Lecture 14 - Short-term (&working) Memory Flashcards
attentional blink
attentional breakdown
is a temporary decrease in the ability to detect a 2nd target
soon after successfully detecting a 1st target.
can describe it by the lag
The deficit in being able to recall T2 is largest if presented
________ after the presentation of T1.
200 ms (after 180ms)
what are some possible causes of
capacity limitation: sensory processing ins’t quite finished with the first target (if it’s really close together it might bind T1 and T2)
switch cost: loss in switching
Can the attentional blink be altered with extensive training?
• Green & Bavelier (2003)
hypothesis: if people had game expertise (training capacity) maybe the attentional blink would go away
Action video game players (VGPs)
were compared to nonVGPs.
huge finding: you can improve!!
- the system has some plasticity
but also it doesn’t completely go away (never get rid of task switching)
Was the difference only for items in the center of vision where you
focus on the game?
• No. They found improvements for a peripheral target detection task at eccentricities outside a game environment.
• This suggests that the skills
learned in gaming GENERALIZE
outside the original viewing area = seeing and responding to things faster
•!!! Generalization is a rare finding
(e.g. chess skill doesn’t tend to
generalize), so this is an intriguing
finding.
Do gamers self-select? Green &
Bavelier
- who plays video games? (people who are good at video games - maybe the original finding just had selected people who were innately better with viseo-spatial tasks)
trained novices on an action game and control game (tetris).
• The training time was 1 hour per
day, over 10 days.
• Peripheral vision and attentional
blink improvements were found in
the action game group.
- still generalized!!!!
• Improvement was not as large,
but was consistent.
• Potential to use ‘games’ for rehabilitation and enhancement in the future (Bavelier & Davidson, 2013). - ppl who had strokes
(opening more channels or optimizing what’s already there)
What about other cognitive training like mindfulness and integrative body-mind training (IBMT)?
• reviewed studies of attention training (e.g. video game practice) versus attention state training (e.g.
meditation, mindfulness, and exposure to nature).
• They report similar improvements in executive attention, but possibly due to different mechanisms.
- maybe in meditation you’re better at being able to focus at one task at a time so you can process faster
generalizable and improve-able skills
reaction time and task switching
attention state training
not developing a certain skill
looks at trying to produce a positive state of mind for attending to stimuli
lowering the internal noise or being less distractable when doing a task
H.M.
Henry Molaison
had short-term memory but couldn’t form long-term memory
• Had surgery for intractable epilepsy in 1953, removing large sections of both medial temporal lobes (including hippocampal
formations and entorhinal cortex ==> strongly involved in memory encoding and storage).
- For the rest of his life, he suffered anterograde amnesia – the inability to form new permanent memories.
- This demonstrated that short-term memory and long-term memory were functional separable.
There are three general tasks that are thought to be fundamental to
any kind of memory system:
elements of short term memory
doesn’t matter if it’s a computer or organic system
encoding –> storage –> retrieval
encoding
The process of translating experiences into a format that
can be represented within memory. [Chunking, verbal/phonological cues, spatial cues]
have to format, translate the incoming information and put it in terms the brain can use
encode sensory data coming in
storage
The process of storing and maintaining a representation with
memory. [Rehearsal]
retrieval
The process of making stored information available at
relevant times.
you have to have access to it
short-term memory
is the temporary storing and maintenance of immediately useful information. It is sometimes called primary
memory.
what you’re experiencing right now
The Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory model (1968)
model for short term memory
have some input that goes to sensory memory (sth really really short) and you need attention to take hold of this sensory memory and make it available to STM, STM can act on these things (rehearse, encode, decision making) and then you have response
at the end of this process it gets transferred to LTM
Sensory memory
one kind of sensory memory for each sense (haptic, iconic, etc..)
very large storage (can take in a lot of info at one time)
very rapid decay (all this stuff gets overwritten if you don’t use it ~1 sec)
attended stimuli transfer to STM
short-term memory
Multimodal: one thing that takes in all the modalities
small capacity
quick decay ( <1 min) and over-writting
rehearsal preserves info in STM
transfer to (and from) long-term memory
Sensory memory and short-term memory operate
differently, and with different capacities. Recall that attention spares some information in sensory memory for additional processing in shortterm
memory.
What was the experiment or technique that demonstrated
the capacity differences between sensory and short-term
memory?
The Sperling partial report of letters experiment.
tones tell people which row to report
there was more available in sensory memory than in short-term memory
sensory memory larger capacity that
short term memory
Within STM, we use maintenance rehearsal
to keep information available.
This can be done with simple subvocal (own voice inside your head) repetition of the information
Two primary problems can take place within maintenance rehearsal :
- interference from other tasks prevents maintenance.
2. forgetting will occur as new items crowd out old items.
interference experiment
Peterson & Peterson (1959)
• presented participants with a three-letter consonant group
(e.g. BKF). They were then shown a three-digit number (e.g. 397) and told to count backwards
by threes.
- The counting interferes with rehearsal.
- The longer the delay due to counting, the less you are likely to remember the letters.
can’t subvocalize if you’re vocalizing some other task
forgetting
will occur as new items crowd
out old items: new things pushing out old info
• Capacity is very limited, so newer items will tend to ‘push out’ older items.
• For example, if you have a long mental list of shopping items, you will tend to only remember the most important items that are
rehearsed.
Coding (also called encoding)
what is the way you are using to memorize this (changing sensory data to something you can recall in STM)?
establishes the form of the representations with STM.
Do we remember information in terms of how it looks, how it sounds, or some underlying
meaning? This can be tested using interference effects.
interference effects
Conrad (1964)
• presented subjects with a series of consonants (e.g. MSTLJX).
- Subjects read aloud some random digits for a time and were then told to recall the consonants.
- The errors made suggested acoustic confusions: MSVLKX, where V sounds like T and K sounds like J (phonological cues)
- Suggests: Sounds of letters interfered with each other, suggesting phonological (verbal) encoding.
