Transcript Levels of Processing

Levels of Processing Theory
What if we don’t have separate
memory systems?
One memory or many?
• Instead of several different memory systems,
maybe we only have one.
• This memory system holds all the information we
know, as well as things we are learning.
• How easily something is recalled depends on how
“deeply” that something is encoded.
Depth of Processing
• Shallow or maintenance processing
• Maintains information in active memory. Doesn’t really
increase recall ability
• Deep or elaborative processing
• Involves understanding or interpretation of the stimulus,
increasing strength of memory trace.
• The idea is that the deeper we process
information, the more likely we are to remember it
later.
Examples with words
• Craik & Tulving (1975) gave people
different tasks for different lists of words:
– Physical - Is the word printed in capital letters?
• ex: TABLE
– Acoustic - Does the word rhyme with
________?
• ex: crate; Does the word rhyme with weight?
– Semantic - Does the word fit in the following
sentence?
• ex: friend; He met a _______ in the street.
Results
Reaction time (ms)
Percent recognition
Another example
• Maybe it’s the case that people remember
the words in the semantic case better
because they simply spent longer thinking
about them.
• Structural processing takes longer than
semantic processing, but people remember
the semantically processed words better.
Self-reference effect
• We are very good at remembering words we
relate to ourselves.
• We are also very good at remembering
words where we generate the elaborative
information.
– ex: elaborative processing of word pairs.
• Implies not all semantic levels are created
equal.
Problems
• Circular definition:
– We are better able to remember something if we
processes it more deeply.
– How do we know if something was deeply processed?
It was better remembered!
• Context effects in encoding
– Transfer-appropriate processing seems to indicate that
depth of processing is not as important as the match
between encoding and recall processes.