PSYC 205 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Episodic Memory, Endel Tulving, What Where
15 Jun 2018
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OUTLINE
Lecture 3: Memory
Lecture Outline
FAQ
News
Matters arising from the learning labs
Memory
Introduction & definitions
Special Focus: Episodic memory
Types of memory
Special Focus: Measuring working memory
1 Introduction
Memory
“The mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval”
(Ashcraft & Klein, 2010)
Two main distinctions
Working Memory
- Limited capacity
- Short retention
- A process of maintaining information in a short-term store to be used in
other cognitive processes
-
Reference Memory
- Long retention
- Process of referring to information that’s in a long-term store
- Non-Declarative
- Declarative
2 Special Focus: Episodic Memory
Research completed with Western Scrub Jays, a species that in the wild regularly caches
(stores) food in various locations and remembers these locations over long periods of
time
Elements of Episodic Memory (from Tulving, 1972)
What
Where
When
The experiment (Clayton et al., 2003)
- Jays engage in caching behaviors in experimenter created environments
- They examined whether caching behavior may involve episodic memory for jays
– do jays know the when where and how?
- To test it, jays were given peanuts and worms to cache.
- The jays prefer worms over peanuts but the worms degrade quicker
- After a long period of time, the jays would uncover the peanuts instead of
worms
The results
The scrub jays seemed to be remembering:
what they stored (worms or peanuts)
where they stored each type of food
when they stored each type of food
BUT: Do animals retrieve episodic memories spontaneously, without prior knowledge
that the information will be important?
Document Summary
Special focus: measuring working memory (cid:862)the mental p(cid:396)ocesses of ac(cid:395)ui(cid:396)i(cid:374)g a(cid:374)d (cid:396)etai(cid:374)i(cid:374)g i(cid:374)fo(cid:396)(cid:373)atio(cid:374) fo(cid:396) late(cid:396) (cid:396)et(cid:396)ieval(cid:863) (ashcraft & klein, 2010) A process of maintaining information in a short-term store to be used in other cognitive processes. P(cid:396)ocess of (cid:396)efe(cid:396)(cid:396)i(cid:374)g to i(cid:374)fo(cid:396)(cid:373)atio(cid:374) that"s i(cid:374) a lo(cid:374)g-term store. Research completed with western scrub jays, a species that in the wild regularly caches (stores) food in various locations and remembers these locations over long periods of time. Jays engage in caching behaviors in experimenter created environments. They examined whether caching behavior may involve episodic memory for jays. To test it, jays were given peanuts and worms to cache. The jays prefer worms over peanuts but the worms degrade quicker. After a long period of time, the jays would uncover the peanuts instead of worms. The scrub jays seemed to be remembering: what they stored (worms or peanuts) where they stored each type of food when they stored each type of food.
