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CogPsych 5

Chapter 5: Short-term and Working Memory

QuestionAnswer
What is memory? Memory is the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information after the original information is no longer present. Memory is active any time some past experience has an effect on the way you think or behave now or in the future.
What are the 5 types of memory? Sensory memory, short-term memory or working memory, long-term memory, procedural memory, and semantic memory.
What is the modal model of memory, as proposed by Atkinson & Shriffin (1968)? It proposed 3 types of memories in order: 1. Sensory memory holds all incoming information for seconds. 2. STM holds five to seven items for about 15 to 20 seconds. (rehearsal takes place here) 3. LTM can hold a large amount of information for years.
What are control processes? Dynamic processes associated with the structural features that can be controlled by the person and may differ from one task to another e.g. rehearsal
When she first looks at the screen, all of the information that enters her eyes is registered in sensory memory. control process of selective attention to focus on the number, so the number enters her short-term memory, rehearsal to keep it there. She is going to memorize the number. The process of storing the number in long-term memory is called encoding . A few days later, she wants pizza. process of remembering information that is stored in long-term memory is called retrieval .
What is sensory memory? Retention, for brief periods of time, of the effects of sensory stimulation.
What is persistence of vision? Continued perception of a visual stimulus even after it is no longer present; ppl viewing a film don't see the dark intervals between the images because the persistence of vision fills in the darkness by retaining the image of the previous frame.
Describe Sperling's (1960) FIRST experiment which he conducted as to find out how much information people can take in from briefly presented stimuli. He flashed an array of letters , on the screen for 50 millisecond and asked his subjects to report as many of the letters as possible. This used the whole report method; that is, subjects were asked to report as many letters as they can.
Describe Sperling's (1960) SECOND experiment which he conducted as to find out how much information people can take in from briefly presented stimuli. Sperling thought it better to report the letters in a single 4-letter row. He devised the partial report method to test this idea. Subjects saw the 12-letter display for 50 ms, then they heard a tone that told them which row of the matrix to report.
Describe Sperling's (1960) THIRD experiment which he conducted as to determine the time course of this fading Sperling devised a delayed partial report method in which the letters were flashed on and off and then the cue tone was presented after a short delay.
What did Sperling (1960) conclude from all of his experiments on the nature of STM? Sperling concluded from these results that a short-lived sensory memory registers all or most of the information that hits our visual receptors, but that this information decays within less than a second.
What is short-term memory? The system involved in storing small amounts of information for a brief period of time
What is recall? Subjects are presented with stimuli and then, after a delay, are asked to report back as many of the stimuli as possible.
What is the duration of STM? Short-term memory, as conceived by cognitive psychologists, lasts 15 to 20 seconds or less.
Describe the experiments conducted by John Brown (1958) in England and Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson (1959) in the United States, who used the method of recall to determine the duration of STM. I will say letters and then a number. Your task will be to remember the letters. Then, begin counting backwards by 3s from that number, until I say “Recall.” Stop counting immediately and say the three letters you heard just before the number.
Describe what Peterson and Peterson found when they did a similar experiment to the method of recall for testing of STM, but they varied the time between when they said the number and when the subject began recalling the letters They found that their subjects remembered about 80 percent of the three-letter groups if they began their recall after counting for just 3 seconds but remembered only about 12 percent of the three-letter groups after counting for 18 seconds
Describe the differences between Peterson & Peterson's (1959) and Keppel & Underwood's (1962) interpretation of the former's results from their recall experiment. They interpreted results as demonstrating that subjects forgot the letters because their memory had decayed during the interval. Underwood suggested that the drop-off in memory was due instead to proactive interference; trial 1 memory remained high.
What is proactive interference? Interference that occurs when information that was learned previously interferes with learning new information.
What is retroactive interference? Occurs when new learning interferes with remembering old learning
How did Keppell & Underwood (1962) intepret Peterson & Peterson's (1959) results for their recall experiment? Keppel and Underwood proposed that, in line with proactive interference, recalling the letters on the first few trials created interference; made it more difficult to remember the letters presented on the later trials. Rapid forgetting was due to this.
How does interference interact with STM? The outcome of this constant interference is that the effective duration of STM, when rehearsal is prevented, is about 15 to 20 seconds or less
HOW MANY ITEMS CAN BE HELD IN SHORTTERM MEMORY? Estimates for how many items can be held in STM range from four to nine. Measured through digit span, change detection and chunking tasks.
What is digit span? The number of digits a person can remember.
Describe the digit span task. Using an index card or piece of paper, cover all of the numbers below. For each string of numbers, Read once, cover it up, and then write the numbers down in the correct order. Longest string you are able to reproduce without error is your digit span.
Describe the change detection task. Two pictures of a scene are flashed one after the other; the subjects’ task was to determine what had changed between the first and second pictures. Also, a display is flashed for 100 ms, followed by 900 ms of darkness and then a new one.
What did Luck & Vogel (1997) find from their change detection experiments? Performance was almost perfect when there were one to three squares in the arrays, but that performance began decreasing when there were four or more squares. Thus, subjects were able to retain about four items in their short-term memory.
What is chunking? Small units (like words) can be combined into larger meaningful units, like phrases, or even larger units, like sentences, paragraphs, or stories.
What is a chunk? A collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another but are weakly associated with elements in other chunks.
How did the subject S.F. of Anders' et al. (2001) study demonstrate chunking? After extensive training (230 one-hour sessions), he was able to repeat sequences of up to 79 digits without error. S.F. used chunking to recode the digits into larger units that formed meaningful sequences.
Aside from items, what else has the capacity of STM been defined by? It should be described in terms of “amount of information.” When referring to visual objects, information has been defined as visual features or details of the object that are stored in memory.
How did Alvarez & Cavanagh (2004) test the amount of information rather than items that STM can hold? They used more complex objects. For example, shaded cubes.. The subject’s task was to indicate whether the two displays were the same or different.
What did Alvarez & Cavanagh (2004) conclude from their research on the amount of information STM can hold? The greater the amount of information in an image, the fewer items that can be held in visual short-term memory.
Why was STM reworked into working memory? The role of STM extends beyond storage. It is also involved in the transfer of information to and from LTM.
What is working memory, as defined by Baddeley & Hitch (1974)? A limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning.
What is the difference between short-term memory and working memory? Working memory is concerned with the manipulation of information that occurs during complex cognition (for example, remembering numbers while reading a paragraph), instead of simply storage.s
What are the 4 main components of Baddeley's working memory model? The central executive, the phonological loop, the episodic buffer, and the visuo-spatial sketchpad.
What is the role of the phonological loop? It holds verbal and auditory information.
What are the subcomponents of the phonological loop? What are their purposes? The passive phonological loop, which has a limited capacity and holds information for only a few seconds; and the active articulatory rehearsal process , which is responsible for rehearsal that can keep items in the phonological store from decaying
What is the role of the visuospatial sketchpad? It holds visual and spatial information.
What are the subcomponents of the visuospatial sketchpad? What are their purposes? The passive visual cache, which stores information about form and color. The active inner scribe, which deals with spatial and movement information. It also rehearses information in the visual cache and transfers information to the central executive.
What is the role of the central executive? It is reponsible for: - Switching between tasks and/or information - Coordinating the other sub-systems (slaves) - Selection and integration of information - Logical reasoning
What is the role of the episodic buffer? It: - Links WM to LTM - Creation and storage of multimodal codes - holding an integrated episode between systems using different codes - Storage of temporary information and thereby increasing storage capacity - A passive store
What are the three phenomena associated with the phonological loop? the phonological similarity effect, the word length effect, and articulatory suppression.
What is the phonological similarity effect? The confusion of letters or words that sound similar.
How did Conrad (1964) demonstrate the phonological similarity effect? He flashed a series of target letters on a screen and instructed his subjects to write down the letters in the order they were presented. Errors were most likely to misidentify the target letter as another letter that sounded like the target.
What is the word length effect? Memory for lists of words is better for short words than for long words.
How did Baddeley et al. (1984) demonstrate the word length effect? Subjects were tasked to read the two lists of words, one at a time. They then looked away and wrote down the words they remembered. They found that subjects remembered 77 percent of the short words but only 60 percent of the long words.
Why does the word length effect occur? It takes longer to rehearse the long words and to produce them during recall.
According to Baddeley, what is the relation of the word length effect to the digit span? The number of words you can say in 2 seconds after the word list task should be close to your digit span.
What is the articulatory suppression effect? A person is prevented from rehearsing items to be remembered by repeating an irrelevant sound.
How did Shepard & Metzler (1971) demonstrate the operation of the visuospatial sketchpad in visual memory? Reaction times were longer for greater differences in orientation; subjects were solving the problem by rotating an image of one of the objects in their mind. Since it involves visual rotation through space, this is the visuospatial sketchpad in work.
How did Brooks (1964) disrupt the visuospatial sketchpad? Why did it happen? He asked the subjects to point at directions "Out" or "In" while traversing a mental image of an F. The reason is that holding the image of the letter and pointing are both visuospatial tasks, so the visuospatial sketch pad becomes overloaded.
What is perseveration, a typical behaviour in frontal lobe damage patients? Repeatedly performing the same action or thought even if it is not achieving the desired goal.
What does an event-related potential in memory experiments indicate? How much space was used in working memory as they carried out the task.
What were the results of Vogel et al. (2005) when they tested central executive and the change detection? Adding blue bars to the change detection task caused an increase in the response of the high-capacity group, but caused a much larger increase in the response of the low-capacity group. The former, thus, were more efficient at ignoring distractors.
What other models of working memory are there? Nelson Cowan: attention *is* working memory Klaus Oberaruer: working memory consists of three embedded components that are related to focus attention
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