10.23.09
STORAGE/ RETENTION
Retention: Remembering. Storage is just a set of processes. It is not a thing or a place.
Retention in terms of forgetting: Reasons why we might forget.
DECAY HYPOTHESIS: info that is stored in memory simply fades away.
INTERFERENCE: Other things that are stored in memory interfere when we are trying to
activate target information. This could be one reason we forget. Similar things slow
down our retrieval of target items.
RETRIEVAL CUE FAILURE: Whatever we are using to activate the targets in the first
place just isn’t working.
Ex. trying to remember information for a test by picturing the page the
information was on. We know the info is there but we just can activate it.
Sometimes the way we try to activate information doesn’t work.
RETENTION FUNCTION: How memory performance deteriorates over time. We are looking at
retention in terms of forgetting. It is a power function.
SAVINGS: The difference in time between the first and second trials that it takes to learn
something perfectly.
Ex. if it took you 100 sec to learn a short list of 3 letter trigrams, and you remember it
perfectly. Then you are given a delay and you come back and you don’t know it
perfectly, so you are trained again but it only takes you 40 sec to learn it perfectly this
time. You have saved 60sec.
He measured savings. If you still have some left in memory, it won’t take as long to get it back
as it did when you had nothing in memory. After a few hours, you still have some info left, but it
takes you longer to learn the list. You have less and less savings. You get big losses at first and
decreases in smaller increments.
The power law applies to all kinds of information
If recognition time is going up, it means that it’s taking you longer and longer to come up with a
right answer.
There is a systematic relationship between amount of practice and that particular retention
function (forgetting).
Practice affects the intercept of the regression line. The starting point for the forgetting curve is
higher. It you have more to start with, its going to take longer to lose it all. The slope of the line
depicts the rate of loss. The steeper the slope, the faster we are losing it. You start with more but
you lose at the same rate. For a given kind of information, we lose it at the same rate. Studying it
