Transcript Elaboration and mnemonic strategies

BUILDING MEMORIES II:
Elaborative Encoding
• Themes
– Elaboration adds potential retrieval
paths
– May be item-specific or relational
– May be intentional or not
– Effective elaboration boosts
“distinctiveness” of memory
• Cue strongly elicits target and not other
competitors
ITEM-SPECIFIC ELABORATION
• The levels-of-processing tradition
R e c o g n it io n
(% )
– “depth” and memory (Craik & Tulving,
1975)
100
80
pos target
neg target
60
40
Sensory
Phonemic
Semantic
Level of Processing
– Further elaboration helps only
“positive” targets. Why?
• Depth or Distinctiveness?
– Reducing semantic distinctiveness:
Moscovitch & Morris (1976):
“semantic” questions
free recall of target words
varied
.85
constant
.50
– Increasing phonemic distinctiveness:
Eyesenck (1979):
48 semantic questions
P(recog)
.43
24 pronounce normally
(e.g., comb like home)
.34
24 mispronounce
(e.g., glove like home)
.42
• Other roads to distinctiveness
– Visual imagery (Paivio, 1969)
• Via concreteness
• Via instructions
– Self-reference (Rogers, 1977)
– Action and movements
– Incidental associations and coding
• Transfer-appropriate processing
– Encoding that’s distinctive for one kind
of cue may not be for another
Morris, Bransford & Franks (1977):
Cue Type
item
rhyme
semantic questions
.85
.24
phonemic questions
.60
.45
– Roediger’s work on conceptuallyversus data-driven processing
RELATIONAL ELABORATION
• The list-organization tradition
(Bousfield, 1953)
– “organized” lists are recalled better
– Blocking by category increases recall
– Categories “cluster” in recall
• Clustering increases over trials
• Even unrelated lists start clustering over trials
(Tulving, 1962: subjective organization)
– Providing category names as cues improves
recall (Tulving & Pearlstone,1969)
• Effect limited to nonrecalled categories
• Relational encoding in text
– Thorndike (1977) (& Binet 1902)
“importance” effect and overall recall
reduced as text is “disorganized”
• “Material-appropriate” processing
(McDaniel, et al., 1996)
Text Type
Strategy
Questions
Outline
Narrative
+31%
+13%
Expository
+28%
+64%
Combining item-specific and
relational encoding
• Additive effects
– Einstein & Hunt (1980):
lists of 6 categories of six nouns each
meaning
Sort list by:
1st letter
none
Rhyme
26
19
19
Pleas?
19
10
10
None
19
9
10
& Pattern of clustering and intrusions
different for item- versus list-depth
Item-specific and relational
encoding (cont’d)
• Interactive effects
– Marschark (1985): concrete sentence
advantage only for “scrambled” text
– Marschark (1992): only unrelated word
lists show concreteness advantage
when sorting into categories
“the presence or absence of
concreteness effects in free recall
depends on the relative salience of
distinctive and relational information..”
MNEMONICS AND
MEMORY SKILL
• Deliberate strategies to make
encoding distinctive
• Utilize prior knowledge in learning
• May be item-specific or relational
• Effective mnemonics have:
– Associability (cue is rich in potential
associative “hooks”)
– Bidirectionality (from target to cue at
study, from cue to target at test)
– Constructability (cue is accessible at
time of study and test)
– Discriminability (cue won’t be confused
with others being used) (Bellezza, 1996)
• So, what does scurrilous mean?
• A sampler of classic mnemonics
ELABORATIVE ENCODING
ADDS RETRIEVAL PATHS
irrelevant
associations
retrieval cue
elaboration
elaboration
target memory
elaboration
VISUAL IMAGERY AND MEMORY
• IMAGERY INSTRUCTIONS AID
MEMORY
– interactive images: MAN - THUMB
• “CONCRETE” WORDS AID MEMORY
– DOOR
FISH
MUG
better than
NOR
WISH
SMUG
• SUBJECTIVE CLARITY OF IMAGE
CAN AID MEMORY
– “An old cannon sat on the river bank; a
silver coin can be seen . .
–
%recalled
shining on top of it
.69
hidden inside the barrel
.56
on the ground across the river
.55
(Keenan & Moore, 1979)
IMAGERY-LINK MNEMONICS
Face-Name Associations
link the name with a
distinctive facial feature
ebbing house?
New Vocabulary (Sweeny, 1983)
SCURRILOUS
PEDUNCLE
next week:
read definition, use in context
14 corr
___%
add the “linkword” mnemonic
59 corr
___%
USING MNEMONICS
IN EVERYDAY TASKS
• MNEMONICS WORK BY
ENCOURAGING
– attention and rehearsal
– effective use of prior
knowledge for encoding and
retireval
– elaborative encoding for
distinctive memories
• LIMITS TO MNEMONIC
TECHNIQUES:
– can require extensive training
to acquire and effort to use
– are often task-specific, and may
show little “transfer”
– may become irrelevant as
material is practiced
• Memory as a skill
– Tradition of study of “memory experts”
•
•
•
•
Luria’s S
Hunt’s VP
Ericcson’s SF and JC
Thompson’s Rajan
– The bottom line(s)
• years of specific practice
• Encoding as where it’s at
• The debate about “talent”