Psychology: Class 11 — Chapter 6: Human Memory

• Encoding: The first stage where incoming sensory information is registered and recorded for the first time so that it becomes usable by the memory system.
• Storage: The second stage where encoded information is retained and held over a period of time.
• Retrieval: The third stage where stored information is recovered and brought back into conscious awareness for use in cognitive tasks.

Control processes monitor and guide the flow of information between different memory stores:

• Selective Attention: Determines what information enters STM from sensory registers.
• Maintenance Rehearsal: Repetitive silent or vocal rehearsal to keep information active in STM.
• Chunking: Combining smaller units of information into larger, meaningful groups to expand STM capacity.
• Elaborative Rehearsal: Connecting new information with existing knowledge in LTM to facilitate permanent storage.

Proposed by Baddeley (1986), Working Memory is an active workbench rather than a passive storehouse. It consists of three components:

1. Phonological Loop: Holds and manipulates a limited number of sounds; decays within 2 seconds unless rehearsed.
2. Visuospatial Sketchpad: Stores and manipulates visual and spatial information.
3. Central Executive: Allocates attentional resources, coordinates the other components, and integrates information from LTM.

1. Physical/Structural (Shallowest): Focusing on the visual or structural features of a stimulus (e.g., whether a word is in capital letters).
2. Phonetic (Intermediate): Focusing on the acoustic features and sounds associated with the letters (e.g., what the word rhymes with).
3. Semantic (Deepest): Analyzing the meaning of the stimulus and connecting it to existing knowledge (e.g., defining the word or imagining its characteristics).

• Declarative Memory: Memory for facts, names, dates, and events that can be consciously recalled and verbally described.
• Procedural Memory: Memory for motor skills, habits, and procedures to accomplish tasks (e.g., riding a bicycle) which cannot be easily verbalized.

• Episodic Memory: Contains biographical details of our lives; personal experiences tied to specific times and places. These memories are often emotional in nature.
• Semantic Memory: General awareness, concepts, ideas, rules of logic, and facts that are affect-neutral and not tied to a specific time or place.

• Flashbulb Memories: Highly detailed, vivid memories of extremely arousing or surprising events that feel like a frozen photograph.
• Autobiographical Memory: Personal memories distributed unevenly across life, characterized by childhood amnesia during the first 4-5 years.
• Implicit Memory: Memories that remain outside conscious awareness and are retrieved automatically, influencing behavior without conscious recall.

Experiment Title: Ebbinghaus's Nonsense Syllables Study
Background/Subject: Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) conducted experiments on himself.
Method/Procedure: Memorized lists of nonsense syllables (CVC trigrams like NOK or SEP) and measured the number of trials needed to relearn the lists at varying time intervals.
Observations/Results: Discovered a sharp, rapid drop in memory within the first nine hours (especially the first hour), after which the rate of forgetting stabilizes and declines very gradually.
Psychological Inference: Forgetting is not a linear process; the initial rate of memory loss is highly accelerated before plateauing.

• Trace Decay (Disuse Theory): Assumes memory leaves physical traces in the brain that fade and decay over time if not used. (Inadequate because sleep reduces forgetting compared to waking activity).
• Interference Theory: Forgetting is caused by competition between different associations stored in memory.
• Retrieval Failure: Proposed by Tulving; forgetting occurs because appropriate retrieval cues are absent or inaccessible at the time of recall.

According to Sigmund Freud, painful, threatening, or traumatic memories are actively pushed down into the unconscious mind (repression) and become unavailable for conscious retrieval, sometimes leading to psychological amnesia or a fugue state.

• The Keyword Method: Associating a foreign word with a similar-sounding native word, then creating a mental image of the two interacting.
• The Method of Loci: Placing items to be remembered as visual objects along a familiar physical path or sequence of locations.

• Chunking: Grouping smaller units into larger, meaningful structures.
• First Letter Technique: Taking the first letter of each word to be remembered and arranging them to form an acronym (e.g., VIBGYOR).

1. Engage in Deep Level Processing: Focus on the meaning and establish associations with existing knowledge.
2. Minimise Interference: Avoid studying highly similar subjects consecutively; distribute learning sessions with rest periods.
3. Give Yourself Enough Retrieval Cues: Create cognitive links and contextual cues during encoding.
4. The PQRST Method: A study method consisting of Preview, Question, Read, Self-recitation, and Test.