PS102 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Multiple Choice, Encoding Specificity Principle, Procedural Memory
Document Summary
Sometimes the information just doesn"t seem important, so you devote very little or no attention to it. Active encoding is a crucial process in memory. You need to pay attention to information if you intend to remember it. Attention involves focusing awareness on a narrowed range of stimuli or events. Attention is often likened to a filter that screens out most potential stimuli while allowing a select few to pass through conscious awareness. At a party and you"re only paying attention to the conversation you"re having not the others around you, you"ve zoned those out, but if you hear someone calling your name, you will automatically hear it. It is clear that people have difficultly if they attempt to focus their attention on two or more inputs simultaneously. When participants are forced to divide their attention between memory encoding and some other task, large reductions in memory performance are seen.
