Lecture 14 - Short-term (&working) Memory

Question 1

attentional blink

Answer 1

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

Question 2

The deficit in being able to recall T2 is largest if presented
________ after the presentation of T1.

Answer 2

200 ms (after 180ms)

Question 3

what are some possible causes of

Answer 3

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

Question 4

Can the attentional blink be altered with extensive training?

• Green & Bavelier (2003)

Answer 4

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)

Question 5

Was the difference only for items in the center of vision where you
focus on the game?

Answer 5

• 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.

Question 6

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)

Answer 6

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)

Question 7

What about other cognitive training like mindfulness and integrative body-mind training (IBMT)?

Answer 7

• 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

Question 8

generalizable and improve-able skills

Answer 8

reaction time and task switching

Question 9

attention state training

Answer 9

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

Question 10

H.M.

Henry Molaison

Answer 10

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.

Question 11

There are three general tasks that are thought to be fundamental to
any kind of memory system:

elements of short term memory

Answer 11

doesn’t matter if it’s a computer or organic system

encoding –> storage –> retrieval

Question 12

encoding

Answer 12

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

Question 13

storage

Answer 13

The process of storing and maintaining a representation with

memory. [Rehearsal]

Question 14

retrieval

Answer 14

The process of making stored information available at
relevant times.

you have to have access to it

Question 15

short-term memory

Answer 15

is the temporary storing and maintenance of immediately useful information. It is sometimes called primary
memory.

what you’re experiencing right now

Question 16

The Atkinson-Shiffrin Memory model (1968)

Answer 16

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

Question 17

Sensory memory

Answer 17

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

Question 18

short-term memory

Answer 18

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

Question 19

Sensory memory and short-term memory operate

Answer 19

differently, and with different capacities. Recall that attention spares some information in sensory memory for additional processing in shortterm
memory.

Question 20

What was the experiment or technique that demonstrated
the capacity differences between sensory and short-term
memory?

Answer 20

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

Question 21

sensory memory larger capacity that

Answer 21

short term memory

Question 22

Within STM, we use maintenance rehearsal

Answer 22

to keep information available.

This can be done with simple subvocal (own voice inside your head) repetition of the information

Question 23

Two primary problems can take place within maintenance rehearsal :

Answer 23

1. interference from other tasks prevents maintenance.

2. forgetting will occur as new items crowd out old items.

Question 24

interference experiment

Peterson & Peterson (1959)

Answer 24

• 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

Question 25

forgetting

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

Coding (also called encoding)

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

interference effects

Conrad (1964)

Answer 27

• 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.