Let's Explore our Memory: Challenging the Stage Theory.

As we saw in yesterday's blog-isode, brain lesions (damage) can produce two opposite patterns of memory defects. Some patients show normal short-term memories coupled with massive defects in long-term learning ability, while others can learn perfectly well but show extremely defective short-term memory performance.

Source

On the surface, it appears that the differences between short- and long-term memory, as proposed by stage theory, are well supported by these two types of memory impairment.

However, after more thought, this is not quite clear.

Why?

The issue is in the fact that some individuals with really poor short-term performance were able to learn new things and have perfectly successful and productive lives. One who was a subject in this study was said to manage a shop and a household, and another subject worked as a personal secretary. But given that the short-term system is the only pathway leading to long-term memory, how were they able to do all of this?

It would appear that stage theory cannot give the short-term storage the great relevance that it does. 🤷

A significant challenge to stage theory comes from research on rehearsal effects. Stage theory suggests that if you practice or rehearse something, it's more likely to stick in your long-term memory.

Which is where we started getting these famous quotes for students.

"Repetition is the mother of learning"
and others.

Now don't get me wrong, I would explain this pretty soon.

Hang in there

Now they claim that the duration of the item's stay on the platform determines whether it gets transferred from the short-term loading platform to the long-term warehouse. Simply put, its chances of getting moved increase with the amount of time it remains there.

That would imply that rehearsing would be beneficial as it prolongs the item's stay in the temporary storage facility(Short term-memory) and prevents it from deteriorating or being moved before the transfer proceeds.

However, research has shown that accessing long-term memory is not always as automated as it seems.

It turns out that one type of rehearsal does relatively little in the long run. This is called "maintenance rehearsal". In this type of learning or rehearsal, the subject mentally holds on to the material for a little while but does nothing more.

This type of practice is what we do when we want to remember a phone number long enough to dial it. Until we start calling, we repeat the numbers to ourselves again and again, and then we immediately forget when we finally dial.

As you can see, most students do precisely this type of stuff in the few hours leading up to a test. For this reason, some people might pass the test just fine but would quickly forget what they had learnt. Why? They committed it to memory long enough to write it down.

Interesting?

Experimental evidence on the effect of maintenance rehearsal comes from a study that varied the time in which items remained in short-term memory.

The participants were instructed to listen to many word lists and keep an eye out for words that started with a certain letter on each list. The lengths of the listings differed. The final word on the list that started with that letter had to be reported by the subjects at the conclusion of each list.

Okay, so assuming the list contained the following items and the letter to be looked out for was G:

*Daughter, Oil, Rifle, Garden, Grain, Table, Football, Anchor, Giraffe, Pillow, Thunder *

In this scenario, the person needs to remember one word that starts with 'G' until the next one shows up. So, after Garden, it changes to Grain, then Giraffe, and this continues until the list ends. When it's done, the person has to recall the last 'G' word, which in this case is Giraffe.

Grain will remain longer than Garden because of this structure, which ensures that some G-words are retained in short-term memory longer than others. I hope you remember the recency effect from earlier blog-isodes.

The question was whether staying longer in the short-term memory increased the likelihood of a word moving into long-term memory.

To check this, the researchers conducted a final test, which was quite surprising. After going through many lists in the session, they just asked the participants to recall as many of the words that started with 'G' as they could.

The findings revealed that the duration something spent in short-term memory didn't matter – both Garden and Grain were remembered equally. This, along with other studies, suggests that repeatedly rehearsing doesn't really help much in improving memory recall.

Fascinated?

Trust me there is more to come in these blog-isodes.

These challenges eventually caused psychologists to rethink how they view memory processes today, which will be discussing in tomorrow's blog-isode.

One change concerns the conception of short-term memory . Another is an emphasis on the role of processing and organization .

This involves how we think about short-term memory and a focus on it's processing and organization.

The Bus Stops Here for today:

Thank you for joining me in today's blog-isode. I hope you had a great time. I really appreciate all the comments I received on these blogs. I would be happy to receive more regarding this topic or my blogs. I want to ensure you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing. Until tomorrow, stay safe.

Ops! I almost forgot my game of the day.

Okay here it is

Enjoy!

References and links:

https://www.verywellhealth.com/elaborative-rehearsal-a-better-way-to-memorize-98694#:~:text=Maintenance%20rehearsal%20is%20the%20straight,the%20information%20in%20your%20mind.

https://sites.psu.edu/intropsychf19grp5/2019/10/15/maintenance-and-elaborative-rehearsal/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657600/

https://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/stages-of-memory/

https://lesley.edu/article/stages-of-memory