4.1.2 - Encoding, Capacity, Durtaion

Question 1

Define encoding

Answer 1

How information is taken in and recorded

Question 2

Define capacity

Answer 2

how much information can be held

Question 3

Define duration

Answer 3

now long information can be held.

Question 4

Encoding in the stm

Answer 4

takes information from the sense organs and hold them in
the same form:
- echoic memory: auditory input from the ears- things we near
- Iconic memory visual from the eyes- What we see

Question 5

Sensory memory duration

Answer 5

· information is stored in an unprocessed form
· transferred to short term memory through attention

crowder (1993)
·sensory register retains iconic for a few milliseconds
echoic store lasts 2-3 seconds

Sperling (1960) - presented a grid of letters for less than a second.
·used tones to are participants to recall a specific row.
·recall on the specified row was high
demonstrates that we have a large capacity in sensory
memory.

Question 6

Sensory memory capacity

Answer 6

Very large

Question 7

Stm encoding

Answer 7

conrad (1969):
visually presented students with letters, one at a time
- sound that letters that are acoustically similar are
harder to recall from short term memory than those are
acoustically dissimilar,
~ this suggests that stm mainly encodes things acoustically
even though the items were presented visually.

Question 8

Stm capacity

Answer 8

Miller (1956)
· the stm can hold “the magic number 7 plus or
Minus two “
↳ on average the capacity of sti is between 5 and 9
Items of information.
the capacity of the sth can be extended by
organising the information into separate chunks.
chunking also involves making the information more
meaningful, through organising it in line with existing knowlege
from the LTM.

Question 9

Stm duration

Answer 9

· very short time as the stm is temporary.
· It is only a few seconds before it decays
unless we rehearse it.
Peterson & peterson (1959)
· got students to recall combinations of 3 letter (trigrams).
after longer and longer intervalls.
· during the intervalls, students were prevented from rehearsing
by a counting task
-> 18-30 secs max.

Question 10

Ltm encoding

Answer 10

Baddeley (1966)
·presented as lists of 10 short words at one time
· some lists were semantically similar, others were not.
- participants were tested immediatly, then again after a 20 minutes delay.
· It was found that after 20 minutes, they did poorly on the semantically similar words.
· Implys that we encode ltm according to what they mean, so things with similar meanings confused.
- encoding in line is meaning based

Question 11

Ltm capacity

Answer 11

Potentially unlimited:
↳ there is no way to test what is stored in the lim

Question 12

Ltm duration

Answer 12

anything from minutes up to a lifetime.
Although the exact duration cannot be tested,

Bahrick et al. (1975) tested US graduates:
- were shown classmates photos a year later
- 90% accuracy for remembering faces and names 34
years after graduation
- began to decline 48 years, particularly for faces.