Chapter 5: Short Term and Working Memory

Question 1

What was the brown-peterson distractor task?

Answer 1

presenting constant trigrams to people
and then making them count backwards by 3 so they wont be able to rehearse it…

result: without rehersal then memory is low after 15-20 seconds

Question 2

What was the waugh and norman probe task?

Answer 2

• presented 16 digits in a sequence
• presented probe digit (i.e. a specific number u were told to remember)
• and then they asked u to report the digit that came after the probe

Question 3

What was the modal model of memory? Who was it proposed by?

Answer 3

shiffrin and atkinson

• proposed 3 types of memory:
  1. sensory memory
  2. short term memory
  3. long term memory

Question 4

According to shiffrin and atkinson’s modal model of memory what was the charactersitics of sensory memory?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

according to shiffrin and atkinson’s modal model of memory what was the characteristics of short term memory

Answer 5

holds 5-7 items for about 15-20 seconds

Question 6

according to shiffrin and atkinson’s modal model of memory what was the characteristics of longterm memory

Answer 6

holds large amount of info for yeasr and decades

Question 7

What are control processes

Answer 7

dymanic processes associated with the strucutral faetures that can be controlled

i.e. strategies used to help make stimulus more memorable or strategies of attention that help you focus on information that is particularly important or interesting

Question 8

what is persistence of vision?

Answer 8

the continued perception of a visual stimulus even after it is no longer present

Question 9

what is visual persistence?

Answer 9

visual informatio proceeds through sequence of levels in the brain, neurons and neural structures take time to stop firing, therefore activity persists at all levels of the visual system

Question 10

what are 3 types of visual persistence?

Answer 10

1. Neural persistence… positive after image … retinal level and increases with flash energy
2. visible persistence –> stimulus remains visible after offset; past retina but not too high into the visual system and decreases with display duration
3. Schematic persistance –> higher up processing that includes information that is no longer visible is still available for some tasks … still having idea of what and where items were even though not visibile … theres little effect of stimulus duration

Question 11

what is the experiment used to measure visibile persistance?

Answer 11

the dot matrix task: 5 x 5 matrix of dots with one missing, you have to report its location

present one display of 12 dots followed by another 12

• task is easy if 1st and second display simultaneously visible and its impossible if not

Question 12

What was Sperling’s Experiment of measuring the capacity and duration of the sensory store?

Answer 12

• flashed an array of letters on the screen for 50ms, and then asked subjects to report as many letters as possible
• the part of the experiment used WHOLE report method, where subjects asked to report as many letters as possible from the 12 letter display
• on average the subjects reported 4.5 out of 12 of the letters
• some subjects reported seeing all of the letters though and then rapidly forgetting most of them
  therefore Sperling came up with a modified experiment and reasoned that the subjects would do better if they were told to just report the letters in a single 4-letter row

Question 13

What is the partial report method done by sperling?

Answer 13

subjects would see the 12 letter display for 50ms, but at the sound of a tone (high,med or low) they would only have to remember the top, med or bottom levels of the 4 letter displays only and be able to recall those after a cue
- this reported an average of about 3.3 of the 4 letters

Question 14

what is the partial report superiority effect?

Answer 14

there is an advantage that comes from doing a partial report vs full report

Question 15

What was Sperling’s delayed partial report method

Answer 15

he used this to figure out the time course of this fading of letters after the 12 letter display was presented.

• the letters were flashed on and off and then cue tone was presented after short delay
• the results showed that when the cue tones were delyaed for 1 second after the flash, subjects were able to report only slighyly more than 1 letter in a row
• he concluded from there these results that short lived sensory memory registeres all or most of the infromation but that this info decays within less of a second

Question 16

what is iconic memory?

Answer 16

corresponds to the sensory memory stage of atkinson and shiffrin’s modal model for sensory memory of visual stimulus

Question 17

What is proactive interferance?

Answer 17

interferance that occurs when information that was learned previously interferes with learning new information

Question 18

what is retroactive interferance?

Answer 18

intereference that occurs when new learning interfers with remembering old learning… this is rapidly lost from STM but theres also a limit of how much info can be hel there

Question 19

What was george millers experiment on how much content STM can hold?

Answer 19

7 +/- 2

Question 20

A person with reduced digit span would most likely have a problem with what type of memory?

Answer 20

short term memory

Question 21

what is digit span?

Answer 21

the number of digits a person can remember

Question 22

what did baddeley and lewis find when a simple reasoning task was combined with a digit load task?

Answer 22

verification time increased with number of digits

Question 23

What was Luck and Vogel’s experiment on STM?

Answer 23

subjects would see a display of number of coloured squares flashed for 100ms and then 900ms delay of blackness and then a new display which had same number of squares but a color of one of the squares changed
- the subjects had to indicate if the displays differed

Question 24

What was the results of luck and vogel’s experiment?

Answer 24

the results indicated that performance was almost perfect when there were one to three squares in teh arrays but that perofomrance began decreasing when there was four or more squares therefore tehy concluded that subjects were able to retain about 4 items in STM

Question 25

What is chunking?

Answer 25

a concept used to describe the fact that small units like words can be combined into larger meaningful units like phrases or even larger units like sentences paragraphs or storeis

Question 26

what is a chunk?

Answer 26

dfined as a collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another but weakly associated with elements in other chunks

Question 27

What was Alvarex and Cavanagh’s experiment on how much information can be held in STM?

Answer 27

• used change detection procedure from luck and vogel
• in addition to coloured squares, they also used more complex objects like shaded cubes where the subject would see a display containing a number of different cubes, follwoed by blank interval followed by the same thing except one of the cubes was different
• the task was to indicate whether the two displays different or were the same
• the results showed that subjects ability to make same/different judgement depended on the complexity of the stimulus

Question 28

What can one conlude from the results of the change detection experiments?

Answer 28

that subject’s ability to make the same/different judgement depends on the complexity/amount of the stimuli

Question 29

Who introduced working memory?

Answer 29

baddley and hitch

Question 30

What did baddley conclude about working memory?

Answer 30

that i must be dymanic but also consist of a number of components that function seperately: phonological loop, visuospatial sketch pad and central executive

Question 31

what was the difference between baddley’s model and atkinson and shiffrin’s modal model?

Answer 31

in atkinson’s it said that we can only perform one of the tasks like reading or solving a word problem or reading and listening to music at the same time, we cant do both but baddley said we can with working memory because its composed of three different components that are seperated in function

Question 32

What is the phonological loop and what 2 things is it composed of?

Answer 32

• holds verabl and auditory information
  1. phonological store: has limited capacy and holds information for few seconds
  2. articulatory rehersal process: responsible for rehersal that can keep items in the phonological store from decaying … goin to LTM

Question 33

What is the visuospatial sketchpad?

Answer 33

holds visual information and spatial information

Question 34

What is visual imagery?

Answer 34

involved in visuospatial sketchpad, where its the creation of visual images in the mind in the absence of physical visual stimulus
involves mental rotation where subjects solving the problem by rotating image of one of the objects in their minds

Question 35

what is the central executive?

Answer 35

where major work of working memory occurs, pulls info from LTM and coordinates the activativy of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad by focusin on specific parts of a task and desciding how to divide attention between different tasks

Question 36

what is one the ways central executive can be studied and what is assessed?

Answer 36

studying brain damaged individuals. Patients with frontal lobe damage have problems controlling their attention, and an example is persevation: repeadtly perfomring same action or thought even if its not achieving desired goal

Question 37

What task is used to measure the capacity of the central executive?

Answer 37

the random number generation

Question 38

What is the phonological similarity effect?

Answer 38

the confusion of letters or words which sound similar

Question 39

what was the experiment done on phonological similarity effect by R.Conrad?

Answer 39

flashed a series of target letters on a screen and subjects write down letters in order they were presened

figured out taht subjects made errors most likely by misidenitifying same sounding letters like F, S or X

Question 40

what is the word length effect?

Answer 40

occurs when memory for list of words is better for shorter words than for longer words

Question 41

what is articulatory suppression?

Answer 41

the repetition of an irrelevant sound which reduces memory because speaking interefers with rehersal

Question 42

What is an episodic buffer?

Answer 42

can store information and provide extra capacity and is connected to LTM thereby making the interchange between working memory and LTM possible…

Question 43

What are the major methods for determining the connection between the cognitive functioning and the brain (4)?

Answer 43

1 . analysis of behavior after brain damage

2. recording from single neurons in animals
3. measuring acitivity in the human brain
4. recording electrical signals in the human brain

Question 44

what is the delayed response task by goldman-rakic

Answer 44

required monkey to hold information in working memory during a delay period

• monkey would see food reward in one of two food wells, both wells are covered then screen is lowered and then raised again
• when the screen is raised the monkey must remembere which well had the food and uncover the correct food to obtain it
• prefrontal cortex removal showed that this decision came down to chance level

Question 45

What was the levels of processing memory task by Craik and Tuvling?

Answer 45

• they asked 40 descriptive adjectives on one of four tasks: structural (big or small font), phonemic (rhyms with xx), semantic (means same as xxx?) and self-reference (describes you). This was followed by incidental recall task
• participants were asked how many words they had seen possible within a given time limit
• Crak and Tulving’s original experiment showed that strucutral and phonemic tasks lead to shallow encoding while semantic tasks lead to deep encoding and resulted in better recall

Question 46

in the Levels of Processing Memory Task, what task leads to the best incidental recall?

Answer 46

originail research considered structural, phonemic and semantic encoding taskss that showed that semantic encoding is the best method