people with highly superior memory for the events of their lives still have many false memories and do not realize it (Patihis et al., 2013). With appropriate feedback, people may be able to recognize and correct false memories (Clark et al., 2012; Leding, 2012), but exactly how the distortion process works and why false memories seem so real is still unclear. Perhaps the more frequently we recall an event, as when students were allowed to rehearse some lists, the stronger our belief is that we have recalled it accurately. There is also evidence that merely thinking about certain objects or events or hearing sounds or seeing photos asso-ciated with them appears to make false memories of them more likely (Garry & Gerrie, 2005; Henkel, Franklin, & Johnson, 2000). And there are times when, after watching someone else do something, we form the false memory that we have done that same thing ourselves (Lindner et al., 2010). This phenomenon may involve the activity of mirror neurons, which are discussed in the chapter on biological aspects of psychology. Questions about how false memories are created lead to even deeper questions about the degree to which our imperfect memory processes might distort our experiences of reality. Is there an objective reality, or do we each experience our own version of reality? Constructive Memory and Neural Network Models Neural network models of memory offer one way of explaining how semantic and ep-isodic information become integrated in constructive memories. As mentioned earlier, these models suggest that newly learned facts alter our general knowledge of the world. These network models focus on how memory creates associations between different spe-cific facts.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  21st Century Education: A Reference Handbook

  • Thomas L Good, Thomas L. Good(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  As you can see, two key elements in information processing theory are cognitive representations and cognitive pro-cesses. Information from the outside world is transformed in the learner’s cognitive system by cognitive representa-tions; cognitive processes then perform mental computations, or the systematic manipulation of the learner’s knowledge. In short, the “information” part of information process-ing refers to the learner’s cognitive representations and the “processing” part of information processing refers to the learner’s cognitive processes. Human information process-ing involves building, manipulating, and using cognitive representations. According to the information processing view, learning involves cognitive processing aimed at building cognitive representations. Research in cognitive science offers three important principles that should be part of any educationally relevant theory of how people learn (Mayer, 2001, 2005a): 1. Dual channels : People have separate channels for process-ing verbal material and pictorial material (Paivio, 1986). 2. Limited capacity : Within each channel people are able to attend to only a few pieces of information at any one time (Baddeley, 1999; Sweller, 1999). 3. Active processing : Meaningful learning occurs when peo-ple engage in appropriate cognitive processing during Information Processing • 169 learning, including attending to relevant incoming mate-rial, mentally organizing the material into a coherent cognitive structure, and integrating the material with rele-vant existing knowledge (Mayer, 2001; Wittrock, 1989). Information Processing Model of Learning Figure 18.1 presents a framework for describing the human information processing system based on the prin-ciples described above (Mayer, 2001). Information from the outside world—such as a textbook lesson or a teacher-led classroom demonstration—enters the learner’s cognitive system through the eyes and ears and is repre-sented briefly in sensory memory.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book