Psychology
Memory recall
Memory recall refers to the process of retrieving information stored in the memory. It involves bringing previously encoded and stored information into conscious awareness. This cognitive process can be influenced by various factors such as the strength of the original memory, the presence of cues, and the individual's emotional state.
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10 Key excerpts on "Memory recall"
eBook - PDF- John P. Houston, Helen Bee, David C. Rimm(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
So, if the two are bound together so closely, why do we have one chap-ter on learning and one on memory? Why not consider them together? The difference between the two areas lies in the focus of the psychologist, not in any clear distinction between learning and memory. In studying learning, we are primarily interested in acquisition processes, while in studying memory we are primarily focusing upon retention processes, even though we are aware of the intimate relationship between the two. Measures of retention Recall Given that we know that learning and retention are very closely related, and that substantial forgetting occurs in a regular manner, what can be said about the available methods of measuring retention? Psychologists usually identify three methods. The first of these is the recall method. In a recall task the subject is required to reproduce the entire stored item. In effect, the subject is asked, What is the item? For instance, if you were asked the name of this text, and were required to produce the title exactly, without looking, you would be engaging in a recall test. Similarly, if you were asked the name of the river that runs between Albany, New York, and New York City, you would be engaging in a recall task. Recall tasks are prominent in the field of verbal learning. They are often used in paired-associate situations in which the subject, after some time interval ranging from seconds to weeks, is asked to recall the correct response members when shown the stimulus members of each pair (Kaus-1er, 1974). When people talk about remembering something, they usually mean recalling something from memory. But retention also involves recog-nition and relearning. These old friends have no trouble recognizing each other, but such chance meetings can be embarrassing if names cant be recalled. Measures of retention 163 Recognition In a recognition task the subject is asked, Is this the item? (Underwood, 1972).
eBook - PDF- Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould, Adrian Furnham(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
CHAPTER 10 MEMORY 274 Consider everything that memory lets you do. Obviously, there are the everyday tasks, such as passing tests, handing in coursework on time or remembering a friend ’s birthday. But go deeper: think of the things memory lets you do that you take for granted. Because of memory, you can have favourite foods, favourite musicians, favourite movies and favourite TV shows. Not only can you remember friends’ birthdays but you can also remember their typical behaviours and preferences and, for example, predict what they might want for their birthday. You can go deeper still. If you did not somehow store events and people in your mind, you would not know about anything that you were not directly sensing at that moment. You would only know what was in your line of sight and have no idea how the things that you were seeing connected to you or had any significance or meaning. Without memory, you may be, like PJM, a stranger to yourself, unable to link the pre- sent to the past and using this information to make decisions about the future (Kihlström, 2001). By keeping a record of our past, our memory takes us out of an infinite present. What Is Memory? LEARNING OBJECTIVE 1 Define the basic activities of memory and describe two major models of memory. Simply put, memory is the faculty for reproducing past events and past learning. This definition is perhaps the only thing about memory that is simple. Although psychologists can differ in their ideas about how memory works, they generally agree that it involves three basic activities: • Encoding – Getting information into memory in the first place. • Storage – Retaining memories for future use. • Retrieval – Recapturing memories when we need them. These three stages work together. For any single memory event, all three need to have been achieved. In memory clin- ics, neurologists sometimes ask people to report what they had for breakfast. You can consider this simple question now, and form an answer.
No longer available |Learn more- Philip Banyard, Christine Norman, Gayle Dillon, Belinda Winder, Philip Banyard, Christine Norman, Gayle Dillon, Belinda Winder(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Retrieval The stage of memory where information is brought back into mind to be used or reported. 96 COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY Retrieval Retrieval processes can be investigated by manipulating the way memory is tested. One of the most important decisions to consider in testing memory is how to measure it; a key distinction is between recognition and recall. EXERCISE THE ROYAL WEDDING: HARRY AND MEGHAN, PART 1: HOW WELL DO YOU THINK YOU CAN REMEMBER EVENTS? Psychologists have studied how accurately people remember key events. Can you remember the Royal Wedding in 2018? This news excerpt might help to jog your memory. THE ROYAL WEDDING On a warm summery afternoon in 2018, Prince Harry married Meghan Markle at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. The Chapel was decorated with colourful flowers and was packed with 600 guests, including foreign dignitaries, diplomats, members of the UK government and the couple’s family and friends. Meghan wore a beautiful white wedding gown by a designer from the French fashion house, Givenchy. Harry, who has previously served in the British Army, wore the Blues and Royals military uniform. After the service, all 600 guests attended a lunchtime reception hosted by the Queen. Instead of a traditional sit-down meal, the couple opted for ‘bowl food’, which is similar to canapés but more substantial. We will return to the Royal Wedding later in the chapter. Recognition Recognition involves re-presenting the original material and asking participants to deter- mine whether it occurred in the experiment. Although recognition appears to be a very simple procedure, it is surprisingly complex. For example, in an old–new recognition test only one item is presented at a time and a ‘new’ (unrecognised) or an ‘old’ (recognised) response is required. In a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test the ‘new’ and ‘old’ items are presented together and the recognised item is selected.
- Lorelle J. Burton, Drew Westen, Robin M. Kowalski(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Varieties of long-term memory • Declarative memory refers to memory for facts and events; it can be semantic memory or episodic memory. Procedural memory refers to ‘how to’ knowl- edge of procedures or skills. • Explicit memory refers to conscious recollection. Implicit memory refers to memory that is expressed in behaviour. • Everyday memory refers to memory as it occurs in daily life. Remembering, misremembering and forgetting • Psychologists often distinguish between the availability of information in memory and its accessibility. • People make memory errors for a variety of reasons. • Psychologists have proposed several explanations for why people forget, including decay, interference and motivated forgetting. • Memories recovered in therapy cannot be assumed to be accurate, but they also cannot be routinely dismissed as false. • Specifc kinds of distortion can also occur within the memories of people whose brains have been affected by illness or injury. Anterograde amnesia involves the inability to retain new memories. By contrast, retrograde amnesia involves losing memories from a period before the time that a person’s brain was damaged. Encoding and organisation of long-term memory • To be retrieved from memory, information must be encoded, or cast into a representational form or ‘code’ that can be readily accessed. • Mnemonic devices are systematic strategies for remembering information. • Knowledge stored in memory forms networks of association — clusters of interconnected information. • LTM is organised in terms of schemas, organised knowl- edge structures or patterns of thought. Pdf_Folio:448 Information processing • sensory • verbal • motoric Short-term memory (20–30 seconds) Response Retrieval Rehearsal Long-term memory (enduring storage) Sensory memory A memory is a mental representation for something to be remembered.
eBook - PDF- Rachel Winson, Barbara A. Wilson, Andrew Bateman, Rachel Winson, Barbara A. Wilson, Andrew Bateman(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- The Guilford Press(Publisher)
It is worth remembering that not every strategy works for every person, and that it can be worth trying a strategy several times, whether or not the first trial was successful. C H A P T E R 4 Memory Jessica Fish Susan Brentnall Memory 69 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND MODELS There are two important things to know about memory: 1. There are three stages of memory: “encoding” (taking in information), “storage” (keeping some representation of that information), and “retrieval” (finding that infor- mation when it is needed). We can think of this as like a filing system—creating the original file, putting it in the right section, and finding it again when it is needed next. 2. There are several different types of memory, organized in different brain areas, and involved in different everyday tasks. The types of memory problems clients experi- ence are likely to depend upon the parts of the brain affected by their injuries, as well as the types of activities they are involved with on a day-to-day basis. Squire and Knowlton (1995) came up with a good way of organizing these compo- nents; a schematic diagram of this model is shown in Figure 4.1. First, there is a distinction between memory that we are aware of (called “explicit” or “declarative” memory, as we can “declare” the contents), and memory that we are unaware of (“implicit” or “nondeclarative” memory). Implicit memory includes the following: • Procedural memory: Memory for nonverbal skills and motor procedures, such as knowing how to ride a bike or play an instrument. • Priming: A type of memory where we may not remember having seen or heard some- thing before, but are quicker to learn or recognize it the second time around. • Conditioning: A type of memory in which we learn to associate one thing with another without having a conscious awareness of the link. For example, in a famous FIGURE 4.1. A schematic diagram of the Squire and Knowlton (1995) taxonomy of long-term mem- ory.
eBook - PDF- David A. Lieberman(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
306 Memory What processes would have occurred in your brain to allow you to store this word when you first saw it and then subsequently retrieve it? Cognitive psychologists wanted to understand these processes. If you stop to think about it, the goal is an audacious one. We could measure the light from the page that reached your eye, and we can observe whether you respond correctly when asked to repeat the word, but how can we say anything about the invisible processes that went on in your brain during the period in between? Existing tech-nology does not allow us to trace the transmission of activity from one neuron to another in a living person’s brain; how, then, can we say what processes occurred? Two clues to a model of memory As it happens, at just about the same time that research on organization was con-vincing psychologists that they needed to understand cognitive processes better, important clues were emerging about the nature of these processes. We will look at two of the key pieces of the jigsaw that was to eventually lead to a model of how memory works. Rapid forgetting One critical clue came from experiments reported by Brown ( 1958 ) at Birkbeck College in England and by Peterson and Peterson ( 1959 ) at Indiana University in America. The two experiments were very similar; we will focus on the one reported by the Petersons. Previous research, from Ebbinghaus onward, had shown that people can remem-ber verbal material (arrangements of words) for long periods – hours, days, or even years. In virtually all these studies, however, participants were allowed to continue thinking about the material during the retention interval, so that the observed recall was, potentially, the fruit of extended practice. The Petersons wondered how long material would be remembered if participants were not given an opportunity to practice it.
eBook - PDFSLA Applied
Connecting Theory and Practice
- Brian Tomlinson, Hitomi Masuhara(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
For research on the bizarreness effect in recall see, for example, Richman (1994), McDaniel and Geraci (2006), Geraci, McDaniel, Miller and Hughes (2013). Some researchers (e.g. Anderson, 1981, 1993; DeKeyser, 2007b, 2015; Criado, 2016) claim that explicit learning can become implicit acquisition through the automatisation of learned language and skills (a claim usually referred to as skill acquisition theory). If this was the case, recall would play a vital role in eventually promoting acquisition, as it is a prerequisite for the successful explicit learning that would need to precede implicit acquisition. However, most researchers (including N. Ellis, 2015, R. Ellis, 2015 and ourselves) dispute skill acquisition theory and claim that explicit declarative knowledge and implicit procedural knowledge are stored separately in the brain and that there is no automatic progression from declarative to procedural knowledge. We would argue, however, that recall does have the following limited roles to play in promoting acquisition. It can, if successful: 1 aid recognition as a result of frequent recollection of the graphic and phonetic forms of language items; 2 increase learner confidence and self-esteem; 3 encourage learners to read, listen and interact more; 4 aid learner self-monitoring during and after language use (see Chapter 7); 5 become auto-input which could reinforce acquired procedural knowledge (see Chapter 8). Roles of Recall in Comprehension So far, we have only considered recall as the bringing out of forms from long-term memory. The term “recall” can also refer to the bringing out of associated meanings 198 Recognition, Recall, Rehearsal and Retrieval and functions from long-term memory. When we encounter a word, expression or structure in an L2 that we recognise but cannot understand, we sometimes try to recall stored meanings or functions associated with this problematic input.
eBook - PDF- Nancy Ogden, Michael Boyes, Evelyn Field, Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
For example, we often give up trying to remember and just as we begin to Google the answer, it comes to us. So, in an exam setting, think of ©iStockphoto.com/Rich Legg Recalling the past Looking at old family photos with grandparents is a good way for her to retrieve information about family events from previous generations. The photos can serve as retrieval cues for accessing particular episodic memories. How Do We Retrieve Memories? 319 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 20 min. 1 hour Retention interval Retention (%) 4 hours 2 days Recall 1 day Recognition FIGURE 8.6 Recognition versus recall In one study of retrieval, participants were tested for either recognition or recall of nonsense syllables over the course of two days. Retrieval on the recognition test was far superior than on the recall test. Source: Schwanenflugel et al., 1992; Luh, 1922 the chapter, section, or lecture the information comes from, and then relax—that is often enough to get past the tip-of-the-tongue problem; sometimes the harder you try, the more the information you want eludes you (Miller et al., 2016). The retrieval of information from memory is facilitated by retrieval cues—words, sights, or other stimuli that remind us of the information we need (what it related to or where we learned it originally, for example). Essentially, when we come across a retrieval cue, we enter our long-term memory system and activate a relevant piece of information. Because the pieces of information in this memory system are linked to each other in a network of associations, the activation of the first piece of information will trigger the activation of related pieces until a complete memory emerges (Reas, 2014). Priming and Retrieval If the pieces of information stored in long-term memory are indeed linked together in a network of associations, then the key to retrieving a specific memory is to locate one piece of informa- tion and follow associated pieces until arriving at the memory.
eBook - PDF- Richard J. McNally(Author)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Belknap Press(Publisher)
Strictly speaking, remembering having seen a word earlier in an experiment counts as an autobiographical episodic memory. But psychologists working in this area are not especially interested in such things. They want to know how people remember in the real world outside the labo-ratory. Autobiographical recollection is a reconstructive, not a reproductive, pro-cess (Bartlett 1932). Recalling one’s past is not like replaying a videotape of one’s life in working memory. When we remember an event from our past, we reconstruct it from encoded elements distributed throughout the brain. There are very few instances in which remembering resembles reproducing. These include reciting poems, prayers, telephone numbers, and other mate-rial memorized by rote. The reconstructive character of autobiographical memory is especially evi-dent for repeated episodes of the same type. Consider someone who has trav-eled by air only once versus someone who has ºown many times. The ªrst person is likely to retain a reasonably speciªc memory of that single, memora-ble ºight. The second person, for whom memories of many ºights will tend to blend together into a generic memory of “ºying on airplanes,” will ªnd it tough to remember the details of any particular ºight unless something un-usual happened during it. But even though this generic memory does not cor-respond to any particular ºight, it will be just as vivid as the memory of the 35 H O W W E R E M E M B E R person who has ºown only once (Linton 1986). The frequent ºyer’s vivid memory is what the cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser (1981) calls a repisodic memory —a memory constructed from repeated episodes of the same type. The more episodes of a certain type we experience, the harder it be-comes to distinguish among them. While repetition makes it harder to retrieve any speciªc episode, it strengthens overall memory for the entire class of event.
eBook - PDF- Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, Robert A. Bjork(Authors)
- 1996(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
In the terms used to describe the process dissociation procedure, a process of conscious recollection can lead one to have a memory of a studied item while simultaneously an unconscious process can lead the item to come to mind, although conscious recollection may dominate experience and so cause one to describe the experience as remembering rather than knowing. (For a full explana- tion of the independence versus exclusivity relations between processes, see Jones, 1987.) The proceduralist claim is that mental events that are based on the use of memories of prior experiences have characteristic qualities that serve to differentiate them from other kinds of mental events. For example, visual images based on retrieval of memories of past perceptions are generally more vivid and more easily generated than are visual images generated anew using imagination, a characteristic that Jacoby (e.g., Jacoby et al., 1989) termed fluency. People also judge thoughts as memories when those thoughts can be placed in an ongoing context of events, what Johnson (1988) referred to as embeddedness. Based on these qualitative charac- teristics and on the rememberer's current orientation and expectations, products of memory are identified as such, hence giving rise to the subjec- tive experience of remembering. Generally, this attribution process is per- formed very quickly and automatically, without awareness of any decision- making processes. Moreover, most of the time such source-attributions are accurate: Products of memory are identified as memories and products of imagery or fantasy are identified as such. Sometimes, however, the prod- ucts of ongoing cognitive processes such as thinking or imagining have qualitative characteristics that are typical of memories. For example, some- times a newly generated image is unusually vivid, detailed, and easily gen- erated.
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