PSYC 1010 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Semantic Network, Long-Term Memory, Encoding Specificity Principle

• School: Humber College
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Gerald Goldberg

Document Summary

Attention- focusing awareness on narrowed range of stimuli or events (crucial to encoding memories) Selective attention is critical to everyday functioning. People have difficulty if they attempt to focus their attention on 2 or more inputs simultaneously. Divided attention can have negative impact on the performance of quite a variety of task (esp. task are complex/unfamiliar) Human brain can effectively handle only one attention-consuming task at a time. Ability to answer question based on each type of processing is a function of several factors (ex: circadian pattern, age) Different rates of forgetting occur b/c some methods of encoding create more durable memory codes than others. Incoming information can be processed at different levels. Levels of processing theory- proposes that deeper levels of processing result in longer lasting memory codes. Structural encoding- relatively shallow processing that emphasis the physical structure of the stimulus. Ex: how they were printed, length of the words.