Chapter 3 Flashcards
What phenomena did John Jacobs come up with?
- Digit span: Max # of sequentially presented digits that can be recalled in order without error.
- Used in the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)
- Does not correlate highly with intelligence but reflects STM
Memory span is limited to —– digits on average.
6-7 digits on average, 10+ is above average, 4-5 is below average.
Memory span measures require which two things?
1) Remembering the items 2) Remembering their order of presentation
What phenomena did George Miller come up with?
- Chunking: the process of combining a number of items into a single chunk that is consistent with long-term language habits (LTM influences STM) e.g FRACTOLISTIC easier to remember.
- Chunking can also be based on prosody (natural rhythms that occur in speech & make meaning clearer through separation)
What did R. Conrad find in his experiment with visually presented consonant strings?
- Despite their visual nature, errors happened when items had a similar sound (P misremembered as V more often than the visually similar letter R)
- STM relies on an acoustic code that fades rapidly
- Similar sounding letters have fewer distinguishing features making them more susceptible to confusion during retrieval (Phonological similarity effect)
What is the phonological loop?
- Coined by Baddley & Hitch
- Responsible for the temporary storage of speech information
- Has two subcomponents (ST store where items are registered as memory traces that fade in secs) & articulatory rehearsal process (Where info in ST store can be rehearsed subvocally to get refreshed)
- As # of items increase, total rehearsal time required increases, chances of fading before refreshing increases
When does phonological similarity come into play? When does it lose its effect?
-Phonological similarity disappears with long lists containing several learning trials because the meaning becomes much more important than how they sound
What is articulatory suppression?
- It is a technique for disrupting subvocal rehearsal during the articulatory rehearsal process to refresh memory traces in ST store, by requiring subjects to continuously repeat a spoken item e.g “the”
- People can still remember up to 4-5 items despite this because auditory speech feeds directly into the phonological store.
- Phonological similarity effect or word length effect do not play a role when articulatory suppression happens; so subject remember similar & dissimilar items at a lower but equivalent rate
What is the word length effect?
- The tendency for verbal memory span to decrease when longer words are used.
- People remember 5 dissimilar one-syllable words relatively easy & can remember as many words as they can say in 2 seconds
- longer words take longer to rehearse & recall, are more complex which leads to more inference
What is the irrelevant sound effects?
- The tendency for verbal STM to be disrupted by fluctuating sounds, including speech & music.
- Vocal music is more disrupting than instrumental
- Unpatterned noise does not affect digit recall, but it disrupts perception
- The degree of intensity of irrelevant sound does not influence verbal STM
- The phonological similarity between irrelevant sound and items to be remembered does not play a role in degree of disruption
What is the Changing State hypothesis?
- Coined by Jones & Macken.
- Even pure tones disrupt performance if they fluctuate in pitch
- Retention of serial order of verbal & visual stimuli can be disrupted by irrelevant stimuli if they fluctuate over time
What are the 2 major shortcomings of the phonological loop model? What conclusions can be made?
1) No adequate explanation for how serial order is stored (e.g digit-span task)
2) No clear specification of processes involved in retrieval from phonological store
Conclusions: Need a more detailed, mathematically simulated model. The similarity effect between irrelevant sound & items to be remembered does not affect STM because they influence different parts of the system.
Describe Dylan Jones’ Object-Oriented Episodic Record (O-OER):
- Sequences of items are represented as points on a multimodal surface
- Recall involves retrieving the path of the points representing the sequence (like reading points on a graph)
- Irrelevant sounds disrupt subsequent recall by creating competing trajectories
- Both auditory & visual serial recall involve the same system
Limitation: Not well supported by other studies
Describe Narine’s Feature Model
- Memory items are represented by a set of features in a single memory system. They are either modality dependent or modality independent.
- The font of a word is a visually dependent feature, but its meaning is visually independent so even if it is said rather than read, the visually independent feature (meaning) stays the same but the dependent one (font) turns into acoustic rather than visual.
- Irrelevant sound & articulatory suppression add noise to memory trace of items & are attention-demanding
Limitation: Little justification for specific assumptions e.g saying that irrelevant sound only disrupts recall when occurring at the same time as memory encoding
Describe Brown et al.’s SIMPLE model
- (Scale Invariant Memory, Perception, Learning) model applies to both STM & LTM
- More distinctive items are more readily retrievable
Limitation: Free recall is well handled but can’t explain serial recall well & Does not cover working memory
