Memory Flashcards
What is meant by capacity ?
The amount of information that can be stored
What is meant by duration ?
The length of time that information can be stored
What is meant by encoding ?
The way that sensory input is represented e.g. visual, acoustic, semantic
What is meant by sensory memory ?
A brief storage of information where information is held until it can be recognised
What is Short Term Memory (STM) ?
Information is stored here for a brief period of time, this is often also called the working memory
What is Long Term Memory (LTM) ?
Vast amounts of information can be held here for long periods of time as long as a lifetime
What is meant by retrieval ?
Finding and accessing memory when it is needed
How is information in the sensory memory forgotten ?
Decay
How is information lost from the STM ?
Decay and displacement
How is information in the LTM lost ?
Retrieval failure and interference
How is information moved from the sensory memory to the STM ?
Attention
How is information moved from the STM to the LTM ?
Rehearsal
How is information moved from the LTM to the STM ?
Retrieval
What are the five sensory stores ?
Visual-Iconic
Auditory-Echoic
Touch-Haptic
Smell-Olfactory
Taste-Gustatory
Outline the procedure of Sperling’s study
He asked the participants to remember as many letters as they could from a grid of 12 which were displayed for 1/20 of a second
Outline the findings of Sperling’s study
Most participants could only remember around 4 of the letters they were shown, however, 75% reported seeing more letters than they were able to recall
What does Sperling’s study conclude about the sensory memory?
It has a very large capacity
Outline the findings of Crowder’s study
The duration of the sensory memory is 500ms for visual information and 2-3s for auditory information
How is information coded for in the sensory memory?
Crowder - sense specific
Outline the procedure of Miller
Participants were asked to immediately recall a list of numbers they had just been read by the researcher, each time they gave a correct answer, the list would increase in length by one more number, this was repeated until the participant could no longer recall the list
Outline the findings of Miller
Miller found that the capacity of the STM was 7 plus or minus 2 this is because most participants could remember 5-9 digits
What is one way that the capacity of the STM can be increased?
Chunking
What is meant by chunking ?
Where multiple items are grouped together so that they become 1 item
Outline the procedure of Peterson and Peterson
They showed participants trigrams and then made them complete a distraction task during a delay between them being shown the trigram and being asked to recall it, the delays started from 3 and increased by 3s each time until they reached 18s