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using lists of meaningless syllables. He practiced lists by repeating the syllables and keeping records of his attempts at mastering them. He drew a learning curve. Keeping careful records, he then tested to see how long it took to forget a list. He drew a forgetting curve that declined rapidly before slowing. He found that recognition was sometimes easier than recall to measure forgetting. A method he used to measure retention of information was the savings method, the amount of repetitions required to relearn the list compared to the amount of repetitions it took to learn the list originally. Ebbinghaus also found that if he continued to practice a list after memorizing it well, the information was more resistant to forgetting. He called this the overlearning effect. When we try to retrieve a long list of words, we usually recall the last words and the first words best, forgetting the words in the middle. This is called the serial position effect. The primacy effect refers to better recall of the first items, thought to result from greater rehearsal; the recency effect refers to better recall of the last items. Immediately after learning, the last items may still be in working memory, accounting for the recency effect. We may remember words from the beginning of the list days later because rehearsal moved the words into our LTM.

What helps us remember? Retrieval cues, reminders associated with information we are trying to get out of memory, aid us in remembering. Retrieval cues can be other words or phrases in a specific hierarchy or semantic network, context, and mood or emotions. Priming is activating specific associations in memory either consciously or unconsciously. Retrieval cues prime our memories.

Cramming for a test does not help us remember as well as studying for the same total amount of time in shorter sessions on different occasions. Numerous studies have shown that distributed practice, spreading out the memorization of information or the learning of skills over several sessions, facilitates remembering better than massed practice, cramming the memorization of information or the learning of skills into one session.

If we use mnemonic devices or memory tricks when encoding information, these devices will help us retrieve concepts, for example acronyms such as ROY G. BIV (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) or sayings such as, “My very educated mother just served us “noodles” (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune). Another mnemonic, the method of loci, uses association of words on a list with visualization of places on a familiar path. For example, to remember ten items on a grocery list (chicken, corn, bread, etc.), we associate each with a place in our house (a chicken pecking at the front door, corn making a yellow mess smashed into the foyer, etc.). At the grocery store, we mentally take a tour of our house and retrieve each of the items. Another mnemonic to help us remember lists, the peg word mnemonic, requires us to first memorize a scheme such as “One is a bun, two is a shoe,” and so on, then mentally picture using the chicken in the bun, the corn in the shoe, etc. These images help both to encode items into LTM and later to retrieve it back into our working memory.

Successful retrieval often depends on the match between the way information is encoded in our brains and the way it is retrieved. The context that we are in when we experience an event, the mood we are in, and our internal state all affect our memory of an event. Our recall is often better when we try to recall information in the same physical setting in which we encoded it, possibly because along with the information, the environment is part of the memory trace; a process called context-dependent memory. Taking a test in the same room where we learned information can result in greater recall and higher grades. Mood congruence aids retrieval. We recall experiences better that are consistent with our mood at retrieval; we remember information of other happy times when we are happy, and information of other