All 10 questions and answers
Try each question before you open the answer. Recalling first, then checking, is what makes a quiz stick (the testing effect).
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Which researcher first mapped the forgetting curve?
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Hermann Ebbinghaus. In the 1880s Ebbinghaus memorized lists of nonsense syllables and measured how fast he forgot them. Forgetting is steep at first and then levels off.
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What is the classic estimate of short-term memory capacity?
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About 7 items, plus or minus 2. George Miller proposed 7 plus or minus 2 in 1956. Later work, especially by Nelson Cowan, suggests a lower figure of about 4 chunks.
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What are the three basic stages of memory?
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Encoding, storage and retrieval. Information must be encoded (taken in), stored (kept over time) and retrieved (brought back). Forgetting can happen at any of the three.
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You keep writing your old phone number when asked for your new one. What is this?
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Proactive interference. Proactive interference: old information disrupts recall of new information. Retroactive is the reverse, when new learning disrupts old memories.
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After hearing a list once, people remember the first and last items best. What is this called?
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The serial position effect. Better recall at the start is the primacy effect, at the end the recency effect. Together they make up the serial position effect.
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Knowing how to ride a bike is an example of which kind of memory?
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Procedural memory. Procedural memory holds skills you perform without consciously recalling them. Episodic memory holds personal events, semantic memory general facts.
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Which brain structure is essential for forming new long-term memories of facts and events?
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The hippocampus. Patient H.M. lost most of both hippocampi in surgery and could no longer form new declarative memories, although he could still learn new motor skills.
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Remembering 1-800-555-0199 as four groups instead of eleven digits is an example of what?
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Chunking. Chunking groups items into meaningful units so fewer slots of short-term memory are needed.
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According to the levels of processing model, which leads to the best recall?
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Thinking about what a word means. Craik and Lockhart (1972) found that deep, meaning-based (semantic) processing produces better memory than shallow processing of appearance or sound.
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What does the testing effect show?
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Recalling information strengthens memory more than rereading it. Practicing retrieval, as in a quiz, leads to better long-term retention than spending the same time restudying. See the Roediger and Karpicke (2006) studies.
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