Attention and perception part 2 Flashcards
What are the three memory stores in Atkinson & Shiffrin’s Three-Store Model of Memory?
Sensory Store, Short-Term Store (STM), and Long-Term Store (LTM)
What is the main characteristic of the Sensory Store in the Three-Store Model?
It holds a limited amount of information for very brief periods.
How is information transferred from the Sensory Store to Short-Term Memory (STM)?
Information passes from the Sensory Store to STM when we pay attention to it.
In the Three-Store Model, what allows information to move from Short-Term Memory (STM) to Long-Term Memory (LTM)?
Rehearsal of the information.
According to the Three-Store Model, how is information retrieved from Long-Term Memory (LTM)?
Information is retrieved from LTM to STM through retrieval strategies, such as recalling the context of the memory.
What experiment did Sperling (1960) conduct to study the Sensory Store?
Participants were shown an array of letters for 50 milliseconds and asked to recall as many items as possible.
What did participants report in Sperling’s experiment about their memory of the letter array?
They initially felt they could remember everything, but memory quickly faded as they tried to recall each item.
What was Sperling’s conclusion about sensory memory based on his initial findings?
Sensory memory holds all stimuli briefly, but memory rapidly decays, especially by the time participants attempt to recall the 5th or 6th item.
How did Sperling modify his experiment with the “partial-report procedure”?
He used a tone to cue participants to recall only one row of the letter array, improving recall accuracy.
What did the “partial-report procedure” suggest about sensory memory capacity?
Sensory memory has a larger capacity (around 7-9 items) but decays very quickly.
What role does attention play in the Three-Store Model of Memory?
Attention acts as a filter, selecting information from the Sensory Store to enter Short-Term Memory (STM). Only information we focus on moves to STM; the rest fades away.
What hypothesis did Sperling form based on his experiment with rapid memory decay?
Sperling hypothesized that sensory memory holds all stimuli briefly, but the memory of these stimuli rapidly decays, making it hard to recall beyond the first few items.
How did Sperling’s partial-report procedure work, and what was its purpose?
Participants were cued by a tone to recall only one row from an array of letters, which improved recall and tested the hypothesis that sensory memory holds more than initially reported.
How did participants’ recall change when the cue tone was delayed by around 0.3 seconds?
Recall dropped to around 2 items per row, indicating that sensory memory fades significantly after 0.15 seconds.
What conclusion did Sperling reach about the capacity of sensory memory based on his partial-report findings?
Sensory memory can initially hold around 8-9 items, but rapid decay limits the number of items we can retrieve after a brief delay.
