Memory Models in Cognitive Psychology

Psychologist Dr. Doping talks about memory systems, information storage principles and the causes of forgetting.

Memory Research in cognitive psychology starting in the context of the knowledge of the computer metaphor, that is, compare it with the work of computer architecture that has the input-output system, CPU and two memories - operative and constant.

Similarly, psychologists have begun to distinguish between two subsystems in the system memory: the memory of short- and long-term memory. The first such two-component model of memory was proposed by Donald Norman and Nancy in 1965. They suggested that short-term memory, having a very small amount of storage and time required to maintain the information in it constant repetition of this information. And the repetition process ensures permanent preservation of its long-term memory in the system, from which the information is already hypothetically never disappears.

But in fact, in favor of a two-component model of memory showed the experimental data and clinical. With regard to the experimental data, if you read a man long list of words, units 30, and ask for a free order to recall all that he could, the man best reproduces the first words of the series, apparently, because the time to repeat them as the presentation and the last words of the series because, as suggested by psychologists, remove them directly from the short-term memory, is not moving in the long term.

Cleavage of these two systems is observed in the so-called syndrome Milner. Brenda Milner described clinical patient case in which, after an unsuccessful operation on the brain survived, on the one hand, the whole of his past experience until brain damage on the other - the ability to solve the current problems involved in the conversation and so on, but after 5 minutes, this people do not remember what happened to him before. Thus, the transfer of information from short-term memory to long-term did not occur.

Three years later, in 1968, Richard Atkinson and Richard Schiffrin complemented this model is still one unit - the so-called ultra-short-time memory, or sensory registers, where information is held within a very short time to maintain the continuity of the process of perception. Each modality sensory register your. For example, vision is iconic memory in hearing - echonic. And further studies of memory in cognitive psychology, with a few exceptions, developed in line with this ternary logic. We studied three separate memory subsystem, three boxes in which the information is stored for a certain time. Psychologists asked basic questions about how information gets there, in what form, in what way is encoded as it is stored there, how long and to what extent, how is retrieved and forgotten for some reasons. Furthermore, their naturally interested processes arising within each of the systems, and at the transition from one system to another.

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For example, Atkinson and Schiffrin, in its three-component model to process repeating as the information transfer from the short term memory to long-term added emphasis process for the transfer of information from the touch sensitive to short term memory, for further processing, and possibly storing, and structuring process enlargement units process managed code - memory with a variety of mnemonic techniques, search and retrieval processes, allowing to pull the information from the non-volatile memory back to the short-term, so that it could be used to address the current challenges.

If we try to characterize these three system memory, something about the sensory registers, we can say that there is information retained in full in the modal-specific form, but not more than half a second in vision, no more than 2-4 seconds at the hearing. It is easy to prove after George Sperling, presenting a person, for example, the character of the matrix in an amount sufficient to allow the visual system, for example, 16 pieces, and asking him to reproduce is not all that he saw (then he would call 4-5 characters), and then what we get his attention, such as a beep or underlined. Then we will see that people will be able to recall any character, which means that in the sensory register kept all. But if we defer this signal, we can see that can be stored is very long, and very quickly fades. This is the main reason for the forgetting of a touch-sensitive. Although we may delete the information there is, for example, by masking, showing a plate after a bright flash.

The information stored longer term memory - as experiments show, to thirty seconds. It is also easy to measure, giving the man a simple memory task such as Peterson's wife, three letters, but forcing him to do something that would distract him from repeating these letters. For example, lead the countdown triples from any type of 271. And we see that in 18 seconds only 20% of people can recall the three letters. Therefore, they should be there collapses.

But the main reason for the forgetting of information from short-term memory - it is a small amount. It was once thought it was 7 ± 2 magic number George Miller. Now it is adjusted to 5 elements. Limited space, therefore some elements are replacing another, but what stands out from the system memory, forgotten and can not be played from there.

In what form the information is stored there? First, psychologists believed that in the form of acoustic articulation, because, in order to keep something in the short-term memory, we have to repeat it to yourself, pronounce. But soon it was proved that it is possible to at least the visual coding, and other possible forms of coding. For example, psychologist Alan Baddeley, in principle, believes that short-term memory (or working, as he calls it) is not uniform: it has the phonological loop, where we repeat the information in it is visual-spatial sketch pad, or a matrix in which we can retain visual information. In principle, we are able to retain and image, and by repeating the information, they will not interfere with each other. Hence, at least there are two subsystems.

Now Baddeley allocates another subsystem for short-term storage, so-called episodic buffer in which we hold all the information about a particular event, an event with us, for further transfer to our autobiographical memory. And all of this, among other things, controls the so-called central executive, the central processing unit capable of holding the information, use the information and pass it on, in long-term memory, where we can it translate either by repetition or by structuring the formation, separation of semantic pieces.

For example, remembering a phone number, we can see where someone's date of birth, or the number of apartments, or anything else. This will help us to remember this information.

Long-term memory itself is not homogeneous. It differs for at least the procedural memory system that stores our skills that we can not say anything, as a rule, but it can be used effectively, and declarative memory where facts are stored.

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In turn, in the declarative memory subsystem is distinguished semantic memory, which stores our knowledge of the world. Presumably they are stored in the form of semantic and hierarchical networks connected to each other and categories of objects. Perhaps in the nodes of these networks are the so-called circuit, which stores the generalized descriptions of objects or situations, such as circuit-prototypes corresponding typical members of certain categories, or schema scripts representing a typical sequence of events in a given situation.

An episodic memory, which also refers to the subsystem declarative memory, arranged in a fundamentally different way: it contains the events of our lives, our past experience is always individual and organized along the time axis. And if from semantic memory we extract information by searching the network, and we assume that when we need to extract any special knowledge, a low-level objects inherit the properties of a high-level. For example, if we ask whether the duck eyes, we do not need to store connection duck and eye as a single ligament in the memory system. Duck is a Bird. The bird has eyes. Therefore, they, too, have duck. Similarly, we come to the fact that it has a spine, as refers to vertebrates.

And the events of episodic memory we extract, referring to some point in our lives. That is, they are arranged along the time axis. When we need to remember we somehow relate to our past experience.

As the researcher Endel Tulving episodic memory, these subsystems - semantic, episodic - presumably even different brain substrate. If you ask people in a functional magnetic resonance imaging or positron emission tomography as Tulving done, extract the facts from his own memory and the facts, for example, the history of astronomy, we will see that these two tasks activate different parts of the brain.

Because of what the lost information from the long-term memory? Psychologists are still studying it. Presumably it is not lost at all - lost access to it. This is especially true of the semantic memory. And it illustrates the phenomenon of spinning on the tip of the tongue, when we can not remember a word that we know for sure, and we can help, for example, a sound clue.

The episodic memory is one of the main causes of forgetting - it is interference or confusion between repeating events. We had breakfast every day, walk, go to work, sit in the subway, and as it was in a particular day, if not coincided with something of public interest or significant for us, and we can not remember.

But in procedural memory traces, apparently extinct, if the skill is not being used, such as the skill of playing a musical instrument, but in any case recovered after some time more efficiently than during the initial memorization. However, apart from this component model, in cognitive psychology, there are essentially an alternative model in which the memory is not considered as a set of boxes, as well as a function of the depth of information processing. Such a theory was offered in the 1970s, Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart. And they showed that the deeper, than in more aspects, we are processing the information, the better we would like to remind her later, even if the problem is not worth remembering.

For example, if we need to understand the written word in lowercase or uppercase letters, we later remember it a lot worse than if we need to understand whether it is synonymous with another word or does it characterize us.

This theory at the time received quite a lot of popularity and is now co-exist with the traditional block, box approach, though experimental studies carried out in the context of more than just the study of memory subsystems, instead of the memory as a function of the depth of information processing.

What is happiness?

The Psychologist Dr. Doping tells about an ancient notions of well-being, experimental studies of happiness and life satisfaction, depending on the material well-being.

If we talk about happiness, you need to ask several questions. What is happiness? There is real or an illusion? On what does happiness depend? Is it achievable? There is in this world, or only in another life? Another BC philosophers tried to understand these issues. There have been many different approaches to happiness. The peak of these conceptualizations were the works of Aristotle's ideas about happiness which remained unsurpassed for a long time. Nothing more serious after Aristotle theory for a long time did not appear.

Aristotle gave this definition: "Happiness - it is an activity of the soul in the fullness of virtue". He believed that the understanding of happiness depends on who we ask. To find out what happiness is, we have to ask the wise men, because different people will give different answers. Therefore, the first main idea - everyone has his happiness. It can vary in different individuals. The dictionary definition of happiness is: "Happiness - is the supreme good accessible to man." But there are differences as to what is good is. Aristotle and many of his contemporaries were trying to determine what a person needs to be happy, what qualities and virtues, a person must possess in order to be happy.

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Experimental studies of happiness

But there is another approach that happy - the one who feels himself to be. In this case, under some happiness understand the emotional state man can maximize the positive experience, which is sometimes described as the best experience. In the last 30-40 years we unfolded experimental psychological studies of happiness based on mass surveys worldwide. Since then, a lot of problems appear in the study of happiness. The researchers write that over the past 30 years, we've learned about happiness more than in the previous 2,000 years after Aristotle.

Experimental studies began with the fact that psychologists have gathered together all the indirect evidence and common sense, and stereotypes have developed evaluation techniques. Studies have shown that about half of what was considered obvious, was confirmed, and the half - no. For example, it was believed that young people are happier than older people. It turned out that happiness is not related to age. Young people have more intense positive emotions, but at the same time and more intense negative emotions. But the overall balance of positive and negative emotions with age has nothing to do. Approximately the same was the situation with the floor. Women are both happier and unhappier. They have more positive emotions than men, and more negative. But in general, in nature everything is balanced. Since the time of Ecclesiastes known stereotype of "Woe from Wit", according to which the more intelligent a person is, the less chance that he will be happy. When psychologists began to study this hypothesis, it appears that this is not so, there is no regular connection is not present.

The level of happiness is largely dependent on the total warehouse personality - temperament and character. Some scholars wrote that happiness is 50% is due to genetic factors, ie psychological features of our biological parents. But the data show that this is not true. Epigenetic studies, i.e. studies of the relationship of genetic factors and causes environmental factors, suggest that these factors can vary in the range from 10 to 40%. However, there is some one or two major genes that affect subjective wellbeing. There are a number of different genes, each of which makes a small, albeit statistically significant contribution. In total, taking into account the interaction with the environment, they provide a sufficiently weighty contribution.

The subjective view on happiness

Happiness - it's more a question of the subjective view. There have been studies examining how happy people are in the most disadvantaged social groups, ie people with severe incurable diseases, persons with disabilities, the homeless, the unemployed, representatives of the lower social strata. The researchers interviewed people who live in extremely unfavorable natural conditions: the Greenland Eskimos, in the jungles of the Masai in Kenya, street prostitutes in India. It was expected that they will have lower estimates of their satisfaction with life. But it turned out that the vast majority had a positive balance, and people who feel unhappy, even in these groups were a minority.

German psychologist Ursula Staudinger says about the "subjective well-being paradox": people can be happy regardless of the obvious reasons for this. American psychologists Sonia Lubomirski and Ken Sheldon summarized the results of different studies and formulated a model known as the "model of the pie." Pie is divided into three unequal parts, representing three groups of factors that determine individual differences in the assessment of people of their own subjective well-being or happiness.

The first group - external factors that do not depend on us, the conditions in which we were lucky or not lucky to be born and live.

The second group - the factors associated with sustainable warehouse personality. There are people who are happy in the warehouse of his character. Nothing can bring them out of the positive state. But there are people unhappy as Eeyore. Nothing can make them happy.

The third group - that is what we are building with their own hands. It is our goal that we set and achieve, the relationships that we build with others.

It was found that the weight distribution of these groups of factors is very different from what the stereotypes suggest. External factors related to geography, social conditions, security, education, explain 10-12% of individual happiness level differences. It depends on them less than it might seem.

The dependence of happiness on material well-being

Beginning in the 1990s, carried out mass surveys of many thousands of samples in different countries to cycle, to identify what the dynamics of the change of happiness in different countries and what it depends on. On the surface, is the question: Is money happiness? The extent to which happiness depends on the level of income, gross domestic product per capita, and so on? It was found that the curve is divided into two parts.

In the first, the bottom of the curve, where we are dealing with the poorest countries, this line goes up as the level of welfare at the level of the nation, there is a sharp increase in subjective well-being assessments. This pattern is very clear and evident not only at the level of nations, but also on the individual level. When basic needs are not met, the person is not well nourished and had no confidence in their own security, no shelter, housing and so on, it has a lot of reasons for negative emotions. In life, there is frustration, which prevents it from being satisfactory.

The basic needs roughly corresponds to what is indicated in our time the term "middle class". Following the well-being of the level at which people are able to eat well, live a healthy lifestyle, have medical care, shelter, education for themselves and their children. It is quite specific, and have saturation limits needs.


Then it turns out that the dependence of happiness on material well-being is changing. The curve sharply break in two. It becomes much more shallow. There have been discussions in the past 5-8 years, there ceases to grow after the welfare of the fracture point, or continues to grow, but more slowly, or, on the contrary, starts to go down a bit.

The most recent data that have been published on the subject, saying that a further increase in material well-being is positively correlated with happiness, but this relationship is mediated by what exactly you spend your money. This is the art of spending money that you have to satisfy their really deep personal psychological needs, and not just for a primitive consumerism. And it turns out that it is important not so much the wealth itself, as is the value you attach to money. People who give more importance to money are less happy than people for whom money is not the most important thing in life.

Happiness is not the destination point, but the way

Russian Silver Age philosophers have criticized the idea of a lot of happiness and the pursuit of happiness as the main principle of human behavior. Berdyaev, in particular, he noted that the state of happiness man stops him and nothing more is needed. All motivation is reset. Happiness - a state of complete fusion with the actual desired. In this sense, to pursue happiness - means to aspire to a stopped moment. Not by chance is often a state of happiness say that at this point you can or even want to die, because he has nothing else is necessary. But happiness can not last for a number of reasons. We are doomed to move towards the desired. Only a very short time we can fully achieve this fusion, and then we will live again at some distance from the desired. And this distance creates a tension, which leads to the fact that in certain moments of life we experience the state of happiness, and the rest of the time we try to find this state again.

What is cognitive dissonance?

The Psychologist Dr. Doping tells about on the relationship with the cognitive dissonance motivation theory, experiments and the sectarians determining unconscious.

The concept of cognitive dissonance in psychology emerged in the late 1950s. Its author is an American psychologist Leon Festinger. He discovered and experimentally confirmed that if our ideas there is any controversy, differences (in fact, it's called cognitive dissonance), then we have a desire to eliminate this contradiction, or add new elements into the picture to remove the discrepancy.
Especially important is the role of cognitive dissonance when one of the elements of the picture - our own actions or habits. For example, information about the dangers of smoking is part of cognitive dissonance with the fact that "I smoke". One way to eliminate cognitive dissonance - to quit smoking, the other way - to discredit the information about the dangers of smoking, that is, to find and to include in his picture of the world contrary to the information, such as information about the dangers of smoking are exaggerated and there are plenty of other, more dangerous habits.

At one time, the theory of cognitive dissonance theory was seen as a motivation, which explains some of the reasons for our actions. Why do we do what we do? To resolve cognitive dissonance. But soon enough it became clear that it works is not clear in many cases the existence of contradictions does not prevent a person to maintain a mixed picture of the world. Moreover, as the theory of cognitive dissonance motivation little to explain, because in Festinger's theory says that as the importance of these elements is important. If these elements are significant, then they generate the appropriate consequences, but if contrary elements are insignificant, there are no consequences of this will be. Thus, the explanation of action still performs weighting factor, which was on the periphery of the attention, but nevertheless, it could not be ruled out. It is a contradiction between something meaningful generates an action.

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Then we discovered, including studies of Festinger, cases where a clear violation of forecasts does not lead to a change in perceptions, as follows from the theory of cognitive dissonance, and to easy modification. For example, were well-known studies on the material of one of the sects, awaiting the end of the world on a certain date, when the end of the light in the desired date does not happen, then the members of the sect have not abandoned their ideas. They just modified them slightly, explaining why the end of the world did not happen, and continued to stick to their belief systems.

Today, the explanation only in a limited number of cases, operate on the basis of cognitive dissonance. In many situations, contradictions or discrepancies do not lead people to desire to achieve a natural unique painting. People live quietly, putting in his head completely contradictory and logically inconsistent ideas. This is one of the most important issues for the understanding of human psychology. At the time, Sigmund Freud said that one of the characteristics of the unconscious is that it does not see the contradiction that in the unconscious, in contrast to the mind, quietly get on absolutely incompatible images and ideas. We have to think about the extent to which the consciousness of modern man is conscious or whether it has accepted the appearance of consciousness and the unconscious world.

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