cognition- short term memory and working memory

Question 1

-what is short term memory
-function of short term memory

Answer 1

-capacity for holding a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time
-functions : holds activated info from sensory memory for further processing

Question 2

Short term memory capacity
-how much information can be held in short term memory
-George Miller (1956)

Answer 2

-millers study , the magic number seven plus or minus two
so capacity = 7 plus or minus 2 ‘chunks’ of information

Question 3

what is a ‘chunk’

Answer 3

groups of items that have been collected together and treated as a single unit (mathy and Feldman, 2012,p346)

Question 4

how can the capacity of short term memory be increased?

Answer 4

by chunking (think of the example in lecture)

Question 5

STM capacity varies with chunk complexity

Answer 5

digit span = 7.7
letter span = 6.35
word span = 5.5
trigrams = 3.2

Question 6

chunks rely on ______ knowledge stored in long term memory

Answer 6

previous

Question 7

STM duration
-how long does information last in STM
-Peterson and Peterson 1959-stm without rehearsal

Answer 7

peterson and peterson
experiment:
-in the trial they had stimulus presentation which was 3 letters and 3 digit number
-then there was a retention interval where the subject counts backward by threes for intervals of 3 to 18 seconds (prevents the participant from rehearsing the letters and numbers so they could test how long they were held in STM without rehearsal)
-then there was recall signal and report : where a red signal light meat they had to try and recall letters.

Question 8

peterson & peterson
results

Answer 8

-when the retention interval was short, the percent correctly recalled was high
-as the retention interval increased, the percentage correct is decreased

-without rehearsal we can hold 3 letters in our short term memory for around 18 seconds

Question 9

how is information lost from STM?

Answer 9

-decay : information may decay over time without rehearsal
-interference : information presented from previous trials and during the retention interval may interfere with the to-be-recalled information in STM
– could the counting backwards have actually interfered with memory- not just preventing rehearsal

Question 10

stm duration
waugh and norman 1965

Answer 10

-they designed an experiment in which participants were presented with list of 16 digits
-after the last digiti, theres a tone that reminded the participant that this is the last digit
-they also told the participant that the last digit was a repeat of an earlier digit (called this this the probe digit)
-participant had to write down the digit that followed the earlier one (the one after the probe digit)

Question 11

how did waugh and norman test the effect of interference manipulation with this experiment

Answer 11

-interference manipulation : decreasing the number of interference items between the last digit and the earlier digit
(large interference had lots of numbers between )
(little interference had the probe digit near the end)

Question 12

how was decay manipulated in this experiment

Answer 12

decay manipulation :2x speed on the presentation
-1 digit per second
-4 digits per second
by varying the presenting speed you can manipulate the decay of information

Question 13

results of Waugh and Norman experiment

Answer 13

-interference plays a larger role in short memory performance.
interference was more important than decay in terms of information lost in short term memory

Question 14

STM vs working memory
compare

Answer 14

-different concepts with overlapping component

short term memory
-short term storage of information
-eg remember a phone number

working memory
-short term storage of information
-AND manipulation of this information
eg remember a phone number and then also be able to switch the last two digits ‘oh sorry that’s wrong the last two digits are swapped’
-your working on whats been stored in your memory

Question 15

explain the working memory model
Baddeley & Hitch (1974)

Answer 15

central executive
(controls and used to process info in the subcomponents (eg swiitching from one task to other)

-phonological loop (inner speech , any language, sound, auditory info is stored and processed in the phonological loop
-Visuospatial Sketchpad (visual and spatial information stored in this)
-episodic buffer - (proposed in 2000 , a recent component) forms a united component of one perception (combine info from diff components and ltm to form a single united perception)

Question 16

working memory model
phonological loop
-function

Answer 16

-function - process and store info briefly in a phonological (speech based) form

Question 17

phonological loop:
what are the two components

Answer 17

phonological loop consists of two components

phonological store
-holds auditory information passively online (info in this store will decay rapidly if nor rehearsed)

rehearsal process
-refreshed information in the phonological store item by item

Question 18

give evidence for the rehearsal process

Answer 18

-demonstrated by phonological similarity effect
-people show poorer recall when items are phonologically similar than when they are phonologically dissimilar

eg rehearsing phonologically similar words like man,mad,cap is harder as they’re so similar so therefore there is poorer recall
vs
related words semantically (eg big, great, large) better recall

Question 19

2) evidence for rehearsal

Answer 19

word length effect
-the longer the word the more difficult to rehearse and therefore the memory performance is worse
-recall decreases as length of word increases (Baddeley et al., 1975)

Question 20

how is the phonological loop important in learning a foreign language

Answer 20

-neuropsychological evidence suggests that the loop is important to language learning because patients with impairments cannot learn a new language

Question 21

phonological loop important in learning a foreign language
-evidence

Answer 21

-patient case (patient PV) had acquired a pure phonological loop deficit as an adult, resulting in a digit span of two items.

-she had only relatively minor language comprehension problems with very long sentences but a profound inability to learn a new language

-she was tested, on learning noble words in her native language or noble words in russian

-her capacity to learn pairs of meaningful words was unimpaired, but she was not able to learn foreign language vocabulary

Question 22

visuospatial sketchpad
function

Answer 22

-function temporary storage and manipulation of visual and spatial info

Question 22

visuospatial sketchpad
-the two components (Logie 1995)

Answer 22

the visual cache
-store information about visual form and colour
the inner scribe
-process spatial and movement (eg mental rotation or mental folding)

Question 22

visuospatial sketchpad
what was the experiment with evidence supporting visual and spatial working memory

Answer 22

• Klauer and Zhao (2004)

main task
-gave participants the main tasks to either memorise dot locations (spatial task) or memorise Chinese ideographs (a visual task) (so could not rehearse the Chinese figures)
(participants were not Chinese speakers)

secondary interference task
-either to make a judgement about movement direction -movement discrimination task (spatial interference)
-or a colour discrimination task (visual interference)

-if the two tasks require the same process they will interfere with each other

Question 22

results of klauer and zhao experiment supporting separate visual and spatial working memory

Answer 22

spatial task was more interfered by the movement judgement task

for visual task, it was interfered more by the colour tasks

-this clearly supports the separation of a visual process and spatial process in visual spatial sketchpad

Question 23

central executive function

Answer 23

-a flexible system responsible for the control and regulation of cognitive processes
-it is the most important and versatile component of working memory
-heavily involved in almost all complex cognitive activities but does not store information

Question 24

episodic buffer
function

Answer 24

-to hold integrated information from phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad and LTM in the form of unified representations

Question 25

capacity of episodic buffer

Answer 25

around 4 chunks (integrated units of information; Baddeley, 2012)

Question 26

Working memory model evaluation
strengths (compared to multi store model)

Answer 26

-WM is concerned with both active processing and transient information storage

-WM consists of independent subsystems (multi store model doesnt) wm has several like verbal , spatial,visual store

-WM model does not over emphasis the importance of the rehearsal for Short term memory retention (as its not the only thing thats important for retention)

-WM model can be applied to more real life tasks (eg learning a foreign language)

Question 27

weaknesses of working memory model

Answer 27

-lack of knowledge on central executive function and episodic buffer
-there could be more domain specific components
-lack of knowledge on the interactions of different components

Question 28

working memory in real life
-its importance for controlling external distraction

Answer 28

-studies shown that aeroplane noise hurts the recall of a prose passage more in low working memory individuals than in high working memory individuals (sorqvist , 2010)

-that means that high working memory individuals have a better ability to inhibit the external distracting information

Question 29

working memory importance in control internal distraction (mind wandering)

Answer 29

-studies shown that low wm individuals engaged in more task unrelated thought than high wm individuals in a sustained attention task(a task in which your constantly remembering new information for long periods of time) (Mcvay & Kane,2012)

Question 30

working memory and fluid intelligence

Answer 30

-WM capacity strongly correlates with fluid intelligence (non verbal reasoning ability applied to novel problems)