Long-term memory,
in and of itself, we've got a couple different kinds of long-term memory
we are going to talk about.
Explicit memory. It's not rated X it's just explicit.
But if you think about rated X being explicit, explicit lyrics,
right. You all remember all those little parental
advisory warnings? That's a mnemonic to help you remember it.
Explicit memory is declared a memory. Which means it's a conscious memory for
specific facts.
You could also say I do declare that yesterday I,
God, what did I do yesterday? Huh.
I had two pot pies last night. I do declare that last night I had two pot pies.
They are little ones and they're made by Marie Callender. I do declare that because
I have a
specific, conscious memory of it.
It could be episotic or it could be semantic. Episotic, the way I think of that, is an
episode.
So what did you do with your friends on Friday night? That was an episode.
Last week I went to Lego Land with my brother, and my son
and my little niece. We went to Lego Land for whom? The niece,
the eight-year-old. We had fun hanging out with the eight-year-old who
had fun
going to Lego Land. There's some pretty cool stuff at Lego Land and I remember
some of it.
In fact, I could tell you a bit about that episode
of my life. If you think about sitcoms, what are they?
Little segments of people's lives, right. So,
to the degree that you can tell me or recount something that happened to you
whether it's two minutes or five minutes or all day, that would be an episodic memory:
where, when, how specific events, specific situations
partially relevant to you. I can't tell you what you did
on that day because I don't know. But to the degree that I am able to remember it
and declare it to you it's a episodic declared of explicit memory.
Semantic memory will be the idea of remembering
ideas, rules, concepts about the world,
generalizations, experiences, and knowledge so when you have people who are arguing
about whether or not to use a comma right here, right,
what are they arguing about? Whether they remember correctly what the rules
of grammer are. "I think you use a comma here."
"I don't think use a comma there." That's a systematic rule-based memory
that we are normally just using without thinking about it but if you think about
it if you make it
conscious and you start talking about what rules are or how we do things, right,
then you're talking about semantic memory.
We all engage in all kinds of behavior that has
patterns to it, that are rule-based patterns
and assets we're often times not conscious of them but we can become conscious
of them at any given.
And that would make it an explicit memory. So if you can make it conscious
then it would be declarative. And many declared memories are both
because you remember things like, "Oh I was waiting in line at Lego Land."
Why waiting in a line? Well, that's the rule for getting on the ride.
So waiting in line is both an episodic memory that I remember and is part of my
rule-based behavior
that I engaged in while I was at Lego Land because I was able to remember both
those factors
they are conscious memories, explicit memories,
declared memories. So a lot of our memories are really a little of both of
these. A lot of times we act without being conscious.
And those are implicit memories. Non declarative,
when you don't even know why you did something but you did it. Well, I did
it because I thought I should do it.
Why? I don't know. I just did.
Sometimes we are not even aware that we do it. Most of the time I would say we are
not aware of things we do.
Unconscious memories. Well that's Freudian, isn't it? They are talking about
the deep unconscious. Yes, it is. Well, Freud wasn't a fool.
It turns out that we do a lot of things without being aware of them. Think about it.
You go through your day
being aware of everything you do you are going to be not doing very much, right.
Don't you drive?
Without having to remember every little thing about driving.
You just kind of get in and do it. Now you could become explicitly aware of what
you're doing. You say
I got in the seat, I grabbed the steering wheel, I inserted the key or pushed the button these
days, right, I
checked the mirrors, I put it into gear, I moved out
but normally you just drive the car. And as such
we can be influenced by memories we're not aware of in a lot of facets of our life
we are.
So for procedural memory we're talking about perceptual motor cognitive skills
required to complete a task.
If you're a run a register for example
and anybody, how many people have run a register in here? Have you all ever run a
register? The first time you do it it's a little tricky isn't it?
You are looking for all all these keys to see where little things are that you need to
ring up.
But the better and better you get at it
the more it goes from being explicit to implicit
that you can just do it pretty quickly without thinking very much about it
because you learned it so well that it becomes a cognitive set,a perceptual set
and a motor set that you don't really need to think about. And if you think about it
it's a fairly complicated task.
This idea of unconscious memory can affect us,
seems a little bit mysterious, but it's well grounded in research.
While Freud was very nebulous about it and maybe overstated the power of the
unconscious,
we are affected unconsciously all the time every day
in ways that we may not be aware. In fact,
just talking to Jason beforehand we were talking about a video you can see online
where they asked people to watch a ball being passed around amongest
a few people and how many times the ball is passed.
And people watched that . And at the end they are like, "did you see the giant gorilla go by in
the back ground?" And
many people never see the giant gorilla go by in the background but it goes by
comes back by, waves at you and then moves on.
It was there the whole time but your focus was so intense
that you didn't even pick up on that. So that shows how your conscious attention could
actually
preclude you from being able to process information
but on the other side sometimes you're unconscious memory
will rule the day and operate
on your behalf for the most part to help you through things so you don't have to
think about them all the time
and you can do other things. So procedural memory,
perceptual motor, cognitive skills required to complete a complex task
and we use as an example learning to run a cash register where
at first it's explicit, that you have to learn each key
and where everything's positioned and how to run it but, then the more you get
comfortable with that eventually there's a point at which
you can just engage in transactions and pretty much make unconscious
movements that are correct by keying in certain items because you are that well
familiar with the procedure which requires perception, motor, and cognitive
skills. Conditioning memory
harkens back to the material we cover in the learning chapter
and classical conditioning but particularly with operant conditioning
because we do things that we're so conditioned to do
without conscious awareness that sometimes it escapes our notice.
So conditioning memory-information stored that's automatically recalled
to help get new information
better and faster without conscious processing. It's hard to unlearn these and I
gave you an example before
of, for example, when you enter a password in. You probably just enter
the password, right. You don't really think about it until they make you change
the password
and then you have to unlearn something that has become so
conditioned that it's reflexive and relearn something you create anew.
And eventually you'll learn that well enough, you will be conditioned, you will reinforce
every time it works and you are punished when it doesn't work. So you extinguish
learning
and you facilitate the adaptation of learning a new thing
through the processes of conditioning. So the implicit
order that we're talking about will have a lot of implications when we get into
social psychology, we are going to talk about schemas more explicitly here shortly,
no pun intended "ahh" explicit, nah, you don't even get that.
Alright explicit memory, we're going to talk about schemas more explicitly, but our
schemas operate oftentimes without our awareness and they shape what we see
and they shape what we don't see, they shape what we hear, they shape what we
don't hear,
but more importantly here is it shapes what we remember and what we don't remember
and we can actually reconstruct memories without being aware that we're doing it
such that we create false memories or distorted memories
that seems so real to us that we would never say a person was lying,
but more that they wore distorting their memories in a way they weren't aware of.
That's just a bad graphics and blurry
but long-term memory breaks down into two major categories:
explicit memory, which we call declarative,
by definition requires conscious recall for me to say what I did yesterday or
say what I did the day before, right. Episodic would be
saying the things that happened to me personally in a situation.
Semantic would be factual knowledge about trivia
or about rules or ideas, things that I could talk about consciously.
Uh, if I want to talk about, for example, governments and types of
governments that would be semantic memory because I would be able to
remember
types of governments and have a debate based on my memory of those different types.
Implicit non declarative memory, memory does not require conscious recall.
Although it can be brought to consciousness, it is
typically going to operate on autopilot so to speak.
Procedural memory and conditioning memory are subtypes of this
so that when we do things that we get really good at that require fairly complicated
procedures but they become so well learned
that we don't really think our way through it we just do it.
And conditioning memory is very similar to that. Automatic conditioned responses
such that we don't realize what we're doing and if we want to use the
behavioral example again of police light coming on while you are driving
behind you at night
and you getting the butterflies, right. That's
what classical conditioned, its automatic. You don't think,
let me have butterflies. That's a conditioned memory,
right. And so you hit the brake seemingly automatically you now know
that's
operant conditioned, right, and that operant conditioning
seems to happen without me thinking, "oh, let me hit the brake." So it happens
implicitly.
We could then bring it to conscious recall if we want to
but it doesn't operate with consciousness being a requirement. In fact, by definition
it's unconscious until we bring it forth.