Levels of Processing Theory What if we don’t have separate memory systems?

One memory or many? Instead of several different memory systems, maybe we only have one. This memory system holds all the information we know, as well as things we are learning. How easily something is recalled depends on how “deeply” that something is encoded.

Depth of Processing Shallow or maintenance processing Maintains information in active memory. Doesn’t really increase recall ability Deep or elaborative processing Involves understanding or interpretation of the stimulus, increasing strength of memory trace. The idea is that the deeper we process information, the more likely we are to remember it later.

Examples with words Craik & Tulving (1975) gave people different tasks for different lists of words: –Physical - Is the word printed in capital letters? ex: TABLE –Acoustic - Does the word rhyme with ________? ex: crate; Does the word rhyme with weight? –Semantic - Does the word fit in the following sentence? ex: friend; He met a _______ in the street.

Results Reaction time (ms)Percent recognition

Another example Maybe it’s the case that people remember the words in the semantic case better because they simply spent longer thinking about them. Structural processing takes longer than semantic processing, but people remember the semantically processed words better.

Self-reference effect We are very good at remembering words we relate to ourselves. We are also very good at remembering words where we generate the elaborative information. –ex: elaborative processing of word pairs. Implies not all semantic levels are created equal.

Problems Circular definition: –We are better able to remember something if we processes it more deeply. –How do we know if something was deeply processed? It was better remembered! Context effects in encoding –Transfer-appropriate processing seems to indicate that depth of processing is not as important as the match between encoding and recall processes.