exam 2 Flashcards
Consciousness
the awareness people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings.
Mindless Reading
Your eyes move forward in the text but you aren’t processing the meaning of the material.
Mind wandering
When your thoughts shift from an external environment to an internal environment.
Thought Suppression
The attempt to eliminate thoughts, ideas, and images related to an undesirable stimulus.
What is the White Bear Task
When you try not to think of something but you can’t help it.
AKA “Try not to think about a white bear”
Rebound effect
When we try to suppress certain thoughts, they “rebound” by increasing in frequency after the thought suppression.
Blindsight: What is it and which region of the brain is involved?
Vision without awareness.
Located in the primary visual cortex.
What did George Miller find the short-term memory span to be?
5-9 items
What is “chunking”?
Consists of strongly associated components.
E.g., the phone number is easier to remember in chunks of 3.
The Brown/Peterson & Peterson Technique: what is it?
Presenting some items to be remembered, then count backward by threes, and attempt to recall.
The Brown/Peterson & Peterson Technique: why do participants count backward?
Prevents rehearsal
The Brown/Peterson & Peterson Technique: what is the effect of delay on memory?
Memory is fragile for material stored for just a few seconds.
Serial-position effect: definition
tendency to remember the first and last items in a list better than those in the middle.
____ is more accurate for items at the BEGINNING of a list and _____ is more accurate at the END of the list.
Recall; Recency
Primacy effect
the tendency to recall information presented at the start of a list better than information at the middle or end
U-shaped relationship: serial-position effect
Relationship between a word’s position in a list and its probability of accurate recall.
semantic similarity: example
How much does term A have to do with term B?
semantics
The meaning of words and sentences
Proactive interference
Old information interferes with memory for new information
Wickens, Dalezman, & Eggemeier (1976)
memory accuracy improved when the semantic category changed, effectively releasing participants from proactive interference.
Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory:
what are the three separate components of human memory?
Sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory
Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory:
What are the three types of sensory memory?
iconic, echoic, and haptic
iconic memory
registered through visual stimuli.
echoic memory
registered through the auditory system
Haptic memory
registered through touch
______ information is stored in ________ memory, just long enough to be transferred into _________ memory.
Sensory; sensory; short-term
Information Processing Approach
Proposed that mental processes are similar to the operations of a computer.
short-term memory is also known as?
working memory
how long can you store short-term memory?
20-30 seconds