PSYC 3121 Study Guide - Final Guide: Exponentiation, Spreading Activation, Lawn Mower
Document Summary
Chapter 7 human memory: retention and retrieval. Power function of retention (forgetting) captures different characteristics of early and late stages. How are they different: the power function of retention is the rate at which or the equation for how you forget something. The power function itself is an equation that can calculate retention at early and late stages: early: during the early stage, performance (of retrieval) deteriorates with delay, late: during later stages, performance or memory loss is negatively accelerated. In other words the rate of change gets smaller and smaller as the delay increases: the log of performance is a linear function of the log of the delay. That is the functional relationship is called a power function because the iv (the delay t or the function) is raised to the power of -b, which results in the performance measure d (d- prime or the memory strength) A power function consists of three quantities, power, scale, and constant.
