Before Reading week Flashcards
what is an experiment
An experiment is a controlled situation in which a researcher manipulates variables of interest, measuring the effect of this manipulation while controlling for irrelevant variables
Why is memory studied
There are 3 main meanings to memory: WHERE info is stored, WHAT info is kept, & HOW info is acquired/stored/retrieved.
what are the primary components of an experiment?
The three primary components of an experiment include the independent and dependent variables, and control variables.
why is experimentation the preferred way of studying memory?
you can control all aspects and focus on desired variable which can be manipulated to cause an effect
what are other ways to study memory?
Case studies, correlation studies, quasi-experiments,
Advantages/disadvantages to case studies?
advantage: topics difficult for studying with large groups
disadvantage: provide minimal use in larger population, results can be influenced by researcher
advantages/disadvantages to correlational studies?
Advantage: assessing a dependent measure that exists without manipulation (looking at age as a dependent measure to memory
advantage/disadvantage to quasi-experiment
Advantage: looking at preexisting conditions tested in a controlled experiment (old vs young memory test)
How are theories and hypothesis different?
Theories are a principal explanation for how a process operates, can derive a hypothesis from a theory.
Hypotheses are educated guesses about how variations of an IV are related to an outcome of a DV
Ways to learn information so it will be better remembered later? Is this true for all types of info?
The more a piece of info is elaborated the more it becomes encoded into memory, so deeply thinking about information will be better remembered than if you rehearse it
flashbulb memory (hint 9/11)
Memory for circumstances which one learned of the event (situation), and often an emotional event shared with other people.
event memory
a memory for a fact about the flashbulb event (sitting in class and hearing about a plane hitting the WTC)
memory research aims to answer 2 questions:
- what is memory
- how does memory work
what kinds of information are easier/harder to remember?
Deeper encoded memory better remembered
poorly coded memory poorly remembered
difference between recall and recognition tests of memory?
Recall attempts to retrieve information from memory
Recognition is a process which the contents of the environment are compared with the contents of memory (primed by something to help recall)
types of recall
Cued recall
Free recall
Forced recall
Serial recall
Types of recognition
Yes/No recognition
Forced choice recognition
how can you correct for guessing on memory tests?
Discrimination
Signal Detection Theory
how to use Discrimination
subtract false alarms from the number of hits to account for guessing
Nature of the forgetting curve?
The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve suggests that we forget things rapidly but that we level out at a baseline.
When we go to re-learn something we start from that baseline and not ground zero.
Jost’s Law
suggests that older memories decay slower than newer ones
Chronometry
Mental chronometry is how fast your mind does something.
This is measured by recording response times like responding to a prompt on a screen as they give context whether chronometry of a given task is fast or slow
Cluster analyses for studying memroy
used to organize how info is organized in memory, to suggest how we can prime the recall of a memory
QALMRI
Question - scientific question
Alternative - Alt hypo
Logic - logic of experiment design
Methods - method for testing hypothesis
Results - results
Inference - what can we infer from results
Modal model of memory
3 components: iconic memory, short term memory long term memory
Has been disproven somewhat
sensory memory
Sensory memories are large in capacity, brief in duration, and modality-specific
What is stimulus persistence, provide an example
When a visual, auditory, or tactical stimulation is present then is removed, but still appears to be present (when your parent TELLS you to help with the dishes and you weren’t paying attention, you can pull info from sensory memory if your parent asks you if you heard them)
What is information persistence (blink and you see it)
Information persistence is info that can be extracted from a stimulus for a short time after tit has been taken away
What is iconic stimuli
The persistence is visual
What is echoic stimuli
The persistence is auditory
How many dots can one remember from a visual stimulus
One can remember 4-5 dots immediately.
What did Sperling (1960) do to study iconic memory? What did he find?
Presented matrix of letters for 50ms to Ss, then they report as many letters as possible, results showed that subjects could only recall half of the letters.
Why did Sperling use a tone to prime Ss with partial recall? What did this suggest?
Sperling used 3 different tones with three different sections of the test. When the corresponding tone is paired with the word list Ss were able to recall was almost perfect. This suggests that the capacity of iconic memory is much larger than we thought, longer the cue the less remembered.
Does echoic memory have a longer duration than iconic?
Yes. Changes more constantly than iconic, can recall 4 seconds back, longer than iconic memory
What is the modality effect?
higher level of recall of the last few items of a list when presentation is auditory as opposed to visual. It is usually attributed to echoic memory.
Which digits in list of #’s are remembered most often? Why?
First and last are remembered most because we rehearse the first few items in a list which go into STM, and the last few are pulled from the PAS.
What did Sperling’s letter test reveal?
Iconic memory held a small amount of information, approx 4-5, and decayed quickly
What is PAS (precategorical acoustic store)? What happens after this?
When items are represented acoustically, this unidentified acoustic information are stored very briefly in the PAS, then is either transferred to short-term memory or decays and lost.
What is the importance of PAS with the Modality effect?
If the PAS did not exist, there is no Modality effect because the last few items would not be stored and not able to be recalled.
What did a chess experiment comparing novice players to grandmasters find? What does this mean?
They found when chess pieces were laid out in common offensive/defensive positions the masters were able to remember a significant amount more than the novice players. But when pieces were randomly placed on the board there was no difference between how many were remembered. This shows the chess masters STM is not superior to novices as they were chunking information that were associated to chess plays, which is why they could not remember more pieces when pieces were randomly placed on the board.
What is the duration of STM? Is this due to decay or interface?
Duration is approx 30seconds and is due to interference.
What is interference? What is its relation to STM?
Interference is when information in stm interferes with or in some way blocks/displaces/hinders the retrieval of other information. Since stm has limited capacity, if new info is entered in here it will compete with the information already there.
Explain Brown-Peterson 1959 study on interference of memory
Brown and Peterson studied Ss ability to recall a letter trigram when asked to count backwards in a cognitively loading way. IV was how long they counted backward for, DV they proportion of the trigram correct. Results showed the longer they counted backward for the worse Ss did on trigram recall.
What is the Brown-Peterson paradigm? Why does accuracy decrease in their study?
Brown & Peterson found that Interference (no rehearsal) after 18 seconds Ss could only recall 10% of the letters. Accuracy decreases because without rehearsal information decays from STM
What did Keppel & Underwood (1962) suggest about decay vs interference?
They suggested that information doesn’t seem to decay over time, but from similar coding occurring causes interference as well as time.
Explain Sternberg’s 1966 study
In 1966 Sterberg presented short lists of digits to participants, afterwards Ss were asked asnwer whether number presented to them afterwards was old or new digit as quickly as possible. He found that regardless of if the number was new (respose no) or old (response yes) the time it took to respond was the same. Suggesting serial exhaustive search.
What are the three theories on how info is retrieved from stm by Sternberg?
Parallel, serial self-terminating, and serial exhaustive.