Lecturer: Dr. Benjamin Amponsah, Dept. of Psychology, UG, Legon Contact Information: bamponsah@ug.edu.gh College of Education School of Continuing and Distance Education 2014/2015 – 2016/2017
Session Overview • This section discusses factors that facilitate retrieval of information from the long-term memory as opposed to the short-term. This is based on the appreciation of the fundamental dichotomy in the memory system that gives rise to the notion of short- and long-term memory retentions. Retrieval from these storages must follow different rules. Slide 2
Session Objectives At the end of the session, the student will • Understand the view that long-term memory retrieval is the ultimate aim of memory • Understand why cues are important in the retrieval process • Appreciate the two competing theories of retrieval from the long-term memory Slide 3
Session Outline The key topics to be covered in the session are as follows: • Topic One: Retrieval from the long-term memory • Topic Two: Is Retrieval Process One or Two? • Topic Three: Decision Making during Retrieval • Topic Four: Retrieval Failure Slide 4
Topic One RETRIEVAL FROM THE LONG-TERM MEMORY Slide 5
Reading List • Ashcraft, M. H. (2006). Cognition (4 th edn.), London: Pearson Education Int. • Galotti, K. M. (2004). Cognitive Psychology: In and out of the laboratory (3 rd Edn.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. • Hunt, R. R. & Ellis, H. C. (1999). Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology (6 th edn.), New York: McGraw-Hill. • Willingham, D, B. (2001). Cognition: The thinking animal . NJ: Prentice-Hall. Slide 6
RETRIEVAL • Retrieval is the process by which stored information is brought back to conscious awareness. • Retrieval is what makes memory practical and the only time we really use our memories is when we retrieve a stimulus that is no longer present in our consciousness which is dependent on cues . Slide 7
Retrieval What makes a Cue Effective? • Retrieval process is critically dependent upon the use of cues. So what is an effective cue? • The obvious answer is that a good cue is any information that helps us to remember. • Cue – a stimulus that signals, prompts or hints during retrieval or anything that excites to action. Slide 8
Why are Cues effective? • There are two competing ideas of cue effectiveness in memory. These are: – Associative Strength Theory of Cue effectiveness – Encoding Specificity Hypothesis of Cue Effectiveness Slide 9
Associative Strength Theory • Associative Strength Theory of Cue Effectiveness – The basic premise of Associative strength is that a cue is effective if it has occurred frequently with the to-be- remembered event in the past. Such cues are said to be strongly associated with the event. – For example, whistle frequently occurs with train , and whistle is a very good cue to help remember train. – Other common words with associative strength in our environment are Commonwealth and Vandals; black and white, rice and beans, Kofi and Ama and so on. Slide 10
Associative Strength Theory • To determine how strongly associated two words are, free- association norms are used. • In free-association, a person simply responds with the first word which comes to mind when given the target word. • Associative strength is determined by the number of persons who give a particular response. The greater the number of persons who give a common response, the higher the associative strength becomes. Slide 11
Associative Strength Theory • The essence of this theory is to show that strongly associated cues produce better memory than weakly associated cues. • Associative-strength theory works on a memory structure consisting of an associative network interrelating all of the items in memory. • Retrieval begins with the activation of the representation of the cue itself. • Activation refers to the transfer of information from long-term to short-term memory . In other words, activation is a concept describing the transformation of information from a latent state to a conscious state. Slide 12
Associative Strength Theory • The strength of association between a cue and another item is represented by the distance between the two in the associative network. See Figure 10.1 Slide 13
Example of Spread of Activation • Figure 10.1. Strongly associated items are closer together ( bird/feathers; bird/sings; bird/flies etc.). Slide 14
Associative Strength Theory • How then does Associative Strength develop? • Historically, the consensual answer to this question has been the frequency of previous pairing of two events. After many pairings, the occurrence of one event quickly and automatically brings the other to mind. • The idea certainly sounds reasonable, but surprisingly Tulving (1971) disagreed and proposed an alternative explanation. Slide 15
Encoding Specificity Theory Encoding Specificity Hypothesis of Cue Effectiveness • Tulving agrees with the premise that past experience is very important to current performance and virtually, all psychologists agree with this principle. • Tulving’s argument is that any given event occurs only once and does not allow frequent pairings with other events, but rather every event has one and only one episode. • If this is true, (and at some level it is), then associative strength theory with its emphasis on frequency of past occurrence must be inadequate. Slide 16
Encoding Specificity Theory • For Tulving, effective retrieval cues are those which were present when the event occurred. • That is, a cue will be effective if it was specifically encoded with the target event. Slide 17
Topic Two IS RETRIEVAL ONE OR TWO PROCESS? Slide 18
Processes of Retrieval Is Retrieval Process One or Two? – Both Associative strength and Encoding specificity are instances of single-process retrieval theory (because retrieval in both processes relies on cues – single process). – Single-process theories propose that once output conditions (cues present at encoding) are met, retrieval occurs automatically. Slide 19
Processes of Retrieval – From this perspective retrieval is a simple psychological process. We don’t think about it. It just happens. – To some extent, this is true. – Example: Think about trying to remember a forgotten name. The name suddenly pops up into awareness and is recalled. Slide 20
Processes of Retrieval Generation-Recognition Process • In another sense, recall is not all that easy. You probably generated so many names, recognized some of them as incorrect, rejected several alternatives and so on. It took you some time in this generation process before you finally retrieved the desired response. • This example indicates the complexity of the retrieval process. Simply, retrieval involves more than automatic activation of the target information. • This alternative view, referred to as Generation-Recognition process, suggests that two processes are involved in retrieval . Slide 21
Processes of Retrieval – The first process is the Generation of an item , • Several information is activated from memory – The second process of Recognizing the generated item is proposed (recognition decision). • The target information is identified and selected. Slide 22
Topic Three DECISION MAKING DURING RETRIEVAL Slide 23
Changes in Retrieval Cues • If retrieval cues are changed from Input to Output, what happens to Recall? Naturally, recall suffers. • If grape-jam is seen at input, changing the test cue to traffic ------ makes it difficult retrieve jam. • Similarly, if a person’s name is associated with his face (cue), and then at a later meeting the face has changed, (e.g., plastic surgery, growing beard, hair style etc.,), the name may be difficult to recall. • This is because the cues have changed from input to output, it becomes difficult to generate a response. Slide 24
Changes in Retrieval Cues • The Figure 11.1. below demonstrates performance outcome of changing retrieval cue from input to output. Slide 25
Changes in Retrieval Cues • Results from a number of studies showing the effect of recognition accuracy of changing a cue from input to test so that the test cue biases a different meaning for the target noun (Hunt & Ellis, 1999). • How do we explain this finding using the single and the two- process theories? • For single-process theorists, the answer for the difficulty in recall is simple: the new cue disrupts the old cue. Slide 26
Changes in Retrieval Cues • The counter-argument by the two-process view is that the cue change does not disrupt the old encoding. Rather, the memory of the old item is different from the new test item. • For example, failure to recognize a friend after he grows beard is not because you cannot remember what he looked like before the beard, but rather he looks much different. • When you see grape-jam at input and fail to recognize traffic-jam at output , it is because the two jams are very different, not because of failure to retrieve the word. Slide 27
Topic Four RETRIEVAL FAILURE Slide 28
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