L5-memory Flashcards
Explain what sensory memory is
It is brief and is a storage for unprocessed sensory memory which is brought in by all of the five senses. Such as what you have seen, heard,smelt etc.
It takes in information but it does not analyse it or has awareness of the information. Such as background noise when at a party (cocktail party effect).
What are the two types of sensory memory? What are the studies which measure both of these?
Iconic sensory memory
=visual modality. Seeing things around us.
- sperling 1960: whole report procedure (subjects can recall 4-5 of the 9 words but insisted they can see more. Sensed more but did not take this information in, this is sensory memory showing how it works.) and partial report procedure (recall just one line of the 9, can recall the requested line. Told the tone of the letters and then heard them. Can not recall the others).
- after one second they can not recall any if they did not automatically repeat them. Shows how limited sensory memory is.
Echoic sensory memory
=auditory modality (the initial echo/ sound heard within where you are)
-we have a temporary storage of sounds which were just perceived for a whole of 4 seconds. This sensory memory is necessary for speech, we can not identify the sound unless all sounds are heard.
What are the three stages of memory?
Encode, storage, retrieval.
What is short term memory ?
The information from sensory memory, is sent to stm
It is a brief storage of items, which has a limited capacity of 7 +- 2 (5-9)
If there is rehearsal of the memory stored in stm, then it can be moved to ltm.
What is the primary and recency effect and what does this show about ltm and stm
If we are told a series of words, we will have a primary and recency effect where only the first and last words .
Recency effect is ltm
What is working memory?
It is often used interchangeably with stm.
Used for maintenance and processing/ manipulation of information.
Explain the working memory multimodal model :
It includes the central executive, visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop.
The central executive: regulates and supervises storage buffers. It allocates mental resources of tasks but does not contain any storage of itself.
The visuospatial sketchpad: retention of visual and spatial information. There is the mental rotation task and corsi block task which shows the use of visuospatial sketch pad.
Phonological loop: retention of verbal acoustic and phonological information.
How well does the phonological loop stores verbal acoustic and phonological information?
Subject to decay but if articulary rehearsal occurs (inner voice) then it offsets this decay of storage.
How well do we retain acoustic and semantic words?
Study by baddely showed that we can retain acoustically dissimilar better than acoustically similar. But not much difference within semantic similar and dissimilar words.
What are all the effects on phonological loop memory ?
Phonological similarity effect:
= similar sounding words are harder to recall than dissimilar words
Word length effect:
= long words are harder to recall than shorter words
Irrelevant speech effect:
=it is harder to recall word sunder irrelevant speech compared to silence
The effect of articulatory suppression
= it is harder to recall words when participants speak unrelated information during the encoding compared to silence.
What does working memory remeber the best?
Words as opposed to non words
Known objects as opposed to unknown
Issues of multimodal model?
Rigidity of storage buffers.
How verbal items are stored when phonological loop is unavailable
How complex images are stored
Why does cross modal interference occur? (Visual similarity effects found in verbal stm)
What is baddeleys working memory model?
It has a central executive connected to each part of the working-modal model.
This part binds information from other storages buffer and interfaces with ltm to maintain multi dimensional representations
Where does memory take place?
In the prefrontal cortex.
Left side of the prefrontal cortex is for encoding and organising information.
Right side of the prefrontal cortex is involved in retrieving information
What does the hippocampus do in terms of memory
Spatial navigation, ltm consolidation
