Answer to Question 1
Our cognitive contexts for memory clearly influence our memory processes of encoding, storing, and retrieving information. Studies of expertise also show how existing schemas (frameworks for representing knowledge) may provide a cognitive context for encoding, storing, and retrieving new information. By consciously developing a schema for remembering names, it would provide a cognitive context for names and make integration and organization relatively easy. Schemas fill in gaps when provided with partial or even distorted information and visualize concrete aspects of verbal information. They also can implement appropriate metacognitive strategies for organizing and rehearsing new information.
Answer to Question 2
Our memories tend to be good when we use distributed practice, learning in which various sessions are spaced over time. Our memories for information are not as good when the information is acquired through massed practice, learning in which sessions are crammed together in a very short space of time. The greater the distribution of learning trials over time, the more the participants remembered over long periods. To maximize the effect on long-term recall, the spacing should ideally be distributed over months, rather than days or weeks. Thus to maximize recall of studied material, it should be studied repeatedly over as long a period of time as possible.
In this cartoon, Boss Tweed welcomes cholera—a skeletal figure of death carrying a handbag from “Asi
Blood Collection Tubes: Order of Draw
Demonstrating the use of venipuncture equipment. Using a syringe to draw blood.
Retroactive and Proactive Interference
RNA interference (RNAi)
Interference Competition