Unit 3: How Does Experience Affect Behaviour and Mental Processes?
Memory and learning as adaptive systems
Unit 3 examines how the nervous system encodes, stores, and retrieves information. You need the multi-store model (sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory) with capacity, duration, and encoding for each, and the working memory model (phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive, episodic buffer). Know the types of long-term memory: explicit (episodic, semantic) versus implicit (procedural, classical conditioning). Explain consolidation, long-term potentiation, and the role of the hippocampus and amygdala.
Forgetting must be explained through decay, interference (retroactive and proactive), retrieval failure including cue-dependent forgetting, and motivated forgetting. Understand reconstructive memory, the misinformation effect, and eyewitness testimony issues, including leading questions and post-event information. For learning, revisit classical and operant conditioning and add observational learning (attention, retention, reproduction, motivation) and insight learning.
Traps to watch
- Retroactive interference: new learning disrupts old. Proactive: old learning disrupts new. Mnemonics: “pro” = prior learning forward.
- Short-term memory duration is about 18-30 seconds without rehearsal, not minutes.
- The hippocampus is crucial for consolidation, but long-term storage is distributed across the cortex.
- Misinformation effect is not lying; memory is altered by post-event information.
Rule of thumb
When a question says “previously learned material interferes,” answer proactive; when “newly learned material interferes,” answer retroactive.
Worked example
A student learns Spanish, then French, and now confuses Spanish words with French. The new learning (French) disrupts the old (Spanish), so this is retroactive interference.