CAS PS 101 Study Guide - Anterograde Amnesia, Short-Term Memory, Retrograde Amnesia

• School: Boston University
• Department: Psychological & Brain Sciences
• Course: CAS PS 101
• Professor: David Sullivan

Document Summary

Memory: capacity of the nervous system to acquire and retain usable skills and knowledge, allowing living organisms to benefit from experience. Encoding: processing of info so it can be stored. Storage: retention of encoded representations over time that corresponds to some change in the nervous system that registers the events. Retrieval: recovering info from memory stores when it is needed. Sensory memory separate sensory-memory store for each sensory system. Persists for about 1/3 of a sec and then progressively fades. Attention - info that has been attended to is passed from sensory stores to short-term memory. Amount of info that flows through is large. Chunking process of grouping distinct bits of info into larger wholes to increase short-term memory capacity. Serial-position effect: tendency to recall more items from the beginning and end of a list than from the middle. Primacy and recency: good recall of first and last items.