AP psychology chapter 7 Flashcards
Three-box/Information Processing Model
External events goes to sensory memory - short term memory - long term memory.
Sensory memory
Holds incoming sensory info for less than a second. Sensory memory is a mental representation of the sensations of an evnvironment
George Sperling
Demonstrated sensory memory by flashing a grid of 9 letters for 1/20 of a second, participants were asked to recall a row right after. Most remembered it perfectly.
Iconic memory
A kind of short term memory, sensory info can be held as a split-second perfect photo.
Echoic memory
Equivalent of iconic memory for sound but lasts 3-4 seconds.77
Short term memory (working memory)
Stores the fraction of sensory memory that is encoded, which is determined by selective attention. Memories can be encoded as visual codes, acoustic codes, and semantic codes, max capacity is approx 7 items.
Selective attention
The ability for an individual to focus on a specific stimulus and ignoring other distractions/irrelevant info.
Visual codes
Memory in the form of an image.
Acoustic codes
Memory as a series of sounds.
Semantic codes
Representations for meaningful facts or world knowledge.
George Miller
Discovered the 7 item capacity of short term memory, performed the experiment called “The Magical Number 7, Plus of Minus 2.”
Chunking
A kin of mnemonic device: grouping together different bits of information into more manageable or meaningful chunks.
Mnemonic devices
Memory devices that help learners recall larger pieces of information
Long term memory
Permanent and has unlimited capacity, but long-term memories can still decay/fate. 3 formats: episodic memory, semantic memory, and procedural memory.
Episodic memory
Memories of sequential series of events, e.g remembering the last date one had.
Semantic memory
General knowledge of the world, stored as facts, meanings, categories, etc., e.g the meaning of the word cold.
Procedural memory
Memories of deeply ingrained skills and how to perform them, are sequential but complicated, e.g how to throw a curveball.
Explicit memories (declarative memories)
Memories that were actively attempted to be memorized.
Implicit memories (non-declarative memories)
Unintentional memories that the individual may not realize they made/have.
Eidetic memory
Photographic memory, studied by Alexander Luria.
Levels of processing model
Suggests that what we remember is determined by if it was deeply (elaboratively) processed or shallowly (maintenance) processed, aka we remember things we spend more cognitive time processing, e.g we remember questions more than statements.
Retrieval
2 types: recognition and recall.
Recognition
Matching a familiar event/fact with one that’s already in the memory.
Recall
Remembering with an external cue.
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Discovered that the order of the items in a list is related to whether or not it can be related.
Primacy effect
States that it is easier to recall items are the beginning of a list.
Recency effect
States that it is easier to recall items at the end of the list.
