Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
Allows to perform specific learned tasks/ habitual responses (riding bike & tying
laces)
Long term, implicit, non-declarative memory
Why are these procedural memories implicit?
You don’t have to consciously remember the steps involved in these actions to
perform them
Try to explain to someone how to tie a shoelace
Priming
Activating 1/< existing memories by a stimulus
Activation not a conscious decision
Affects subsequent thoughts and actions
Two main types of priming:
Semantic
Perceptual
Semantic
Semantic priming: used to understand the organization of semantic memory
e.g., what words "prime" or "activate" one another
words that are "close together" in memory, should rapidly activate one another
(dog activates pet)
Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
1
What words/concepts "prime" or "activate" one another?
Similarity relations: car-truck, moose-caribou
Opposites: love-hate
Action/event-based relations: sweep-broom, comb-hair, chef-bake, cafeteriaeat
Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
2
Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
3
Perceptual Priming
Prior exposure: enhances ability to identify a test stimulus based on its physical
features
Priming is implicit: you don’t need to be able to consciously recall seeing the
priming stimulus for priming to occur
priming effects can be dissociated from explicit memory
Test 1
Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
4
Precede the anagram task with a lexical decision task
Then explicitly say: “Now we’re going to do an anagram task”
Reuse words from the previous slide in the anagrams
Performance improves even when participants don’t realize they’ve seen the
words before
Shows implicit priming (no conscious awareness needed)
Test 2
Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
5
Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
6
Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
7
Overall:
Retrieval from long-term memory can be explicit or implicit
Memory can affect your behaviour regardless of whether or not you are aware of
its effects
Lesson 8: Procedural Memory
8