Cognition ❮ 145he then tested to see how long it took to forget a list. He drew a forgetting curve that
declined rapidly before slowing. He found that recognition was sometimes easier than recall
to measure forgetting. A method he used to measure retention of information was the sav-
ings method, the amount of repetitions required to relearn the list compared to the amount
of repetitions it took to learn the list originally. Ebbinghaus also found that if he continued
to practice a list after memorizing it well, the information was more resistant to forgetting.
He called this the overlearning effect. When we try to retrieve a long list of words, we usually
recall the last words and the first words best, forgetting the words in the middle. This is
called the serial position effect. The primacy effect refers to better recall of the first items,
thought to result from greater rehearsal; the recency effect refers to better recall of the last
items. Immediately after learning, the last items may still be in working memory, accounting
for the recency effect. We may remember words from the beginning of the list days later
because rehearsal moved the words into our LTM.
What helps us remember? Retrieval cues, reminders associated with information we
are trying to get out of memory, aid us in remembering. Retrieval cues can be other words
or phrases in a specific hierarchy or semantic network, context, and mood or emotions.
Priming is activating specific associations in memory either consciously or unconsciously.
Retrieval cues prime our memories.
Cramming for a test does not help us remember as well as studying for the same
total amount of time in shorter sessions on different occasions. Numerous studies have
shown that distributed practice, spreading out the memorization of information or
the learning of skills over several sessions, facilitates remembering better than massed
practice, cramming the memorization of information or the learning of skills into one
session.
If we use mnemonic devices or memory tricks when encoding information, these
devices will help us retrieve concepts, for example, acronyms such as ROY G. BIV
for colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) or sayings
such as, “My very educated mother just served us noodles” for the planets (Mercury,
Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Nep tune). Another mnemonic, the method
of loci, uses association of words on a list with visualization of places on a familiar path.
For example, to remember ten items on a grocery list (chicken, corn, bread, etc.), we
associate each with a place in our house (a chicken pecking at the front door, corn
making a yellow mess smashed into the foyer, etc.). At the grocery store, we mentally
take a tour of our house and retrieve each of the items. Another mnemonic to help us
remember lists, the peg word mnemonic, requires us to first memorize a scheme such
as “One is a bun, two is a shoe,” and so on, then mentally picture using the chicken in
the bun, the corn in the shoe, etc. These images help both to encode items into LTM
and later to retrieve them back into our working memory.
Successful retrieval often depends on the match between the way information is
encoded in our brains and the way it is retrieved. The context that we are in when we
experience an event, the mood we are in, and our internal state all affect our memory of an
event. Our recall is often better when we try to recall information in the same physical set-
ting in which we encoded it, possibly because along with the information, the environment
is part of the memory trace; this process is called context-dependent memory. Taking a
test in the same room where we learned information can result in greater recall and higher
grades. Mood congruence aids retrieval. We recall experiences better that are consistent
with our mood at retrieval; we remember information of other happy times when we are
happy, and information of other sad times when we are unhappy. Finally, memory of an
event can be state-dependent; things we learn in one internal state are more easily recalled
when in the same state again. Although memory of anything learned when people are