Test yourself repeatedly throughout your studies. This will not only help you figure out what you know and don’t know; the testing itself will help you learn and remember the information more effectively thanks to the testing effect.
The psychological terms for taking in information, retaining it, and later getting it back out are ______, ______, and ______.
encoding; storage; retrieval
The concept of working memory
a
Sensory memory may be visual (_______ memory) or auditory (_______ memory).
iconic; echoic
Our short-term memory for new information is limited to about _______ items.
seven
Memory aids that use visual imagery (such as peg words) or other organizational devices are called ______.
mnemonics
The hippocampus seems to function as a
a
Amnesia following hippocampus damage typically leaves people unable to learn new facts or recall recent events. However, they may be able to learn new skills, such as riding a bicycle, which is an _______ (explicit/implicit) memory.
implicit
Long-term potentiation (LTP) refers to
c
A psychologist who asks you to write down as many objects as you can remember having seen a few minutes earlier is testing your ______.
recall
Specific odors, visual images, emotions, or other associations that help us access a memory are examples of
d
When you feel sad, why might it help to look at pictures that reawaken some of your best memories?
Memories are stored within a web of many associations, one of which is mood. When you recall happy moments from your past, you deliberately activate these positive links. You may then experience mood-congruent memory and recall other happy moments, which could improve your mood and brighten your interpretation of current events.
When tested immediately after viewing a list of words, people tend to recall the first and last items more readily than those in the middle. When retested after a delay, they are most likely to recall
a
When forgetting is due to encoding failure, meaningless information has not been transferred from
d
Ebbinghaus’ “forgetting curve” shows that after an initial decline, memory for novel information tends to
d
The hour before sleep is a good time to memorize information, because going to sleep after learning new material minimizes _______ interference.
retroactive
Freud proposed that painful or unacceptable memories are blocked from consciousness through a mechanism called ______.
repression
One reason false memories form is our tendency to fill in memory gaps with our reasonable guesses and assumptions, sometimes based on misleading information. This tendency is an example of
b
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Eliza’s family loves to tell the story of how she “stole the show” as a 2-year-old, dancing at her aunt’s wedding reception. Even though she was so young, Eliza can recall the event clearly. How is this possible?
Eliza’s immature hippocampus and lack of verbal skills would have prevented her from encoding an explicit memory of the wedding reception at the age of two. It’s more likely that Eliza learned information (from hearing the story repeatedly) that she eventually constructed into a memory that feels very real.
We may recognize a face at a social gathering but be unable to remember how we know that person. This is an example of _______ _______.
source amnesia
When a situation triggers the feeling that “I’ve been here before,” you are experiencing _______ ________.
déjà vu
Children can be accurate eyewitnesses if
b
Psychologists involved in the study of memories of abuse tend to DISAGREE about which of the following statements?
b
Answering these questions will help you make these concepts more personally meaningful, and therefore more memorable.
What has your memory system encoded, stored, and retrieved today?
How do you make psychology terms more personally meaningful so you remember them better? Could you do this more often?
Can you recall a time when stress helped you remember something? Has stress ever made it more difficult to remember something?
In what ways do you notice your moods coloring your memories, perceptions, or expectations?
Most people wish for a better memory. Is that true of you? Do you ever wish you were better at forgetting certain memories?
If you were on a jury in a trial involving recovered memories of abuse, do you think you could be impartial? Would it matter whether the defendant was a parent accused of sexual abuse, or a therapist being sued for creating a false memory?
Think of a memory you frequently recall. How might you have changed it without conscious awareness?
Which of the study and memory strategies suggested at the end of this chapter do you plan to try?
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