Memory
Psychology · Section 2.3 · 18 study cards
Encoding, storage and retrieval, the stages and types of memory, why we forget, and how memory reconstructs rather than replays.
Practice this set → Spaced repetition, card by card. No account needed.
Method
Ask which of the three processes has failed
Almost every applied memory question is a diagnosis. Decide whether the problem is encoding, storage or retrieval before you reach for a term. Never noticing the information is encoding failure, losing it over years is storage decay, and being unable to produce something you clearly know is retrieval failure. Only then choose between interference, cue mismatch and the rest.
Hold the architecture as a pipeline with named limits
- Sensory memory: large capacity, fractions of a second for vision and a few seconds for hearing. Attention is the gate.
- Short-term or working memory: about seven chunks, plus or minus two, for 20 to 30 seconds. Rehearsal and chunking are the tools.
- Long-term memory: unlimited in practice and durable. Elaborative, meaningful processing is the gate.
When a question names a capacity or a duration, it is telling you which stage it is about.
Split long-term memory before answering a type question
First ask whether the memory can be consciously declared. If yes, it is explicit, and then ask whether it is a personal event, which is episodic, or a fact, which is semantic. If it cannot be declared, it is implicit, and is either a skill, which is procedural, or a conditioned association. Attach the brain structure at the same time: hippocampus with explicit, cerebellum and basal ganglia with implicit, amygdala with emotional intensity.
Use a fixed reading for the pairs students confuse
- Proactive versus retroactive interference: read the prefix as a direction in time, and identify which material you are failing to recall.
- Primacy versus recency: a delay before recall destroys recency only.
- Anterograde versus retrograde: antero points forward to new memories, retro points back to old ones.
- Recall versus recognition: does the question supply the answer somewhere in it?
Treat memory as reconstruction, not recording
Anything about eyewitnesses, leading questions, flashbulb memories or recovered memories is testing one idea: retrieval rebuilds a memory from fragments and current expectation, and confidence does not track accuracy. Say that explicitly in the answer.
Definitions and theorems
Worked example
Students hear a 15-word list once and then either recall it immediately or count backwards for 30 seconds first. In the immediate condition the first three and last three words are recalled best. In the delayed condition only the first three retain their advantage. A week later, students who were quizzed on the list twice remember far more than students who reread it four times. Explain both results with the appropriate terms.
Name the overall pattern first: better recall at both ends of a list is the serial position effect, made up of a primacy advantage and a recency advantage.
Explain primacy. Early words received the most rehearsal because few competitors were present, so they were transferred into long-term memory and are retrieved from there.
Explain recency. The last words were still in short-term or working memory when recall began, so they were simply read off rather than retrieved.
Now use the delay condition as the diagnostic. Counting backwards blocks rehearsal and occupies working memory for 30 seconds, so the short-term contribution is gone and recency disappears, while primacy survives because it rests on long-term storage.
Turn to the week-later result. The quizzed group practised retrieval, which strengthens the routes back to the memory. This is the testing effect.
Say why rereading loses despite more exposures. Rereading raises fluency and familiarity, which students misread as learning, but it creates no retrieval practice and leaves few new cues.
Conclude with the principle that links the two halves: retention depends on how material was processed and retrieved, not on how long it was in front of the learner.
Common mistakes
- Reversing proactive and retroactive interference. Do not guess from which material is 'in the way'. Identify the material you are failing to recall: if it is the newer learning, older learning is interfering and the term is proactive; if it is the older learning, the term is retroactive.
- Treating short-term memory and working memory as the same thing. Short-term memory in the Atkinson-Shiffrin model is a passive holding store; Baddeley's working memory is an active system with a phonological loop, a visuospatial sketchpad, an episodic buffer and a central executive. A question naming components wants Baddeley.
- Calling flashbulb memories accurate because they are vivid. Emotional arousal engages the amygdala and makes memories feel detailed and certain, but studies that record accounts on the day and again years later find substantial drift with no drop in confidence. Vividness and confidence are not evidence of accuracy.
- Explaining all forgetting as decay. Most everyday forgetting on exams is encoding failure or retrieval failure. Tip-of-the-tongue states and the success of cues both show the information is still stored, so an answer that reaches for decay by default misses the distinction being tested.
- Confusing maintenance with elaborative rehearsal. Repeating a number to yourself keeps it in working memory but builds little long-term retention. Long-term storage comes from connecting material to meaning, imagery or the self, which is why rereading notes is a weak strategy and self-explanation is a strong one.
Practice it
Reading the method is not the same as being able to recall it under pressure. This set drills 18 cards one at a time and schedules each card separately, so the ones you keep missing come back sooner.