PSYCH 140M Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Psych
Document Summary
Activation of concepts in memory increases with attention (i. e. retrieval success increases with attention) Subjects tried to recall items from ltm while paying attention to another intervening task. When intervening attentional task involved attending to material similar to target material (i. e. a verbal task) recall ability dropped from 30-50% compared to subjects not performing distracter task. When intervening attentional task was not similar to target recall task (e. g. attending to digits or pictures), recall was less affected. With retrieval, automatic spreading of activation in memory is sometimes enough to bring a piece of target information to mind, but attention during retrieval greatly increases the ability to recall a piece of target information. Number of retrieval cues present - the more retrieval cues we have, the more the target information will be activated and the more easily it will be retrieved.
