memory

Question 1

what is sensory memory and does it fade very quickly?

Answer 1

• mental representation of how environmental events look, sound, feel, smell and taste
• YES

Question 2

what are the 2 important brain regions that play a role in memory?

Answer 2

• temporal cortex that includes the hippocampus (associated with storage of new memories)
• prefrontal cortex (associated with encoding new memories and retrieving old memories)

Question 3

what is the MSM of memory?

Answer 3

• Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968)
• sensory store > attention > STM > LTM

Question 4

what is a critical element in the MSM of memory + research?

Answer 4

• the idea that the amount of rehearsal determines whether information is transferred to long-term memory
• Rundus (1971) asked participants to rehearse out loud, and the results showed that the more that pp’s rehearsed an item, the more likely they were to remember it

Question 5

what is some evaluation of the MSM of memory?

Answer 5

• Souza & Obeaurer (2018)
• manipulate the number of rehearsals (repeating the words) opportunity for lists of 6 words
• examined the performance proportion of correct responses)
• there was no difference between performance despite the important difference between rehearsal opportunity

Question 6

what is the WMM?

Answer 6

• Baddeley & Hitch (1974)
• central executive: attentional system; coordinating activity within the cognitive system
• phonological loop: process and store information briefly in phonological form (speech-based)
• the visuo-spatial sketchpad:process and store spatial and visual information briefly
• episodic buffer is a passive system that integrates information from different systems

Question 7

what is the most important part of the WMM and what does it include?

Answer 7

• most important component is the PL and it includes:
• the articulatory process: inner voice that rehearses verbal information (information is loss if not rehearses); auditory information can enter the phonological store directly, but visual information must be rehearsed
• phonological store: inner ear that stores information in phonological form

Question 8

evidence for existence of articulatory loop?

Answer 8

• word length effect (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan, 1975)
• pp’s performance is superior for word that are faster to repeat (e.g., wit, sum, harm, bay, top) relative to slower to repeat words (e.g., university, opportunity, hippopotamus, constitutional, auditorium)

Question 9

what is some evaluation of the WMM?

Answer 9

• Jalbert et al. (2011)
• show that in all previous demonstration short words had more orthographic neighbours (words of the same length that differ by one letter: cat and bat)
• word with more orthographic neighbour (words that shared all the letters except one: cat and bat) are better remember than words with less orthographic neighbour
• found the word length effect is absent if short and long word are controlled for orthographic neighbours

Question 10

what is consciousness?

Answer 10

anything and everything that one experiences, including but not limited to the experience of the external world and the experience of oneself

Question 11

what is awareness?

Answer 11

• refers to the conscious experience that something exists
• awareness is a specific form of conscious experience

Question 12

awareness and memory according to MSM?

Answer 12

we need to pay attention and rehearse the information for it to be transferred in long-term memory

Question 13

awareness and memory according to Hebb?

Answer 13

• we can learn information without awareness
• “cells that fire together, wire together”

Question 14

what is the Hebb repetition effect?

Answer 14

• pp’s study sequence of nine digits and every three trials 1 list is repeated (4-3-2-1-9-8-7-5-6)
• pp’s are not aware of the repetition
• performance in the repeated list gradually improve
• these results suggest that we don’t need to be conscious to learn

Question 15

what is some evaluation of Hebb (1961)?

Answer 15

• Musfeld et al. (2023)
• directly measuring repetition awareness revealed that awareness almost invariably preceded or co-occurred with learning
• their findings suggest that awareness of the recognition of the repetition triggers a swift boost on knowledge formation

Question 16

STM/WM is affected by numerous factors … ?

Answer 16

• word frequency (how frequent a word is in the language)
• high frequency words are remembered better than low-frequency words
• concreteness (how easy it is to create a mental picture of a word)
• concrete words are remembered better than abstract words

Question 17

According to Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum (1957), emotional stimuli can be described in what three components?

Answer 17

• valence: refers to whether a word is generally seen as being positive (e.g., vacation) or negative (e.g., pain)
• arousal: refers to whether a word is generally seen as calm (e.g., asleep) to exciting (e.g., party)
• dominance: refers to whether a word is generally as the level of control from submissive (e.g., lobotomy) to more in control (e.g., successful)

Question 18

what was the valence and memory study by Bireta et al., (2021)?

Answer 18

• according to the NEVER model, negative words will be remembered better than positive words
• Bireta et al. ask participants to study lists of 7 emotional words (positive or negative)
• unlike the prediction of the NEVER model, the performance was not different
• so maybe emotional stimuli does not affect memory performance

Question 19

what was the arousal and memory study by Landry et al., (2022)?

Answer 19

• asked pp’s to study lists of 6 emotional words (low arousal or high arousal)
• unlike valence, arousal affects memory performance
• some emotional words affect memory performance

Question 20

does emotional stimuli affect memory performance (valence vs arousal)?

Answer 20

• valence = NO (Bireta et al., 2021)
• arousal = YES (Landry et al., 2022)