Final Exam Flashcards
What is the modal model of memory by Atkinson and Schiffrin?
- Environmental input, goes into the sensory registers (visual, auditory, haptic)
- then short term store and temporary working memory (control processes of rehearsal, coding, decisions, retrieval strategies)
- there could be a response output or it goes in long term store or permanent memory store (interaction between STM and LTM)
What is iconic memory?
- A temporary buffer that holds visual information for very brief periods of time
- What is visual persisitence?
- The apparent persistence of a visual stimulus beyond its physical duration (lightning flash)
What are the characteristics of visual sensory memory?
- The capacity, the duration, the representation
What was Sperlings experiment for whole report?
- Used a tachistoscope to quickly present images to the eyes
- Subjects saw 3x4 grid of letters presented very briefly (50ms)
- In the whole report condition, SS had to free recall the letters (as many as possible) immediately after presentation
- Whole report performance was poor (37% accuracy or 4.5/12 avg)
What was Sperlings experiment for partial report?
- A tone was sounded right after the letter grid disappeared
- High pitch tone for tope row, medium for middle and low for bottom
- Partial report accuracy was at 76% (3/4 items from cued row) immediately after presentation
- Performance dropped if the delay was greater than 250ms between presentation of array and tone cue = infer trace duration
- Duration of iconic memory = 250ms
How is iconic memory represented?
- Pre-categorical coding = physical, looks like input in of itself (snapshot of image)
What is echoic memory?
- Parallels visual sensory store (iconic memory) but for auditory information
- Capacity, duration and representation
What is the sensory stores for both echoic and iconic memory?
- Echoic memory: veridical, 4s duration, large capacity
- Iconic memory: veridical, 250ms, large capacity
For both: partial report gives truer estimate of capacity
What are the different aspects of STM?
- Follows attentional filtering stage
- Where immediately present moment is held in consciousness
- Active mental effort is expended
- Comprehension takes place
- Constant refreshing and integration of new information
How did Miller describe chunking?
- Chunking: grouping a series of apparently random items into a smaller number of meaningful segments to enhance recall,
- Can be induced by altering prosody of the presentation list, random digits are often best chunked into groups of about 3 items
- Miller suggested that memory span is not limited to a certain number of items but by the number of chunks
What is the difference between STM and WM?
- STM: performance on experimental tasks involving the capacity to store small amounts of information over brief intervals, tested either immediately or after short delay (digit span)
- WM: a system that allows for the temporary storage and manipulation of information to allow for reasoning, learning, and comprehension, higher level of cognition
How is STM for consonants partially reliant on acoustic code even when letters are presented visualy?
- Memory is improved for lists of consonants with dissimilar sounds
- Acoustic information fades from short term store, items become confused for consonants sharing similar sounds rather than a similar visual form
What is the difference between primacy and recency effect?
- Primacy effect: the first few items on a list have recall advantage
- Recency effect: the last few items on a list are very well recalled (eliminated by a brief delay filled with a distractor task)
What is free recall and resutls?
- Involves asking SS to recall studied items in any order
- Recall probability for a given item declines as list length increases
- The absolute number of items recalled increases with list length
What does the primacy effect depend on?
- LTM
- Related to tendency to rehearse first few items during initial presentation and throughout remainder of study list
- Rehearsed items have a better chance of entering LTM, making them available for later recall
What are the factors that influence primacy effect?
- Affect LTM, affect recall of early and middle part of list
- Presentation rate (slower = more encoding), word frequency (more familiar = easier to recall), imageability (words more imaginable = easier recall), age (young = remember more), physiological state (drugs and alcohol= impair memory)
What disrupts recency effects?
- Short distractor task disrupts short term store
- Interference is there bc of similar to be remembered material and suffix
What is chaining?
- Method of remembering the order of items in which a person links each item to next in series
- Predicts that forgetting one link would prohibit any further recall in the chain (not well supported)
What are the ordinal and positional models (inhibition and context)?
- Inhibition: inhibition of retrieved item leads to inhibition and activation of item
- Context: encoding of ordinal context that shifts over time as recall progresses
What are the different working memory metaphors?
- Phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, central executive, episodic buffer
What is Baddeley and Hitch multi component model?
- Central executive: an attentionally-limited system that selects and manipulates material in two slave systems:
- Phonological loop: holds sequences of acoustic/speech based items
- Visuo-spatial sketchpad: holds visually and/or spatially encoded items and arrays
- Episodic buffer added later
What is the phonological loop?
- Speech and sound related component responsible for rehearsal of verbal info
Items rehearsed in articulatory loop and recoded if the presented info is in a visual format - Phonological store holds speech based info
What are the different articulatory loop effects?
- Phonological similarity: similar sounding words are more confusable
- Word length effect: memory for multi-syllabic words is worse than single syllable words 9Welsh children with slow speech have lower WM)
- Irrelevant speech effect: involuntary access to the articulatory loop shown by comparing digits in silence vs digits with nonsense syllables vs digits with words (most interference)
What is articulatory suppression?
- A technique for occupying the vocal musculature
- During encoding of either visually or auditorily presented words, repeat nonsense item at the same time
- Suppression while encoding visually presented info wipes out recoding and wipes out phonologically similarity effect, unattended speech effect, and word length
- Auditory memory items, articulatory suppression does not abolish the phonologically similarity effect, no recode auditory items
What is the visuo-spatial sketch pad?
- A system specialized for visual and spatial information
- Distinction between spatial and visual information
- Double dissociation: two subsystems are being used for dual task, no interference
What did Logie (1995) suggest about the structure of the visuo-spatial sketchpad?
- Similar to the phonological loop and consists of visual cache and inner scribe
- Visual cache = a passive store, store visual info and holds info in VSSP
- Inner scribe: an active spatial rehearsal process
What is the central executive?
- An attentional controller with two main modes of operation
- Semi-automatic conflict resolution system based on existing habits and requiring little attention
- Function is to direct attention to the task at hand (planning next move or remembering position
What was the central executive inspired by?
- The supervisory attentional system
- Based on attentional limited executive
- Able to intervene when automatic conflict resolution is not possible or when a new situation arises
What are the problems of the three component model of WM?
- Cant explain why memory span can sometimes exceed the capacity of the subsystems (for words in a sentence, digit span),
- Cannot explain why images based on LTM do not depend on the sketchpad or phonological subsystems
What is the episodic buffer?
- Fourth component of WM system
- Storage system with a capacity of around four chunks of info in a multidimensional code
How is the episodic buffer a solution to the problems with the WM model?
- Multiple dimension allow links between the subsystems as well as with LTM
- Info is retrieved through conscious awareness
- Allows for binding of previously unrelated concepts
What is episodic memory?
- System that can catalog unique
- Method for storing the events durably ad searching and retrieving the events
Why does learning facilitate LTM?
- Levels of processing hypothesis
- Shallow to deep (visual form, phonology, semantics/meaning)
- The depths of processing helps determine durability in LTM
What is the difference between elaborative and maintenance rehearsal?
- Elaborative rehearsal: linking material being rehearsed to other material in memory
- Maintenance rehearsal: continuing to process an item at the same level at which it was encoded
What is the transfer appropriate processing (TAP)?
- Alternative view to LOP that considers both encoding and retrieval properties
- Processing requirements of test should match the processing conditions at encoding in order to reveal prior learning
What are context effects found for TAP?
- Mood dependent effects (happy vs sad retrieval)
- Advantage as to where you learn info and where you get tested for info (matched vs mismatch scuba divers learning)
What did Tulving and Thompson find for encoding specificity?
- Anything present during learning a target can serve as an effective cue for later remembering that target
What is proactive interference?
- Earlier learned information negatively affects new learning
What is retroactive interference?
- New learned information negatively affects our ability to recall earlier learned information
Who was the most famous and earliest formal investigation of learning?
- Ebbinghaus
- Researcher interested in technique of learning and wanted to understand what we were humanly capable of doing
What is distributed practice?
- Better to space out learning trials sparsely across a period of time than to mass them together into a single learning block
What is the spacing effect?
- Spaced presentation enhances memory for a variety of materials
What is the generation effect?
- Successfully testing yourself strengthens memories more than passively studying the items (the sooner the item is tested after initial presentation, the more likely it will be recalled and strengthened)
What is the expanding retrieval?
- When a new item is initially tested after a short delay to ensure that it is recallable
- As the item becomes better learned, the practice-test interval is gradually extended
- Recall failures shows that it should be presented after a shorter delay
- Successful recall indicates that the delay should be increased
What is subjective organization?
- Tulving found can learn verbal material spontaneously through subjective organization (how people customize their learning or way of organizing to be remembered info)
- chunking words together separate words for recall, even if those words weren’t presented together
How are items chunked together?
- if items are linked toa common associate
- If item come from same semantic category
What are the different strategies for improving memory?
- Creating a story involving all the studied items
- Using visual imagery to have the studied items interact
What are the pros and cons of creating a story involving all the studied items?
- Pros: given enough time and imagination, its possible to create a story for early any set of items, promote elaborative encoding, building in links between items
- Cons: time intensive, risk of recalling part of the story that weren’t actually studied
What are the pros and cons of using visual imagery to have the studied items interact?
- Pros: flexible and quick
- Cons: best for concrete nouns
Who was the patient K.C?
- Survived motorcycle accident
- damaged hippocampus
- Impaired episodic memory
- Intact semantic and STM, procedural