PSY 390 Week 3 Memory Systems and Forgetting Example

Drug Names and a Parking-Lot Crash: How Memory Works, Fades and Gets Rewritten

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSY/390: Learning and Cognition

Week 3 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The student and events described are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

Memory is not a single store or a perfect record. Information passes through several systems, can be lost at each step and is rebuilt every time it is recalled. This paper explains how memory works and why it fails, using one week in the life of a nursing student who forgot what she studied and misremembered what she saw.

The Student

Grace is twenty-four and in a licensed practical nurse to registered nurse bridge program in Phoenix, Arizona, while working evening shifts at a long-term care facility. Her pharmacology exam covered two hundred drugs. She studied by rereading flashcards for six hours the night before and scored 84 percent. Two weeks later, a quiz on the same drugs found she could recall fewer than a third. The same week as her exam, she saw two cars collide at low speed in a grocery store parking lot and gave a statement to a police officer.

The Flow of Information

Information first enters sensory memory, which holds sights and sounds for a fraction of a second to a few seconds. What receives attention moves into working memory, a limited system for holding and manipulating information in the moment. Through encoding, some information is stored in long-term memory, which has vast capacity. Retrieval brings it back into working memory when needed. Failure can occur at any stage.

Working Memory and Its Limits

Baddeley (2000) extended the earlier model of working memory, which included a phonological loop for sounds and words, a visuospatial sketchpad for images and locations and a central executive that directs attention. The 2000 paper added an episodic buffer, a limited-capacity store that combines information from these components and from long-term memory into integrated episodes. The model explains how people hold several kinds of information together briefly while working with it.

When Grace studies a card, she must hold the drug name, its class, its uses and its side effects together. Unfamiliar names such as "metoprolol" strain the phonological loop, and juggling four facts at once taxes the buffer, which is one reason cramming large amounts at once is inefficient.

Why Grace Forgot

In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus memorized lists of nonsense syllables and tested himself at intervals. The resulting forgetting curve showed that most loss happens soon after learning, then levels off. Grace's drop from 84 percent to under a third in two weeks fits this pattern.

Interference adds to the loss. Proactive interference occurs when older learning disrupts new learning; the drug names Grace learned in a previous course made similar new names harder to keep straight. Retroactive interference occurs when new learning disrupts older memories; studying cardiac drugs after antibiotics made the antibiotics harder to recall. Many drug names share endings, such as "-olol" and "-pril," which increases interference.

The Spacing Effect

Cepeda et al. (2006) pooled hundreds of word-list and fact-learning experiments and showed that dividing study time into separate sessions reliably produced better long-term retention than the same total time massed together. The best spacing depended on the retention target, so material needed for months benefits from gaps of weeks rather than days.

Grace's six-hour session was massed practice. It produced a good score the next morning but weak retention afterward. The same six hours spread over two weeks, with short sessions every two or three days, would likely have produced a similar exam score and far better memory weeks later, which matters in nursing, where drug knowledge must last.

Six hours of rereading bought Grace one good morning; the same six hours spread over two weeks could have bought her a career's worth of drug names.

Retrieval Failure

Some of what Grace seems to have lost may still be stored. On the quiz, she blanked on "lisinopril," but when a classmate mentioned blood pressure, the name came back at once. The memory was available but not accessible without the right cue, a retrieval failure rather than true loss.

Retrieval Practice

Testing oneself, rather than rereading, also strengthens memory. Each act of retrieval makes a memory easier to recall later and reveals what has not been learned. Rereading creates a feeling of familiarity that can be mistaken for knowledge. Grace's flashcards would work better if she tried to recall each answer before flipping the card and set aside cards she missed for more practice.

Memory as Reconstruction

Loftus and Palmer (1974) played short films of traffic collisions and then varied a single verb in a speed question, asking whether the vehicles had "smashed" or merely "hit" or "contacted" one another. Speed estimates climbed as the verb grew more violent. In a second experiment, participants asked with "smashed" were more likely a week later to report seeing broken glass, though none appeared in the film. The wording of a question had changed what people remembered.

At the scene, Grace first told the officer the cars were moving slowly. Later the officer asked, "How fast were they going when they smashed into each other?" In her written statement, Grace estimated twenty miles per hour and mentioned a shattered headlight. Security video later showed the cars moving at about five miles per hour, and no headlight broke.

Why Reconstruction Happens

Memories are stored as fragments and rebuilt at recall, drawing on general knowledge and later information. This process is usually efficient, filling gaps sensibly, but it makes memory vulnerable to suggestion. It also explains why confidence and accuracy do not always match: Grace felt sure about the broken headlight.

Practical Recommendations

For studying, Grace should spread practice across short sessions, test herself before checking answers, mix drug classes within a session to sharpen distinctions and group names by shared endings to turn interference into a cue. For eyewitness situations, investigators should ask open questions, record first accounts before any leading questions and treat later details with caution.

Conclusion

Grace's week shows memory's main weaknesses. Working memory limits made cramming inefficient, forgetting and interference erased most of what she crammed and a leading question rewrote her memory of a crash. Research on working memory, spacing and eyewitness reconstruction explains each failure and points to better ways to study and to question witnesses.

References

Baddeley, A. (2000). The episodic buffer: A new component of working memory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(11), 417-423. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01538-2

Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.3.354

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13(5), 585-589. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3