Long Term Memory

Memory is the most important part of cognitive processes. We use the terms “encoding and retrieval” to explain how our memory works. Encoding is the act of placing something from your short-term or working memory into your long-term memory. Retrieval is simply ‘remembering’ something, or using something from your memory. Once something is encoded in your long-term memory, it does not go away. What happens, however, when you can’t remember something that you’ve known before and are certain that it’s in your long-term memory is that you simply can’t retrieve it. This is called the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

Incidental and Intentional Learning

What we learn incidentally, are mostly what we have experienced in everyday life, especially those associated with a strong relevance such as our own wedding, a close friend’s death, or the birth of our own children. We have made no effort to remember these things, but they are relevant to us, and they are therefore retained.

Intentional learning requires an effort. A common example of such would be historical events unconnected to our own lives such as George Washington’s cross of the Delaware. Only the troops, Washington himself, and those who were waiting for them would be able (if they were not dead) to say – ‘Oh, that was around Christmas time of 1776 and the cold was unbearable!’ Whereas we did not experience it, we have to cause ourselves to remember this fact.

We can apply this is everyday situations, not just those that have an exceptionality. Emotions are strongly tied with our ability to retain information. However, there is a limit to this ability. We will remember better if we are a little agitated, happy, or otherwise stressed than if we are emotionally neutral. Yet if we are in an extreme state of emotions, this advantage is decreased.

Declarative and Procedural Memory

There are two ways in which the brain can remember, declarative (explicit) and procedural (implicit). The declarative memory processes occur when you are consciously trying to recall something. Try to think of when you last paid a bill. You just used your declarative memory. The procedural memory is more like what it says, procedure. These are skills that our body has learned to perform, and can come from experimental techniques as well. There is no difference here between learning to ride a bike, drive a car, or pipette a liquid in a chemistry lab. This website delves further into the subsections of declarative and procedural memory.

These processes are different, demonstrated by the fact that they use different parts of the brain to work. The declarative memory is stored in the temporal lobe of the brain, specifically the hippocampus, while the procedural memory uses the basal ganglia and cerebellum. Here is a map of the brain to aid you; it even has little movies for each part. It’s also worth mentioning that the BBC has a great interactive map of the brain; I think you will enjoy it.

Lifespan Development of Memory

When was your first memory? How old were you? We have believed that younger children had a harder time remembering things because they don’t retain it in their long-term memory. However, as it turns out, children encode fine; it is their inability to recall information. They just do not use the strategies we develop around the age of eight, those being rehearsal and organizational techniques (i.e. linking similar events together, seeing causal relationships).

Kail and Hagen (1982) found that when testing recency, which is testing what they recently saw or experienced, five-year-olds performed just as well as adults. So it appears that they seem to have equal brain development when it’s concerning recent memory. They do not perform as well when the time duration between the event and the testing increases (cited in Dworetzky 1989).

Researchers (Rovee-Collier 1999) have found that even infants have some retention of memory. (Cited in Ornstein & Haden, 2001) For example, if a ribbon tied to an infant’s foot is connected to the mobile above the crib, the infant will learn that by kicking her foot, she can get the mobile to make movement. Two to three year olds will retain this information or response for several days and some, even weeks as long as they are exposed to this scenario some during the period. Thies and Travers (2001) believe that mental life begins as the infant interacts with their physical environment. They will look for events that correlate. This implies that they are able to store information and retrieve it.

Bauer (1995) found that two year olds were able to respond to events based on their prior experience to similar events. (Cited in Ornstein & Haden, 2001) “I saw that box last time and there were toys in it, there are probably toys in it now.”

Another reason that children are able to perform some memory tasks and not others is because of what the content is. Recognition, relying on perception and sensori-motor skills alone, is easier than say, evocation, which requires language, or mental imagery of things unknown to the child. (Piaget 1969) Recognition, but not evocation, is found in organisms other than humans as well. (Piaget 1969)

As memory and cognitive ability is always increasing from infant stage to adulthood, an older child will be able to perform better than a younger child in how many things they can imitate, their reliance on reminders, and how much information they will know.

Reese et al. demonstrated in their studies that children whose mothers spoke more elaborately to their children about past events or other things had children who were better able to recall such information and also had better skills for remembering than those whose mothers did not. (Cited in Ornstein & Haden, 2001)

Piaget studied the development of memory over the course of a lifetime and broke the stages into four periods: sensorimotor period (birth to two years), preoperational period (two to seven years), concrete operational period (seven to twelve years), and formal operational period (twelve years to end of lifespan).

These four periods can be summed up with what is going on at that particular time, how the person is learning. The sensorimotor period is mostly a reactive stage, in which the child is physically ‘feeling out’ her mental capabilities and begins to imitate that which she sees. The preoperational period is mostly the development of mental imagery. Language is growing and communication becomes more concrete. The concrete operational period finds the child able to have mostly normative memory and cognitive processes, but is unable to find the overall picture of how things interrelate. The formal operative period is this last stage, where the individual can think of all perspectives and see the overall concept in what she is learning. She is able to think of things in a hypothetical or theoretical context as well. Basically, the abstract thought has developed.

So why do adults do a better job remembering? It’s possible that because adults use scripts, they therefore have better efficiency of retrieving. A script is basically like a movie script, except it’s what happens in different situations in your life. You know when you go to the movies, the procedure you go through: buy a ticket, hand the ticket off to get ripped by an employee, she gives you instructions to the room that is playing your movie; you consider buying popcorn and think about the calories, etc. Scripts are for any part of your life.

Children would have difficulty in developing scripts, wouldn’t they? They haven’t experienced very much at their ages, so how could they possibly have the “usual scenario” in their mind?

As adults age, their memories fade. This is usual, as the connections we have aren’t being activated, so it becomes harder and harder to retrieve the information. Try to remember what your best friend’s name was in high school. Had to think about it for a second? Or a minute? The information is still there, that is important to stress, but the connection is weak.

Likewise, as adults try to recall information that they’ve forgotten, they often replace the missing parts with “recollections” of what they believe must have happened. This isn’t to be confused with lying, as it’s not a conscious effort to deceive, but it’s rather a recall adaptation that uses scripts. It’s what is supposed to have happened as based on their scripts (Cited in Dworetzky 1989).

Also, as age increases, a person’s encoding efficiency will decrease (Dworetzky 1989). One of the reasons this occurs is because older people tend to not use mnemonic devices or efficient organizational strategies. A mnemonic device is anything a person uses to aid their memory. On the following link, some common strategies are listed that you might be familiar with, others might be new, check it out and see if there’s any new ones you can try.

Decision Making

It’s something that most people never think about - how they make decisions. But experts in the field of psychology have taken the time to setup principles and steps that outline the typical decision making steps that we all make.

The decision making process starts with the problem identification. A person has to notice the disparity between an action and another action or a belief she holds and another belief that she might have. This can be a subjective aspect, as she might see a problem between two actions and another person might not. Problem identification, then, relies on one’s own beliefs, experiences, and understandings about a situation.

The person can then decide what to do – either to think on the problem or to simply ignore it. We might find the idea of ignoring a problem counterintuitive; however, we all do it. Think about your beliefs for a minute. Are there any that contradict the other? Take, for example, the war in Iraq. Many of us are of two minds about it: we don’t want more people to die and we do not like war, but how can we leave now, and let the situation get worse? And so, we don’t focus on it in our own minds and conversations because we really don’t know how to resolve the issue. ‘Being of two minds’ is the decision to ignore the problem.

Problem representation is the third step. The individual thinks through the possible scenarios that can improve or alter the situation to a more favorable one. This involves the person’s imagination and could possibly involve her past experiences as well. Hansson said that “the choice of a value-standard for decision-making is the subject of moral philosophy.” (p 13)

The next and last steps are relatively straightforward. She makes a choice, and she implements it. All of this can happen quite quickly, or it could take awhile. What’s the longest time you’ve taken to decide to do or not to do something? Have you ever made a split-second decision? We commonly refer to these as impulses, such as the impulse buying we normally regret later. It wasn’t a reflex, but an impulse, or, decision. How long we take to get to the action is irrelevant.

An adult will use scientific reasoning that children do not understand. She will observe the problem, look for possibilities immediately, analyze the possible solutions and make her choice. With the greater informational processing capacity, she will have greater speed and accuracy in her reasoning that a child will not express. This aids the adult with novel decision making. With the improved memory that she has comparable to a child’s she is able to solve similar but new problems more quickly as well. (Thies and Travers 2001)

Normative and Descriptive Decision Theory

Decision theorists also make distinctions between what their theories actually entail. There is normative decision theory, which focuses on how decisions should be made in order to be considered rational. And there is also descriptive decision theory, which is how decisions are actually made.

Decisions don’t have to take a complete cognitive process, sometimes they are just changes of our behavior. “Changes in behavior tend to be incremental modifications of past behavior, and a decision maker learns from the apparent consequences of each small step before undertaking the next” (Ungson 1982). Behavior, then, is a reflection of past experiences cumulated by decisions to act a certain way in the present and future; it is a reflection of past experience. The consequences of past behavior are commonly referred to as reinforcers. Psychology researcher BF Skinner was summed up by Ties and Travers (2001) with “control the reinforcers, control the behavior.” (p. 15)

Combining the Concepts

Piaget (1932) argued that to understand the decision made by any individual, you had to first understand her schema. This is basically the generalized knowledge or expectation she might have based on her past experiences. The decision maker depends on: experience, skills, values, needs, goals, and their cognitive style. All of these come from their individual experiences that create who they are and are stored in their long term memory. (Kleindorger, 1993)

So, what you’ve experienced determines how you’ll respond to a situation. The decisions you make are formed from your positive or negative expectations of the results of that decision. You only know this from past experience or observation of other’s mistakes and fortunes.

Moral judgments, being linked to cognitive development, also go through stages. The first stage begins with preconventional thinking, where the child will obey because he is told to. In the last stage, postconventional, the individual has her own sense of right, wrong, and justice. This is based on Lawerence Kohlberg’s work (cited in Dworetzky 1989).

As we age, we have an increased tendency to rely on subjective feelings, rather than objective logic. Major criticism of Piaget’s theory feel as though he “assumes a progression toward a ‘pure’ state of reasoning, free from subjectivity and cultural contamination and totally objective in its search for truth” (Dworetzky 1989, p.416). It is up to you, the reader; to make your own conclusions on what is more right in decision making: objectivity or subjective justice. We all will have our own answers because we were all raised in a different culture.

Culture is a pattern of behavior, thinking, belief systems, etc. They are passed on from generation to generation. We do not think about our culture as something that could be a controlling aspect on our behavior, but it is. This is not saying it is a bad thing. Culture can give us a framework of learning that can put us at an advantage. Culture also gives us perspectives of the world that we can cherish and relate to. Our definition of the world gives us the tools we need to find our place in it.

References

1. D’Arcangelo, M. (2000, November). How does the brain develop? A conversation with Steven Petersen.
Educational Leadership. 18-21.

2. Dworetzky, J. P. & Davis, N. J. (1989). Human Development: A Lifespan Approach. St Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Company.

3. Hansson, S.O. (1994, Revised 2005). Decision theory: A brief introduction. [Online]. Available: http://www.infra.kth.se/~soh/decisiontheory.pdf

4. Kleindorfer, P. R. & Schoemaker, J.H. & Kunreuther, H. C. (1993). Decision Strategies: An Integrated Perspective. Cambridge: The University of Cambridge Press Syndicate.

5. LaValle, I. H. (1978) Fundamentals of Decision Analysis. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

6. Matlin, M. W. (2005). Cognition. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

7. Ornstein, P. A. & Haden, C. A. (2001). Memory development or the development of memory? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 202-205.

8. Piaget, J. (1969). On the Development of Memory and Identity. Barre, Massachusetts: Clark University Press.

9. Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

10. Thies, K. M. & Travers, J. F. (2001) Growth and Development through the Lifespan. Thorofare, New Jersey: Slack, Inc.

11. Ungson, G. R. & Braunstein, D. N. (Eds.). (1982). Decision Making: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Boston: Kent Publishing Company.

12. Wadsworth, B. (1981) Misinterpretations of Piaget’s Theory. Impact of Instructional Improvement, 16, 1-11.

Funny