As I was reading through Chapter 7 in our Cognitive Psychology book, I found it hard not to stop and start this blog post before I was finished. So much of what we have read over the last few chapters has answered questions I didn’t know I had about our brains and memory. For example, if you’ve ever seen the movie The Notebook, the woman at the home has Alzheimer’s but can play the piano at one point in the film; without sheet music. I now know that the reason she can remember how to play an instrument, but not remember her husband or children, is because episodic memories are explicit memories while procedural memories (riding a bike, playing an instrument) are implicit memories. My fascination with memory not satisfied in the least by this newfound knowledge, I chose to write my blog post this week on memory and the process of retrieval.

The first second of Chapter 7 talked about how to encode information in LTM, which I found to be very helpful when thinking about my studies. However, the next section of the text, retrieving information, really got my attention. I was surprised and intrigued by the number of examples and processes described in the text that I have experienced in my own life. The retrieval cue experience described on page 188 of the text really hit home. Retrieval cues are words or other stimuli that help us remember information stored in our memory (Goldstein, p. 188).  Just this past weekend I was packing for a trip out of town and knew that I had forgotten something. It was a toiletry related item, which I remembered, so I walked back into the bathroom and just looked around until I remembered what I was missing (my toothbrush, btw). This type of retrieval cue is an example of matching the conditions of encoding information to retrieval of that information.

Of the three examples given in the text, I feel the matching conditions process that works best for me is encoding specificity. Encoding specificity states that we encode information learned along with the context in which we learned it (Goldstein, p. 190). What this means is, when I told myself I needed to remember my toothbrush, I was in the bathroom. That is where the information was encoded, in the context of the bathroom. Therefore, when I was trying to remember that information later, I immersed myself in the same context and jogged my memory.

When we started this course, I was surprised to find that we would be learning about memory over four lessons. Now that we are three lessons in, I can see why we have spent so much time on “one subject.” Memory is one of the more fascinating topics I have learned about in my psychology classes, and I would imagine it’s because most people can relate to memories, and how they affect our lives, very easily. Armed with some new tools to study, I’m ready to head into the final memory lesson!

Reference:

Goldstein, E. Bruce (2017). Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research, and Everyday Experience. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning.