THE UNIT GOAL:
Understand the processes involved in encoding, storing, retrieving, and constructing memory.
THE BIG IDEAS:
(1) Be able to explain what “memory” is.
(2) Analyze how and why we encode what we encode.
(3) Analyze how we store memories.
(4) Analyze how we retrieve memories.
(5) Analyze how and why memory “fails.”
(6) Analyze how we construct memory.
Understand the processes involved in encoding, storing, retrieving, and constructing memory.
THE BIG IDEAS:
(1) Be able to explain what “memory” is.
- Recognize the importance of memory in terms of identity.
- Differentiate between sensory, short-term, working, and long-term memory.
(2) Analyze how and why we encode what we encode.
- Differentiate between automatic and effortful encoding, including what information we encode in each manner.
- Analyze the implications of the spacing effect.
- Identify what information is more or less likely to be encoded, because of phenomena like the serial position effect, primacy and recency effect.
- Differentiate between semantic, visual, and acoustic encoding.
- Identify techniques we use for effortful encoding, including chunking, mnemonics, and hierarchies.
(3) Analyze how we store memories.
- Differentiate between iconic and echoic memory.
- Differentiate the duration and capacity of short-term and long-term memory.
- Explain what long-term potentiation is.
- Differentiate between implicit and explicit memory, including how and where they are each stored.
(4) Analyze how we retrieve memories.
- Differentiate between recall, recognition, and relearning – understanding how each demonstrates different levels of memory retrieval.
- Analyze the significance and workings of of retrieval cues, context, priming, and mood-congruent memory.
(5) Analyze how and why memory “fails.”
- Identify and understand the “sins of forgetting.”
- Identify and analyze the ways in which memory can fail (encoding failure, storage decay, retrieval failure).
- Differentiate between proactive and retroactive interference.
- Analyze Freud’s theory of repressed memory, and modern evaluations of the reliability of repressed memories.
(6) Analyze how we construct memory.
- Explain and analyze the misinformation effect.
- Explain and analyze source amnesia.
- Explain the reliability of memory, repressed memory, and constructed memory.