Lecture 15 Flashcards
What are the three functions that memory has?
- A system that allows us to store facts and retrieve them
- An ability to relate new events to previous knowledge in order to understand them
- An ability to deliver relevant knowledge when needed
List three different types of memory
not short, long, working and sensory
Episodic memory: Specific details of events
Semantic memory: Storing facts and categories of information
Procedural memory: The ability to remember skills
What helps the flow of sensory to short term to long term memory?
To shift information from sensory memory to short term, attention is required and to shift information from short term to long term, rehearsal is required. The sensory stores hold more than we can process.
What are the two characteristics of short term memory?
Limited capacity; this is shown via the recency effect and our digit span.
Fragility of storage; information decays rapidly and interference affects the store.
Discuss the digit span in terms of short term memory
Our short term memory can only recall a certain number of digits in a row. However, when you group digits into chunks, they are easier to recall, e.g. phone numbers.
Discuss the fragility of storage in short term memory
Participants had to remember sets of three letters and they then had a filler task or didn’t. The participants who completed a filler task, had significantly poorer performance. Also, memory recall was poor because of proactive interference; difficulty learning new material as previous material interferes. For example, all of the content to learn consisted of sets of 3 letters, however, if one set consisted of 3 numbers then there would be less interference and recall would be better as there is a release from proactive interference.
How is information encoded in the short term store?
The information processing approach believes that it is encoded in an acoustic verbal code; the acoustic articulatory code. For example, when recalling letters incorrectly, the incorrect recall usually has phonetic similarity to the correct letter. Also, recall is worse when distracter items rhyme with the proper items. However, further research has shown that there are semantic and visual codes also. This is shown because there is also a release from proactive interference when semantic categories of information change in the last trial. These different variety of codes do not interfere with each other.
Is working memory a type of sensory, short or long term memory?
Short term.
What is working memory?
Baddeley and Hitch developed the idea and look at how information in the short term memory is used, not just stored. They looked into this because there were inadequacies in the simple ‘information is stored’ approach. For example, if the short term store can only hold 7 +/- 2 items of information, then how can the short term store problem solve, comprehend and reason as these are too complicated. Also, people with short term memory impairments can still comprehend, reason and problem solve in a short term situation. There must be a larger system. This larger system has three components; executive control (working memory), phonological loop (retention of verbal information) and the visuospatial scratchpad (the retention of visual information). The central executive overrules the other components. This idea believes that memory recall should decline if two tasks are from the same component, but there should be no effect on recall if from different components. You can listen and write fine but cannot listen and talk fine as cognitive load is increased.
Give evidence for the components of working memory
Neurological evidence: People having impairments in their digit span but still able to problem solve.
Experimental evidence: Participants doing reasoning tasks whilst counting backwards in 3s, the counting should occupy the short term memory capacity, however, participants were still able to reason. Also, the word length effect; people are better at recalling short words and if you suppress articulatory control then there is no word length effect. Irrelevant speech also impairs recall as it takes up space in the phonological loop. Also, visuospatial task results are interfered when there’s is dynamic visual noise as both systems are being used. Participants were asked to randomly generate numbers every second. They were stopped in the middle and asked about their thoughts, those with no thoughts, generated numbers truly randomly and those with thoughts did not have a random generation. This is because the central executive was active and organising thought.
Intuitive evidence: When rehearsing 3 words, we say it in our head slower than rehearsing 6 words because our articulatory process tries to fit the information into 2 seconds as that is the capacity of its storage.
What are the two parts in the phonological loop?
The phonological store: Holds acoustic information for about 2 seconds.
The articulatory control process: The inner speech we all hear.
What does the central executive do?
It switches retrieval plans, it time-shares dual tasks, it has selective attention and it can temporarily activate long term memory. It could be seen as an attentional system.
Discuss Ebbinghaus’ theory of forgetting
He believed in the savings method; forgetting information rapidly in the first hour of retesting but after that the time it took to forget reduced.
An alternative theory of forgetting is the evolutionary view that there is no advantage in remembering information that is no longer relevant.
Discuss the interference theory
There are two types of interference involved in memory. One type is proactive interference; older memories interfering with new memories.
Retroactive interference; forgetting old information due to new information being encoded over it.
Discuss Freudian repression
According to Freud, traumatic memories become inaccessible to conscious awareness. However, a lot of the data gathered on this was not valid.
