L7 Sensory Memory Flashcards
Learning and Cognition
What is Cognition?
The internal mental processes involved in making sense of incoming information.
Describe the Three-Stage Model of Memory
What is Sensory Memory?
The retention, for a brief period of time, of the effects of sensory stimulation.
Is sensory information registered in sensory memory?
Yes, but it only persists for a few seconds (or less)
Why don’t we attend to all things at once in our environment?
Information overload: We would be overwhelmed with information so we only attend to certain information.
What are the two different types of storage that sensory information research focuses on?
Iconic Storage and Echoic Storage
Define Iconic Storage
The momentary memory for visual information.
Define Echoic Storage
The momentary memory for auditory information
What is the Sperling Task (or Whole-Report Procedure, 1960)?
A test that involves briefly (less than a second) flashing a 4x3 group of letters and asking a participant to recall those letters afterwards.
What were the results of the 1960 Whole-Report Procedure?
Participants could correctly report 4-5 items despite knowing they saw more letters than they could report.
What was Sperling’s Partial-Report Procedure?
The letter grid was presented briefly however afterwards participants heard one of three tones and was asked to recall the letters from the line the tone represented.
What was the difference in recall percentage between partial-report and whole-report procedure?
Partial Report: 82%
Whole-Report: 33%
Why was the Partial Report Procedure an improvement on the Whole Report Procedure?
What is this effect called?
Participants attention was being directed to the memory trace of the letters in their sensory store rather than directed to the actual letters in the stimulus that the Whole Report was doing.
Partial-Report Superiority
How did Sperling manage to measure the duration of iconic storage?
By using delayed-partial-report procedure.
It is the partial-report procedure but he varied the length of time between the stimulus off-set and the high/med/low cue tone
What did Sperling conclude the speed in which information stores in iconic memory decays?
Within less than a second
According to Sperling’s experiments, what kind of information does the iconic memory store?
Physical characteristics of the stimuli
Relative positions of the stimuli
‘What’ and ‘where’ of the stimulus
Did the following experiments show partial-report superiority for semantic categories (numbers, letters) and sound characteristics (as in ‘ee’ sound [D,B,V,C etc.]).
What does this mean?
No.
That information stored in iconic memory is visual and pre-categorical.
What was the Darwin et al (1972) partial-report procedure test in regards to echoic (auditory) sensory memory?
Stimuli were presented aurally and simultaneously across three separate channels (left, middle, right) and visual cues indicated which channel was to be reported in the partial-report procedure.
What did the results of the Darwin et al (1972) experiment indicate?
That echoic memory had partial-report superiority (like with iconic memory).
That echoic memory does not encode semantic information (like with iconic memory).
How long does echoic storage last according to the Darwin (1972) partial-report experiment?
Around two seconds
How long does it take for iconic storage to decay?
Approximately 0.5 seconds (Sperling, 1960)
How long does it take for echoic storage to decay?
Approximately 2 seconds (Treisman, 1964)
Why is sensory memory so brief?
If iconic memory wasn’t so brief the world would look like a mess of overlapping images.
If echoic memory did not fade away everything we heard would overlap.
What is visual persistence?
When a stimulus may no longer be physically present, but the image of the stimulus is still present.
E.g. when a camera flashes and we see a ‘spot’ in a visual field that slowly disappears or when animations are just a series of pictures but it looks like they are moving, or waving a sparkler around.
Is Iconic Sensory Memory just Visual Persistence? Who argued against this position?
No, Coltheart (1980) noted some experimental manipulations that affected visual persistence did not affect the Sperling task.
Iconic sensory memory is a (very brief) store of sensory information.
Is Iconic Memory a cognitive or a physiological process?
Cognitive
Is visual persistence a cognitive or physiological process?
Physiological
