Encoding, capacity, duration Flashcards
Encoding
The brain taking in and processing information
Capacity
How much information a store can hold
Duration
How long a store can hold information
Sensory memory encoding
The sensory memory takes information from the sense organs and holds them in that form.
Echoic
Auditory input from the ears. Stored as sounds.
Iconic
Visual information from the eyes. Stored as images.
Haptic
Tactile input from the body. Stored as images.
Research into sensory memory
Information is stored in an unprocessed form.
Transferred to short term memory through attention.
Crowder (1993)
Sensory register retains iconic information fir a few milliseconds.
Echoic store lasts 2/3 seconds.
Sensory memory capacity
Based on Sperling (1960)
Presented a grid of letters for less than a second.
Sperling used tones to cue participants to recall a specific row.
Recall on the specified row was high.
Demonstrates we have a large capacity in our sensory memory.
Sensory memory encoding
Conrad (1964)
Visually represented students with letters one at a time.
Found that letters which are acoustically similar (rhyming) are harder to recall from STM than those which are acoustically dissimilar (non-rhyming).
This suggests that STM mainly encodes things acoustically even though items were presented visually.
Capacity of STM
Miller (1956): The STM can hold ‘the magic number 7, plus or minus 2’.
Miller found that the capacity of STM could be considerably increased by combining/organising separate bits of I formation I to larger chunks.
Chunking involves making the information more meaningful, through organising it in line with existing knowledge from your LTM.
Duration of STM.
The duration for which STM can retain information is temporary.
Some findings suggest only a few seconds before it decays (unless we rehearse it).
Duration of STM research.
Peterson and Peterson (1959).
Got students to recall combinations of 3 letters, After longer and longer intervals.
During the intervals, they were prevented from rehearsing by a counting task.
Concluded that STM is between 18-30 seconds.
Long term encoding research
Based on Baddeley (1966).
Presented list of 10 short words at one time.
Some lists were semantically similar, others not.
Tested immediately and then after a 20 minute delay.
Found that after 20 minutes, they did poorly on the semantically similar words.
This suggests that we encode LTM according to what they mean, so we get similar-meaning things confused.
Long term encoding
Encoding in LTM is ‘semantic’-meaning based.
