The research starts with a common experience in daily life that you forget what you are doing and retrace your steps back to the original spot to find memory. Along with my emotional memory shared in blog 1, I come up with a series of intriguing questions.

Through the explanation in Alley dog (n.d.) and reading “Memory in the Real world”
(Cohen & Conway, 2007), I realize the existence of cues and put forward the research question to dig more into the memory retrieval.

Two rounds of experiments are conducted to study the types of retrieval cue and the extensive application in human remembering. In blog 2, I recorded a 4-day life of 5 HKU students to see what memory retrievals happened. Linking with lecture, I learned that the memory is composed of three components, encoding, storing and retrieval (The Human Memory, 2018). Encoding is the process of extracting features and generalization, where cues gradually form connected with specific events. Retrieval is to recall the generalizations later by activating the cues. So I looked into descriptions to find how cues foster in encoding and come into effect in retrieval, and learned about three types of cues.

In blog 3, I designed three experiments to examine how to apply three types of cues to retrieval improvement. However, from the lecture, sensory memory is not involved in higher cognitive functions like short-term or long-term memory, meaning that it cannot be consciously controlled. Therefore, it is impossible to improve memory through perceptual cues. Besides, exploring how to utilize the mechanism of different cues to improve retrieval, is somehow trying to consolidate working memory into long-term memory. Then, learning from cases in class, I tried to get inspired from the first-hand resource such as the interview notes, where one of the participant pointed out the possible effect of the cue amount on memory. Based on this, I redesigned the hypotheses and approaches, especially when statistics were ambiguous. In the end, results make sense to prove the following hypotheses.

Admittedly, conclusions may not have universality due to limitations such as small sample size and the deficiency of design. While, I still think these experiments are useful references and can answer the research question well.

Insights

Additionally, I gain another insights into the fieldwork. Firstly, cues should be set up by oneself, or people cannot use them to recall memory fluently, as all experiments are tested based on participants’ own creation of cues on memory, which needs more research. Also, random things can be turned into useful cues as long as people make an association with memory.

While, forgetting is inevitable despite cues, according to “The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve” and the aging trend. Comparing a pair of results in the two-round test of emotional cues, the participant in even the same state cannot remember all the items exactly as the first time. Therefore, people have to activate the cues often to strengthen the association with memory.

In the end, I sincerely hope my study on types and the application of retrieval cues can help you understand and improve retrieval, and look forward to more solid research on retaining memory.

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Reference:

Alley Dog. (n.d.). In Alleydog.com’s online glossary. Retrieved from: https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition-cit.php?term=Retrieval+Cue

Cohen, G., & Conway, M. A. (2007). Memory in the Real World. London, England: Psychology Press.

The Human Memory. (2018). Memory Processes. Retrieved from http://www.human-memory.net/processes_recall.html

In this blog, I will continue to discuss “Memory and Retrieval cues,” which embodies in daily life very often. In blog 2, I concluded three main types of retrieval cues: context-based, perception-based, and state-based. Based on this, I will further explore how to exert these cues to improve memory retrieval and help human remembering in daily life. In blog 3, there will be three experiments together with interviews with participants to test my hypothesis of application.

To test it, I invited two of my classmates to recite a part of Chinese prose done by Qu Yuan. One of them was provided with both scripts and the auditory material matching each sentence. While, the other just had the text. After 30 minutes, they were asked to write from memory.

Surprisingly, the student with song did much better on retrieval. According to his interview, he said he could remember better due to melody and emotion associated with texts which helped him to better understand and recall them later.

Three students with similar memory capability were asked to do a test demanding them to remember 15 new Korean words. Lily revised for it in the same classroom; Eva in a quiet study room of the main library; Emily in the Starbucks. [take example by Godden& Baddeley (1975)] They all started to recite the words on Sunday, and the test was on Monday morning in class. The test scores show that they had similar accuracy, which could not prove the hypothesis to some extent. During the interview, I asked about their feeling while retrieving the memory of new words, where their answers gave me insights.

Then, I changed the test spot twice and saw the difference. Therefore, encoding in the same room or a room with the similar surrounding to the retrieval place can improve memory retrieval through context-based cues unconsciously.

In the test, three people are asked to remember a shopping list in a happy (A), ordinary (B) and sad mood (C) by listening to different music or without music. Then, after calming down, they are asked to write items down.

The first-round result is B (15)>C (12)>A(10). Then, AC were provided with comedy and tragedy respectively to stimulate positive and negative emotion again, which turned out that they performed better than before and than B. Therefore, if there is a task related to remembering, people can make it state—dependent and try to return the same state to obtain better retrieval.

Till now, I did not talk about the application of perception-based cues. This is because it is hard for people to consciously control perceptual cues for retrieval improvement, which was mentioned in the lecture.

To conclude, through activating more cues to one memory, it will be much easier for people to complete the retrieval process; staying in the same or similar environment can facilitate the memory retrieval; last but not least, doing the recitation task in the same state can generate better results of remembering. Besides, the influence of order on retrieval needs more research.

word count:499

Reference:

Godden, D. R., & Baddeley, A. D. (1975). Context-dependent memory in two natural environments: On land and underwater. British Journal of Psychology, 66(3), 325–331.

Romm, C. (2016, May 23). How to Turn Any Random Object Into a Memory Cue. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/05/how-to-turn-any-random-object-into-a-memory-cue.html

Fig. 6 https://mrskla.wordpress.com/category/bulletin-board/page/2/

Fig.7 https://stock.adobe.com/bg/images/smileys-emoticons-icon-positive-neutral-and-negative-different-mood-vector-illustration/181911115

Fig.12 https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/319056.php

In the first blog, I shared two examples of memory retrieval. Inspired by them, I hypothesize that there are different kinds of retrieval cues in various situations. Therefore, in this blog, I will further explore the categories of memory cues and the mechanism through the experiment with five people and an interview with one of them.

Records from 5 undergraduates are carefully summarized and analysed into the following image full of keywords. Despite the small sample size, there are still insights into the types of retrieval cues generated from the description.

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Memories are held in the storage of the human brain by a web of associations which are generated while making new memory and then act as prompts to trigger memory retrieval (Retrieval cue, n.d.). That is to say, everything can be cues as long as it is included in encoding.

Firstly, exposed to the external environment, people tend to capture information around and arouse memory of the episode including such information. Reviewing the first blog, if one suddenly forgets something on half way, he will retrace his steps to retrieve the memory, which is a way of returning to the right context and sense cues to realize retrieval. Similarly, when Li went to Chi Wah, he remembered playing video games there before. According to the records, various scenes such as a specific place, the weather, and special activities, are all powerful external cues to trigger matching memories markedly. Therefore, cues depending on external environments or conditions, are categorized into “context-based cues.”

Secondly, perception-based cues are concluded in response to the keywords such as “image,” “smell”, and “music”, thus being further categorized into visual cues, olfactory cues and aural cues. The picture of fried chicken reminded Jing of eating chicken in Jeju island; While Cui received the smell signal of leeks in the classroom, he thought of the dumplings made by mum; Immersed in the same music played during the class breaks in high school, Eva remembered the happy time of asking teachers about textbook questions. The perception of human stored in mind can lead people to the past memory.

Lastly, another main type of keywords include emotions, mood and other psychological situations. Eva was nervous when she checked ECON answers, and thought of similar experience in high school with such feeling. Besides, her unpleasant experience of waiting for others illustrates that negative emotion”anxiety” can recall unhappy memories of waiting. Thus, a given state can recall memories that are consistent with this internal condition. These cues are called “state-based cues” having impacts on memory retrieval. However, due to the limitation of the experiment, this point needs more research.

At the end of this blog, I would like to share a new finding from the interview with Eva that she found no matter schoolmates, music or school publicity on Wechat can induce her memory of high school stories. So is there any relationship between memory retrieval and the number of cues? This question will be discussed in the next blog.

Word count: 498

References:

Retrieval Cue. (n.d.). In Alleydog.com’s online glossary. Retrieved from: https://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition-cit.php?term=Retrieval+Cue

Retrieval Cues | Introductory Psychology Blog (S14)_C. (2014, March 6). Retrieved from https://sites.psu.edu/intropsychsp14n3/2014/03/06/retrieval-cues/

9.2 How We Remember: Cues to Improving Memory – Introduction to Psychology – 1st Canadian Edition. (2014, October 17). Retrieved from https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/8-2-how-we-remember-cues-to-improving-memory/