Psychology 2 Marks Question

1. Semantic memory is the memory of general awareness and knowledge.
2. All concepts, ideas and rules of logic are stored in semantic memory.
3. For instance, it is because of semantic memory that we remember that 2 + 6 = 8 or the STD code of New Delhi is 011.
4. This kind of memory is not dated; you perhaps will not be able to tell when you learnt the meaning of non-violence or on which date you came to know that Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka.
5. Since the contents of semantic memory relate to facts and ideas of general awareness and knowledge, it is affect-neutral and not susceptible to forgetting.

Control process:

1. It is proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin.
2. It functions to monitor the flow of information through various memory stores.
3. Control processes have three kinds.

They are following:

1. Selective attention: That information which is attended to enter the STM from sensory registers. It decides what will travel from sensory registers to STM.
2. Maintenance rehearsal: This kind of rehearsal simply maintains information through repetition and when such repetitions discontinue, the information is lost.
3. Chunking: Through chunking it is possible to expand the capacity of STM which is otherwise T + 2.

e.g. It you are told to remember a sting of digits as 1947, 1949, 2004. You may create the chunks as 1947, 1949, 2004 and remember them as the year when India became independent, the year when the Indian constitution was adopted and the year when the tsunami hit the coastal regions of India and South East Asian countries.

Implicit memory: Implicit memory is a kind of memory that a person is not aware of. Many of the memories remain outside the conscious awareness of a person.

1. It is the memory that is retrieved automatically. e.g. If someone knows typing that means he/ she also knows the particular letters on the keyboard. But many typists cannot correctly label blank keys in a drawing of a keyboard.
2. Implicit memories lie outside the boundaries of awareness.
3. Implicit memories do influence our behaviour.
4. This kind of memory was found in patients suffering from brain injuries.
5. We are not conscious of the fact that a memory or record of a given experience exists.
6. Implicit memories are also observed in people with normal memories.

• According to this view the processing of any new information depends on the manner in which it is perceived analysed and understood. This determines the extent to which the content is eventually retained.
• Craik and Lockhart proposed that it is possible to analyse the incoming information at more than one levels.

These levels of processing are following:

1. One may analyse it in terms of its physical or structural features. This is the first and the shallowest level of processing. e.g. One might attend only to the shape of letters in a word say cat - inspite of whether the word is written in capital or small letters or the colour of the ink in which it is written.
2. At the intermediate level one might consider and attend to the phonetic sounds that are attached to the letters and therefore the structural features are transformed into at least one meaningful word say, a word cat that has three specific letters.
3. The third and the deepest level at which information can be processed. In order to ensure that the information is retained for a longer period. It is important that it gets analysed and understood in terms of its meaning.

To sum up, analyzing information in terms of its structural and phonetic features amounts to shallower processing while encoding it in terms of the meaning it carries is the deepest processing level that leads to memory that resists forgetting considerably.

Judgement: It is a process in which we form options, arrive at conclusions and make critical evaluations about objects, events and people on basis of available information. Process of judgement is often automatic and spontaneous and is dependent on our beliefs, attitudes. Judgement can also change on the basis of newly acquired information. Judgements involve evaluating information while decision require making choices. Decision Making: It is a kind of problem solving in which we have several alternatives and after evaluating the cost, benefit associated with each alternatives, we must choose best among them.
Judgement and decision making are inter-related.
Decision making differs from other types of problem solving as in this we already know various choices and one has to be selected.

According to some psychologists the short term memory is not unitary, but it includes many components. This multiple component view of short term memory was first proposed by Baddeley (1986).
According to him the short term memory is not a passive storehouse but it is a work bench that holds many types of memory materials that are handled, manipulated and transformed as people perform various cognitive tasks. This is called the working memory.
It has many components:

1. The first component is the phonological loop which holds a limited number of seconds and unless rehearsed, they decay within 2 seconds.
2. The second component visuospatial sketchpad stores visual and spatial information and phonological loop, sketchpad too is limited.
3. The third component, which Baddeley calls the central executive, organizes information from phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad as well as from the long term memory.

1. Episodic memory contains biographical details our lives.
2. Memories relating to our personal life experiences constitute the episodic memory and it is for this reason that its contents are generally emotional in nature.
3. Although such experiences are hard to forget, yet it is equally true that many events take place continuously in our lives and that we do not remember all of them.
4. Besides, there are painful and unpleasant experiences which are not remembered in as much detail as pleasant life experiences.

All concrete objects generate images and the knowledge related to them is encoded both verbally as well as visually.

• This is known as dual coding hypothesis, originally proposed by the Paivio.
• According to this hypothesis, concrete nouns and information related to concrete objects are encoded and stored in the form of images while information related to abstract concepts assume a verbal and a descriptive code.
• e.g. If you are asked to describe a bird, the first thing that happens is that an image of a bird is generated and based on this image, you describe a bird. But on the other hand, the meanings of concepts link "truth” or “honesty" will not have such accompanying images.

So, any information which has been encoded verbally as well as in the form of images is recalled with greater ease.