Invitation to Psychology

ChaPteR 8 Memory 289

want to remember for the long haul is elabora-

tive rehearsal, also called elaboration of encoding

(Cermak & Craik, 1979; Craik & Tulving, 1975).

Elaboration involves associating new items of

information with material that has already been

stored or with other new facts. It can also involve

analyzing the physical, sensory, or semantic fea-

tures of an item.

Rehearsal

Association of new in-

formation with already

stored knowledge and

analysis of the new

information to make it

memorable.

call it, you are learning what happens when you
don’t rehearse.
A poignant demonstration of the power
of  rehearsal once occurred during a session
with H. M. (Ogden & Corkin, 1991). The
experimenter gave him five digits to repeat and
remember, but then she was unexpectedly called
away. When she returned after more than an
hour, H. M. was able to repeat the five digits
correctly. He had been rehearsing them the
entire time.
Short-term memory holds many kinds of
information, including visual information and
abstract meanings. But most people, or at least
most hearing people, seem to favor speech for
encoding and rehearsing its contents. The speech
may be spoken aloud or to oneself. When people
make errors on STM tests that use letters or
words, they often confuse items that sound the
same or similar, such as d and t, or bear and bare.
These errors suggest that they have been rehears-
ing verbally.
Some strategies for rehearsing are more
effective than others. Maintenance rehearsal
merely involves rote repetition of the mate-
rial. This kind of rehearsal is fine for keeping
information in STM, but it will not always lead
to long-term retention. A better strategy if you

maintenance rehearsal

Rote repetition of mate-

rial to maintain its avail-

ability in memory.

Get Involved Pay Attention!

It seems obvious, but often we fail to remember because we never encoded the information in the first

place. Which of these Lincoln pennies is the real one? (The answer is at the end of this chapter.) If you are

an American, you have seen zillions of pennies, yet you will probably have trouble recognizing the real one

because you have never paid close attention and encoded the details of its design (Nickerson & Adams,

1979). If you are not an American, try drawing the front of one of your most common coins and then check

to see how well you did.

When actors learn a script, they do not rely on main-

tenance rehearsal alone. They also use elaborative

rehearsal and deep processing, analyzing the meaning

of their lines and associating their lines with imagined

information about the character they are playing.