Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8: Connectionism, Elizabeth Loftus, Episodic Memory

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: Mike Atkinson

Document Summary

One group of theories proposes that memory can be represented as an associated network, which is a massive network of associated ideas and concepts. Each concept or unit of information can be represented by a node, and the lines between nodes represent associations between concepts, with shorter lines indicating stronger associations. Alan collins and elizabeth loftus theorize that when people think of a concept, there is a spreading activation of related concepts throughout the network related concepts are partially activated associative networks look similar to mindmaps. Priming refers to the activation of one concept by another. The notion that memory stores information in an associative network provides an explanation for why mnemonic devices help stimulate our recall associate the mnemonic with the info. A neural network has nodes that are linked to one another, but these nodes are physical in nature, and do not contain individual units of information each node is like a small information- processing unit.