Chapter 5 - Short term and working memory

Question 1

MEMORY

Answer 1

the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present

is active any time some past experience has an effect on the way you think or behave now or in the future

Question 2

Sensory memory

Answer 2

First stage of memory (structural feature)

Takes in all sensory input

Short lasting - held for very brief amount of time

Question 3

Short-term or working memory

Answer 3

Information that stays in our memory for brief periods, about 10 to 15 seconds if we don’t repeat it over and over

although people often mistakenly use the term “short-term memory” to refer to memory for events that happened minutes, hours, or even days ago, it is actually much briefer

Question 4

Long-term memory

Answer 4

responsible for storing information for long periods of time—which can extend from minutes to a lifetime

Question 5

MODAL MODEL OF MEMORY - who and what?

Answer 5

Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin

flow diagram for memory which contains structural features and control process

input>sensory>short-term><long-term

output from short term

rehearsal in short term

Question 6

What are the 3 structural features in the modal model of memory?

Answer 6

Sensory memory is an initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second

Short-term memory (STM) holds five to seven items for about 15 to 20 seconds.

Long-term memory (LTM) can hold a large amount of information for years or even decades

Question 7

What is a control process?

Answer 7

Active (dynamic) processes that can be controlled by the person and that may differ from one task to another

Question 8

What is the control process included in the modal model of memory?

Answer 8

rehearsal

Question 9

Sensory memory

Answer 9

the retention, for brief periods of time, of the effects of sensory stimulation

Question 10

persistence of vision

Answer 10

This retention of the perception of light in your mind - The lighted trail is a creation of your mind, which retains a perception of the sparkler’s light for a fraction of a second

Question 11

how many projector frames are flashed per second in a regular film?

Answer 11

24 - sensory memory holds images between flashes

Question 12

George Sperling

Answer 12

famous experiment in which he flashed an array of letters on the screen for 50 milliseconds (50/1000 second) and asked his participants to report as many of the letters as possible
-whole report method
-partial report method
-delayed partial report method

Question 13

whole report method results in Sperling’s experiment

Answer 13

they were able to report an average of 4.5 out of the 12 letters (33%)

Question 14

fading

Answer 14

some of the participants in Sperling’s experiment reported that they had seen all the letters, but that their perception had faded rapidly as they were reporting the letters, so by the time they had reported 4 or 5 letters, they could no longer see or remember the other letters

Question 15

partial report method

Answer 15

Participants saw the 12-letter display for 50 ms, as before, but immediately after it was flashed, they heard a tone that told them which row of the matrix to report. A high-pitched tone indicated the top row; a medium-pitch indicated the middle row; and a low-pitch indicated the bottom row

Question 16

partial report method results in Sperling’s experiment

Answer 16

they correctly reported an average of about 3.3 of the 4 letters (82 percent) in that row

Question 17

delayed partial report method - purpose?

Answer 17

Sperling then did an additional experiment to determine the time course of this fading

Question 18

delayed partial report method - results

Answer 18

when the cue tones were delayed for 1 second after the flash, participants were able to report only slightly more than 1 letter in a row

Question 19

Conclusions of Sperling’s experiments (2)

Answer 19

a short-lived sensory memory registers all or most of the information that hits our visual receptors, but that this information decays within less than a second

This brief sensory memory for visual stimuli, called iconic memory or the visual icon (icon means “image”), corresponds to the sensory memory stage of Atkinson and Shiffrin’s modal model

Question 20

echoic memory

Answer 20

Other research using auditory stimuli has shown that sounds also persist in the mind. This persistence of sound lasts for a few seconds after presentation of the original stimulus (e.g., when you hear someone say something, but you don’t understand at first and say “What?” But even before the person can repeat what was said, you “hear” it in your mind)

Question 21

Recall experiments - what is it and what purposes (2)

Answer 21

Subjects are asked to report stimuli they have previously seen or heard

Used to answer the questions: What is the duration of STM? & What is the capacity of STM?

Question 22

how long does short term memory last without rehearsal?

Answer 22

lasts 15 to 20 seconds or less

Question 23

Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson

Answer 23

presented participants with three letters, such as FZL or BHM, followed by a number, such as 403. Participants were instructed to begin counting backwards by threes from that number (to keep participants from rehearsing the letters)

After intervals ranging from 3 to 18 seconds, participants were asked to recall the three letters

Question 24

Results of the Petersons’ experiment

Answer 24

Participants correctly recalled about 80 percent of the three letter groups when they had counted for only 3 seconds, but recalled only about 12 percent of the groups after counting for 18 seconds

Question 25

estimates for how many items can be held in STM (capacity)

Answer 25

four to nine

Question 26

digit span

Answer 26

The number of digits a person can remember. Digit span is used as a measure of the capacity of short-term memory

Question 27

George Miller

Answer 27

According to measurements of digit span, the average capacity of STM is about five to nine items—about the length of a phone number

“The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”

Question 28

Steven Luck and Edward Vogel

Answer 28

measured the capacity of STM by using a procedure called change detection

Question 29

change detection task - results

Answer 29

performance was almost perfect when there were one to three squares in the arrays, but that performance began decreasing when there were four or more squares. Luck and Vogel concluded from this result that participants were able to retain about four items in their short-term memory

Question 30

Chunking

Answer 30

Combining small units into larger ones, such as when individual words are combined into a meaningful sentence. Chunking can be used to increase the capacity of memory

Question 31

who introduced the concept of chunking?

Answer 31

George Miller introduced the concept to explain why it is possible to hold many more items in memory in some situations, as when words are arranged in a sentence

Question 32

Chunk

Answer 32

a collection of elements that are strongly associated with each other but weakly associated with elements in other chunks. (e.g., the word ringtail is strongly associated with the word monkey but is not as strongly associated with the other words, such as child or city)

Question 33

We can recall a sequence of 5 to 8 unrelated words, but arranging the words to form a meaningful sentence so that the words become more strongly associated with one another increases the memory span to ___ words or more

Answer 33

20

Question 34

George Alvarez and Patrick Cavanagh

Answer 34

did an experiment using Luck and Vogel’s change detection procedure

in addition to colored squares, they also used more complex objects (e.g., shaded cubes, which were the most complex stimuli)

Question 35

Results of Alvarez and Cavanagh’s change detection experiment

Answer 35

Memory capacity for the colored squares was 4.4, but capacity for the cubes was only 1.6. Based on this result, Alvarez and Cavanagh concluded that the greater the amount of information in an image, the fewer items that can be held in visual short-term memory

Question 36

What kind of container can we compare with STM?

Answer 36

a leaky bucket that can hold a certain amount of water for a limited amount of time

Question 37

Working memory - who and what

Answer 37

introduced in a paper by Baddeley and Hitch

Short-term memory is concerned mainly with storing information for a brief period of time (for example, remembering a phone number), whereas working memory is concerned with the manipulation of information that occurs during complex cognition

involves both holding information in memory and processing information

Question 38

three original components of Baddeley’s working memory model

Answer 38

the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketch pad, and the central executive

Question 39

phonological loop

Answer 39

The part of working memory that holds and processes verbal and auditory information

Question 40

two components of the phonological loop

Answer 40

phonological store

articulatory rehearsal process

Question 41

phonological store

Answer 41

has a limited capacity and holds information for only a few seconds

Question 42

articulatory rehearsal process

Answer 42

responsible for rehearsal that can keep items in the phonological store from decaying

Question 43

visuospatial sketch pad

Answer 43

The part of working memory that holds and processes visual and spatial information

Question 44

central executive

Answer 44

The part of working memory that coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketch pad. The “traffic cop” of the working memory system

pulls information from long-term memory and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad by focusing on specific parts of a task and deciding how to divide attention between different tasks

Question 45

three phenomena that support the idea of a system specialized for language

Answer 45

phonological similarity effect
word length effect
articulatory suppression

Question 46

phonological similarity effect

Answer 46

An effect that occurs when letters or words that sound similar are confused. For example, T and P are two similar-sounding letters that could be confused

Question 47

R. Conrad

Answer 47

flashed a series of target letters on a screen and instructed his participants to write down the letters in the order they were presented. He found that when participants made errors, they were most likely to misidentify the target letter as another letter that sounded like the target (phonological similarity effect)

even though the participants saw the letters, the mistakes they made were based on the letters’ sounds

Question 48

word length effect

Answer 48

The notion that it is more difficult to remember a list of long words than a list of short words

• it takes more time to pronounce and rehearse longer words and to produce them during recall

Question 49

Baddeley and coworkers (1975) found that people are able to remember the number of items that they can pronounce in about ____ seconds

Answer 49

1.5-2.0 seconds

Question 50

articulatory suppression

Answer 50

Interference with operation of the phonological loop that occurs when a person repeats an irrelevant word such as “the” while carrying out a task that requires the phonological loop

reduces memory because speaking interferes with rehearsal - overloads the phonological loop

Question 51

how does articulatory suppression affect the word length effect?

Answer 51

eliminates the word length effect - eliminating rehearsal by saying “the, the, the …” removes this advantage for short words, so both short and long words are lost from the phonological store

Question 52

visual imagery

Answer 52

A type of mental imagery involving vision, in which an image is experienced in the absence of a visual stimulus
-part of the visual sketch pad

Question 53

Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler

Answer 53

“Comparing Objects” demonstration involving mental rotation

-when one shape was rotated 40 degrees compared to the other shape, it took 2 seconds to decide that a pair was the same shape. However, for a greater difference caused by a rotation of 140 degrees, it took 4 seconds

Question 54

Sergio Della Sala

Answer 54

presented his participants with patterns ranging from small (a 2 × 2 matrix with 2 shaded squares) to large (a 5 × 6 matrix with 15 shaded squares), with half of the squares being shaded in each pattern. He found that participants were able to complete patterns consisting of an average of 9 shaded squares before making mistakes

individual squares can be combined into subpatterns—a form of chunking that could increase the number of squares remembered

Question 55

Lee Brooks

Answer 55

Holding a Spatial Stimulus in the Mind demonstration: involves visualizing a large “F” which has two types of corners, “outside corners” and “inside corners,”
pointing or saying - Most people find that the pointing task is more difficult
-holding the image of the letter and pointing are both visuospatial tasks, so the visuospatial sketch pad becomes overloaded

Question 56

Baddeley describes the central executive as being an…

Answer 56

attention controller which is related to executive attention

Question 57

One of the ways the central executive has been studied is by assessing the behavior of…

Answer 57

patients with brain damage

Question 58

the frontal lobe plays a central role in…

Answer 58

working memory

Question 59

A typical behavior of patients with frontal lobe damage is…

Answer 59

perseveration

-represents a breakdown in the central executive’s ability to control attention

Question 60

episodic buffer

Answer 60

A component added to Baddeley’s original working memory model that serves as a “backup” store that communicates with both long-term memory and the components of working memory. It holds information longer and has greater capacity than the phonological loop or visuospatial sketch pad

Question 61

Areas of the brain associated with working memory

Answer 61

the prefrontal cortex (PFC) but more recently research has expanded the “brain map” of working memory to include many additional areas: visual cortex, hippocampus, amygdala and frontal cortex

Question 62

delayed-response task

Answer 62

example of animal research that explored the effect of frontal lobe damage on memory

if their PFC is removed, their performance drops to chance level, so they pick the correct food well only about half of the time

Question 63

frontal and prefrontal cortex do not become adequately developed until about what age to hold a hidden object in their mind?

Answer 63

8 months

Question 64

Shintaro Funahashi

Answer 64

found neurons that responded only when the square was flashed in a particular location and that these neurons continued responding during the delay

Question 65

Mark Stokes

Answer 65

information can be stored by short-term changes in neural networks

Question 66

activity-silent working memory

Answer 66

Short-term changes in neural network connectivity that has been hypothesized as a mechanism for holding information in working memory

Question 67

activity state

Answer 67

information to be remembered causes a number of neurons, indicated by the dark circles, to briefly fire. This firing doesn’t continue, but causes the synaptic state

Question 68

synaptic state

Answer 68

a number of connections between neurons, indicated by the darker lines, are strengthened

Question 69

Meredyth Daneman and Patricia Carpenter

Answer 69

carried out one of the early experiments on individual differences in working memory capacity by developing a test for working memory capacity and then determining how individual differences were related to reading comprehension - reading span test

Question 70

higher working memory capacity is related to…

Answer 70

individual differences in reading comprehension, better academic performance, better chance of graduating from high school, the ability to control emotions, and greater creativity

Question 71

Edmund Vogel

Answer 71

focused on one component of working memory: the control of attention by the central executive

Participants in the high-capacity group were able to hold a number of items in working memory; participants in the low-capacity group were able to hold fewer items in working memory

event-related potential was measured, which indicated how much space was used in working memory as they carried out the task

Question 72

Vogel’s results

Answer 72

The fact that adding the blue bars had only a small effect on the response of the high-capacity group means that these participants were very efficient at ignoring the distractors, so the irrelevant blue stimuli did not take up much space in working memory. Because allocating attention is a function of the central executive, this means that the central executive was functioning well

some people’s central executives are better at allocating attention than others

Question 73

individual differences in cognitive control are closely related to individual differences in…

Answer 73

working memory

Question 74

experiments have generally shown that high-capacity participants are better at

Answer 74

tuning out the distractors

Question 75

Zhang & Simon

Answer 75

Visual coding: Chinese speakers are asked to recall strings of radicals and characters

Radical - no sound (can only be coded visually

Character - has sound

Characters were better recalled but participants are able to recall radicals (just not as well)

Question 76

Wickets

Answer 76

Semantic coding: Listen to word list (3 words) Count backwards for 15 - to prevent rehearsal

3 Groups in experiment: Fruit group (word list of different fruit)
Meat group (different meats)
Profession group (different occupations)

On the 4th trial - every group got fruit words

In trials 2 and 3 the recall decreased in performance due to proactive interference

Then, in trial 4, the profession group performance increases the most, the meat group increases the least and the fruit group continues to decrease

Question 77

proactive interference (PI)

Answer 77

previous info interferes with ability to learn/recall new info because the new info is from the same semantic category

Question 78

Chase & Simon

Answer 78

chess experiment - using semantic coding, participants familiar with chess moves are able to chunk info

Question 79

what type of coding does chunking use?

Answer 79

semantic

Question 80

1st trial: 3 sec vs. 18 sec delay = accuracy very similar

3rd trial: 3 sec vs. 18 sec delay = large difference in accuracy

What is causing the difference in accuracy?

Answer 80

due to proactive interference (not decay)

Question 81

Brandimonte

Answer 81

Briefly present image of an object
Then present part of the object
Task: mentally subtract the two images and indicate what is the remaining image - “Candy” image to “fish” image
Articulatory suppression (la la la) vs. none

Coding it as a candy requires the phonological loop so when this is suppressed with the “la la la” it actually becomes easier to then state the the remaining image is a fish because they did not first code the image as a candy

Question 82

If someone is showing perseveration, then they’ve likely had damage to the ___ lobe of the brain.

Answer 82

frontal

Question 83

Currently, it is generally believed that the upper limit for short-term memory is ___.

Answer 83

7 plus or minus 2 items

Question 84

___ has helped to bolster the idea that the ___ is important for holding information for brief periods of time.

Answer 84

The delayed-response task; prefrontal cortex

Question 85

What distinguishes working memory from short-term memory?

Answer 85

complexity

Question 86

According to Baddeley, the central executive controls ________.

Answer 86

attention

Question 87

According to the activity-silent working memory model, neurons fire ________.

Answer 87

at stimulus input and remembering

Question 88

Daneman and Carpenter’s research on reading span looked at differences in memory ________ among individuals.

Answer 88

capacity

Question 89

What is a key function of the phonological loop?

Answer 89

to prevent decay

Question 90

Funahashi and Stokes both focused on which concept relating to memory?

Answer 90

delay

Question 91

According to Broadbent, where does the process of rehearsal take place?

Answer 91

short-term memory

Question 92

At this point in time, what is considered the primary function of the episodic buffer?

Answer 92

storing information

Question 93

Which of the following likely led early telephone companies to create phone numbers using the format 213-555-1234 rather than a format such as 21776-551873-0633295?

a. phonological similarity
b. digit span
c. articulatory rehearsal
d. chunking

Answer 93

digit span

Question 94

Which of the following has the shortest rate of decay?
a. an exit sign
b. a finger snap
c. a trumpet note
d. an opera aria

Answer 94

an exit sign