PSYC 213 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Semantic Network, Episodic Memory, Implicit Memory
16 May 2018
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Lecture 012 - 02/20/2018
Last class:
• Implicit memory
o Habit formation via the striatum
o Breaking habits via the prefrontal cortex
• Explicit memory
o Episodic and semantic memory
• The act of remembering is consecutive
o Schemas estimate what we expect to remembers
o False memories
This class
• Imagination inflation technique
o P rate if events that could happen in a person; a childhood happened to
them
o They imagine some of those events that did not happen to them
▪ They were given instructions not focus on the details of this
imagined event as if it were a memory
o People re-rated the same list of childhood events for whether they
happened to them or not
• The events participant are more likely to be falsely re-rate as having occurred →
people were more likely to endorse the memory of a false event if they had
imagined it during the experiment
• False memories: mostly happens or childhood memories but can also happen for
adult memories as well
o Study about a gambling task with a partner (who was a confederate aka a
researcher): they gambled and then P went home and they came back for
a 2nd session and the researchers showed the P fake footage of the
partner cheating
▪ Many believed that they saw the partner cheating → 20% were
willing to sign a statement saying they witnessed the partner
cheating
• This suggest that fabricated evidence can induce individuals to accuse another
person of doing something they never did
o Even after they were told this was fake footage, some of them signed the
statement
• Semantic memory
o Spreading activation models
• How memory changes
o Cognitive aging
o Memory disorders
• Special issues in memory
o Childhood amnesia
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o Superior memory abilities
• Episodic memory: conscious memory for specific events from certain times &
places
o Have to remember the memory content & context (ie: my delicious dinner
last fall in Paris)
• Semantic memory: conscious memory for general fact & information → don’t
need to recall the context, you just kind of know it
• Semantic memory: where we store all facts about the world accumulated
throughout lifetime (facts about oneself and about the world)
o Facts, concepts, ideas, meanings
• This is important for knowing ourselves and using things around us
• Researchers have tried seeing how we store semantic info by developing some
models:
a. Quillian’s model of semantic memory:
• Semantic memory is generated in a network and in a hierarchy
o We store things at broad and specific levels → different levels are all
connected together, the network has different parts
• Have units Vs Properties Vs pointers
o Units: objects/ things/ concept that we want to represent (ie: animal)’
o Properties: description related to the object/s concepts, kind of like
adjective (ie: has wings)
o Pointers: links that specific the relation between the units in our network
• Study based on the idea that searching through the semantic network takes time
(called mental chronometry) and the length of the path in the network will
determine this time
o Ie: Can a canary sing? Does a canary eat?
▪ Can see how fast someone is to answer a question
o You will be faster to answer the “canary sing” because they are more
directly associated (whereas eat is associated through more pointers so
more time)
• One problem with this model: it cannot explain contradictions
o Ie: does a canary have hands? → doesn’t tell us how we are able to get to
that ‘no’ answer
b. Spreading activation
• When we access concepts in our network, we also activate related concepts →
activation in a semantic network is not hierarchical and activity can spread from
the concept we are searching to other interconnected units
• Can see this with semantic priming: when you activate a concept that affects the
processing other meaning related concepts as well
o Info that is semantically related
• Study on lexical decision task: P are shown a string of letters and asked if that
makes up a word → they have shown that if somebody sees one word (ie: nurse)
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