Lecture 10: Working Memory Flashcards
Working Memory
The part of short-term memory that is concerned with immediate conscious perceptual and linguistic processing
Working Memory in Mental Arithmetic
Remembering what is in the 1’s place and 10’s place when adding 3-digit numbers
Measure of Working Memory Span
The number of last words in a sentence you can remember from a list of sentences
Raven’s Progressive Matrices
A study where participants had to try and figure out what should go on the bottom right of a series of shapes while remembering what is in each row to fit the pattern
Raven’s Matrices Score Trends
The scores for Raven’s matrices gets worse as we get older, and people with better WM do better
Aging and Working Memory
WM is worse the older one is
Interference
Asking one to do a WM task, such as RNG, along with a syllogistic task will result in difficulty in the syllogistic task
Syllogistic Reasoning
“All A’s are B’s and all B’s are C’s then all A’s are C’s,” depends on working memory
Reading Comprehension and Working Memory
We remember words that came earlier in the sentence in order to comprehend the passage
Double Dissociations
Having people do two different tasks one relying on WM and one on LTM. One person who has damaged WM does well at LTM tasks, and vice versa, allowing us to conclude that these two things depend at least in part on different underlying systems
Primacy Effect
People tend to remember the first few things in a list, a LTM process
Serial Position Curve
Performance at beginning and end of the list is higher up than the middle
Baddeley’s 3-Part WM Model
Visuospatial Buffer, central executive, and phonological buffer/loop
Recency Effect
People tend to remember the last few things in a list, a WM process
Visuospatial Buffer
- Visuospatial Sketchpad/Buffer: The component of WM devoted to visual imagery and spatial processing
○ Information can enter either through visual perception or from long-term memory - Information can be treated like a percept: scanned rotated, etc.
Central Executive
Supervise attention, planning/coordination, monitoring
Phonological Loop Evidence
Acoustic confusion, acoustic similarity effect, and articulatory suppression
Phonological Buffer/Loop
Language sounds are stored in short term memory, and are refreshed by saying them to yourself to remember them
Acoustic Confusion
Giving people lists of things that are acoustically confusable will remember them worse than ones that are not confusable
Acoustic Similarity Effect
Giving peoples list of words that have the same meaning does not cause confusion, only sound does
Articulatory Suppression
Frequently saying the word “the” when reading a list makes people remember the list worse because you cannot rehearse the words in the list
Chunks
Chunking letters helps to remember things when they stand for something/are familiar. Ex. remembering the number 122436 as “12, 24, 36”
Phonological Loop PET Evidence
Broca’s and Parietal light up in the left brain
Behavioral Double Dissociation: Brooks gave a visuospatial and phonological task
○ Had to remember a sentence and say how many nouns there were
○ Also a shape with the words yes and no around it
○ Gave a vocal or visuospatial response
- Mixing up vocal and visuospatial results in a much shorter completion time
Time Effects
○ Word Length: People are much better at remembering short words than long words, they can rehearse them more
○ Speed of Speech: People who talk faster have a better working memory
- WM Span is large for… Words that are pronounced quickly, people who speak quickly, and languages where words can be pronounced quickly
Visuospatial Sketchpad PET Evidence
Prefrontal and occipital light up in the right brain
