Month: October 2019

In class we learned about retrieval problems with our memory.  Among these problems was interference.  There are two types of interference: retroactive interference and proactive interference.  Retroactive interference occurs when information learned later interferes with information learned earlier.  An example of retroactive interference would be learning a topic in class one week, and then learning a new topic the next week.  After learning the new topic, it is hard to recall the previous topic.

Proactive interference occurs when information learned earlier interferes with information learned later.  An example of proactive interference would be getting a new phone number and being unable to remember the new phone number because you can only remember your old phone number.

 

People experience interference a lot and in many ways.  Recently, I have been experiencing proactive interference.  In high school I took Spanish class and even went on a trip to Costa Rica.  The summer before my freshman year of college I continued to learn Spanish by using Duolingo.  When I moved into my dorm freshman year and met one of my roommates, she told me she was from Brazil.  Originally, I thought she spoke Spanish because Brazil is in South America.  And then she told me that in Brazil they speak Portuguese so that was her first language.  This year I decided to learn Portuguese so if I ever decide to visit her in Brazil, I would know some of what they were saying.  When I started learning it I thought it would be a lot like Spanish, but it’s actually very different.  When I began using Duolingo to learn Portuguese I found myself remembering more Spanish words than Portuguese words.  Since I was remembering the words I had learned in Spanish before in place of the words I had learned in Portuguese later, this was due to proactive interference.  Continuing to learn Portuguese makes it easier to remember certain words, but I still find myself recalling Spanish words sometimes.

In Class, we learned all about retrieval failures which are an explanation for forgetting things from long term memory. There are two types of retrieval failures: retroactive interference and Proactive interference. To clarify Proactive interference is when information learned earlier interferes with new information you learned. While retroactive interference is when you learn something, and it messes up what you previously thought. In 9th grade my freshman year I decided to switch language classes. I was previously taking Spanish for all three years of middle school, but I was horrible at it. I decided I was going to take Italian because my brothers had taken it and they said it was very easy. What I didn’t know is that the Spanish and Italian languages are so similar to each other that people commonly have trouble deciphering the two due to their similar conjugations. On my first Italian test freshman year, I got a 55 Percent. The problem was walking out of the test I thought I knew everything and was chilling. But wow was I wrong. Looking back on the corrections I had gotten so many conjugations and spellings wrong. This was actually the one thing I was good at in Spanish so I was so surprised I did it wrong in Italian but now looking at it the horrible score can be explained. Due to a shocking mere similarity between the two languages proactive interference had crippled me. Considering my strength in conjugating in Spanish when it came time for the Italian test, I had used Italian verb endings for a majority of the exam. To explain why this is an example of proactive interference isn’t too difficult. Since something I had learned prior was old information when I was trying to draw from recent long-term memory I got lost and that is how the retrieval failure occurred.   

In our lesson on Forgetting and the Biology of Memory, one concept really made me think about my own life and how this concept may affect me today. Memory construction is a process by which humans filter or fill in pieces of information that are seemingly missing in order to make our recalling of a specific memory more coherent. By almost unknowingly doing this, something called the Misinformation Effect may take place. This effect occurs when humans incorporate information that is misleading and not entirely valid into one’s memory of an event. The Misinformation Effect has been proven by testing eyewitness accounts. Several people were shown videos of an accident. Two cars ran into each other, causing a crash. One half of the study were asked what happened when the cars “hit each other”, and the other half were asked what happened when the cars “smashed into each other”. Although seemingly minor, these choices of words impacted the people’s memories. About a month later, the people in the study were called back and asked about the videos that were seen. Researchers asked the people if there was broken glass on the street after the crash. Those that were exposed to the word choice of “smashed” reported seeing glass. However, there was never any glass in the video. This form of implanting memories is very common in everyday life.

When I was in elementary school, I remember traveling about an hour away from home to visit some family friends. These friends have a pool, and all of the kids were spending the day playing in it. I went to jump into the pool backwards, but I did not jump far enough away from the side of the pool. Because of this, my chin hit the side of the pool as I was jumping in, and I bit through the bottom half of my lip. I was rushed to my family doctor, and he glued my lip back together-avoiding stitches. Or at least, this is what I think happened. After the lesson on the Misinformation Effect, I am not positive that this was the whole story. While I know that I did bite through my lip because I have the scar to prove it, I don’t think all of my details add up. One detail is that I swear I remember jumping into the pool, but some people have mentioned that a kid accidentally pushed me and initially lied about it. I also swear I remember going to my family doctor, but this happened about an hour away from my house so I am not sure that my parents would have driven the full hour if there was an emergency room or another doctor much closer. So, maybe I remember going to my family doctor simply because that was the doctor I always went to and that is what was familiar to me.

With these suspicions, I don’t think that there is a way that I would be able to positively recall this event. We can never really be sure if a memory is true or false. I would need to talk to the people that were there during the event. But even then, their memories of the event could also be misconstrued.

Declarative, or otherwise called explicit memories, are a type of long term memory stored in the brain. Declarative memories can be broken down into two categories, semantic and episodic. Semantic memories are things like general knowledge. Such as remembering who the first president of the US was, remembering what the word psychology means, or remembering simple math such as 3-2=1. Episodic memories on the other hand, are memories that come from events that have happened to you. Such as remembering your 10th birthday party, or your first day of high school. Both categories of declarative  memories are stored in long-term memory, where the memories remain relatively permanent in the brain.

We have all had experiences or have experienced learning general knowledge that is ingrained into our long term declarative memory. An example of a piece of information I feel like I have always known from when I was younger, is that Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas on his ship called the Santa Maria. I remember learning this piece of information in about second grade, and since then I have never forgotten it. I also remember a little bit about my surroundings as I learned this. I remember it was sometime around fall when our teacher gave us this Christopher Columbus book to read in class and I was looking down at the illustrations of the ships and pilgrims on the pages. Remembering this general fact over all these years is an example of a semantic memory I have, because it was a general piece of information I learned when I was little and can still recall today. The little bits I remember from my surroundings as I was learning about Christopher Columbus show this memory was also episodic, because I remember what I saw, heard, and felt, as I was experiencing this moment. This is an example of just one of the billions of declarative memories we all have stored in the long term memory of our brains.

 

Oldprimarytimer. (2018, February 11). Memory not memories – teaching for long term learning. Retrieved from https://primarytimery.com/2017/09/16/memory-not-memories-teaching-for-long-term-learning/.

 

Proactive and retroactive interference are ways that our brain “forgets” things. Proactive interference is when information you learned in the past interferes with information that is being learned currently. Retroactive interference is when information you are learning currently interferes with your ability to recall past information. Students oftentimes find themselves experiencing one of these types of interference during exams. For instance, I just took my first computer science exam and found myself stuck in between two answer choices on one of the questions. I was getting confused with the syntax for a type of repetition structure known as a while loop. We had previously learned about a different repetition structure called for loops, which have very similar syntax except for one line of code. During the exam I was struggling to remember which was the correct syntax for while loops. This would be an example of proactive interference because the information I learned about for loops earlier on in the semester was interfering with my ability to recall information about while loops. The only way to avoid interference as much as possible is to make sure that you understand the information deeply and are using elaborate rehearsal. If you only have the information memorized some sort of interference is bound to occur while under the stress and time pressure of an exam.

Whether I am just sitting in class, taking an exam, or even just in the middle of a conversation, I get these periods of time when I start to think “haven’t I heard of this before”, or “I thought it was the other way around.” This happens to me quite often and I know it happens to other people as well. There is an explanation as to why we get confused while learning things. The explanation is Proactive and Retroactive Interference. Proactive Interference is information that we learned earlier in our life that interferes later in life, and Retroactive Interference is information we start learning now that interferes with things we have learned in the past. I am going to give an example of a Proactive Interference story that just happened to me in the last couple of weeks. The other day in my biology class we started learning a bunch of new concepts and I was getting very stressed. We came upon this one concept and it reminded me of a theory that I learned back in high school. The problem was it had a whole different name. I started to then think the teacher was wrong and she was teaching us wrong information. I quickly came to realize that I was wrong and I had everything mixed up. The concept I learned in high school was completely different and did not go along with this chapter at all. It did have some of the same words in the definition, but overall it was not the same. That story just proves that information that I learned three years ago was still packed into my brain and it interfered with the new information I was trying to learn now. Sometimes our mind could get very confused because usually we will learn very similar things throughout our lifetime. There are not many ways at all to help this situation it usually just happens on its own and we figure out the right idea, but there is one thing that helps retroactive interference, and that is sleep. If you sleep well enough and long enough you tend to forget much less over time and it leads to better recall. These interferences could leave us very confused at times but eventually we learn what is right and what is in the past.

Implicit Memory

The topic I decided to write about is a type of long-term memory, procedural (implicit) memory. Implicit memories are memories that come to you easily because you have done them over and over. You can recall these memories with your unconscious mind, and it takes little effort to retrieve this information. Past experiences allow a person to act with out thinking about it, no matter how long ago the experience occurred. An example of this is a person tying their shoe. They learned to tie a show as a child, but they never forgot how to do this task because implicit memories are almost automatic. Even though they learned at such a young age how to tie shoes, as an adult they can complete this task with out even thinking about it.

I had an experience with implicit memories when I was skiing with my family. I learned to ski at a young age, around 8 years old, but I didn’t go again until I was about 10 years old. When I learned to ski I became good because I went frequently and got down all the techniques. However, after not skiing for two years I was nervous I was going to be a wreck on the slopes. I rode the ski lift to the top of the mountain and when I got to the top I panicked thinking I would have forgotten how to ski, but that wasn’t the case. After dropping in, my skills came back to me. I was able to avoid hazards, stop on a point, and even cut through the woods. This is all to my implicit memory, I recalled how to do these things by using past experiences. Without hesitation my skis were almost acting on their own. I automatically picked up skiing again and had no problems getting down the mountain.

This experience is related to implicit memory because I wouldn’t haven been able to get down the mountain if it wasn’t for my implicit memory. My unconscious mind acted automatically, and I was able to remember how to ski. I learned how to ski and never forgot it, so every time I go now I know I will be successful thanks to my implicit memory. I know I will recall the techniques and skills I had before in order to be a successful skier.

Click below to open up Microsoft word document for my blog post 2

Retrograde Amnesia

In this blog, I am going to discuss retrieval cues, which is when memories are held in storage by a web of associations. These associations will help the person retrieve the memory. For example, Jimmy is at a family reunion and is speaking to his cousins that he hasn’t seen him in years. One of his cousins, Jamie, brings up a time when Jimmy ran around the house naked during a Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone laughs as they remember the funny moment, but Jimmy doesn’t remember this event happening at all. They then explain that it was the Thanksgiving at Aunt Linda’s house when they first moved to Pennsylvania. These pieces of information required Jimmy to think about the time in the past and he then makes associations to the event and remembers the scene. I have had many experiences when associations have helped me retrieve a memory such as taking tests. In high school, I specifically remember taking biology tests that were mainly based off the textbook reading. During the test, I would always think back to the pages I read and where the information would be. I had studied so much that when I thought of a page, I could remember what piece of info was on it and even where it was on the page. This would allow me to recall it and answer the questions correctly on the test. These instances relate to retrieval cues because when ever I forgot something like a definition or example, I would think back to the pages I read. Then I would make associations and remember where the piece of information was in the book and then recall it. This is a fascinating topic and technique for remembering things that you might have forgotten. Making associations is the most important part of being able to retrieve the info from your memory.