Experimental Findings Flashcards
What did they do in Sperling’s Iconic memory experiment?
Presented matrix of letters for 50 ms. Asked to recall as many as possible. Later, used tones to identify which row.
What were the results of Sperling’s Iconic Memory Experiment?
Subjects recalled half of letters. Then they could identify whole rows with a tone.
Delayed the tone, and those sensory memories disappeared after 1 second.
Significance of Sperling’s Iconic Memory Experiment?
Sensory memory lasts about a second.
What was the procedure for the overt rehearsal task?
Participants would say the words on a word list out loud.
What were the results of overt rehearsal task?
Primacy and recency effect.
What was the significance of the overt rehearsal task?
Showed that words that had more rehearsal would be better stored in LTM.
What did they do in the incidental learning task?
The control group knew they were doing a memory test. The experimental group were not told.
What were the results of the incidental learning task?
The group that wasn’t told about the memory test had no primacy effect.
Why was the incidental learning task significant?
Showed that you need rehearsal to have a primacy effect. They aren’t working hard to form associates between words, as they don’t know there’s a memory test.
What were the results of the speeded word list tests?
Primacy effect diminished, regency effect intact.
What was the significance of the speeded list test?
Shows that participants rehearse the words.
What were the results of the primacy and recency effects in amnesia?
The primacy effect diminished, recency still there.
What were the results of the delayed recall test?
The primacy effect was intact, but the recency effect diminished.
What was the methods in the immediate vs. delayed recall test?
They’d give the experimental group a distracting task to do after reading the words.
What did they do in the final free recall test?
They tested the subjects again a while after the first test.
What were the results of the final free recall test?
There was a negative recency effect.
What’s the significance of the final free recall test?
The less rehearsal an item recieves, the less likely it is to be encoded into LTM.
What was the significance of the immediate vs. delayed recall tests?
Proved that the recency effect is a STM phenomenon temporarily maintained in a “buffer” using rehearsal.
What did they do in the immediate vs. delayed recall test to try and get the participants to rehearse the words at the end of the list?
Say them out loud.
When they had participants repeat the end of the word list a few times in the immediate vs. delayed recall test, what happened?
There was a negative recency effect.
What was the significance of the experiment where they had participants repeat the end of the word list a few times in the immediate vs. delayed recall test?
It showed that the hypothesis that maintenance rehearsal helped with recall was false.
What was the significance of the depth of processing test?
Words that were encoded semantically were more likely to be retrieved.
What was the procedure for the chess positions experiment?
Studied chess positions for 10s. They then either repeated a word aloud or pushed keys on a calculator. Then they had to reproduce the chess positions.
What were the results of the chess positions test?
Those that used the calculator, who had their visuospatial sketchpad interfered with, did poorly.
What was the significance of the chess positions test?
It showed there were different aspects to working memory.
What was the procedure for the nonword pair test, involving PV?
They’d pair a non-word with a word.
What were the results of the nonword pair test, involving PV?
PV did poorly compared to the control group.
What was the significance for the nonword pair test, involving PV?
Showed that the phonological loop is used for speech sounds.
What happened in the visual paired-associate non-word learning task with PV?
They read the words instead of hearing them aloud and repeated them back.
What were the results in the visual paired-associate non-word learning task with PV?
PV didn’t do as well as the control, but better than she did on the auditory test.
