AP Psychology Flashcards: Memory Types, Encoding, Storage, Retrieval, Forgetting

The Atkinson-Shiffrin model proposes three memory stages. Sensory memory holds a large amount of sensory information for a very brief time, less than a second for visual iconic memory and three to four seconds for auditory echoic memory. Short-term memory, now often called working memory, holds about seven items, plus or minus two, for roughly 20 to 30 seconds without rehearsal. Long-term memory has virtually unlimited capacity and can store information for a lifetime.

Explicit memory, also called declarative memory, is the conscious recall of facts and events and requires deliberate effort to retrieve. It divides into semantic memory for general knowledge like knowing that Paris is the capital of France, and episodic memory for personal experiences like remembering your first day of school. Implicit memory, also called nondeclarative memory, is unconscious memory that influences behavior without awareness. It includes procedural memory for motor skills like riding a bicycle, classically conditioned associations, and priming effects.

The serial position effect is the tendency to recall items at the beginning and end of a list better than items in the middle. The primacy effect explains better recall of early items because they receive more rehearsal and are transferred to long-term memory. The recency effect explains better recall of the last items because they are still in short-term memory at the time of recall. Items in the middle receive less rehearsal than early items and have been displaced from short-term memory by later items.

Retroactive interference occurs when newly learned information disrupts the recall of previously learned information. For example, learning your new phone number makes it harder to remember your old phone number. Proactive interference occurs when previously learned information disrupts the ability to remember new information. For example, your old locker combination interferes with remembering your new one. Both are major causes of forgetting. The key distinction is timing: retroactive works backward in time with new disrupting old, while proactive works forward with old disrupting new.

The misinformation effect, demonstrated by Elizabeth Loftus, occurs when misleading information presented after an event alters a person's memory of that event. In her classic study, participants who were asked "How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other" gave higher speed estimates than those asked about the cars "hitting" each other. The word "smashed" planted a misleading suggestion that changed their memory.

Mnemonic devices are memory strategies that organize information into more memorable formats by creating associations with existing knowledge. The method of loci, or memory palace, associates items with specific locations along a familiar route. Acronyms use the first letters of items to form a word, like ROY G BIV for rainbow colors. The peg-word system associates items with pre-memorized rhyming pairs. Chunking groups individual items into meaningful units, like remembering a phone number as three chunks rather than ten separate digits.

Recall requires retrieving information from memory without cues, like answering an essay question or remembering a name. It is the most demanding memory task. Recognition involves identifying previously learned information from a set of options, like answering a multiple-choice question or recognizing a face. It is easier because the correct answer serves as its own retrieval cue. Relearning measures how much faster you learn something the second time compared to the first, even if you cannot consciously recall or recognize the material. ---