Psychology
Semantic memory builds schemas and scripts. With this, semantic memory is known as the knowledge that people gain from experiencing events in the everyday world. This information is then organized into a concept that people can understand in their own way. Semantic memory relates to scripts because scripts are made through the knowledge that one gains through these everyday experiences and habituation.
There have been many empirical research studies conducted in order to test the validity of the script theory. One such study, conducted by Bower, Black, and Turner in 1979, [3] asked participants to read 18 different scenarios, all of which represented a doctor’s office script. The participants were later asked to complete either a recall task or a recognition task. In the recall task, the participants were asked to remember as much as they could about each scenario. Here, the participants tended to recall certain parts of the stories that were not actually present, but that were parts of the scripts that the stories represented. In the recognition task, participants were asked to rate various sentences on a 7-point scale regarding their personal confidence that they had seen each sentence in the scenario. Some sentences shown to participants were from the stories and some were not. Of the sentences that were not from the stories, some were relevant to the doctor’s office script and others were not relevant to the script at all. Here, participants tended to recognize certain non-story sentences as having come from the story if the non-story sentence was relevant to the script. Ultimately, Bower, Black, and Turner’s study suggested that scripts serve as a guide for a person’s recall and recognition for certain things that they already know.
Behavioral scripts that people are taught allow them to make realistic assumptions about situations, places, and people. These assumptions stem from what are known as schemas. Schemas make our environments more approachable to understand, and therefore people are able to familiarize themselves with what is around them. When people become comfortable with what they find familiar, they are more likely to remember events, people or places that obscure from their initial thought or script. [4]
Some people may have a tendency to habituate behavioral scripts in a manner that can act to limit consciousness in a subliminal way. This can negatively influence the subconscious mind and, subsequently, can negatively affect perceptions, judgments, values, beliefs, cognition and behavior. For example, over-reliance upon behavioral scripts combined with social norms that encourage an individual to use these behavioral scripts may influence one to stereotype and develop a prejudiced attitude toward others based on socioeconomic status, ethnicity, race, etc.
Some applied behavior analysts even use scripts to train new skills [1] and 20 years of research supports script use as an effective way to build new language, social, and activity routines for adults and children with developmental disabilities. [1] With language scripts fading, efforts are being made in an attempt to help the scripts recombine in order to approximate more natural language.
Much of the development of scripts first addresses language and how it influences what we know and understand. With language, many psychologists have used the specific study of language [5] to develop theories about concepts and scripts. In particular, researchers recognize semantic memory development is mostly possible through verbal-linguistic stimuli. Language and memory are constantly used for people to be able to interpret what experiences or people mean to or relate to them. Here, language has influence on the scripts people use because of its relationship to semantic memory.
There are also instances where damage to a person’s script affects to their ability to understand concepts. For instance, Sirigu, Zalla, Pillon, Grafman, Agid, and Dubois (1995) [6] conducted a study on brain-damaged patients and their ability to access scripts that relate to a certain situation. Within their study, they asked patients with brain-damage (particularly to their prefrontal cortex) to make as many scripts for different situations as they could and put them in their commonly known sequence. These researchers found that those with prefrontal brain damage could make just as many scripts for different situations as those without prefrontal brain damage. Although with finding this, these researchers also found that patients with prefrontal brain damage had a difficult time putting in order or sequencing the events that happen within a script. They concluded that the prefrontal brain-damaged patients had difficulty within finding the goal of each script, where each script has a specific thing that a person looks for to achieve. For example, within the script of going to a restaurant, the goal of the dinner would be to eat, where prefrontal brain-damaged patients are likely to see the goal of this script as paying for the meal or ordering for the food.
Recall in memory refers to the mental process of retrieval of information from the past. Along with encoding and storage, it is one of the three core processes of memory. There are three main types of recall: free recall, cued recall and serial recall. Psychologists test these forms of recall as a way to study the memory processes of humans and animals. Two main theories of the process of recall are the two-stage theory and the theory of encoding specificity.
The frontal lobe is the largest of the four major lobes of the brain in mammals, and is located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere. It is parted from the parietal lobe by a groove between tissues called the central sulcus and from the temporal lobe by a deeper groove called the lateral sulcus. The most anterior rounded part of the frontal lobe is known as the frontal pole, one of the three poles of the cerebrum.
Episodic memory is the memory of every day events that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred at particular times and places; for example, the party on one's 7th birthday. Along with semantic memory, it comprises the category of explicit memory, one of the two major divisions of long-term memory.
In psychology and cognitive science, a schema describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them. It can also be described as a mental structure of preconceived ideas, a framework representing some aspect of the world, or a system of organizing and perceiving new information. Schemata influence attention and the absorption of new knowledge: people are more likely to notice things that fit into their schema, while re-interpreting contradictions to the schema as exceptions or distorting them to fit. Schemata have a tendency to remain unchanged, even in the face of contradictory information. Schemata can help in understanding the world and the rapidly changing environment. People can organize new perceptions into schemata quickly as most situations do not require complex thought when using schema, since automatic thought is all that is required.
Explicit memory is one of the two main types of long-term human memory, the other of which is implicit memory. Explicit memory is the conscious, intentional recollection of factual information, previous experiences, and concepts. This type of memory is dependent upon three processes: acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval. Explicit memory can be divided into two categories: episodic memory, which stores specific personal experiences, and semantic memory, which stores factual information. Explicit memory requires gradual learning, with multiple presentations of a stimulus and response.
The Levels of Processing model, created by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in 1972, describes memory recall of stimuli as a function of the depth of mental processing. Deeper levels of analysis produce more elaborate, longer-lasting, and stronger memory traces than shallow levels of analysis. Depth of processing falls on a shallow to deep continuum. Shallow processing leads to a fragile memory trace that is susceptible to rapid decay. Conversely, deep processing results in a more durable memory trace.
Involuntary memory, also known as involuntary explicit memory, involuntary conscious memory, involuntary aware memory, madeleine moment, mind pops and most commonly, involuntary autobiographical memory, is a sub-component of memory that occurs when cues encountered in everyday life evoke recollections of the past without conscious effort. Voluntary memory, its binary opposite, is characterized by a deliberate effort to recall the past.
Every day, people are presented with endless amounts of information, and in an effort to help keep track and organize this information, people must be able to recognize, differentiate and store information. One way to do that is to organize information as it pertains to the self. The overall concept of self-reference suggests that people interpret incoming information in relation to themselves, using their self-concept as a background for new information. Examples include being able to attribute personality traits to oneself or to identify recollected episodes as being personal memories of the past. The implications of self-referential processing are evident in many psychological phenomena. For example, the "cocktail party effect" notes that people attend to the sound of their names even during other conversation or more prominent, distracting noise. Also, people tend to evaluate things related to themselves more positively. For example, people tend to prefer their own initials over other letters. The self-reference effect (SRE) has received the most attention through investigations into memory. The concepts of self-referential encoding and the SRE rely on the notion that relating information to the self during the process of encoding it in memory facilitates recall, hence the effect of self-reference on memory. In essence, researchers have investigated the potential mnemonic properties of self-reference.
Memory has the ability to encode, store and recall information. Memories give an organism the capability to learn and adapt from previous experiences as well as build relationships. Encoding allows a perceived item of use or interest to be converted into a construct that can be stored within the brain and recalled later from long-term memory. Working memory stores information for immediate use or manipulation which is aided through hooking onto previously archived items already present in the long-term memory of an individual.
Selective amnesia is a type of amnesia in which the sufferer loses certain parts of their memory. Common elements that may be forgotten: relationships, special talents, where they live, abilities in certain areas.
Implicit cognition refers to unconscious influences such as knowledge, perception, or memory, that influence a person's behavior, even though they themselves have no conscious awareness whatsoever of those influences.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is a part of the prefrontal cortex in the mammalian brain. The ventral medial prefrontal is located in the frontal lobe at the bottom of the cerebral hemispheres and is implicated in the processing of risk and fear, as it is critical in the regulation of amygdala activity in humans. It also plays a role in the inhibition of emotional responses, and in the process of decision-making and self-control. It is also involved in the cognitive evaluation of morality.
Retrospective memory is the memory of people, words, and events encountered or experienced in the past. It includes all other types of memory including episodic, semantic and procedural. It can be either implicit or explicit. In contrast, prospective memory involves remembering something or remembering to do something after a delay, such as buying groceries on the way home from work. However, it is very closely linked to retrospective memory, since certain aspects of retrospective memory are required for prospective memory.
Autobiographical memory is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of episodic and semantic memory. It is thus a type of explicit memory.
Priming is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. For example, the word NURSE is recognized more quickly following the word DOCTOR than following the word BREAD. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Research, however, has yet to firmly establish the duration of priming effects, yet their onset can be almost instantaneous.
Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) is the result of injury to the right cerebral hemisphere. The right hemisphere of the brain coordinates tasks for functional communication, which include problem solving, memory, and reasoning. Deficits caused by right hemisphere brain damage vary depending on the location of the damage.
Memory gaps and errors refer to the incorrect recall, or complete loss, of information in the memory system for a specific detail and/or event. Memory errors may include remembering events that never occurred, or remembering them differently from the way they actually happened. These errors or gaps can occur due to a number of different reasons, including the emotional involvement in the situation, expectations and environmental changes. As the retention interval between encoding and retrieval of the memory lengthens, there is an increase in both the amount that is forgotten, and the likelihood of a memory error occurring.
In psychology, the misattribution of memory or source misattribution is the misidentification of the origin of a memory by the person making the memory recall. Misattribution is likely to occur when individuals are unable to monitor and control the influence of their attitudes, toward their judgments, at the time of retrieval. Misattribution is divided into three components: cryptomnesia, false memories, and source confusion. It was originally noted as one of Daniel Schacter's seven sins of memory.
Reconstructive memory is a theory of memory recall, in which the act of remembering is influenced by various other cognitive processes including perception, imagination, semantic memory and beliefs, amongst others. People view their memories as being a coherent and truthful account of episodic memory and believe that their perspective is free from an error during recall. However, the reconstructive process of memory recall is subject to distortion by other intervening cognitive functions such as individual perceptions, social influences, and world knowledge, all of which can lead to errors during reconstruction.
The self-reference effect is a tendency for people to encode information differently depending on whether they are implicated in the information. When people are asked to remember information when it is related in some way to themselves, the recall rate can be improved.
