(Cognitive) Memory

Question 1

In what order do the Stages of Memory take place? (Melton, 1963)
Storage, Encoding, Retrieval

Answer 1

Encoding - the formation of a mental representation through processes occuring during the ‘to be remembered’ experience >
> Storage - temporary (or more permanent) mental retention of some aspect(s) of the representation >
> Retrieval - recovery or extraction of the mental representation from our mental storage system

Question 2

What is Primacy effect?

Answer 2

Better recall performance with words positioned at the start or early in a list.

Question 3

What is recency effect?

Answer 3

Even better performance with words late or last in a list.
(Murdock 1962, found using free recall)

Delays up to 30 seconds removed the recency effect, supporting the idea that the representations were in a fairly temporary memory store. (Glanzer & Cunitz, 1966)

Question 4

Short term memory is

Answer 4

a more temporary form of memory that we aren’t able to keep much in. Miller (1956) suggests it can only hold 7 +/- 2 things. It also doesn’t retain things very long. (30 seconds)

Question 5

Long term memory is

Answer 5

a more permanent form of memory that we can retain a lot of information in (possible limitless) and for a long time. These are referred to as duration and capacity.

Question 6

Recency and primacy effects support two ideas..

Answer 6

Recency effects support idea of temporary store with a limited capacity, sometimes lables as short term memory.
Primacy effects support idea of a more permanent store with a much larger capacity, long term memory.

Question 7

What is the name of Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) model of memory

Answer 7

The modal model

Question 8

Sensory registers

Answer 8

a system that recieves information from the environment (via our senses) and is stored very briefly but has a large capacity.
If relevant, information must be ‘copied’ into the short term store from sensory registers as it can’t be rehearsed here.

Question 9

Short term store

Answer 9

A temporary store for relevant information (up to approx 30 seconds) with a small capacity.
Contents in the short term store can be mentally rehearsed but this is limited, if needed on a more permanent basis it must be ‘copied’ into the long term store.

Question 10

Long term store

Answer 10

A more permanent store for information with an unknown but large capacity.
Information can be ‘copied’ from the long term store into the short term store whenever it is needed to be mentally manipulated or combined with other information.

Question 11

Working memory

Answer 11

This is a more active version of STM and changed theoretical thinking about the architecture of memory.

Question 12

Phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and central executive are the three components of what system?

Answer 12

Working memory

Question 13

‘Central executive’

Answer 13

Introduced by Baddely & Hitch (1974), is an attentional system to control and co-ordinate mental activities .

Little dude pulling strings in your head. homunculus

Question 14

Visuo-spatial sketchpad

Answer 14

Stores a small amount of information based on visual and spatial characteristics. IE the colour or position of something, where a piece is on a chess board.

Question 15

Phonological loop

Answer 15

Stores a small amount of information in a speech based form.

Question 16

Evidence for phonological loop:

Conrad (1964)

Answer 16

Error patterns reveal most confusions made with similar sounding letters (e.g. p and b) which supports the idea that short-term storage for visually presented letters/words uses a temporary acoustic code (relies on phonology and is speech based)

Question 17

Della Sala et al. (1999) investigated whether visuospatial sketchpad could be divided into visual storage and spatial storage.

Answer 17

Visual task was disrupted more by a visual interference (a drop to 65%) than by spatial interference, and ditto; spatial task was disrupted more by a spatial interference (drop to 66%).
This supports the idea that these are at least partially stored seperately.

Question 18

Shifting, updating, and inhibition, are three functions of what?

Miyake et al. 2000

Answer 18

Central executive

Question 19

Shifting

Answer 19

Shifting back and forth between multiple tasks, operations, or mental sets.
Examples include plus-minus, local-global.

Question 20

Updating

Answer 20

Updating and monitoring of working memory representations.
keeping track of things, tone monitoring.

Question 21

Inhibition

Answer 21

Inhibit dominant, automatic, or prepotent responses.
(ability to block out unnecesarry noise for example, or inhibiting yourself from biting your nails.)

Question 22

Examples of everyday tasks that are going to be drawing on working memory:

Answer 22

• cooking dinner
• playing video games
• following directions to the shop
• choosing what drink to buy
• playing on a quiz machine

Question 23

Levels of processing, Craik & Tulving, 1975

Answer 23

Brief summary: They challenged the modal model and focused on how much one had to do with a piece of information when it was encoded and how it was processed. They ran 10 recall experiments altering how the information was processed before recalled. Structural, phonemic, categorical, and sentence processing. The words had been encoded differently based on the depth/amount of semantic elaboration required, and the retrieval was always a recognition test. Performance was lowest in the shallowest preocessing condition and highest in the deepest condition.

Question 24

Examples of the different processes used by Craik and Lockhart.

Answer 24

Structural processing – “is the word in capital letters?”
Phonemic processing – “does the word rhyme with weight?”
Categorical processing – “is the word a type of fish?”
Sentence processing – “would the word fit the sentence ‘he met a ___ in the street’?”

The words require increasingly deeper processing from top to bottom.

Question 25

Transfer Appropriate processing
Morris, Bansford & Franks 1977

Answer 25

The way information is recalled matters too. If information is recalled the same way it was encoded this will be most successful.

Question 26

Encoding Specificity Principle
Thompson & Tulving, 1970

Answer 26

Suggested that its not just about the way that information is coded and what you’re doing to remember it, but also whats going on around that. The encoding context; what time of day it was, where we were, the colour of the walls. It predicts that successful retrieval of a target item will increase if the encoding context matches the retieval context. IE tested by people studying words on land or underwater in full scuba gear.
More words were correctly recalled when conditions matched.

Question 27

Encoding specificity principle summarised

Answer 27

… argues that the context is also encoded alongside memory and can be used to enhance access to it. e.g. by attempting to recall in the same location encoded in.