Two ways of assessing recall*

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1 Recall* Recall or retrieval of memory refers to the subsequent re-accessing of events or information from the past, which have been previously encoded and stored in the brain. In common parlance, it is known as remembering. During recall, the brain "replays" a pattern of neural activity that was originally generated in response to a particular event, echoing the brain's perception of the real event. In fact, there is no real solid distinction between the act of remembering and the act of thinking.

2 Recall* If you've forgotten something, it may be 1/because you didn't encode it very effectively 2/ because you were distracted while encoding should have taken place, or 3/because you're having trouble retrieving it. If you've "forgotten" where you parked the car, you may not have really forgotten at all -- instead, the location of your car may never have gotten into your memory in the first place.

3 Two ways of assessing recall* There are two main types of recall assessment : 1/ Free recall is the process in which a person is given a list of items to remember and then is asked to recall them in any order (hence the name free ). This type of recall often displays evidence of either the primacy effect (when the person recalls items presented at the beginning of the list earlier and more often) or the recency effect (when the person recalls items presented at the end of the list earlier and more often).

4 Comparison of recognition and recall* The big difference between recognition and recall is the amount of cues that can help the memory retrieval; recall involves fewer cues than recognition Answering a question such as Did Herman Melville write Moby Dick? involves recognition: you simply have to recognize whether the information provided is correct. If instead I asked you Who wrote Moby Dick? you would use a process of recall to retrieve the right answer from your memory. Recognition is easier than recall because it involves more cues: all those cues spread activation to related information in memory, raise the answer s activation, and make you more likely to pick it. It s the reason for which multiple-choice questions are easier than open questions, where the respondent has to come up with an answer.

5 Forgetting* Four theories Cue-dependent forgetting (retrieval failure) Trace Decay Interference theories Organic Causes

6 Recall/forgetting* A memory is the fruit of the learning process, the concrete trace of it that is left in your neural networks. Human memory is fundamentally associative. You can remember a new piece of information better if you can associate it with previously acquired knowledge that is already firmly anchored in your memory. And the more meaningful the association is to you personally, the more effectively it will help you to remember.

7 Recall* Contrary to the image that many people have of memory as a vast collection of archived data, most of our memories are actually reconstructions. They are not stored in our brains like books on library shelves. Whenever we want to remember something, we have to reconstruct it from elements scattered throughout various areas of our brains. Thus, scientists today view remembering not as a simple retrieval of fixed records, but rather as an ongoing process of reclassification resulting from continuous changes in our neural pathways and parallel processing of information in our brains.

8 Recall/forgetting* The memory is altered in the absence of the original stimulus BECOMING LESS ABOUT WHAT YOU REMEMBER AND MORE ABOUT YOU so.. Memories are being modified to fit what we know now. The more you remember (recall) something in the absence of the actual stimulus the less accurate the memory becomes. As Proust put it in Search The only paradise is paradise lost

9 Summary of maximizing recall based on today s material* Re-expose yourself to the information if you want to retrieve it later Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately if you want better recall Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately and in fixed spaced intervals if you want even better recall Deliberately re-expose yourself to the information more elaborately and in fixed spaced intervals in a similar environmental (internally and externally) to get even better recall.

10 A special form of not remembering Amnesia* Amnesia has several root causes. Most are traceable to brain injury related to physical trauma (e.g. concussion), disease, infection, drug and alcohol abuse, or reduced blood flow to the brain (vascular insufficiency). In Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, for example, damage to the memory centers of the brain results from the use of alcohol or malnutrition. Amnesia may be one of the symptoms of some degenerative brain diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease Infections that damage brain tissue, including encephalitis and herpes, can also cause amnesia. If the amnesia is thought to be of psychological origin, it is termed psychogenic.e.g. defense mechanisms

11 A special form of not remembering Amnesia* There are at least four general types of amnesia: 1/Anterograde. 2/ Retrograde 3/Transient global 4/Traumatic