Approaches to understanding of remembering

Abstract

Article 1 gives an account of how cognitive psychology and behavior analysis understand and explain memory or remembering. Within behavior analysis, the most common procedure for studying remembering is matching-to-sample procedures. Cognitive psychology employs such procedure also, but the Article 1 gives examples of other procedures used to either recall or recognize earlier presented stimuli as words and items. Both cognitive psychology and behavior analysis focus on for how long a past event can control correct responding, and how fast participants respond immediately after the presentation of stimuli, or after a delay. The procedures may not seem to be so different. However, the main difference is related to how the cognitive psychology and behavior analysis interpret the outcome of these behavioral events. Cognitive psychology explains remembering or memory in models and structures, e.g., short-term memory, long-term memory, different systems of working memory, and the transfer of information from one system to another. On the other hand, behavior analysis describes the functional relation between the environmental conditions and the observed behavior, and argues that remembering is something we do, and not any hypothetical constructs. Furthermore, there is a distinction between remembering and reminding, where there are some stimuli guiding correct responding, and just remember without any present stimuli to evoke responses. Article 2 presents an experiment using a titrating DMTS (TDMTS) procedure. Thirty participants are allocated to three different groups, 10 in each. For two groups, a baseline training is conducted prior the TDMTS condition and for one group, TDMTS condition only is investigated. The main results from this experiment show no differences in the accuracy of responding between the groups. However, the response patterns are more stable in the TDMTS procedure for those who had some training of conditional discrimination on beforehand. Finally, the reaction time data show a typical pattern of an increase in reaction time from training to test, and decrease during the test conditions