Memory and Cognition Flashcards
Understanding different forms of memory and processes
What are the key elements inside the Standard Model/ Modal Model of memory?
3 types of memory:
Sensory Memory
Working (short-term) Memory
Long-term memory
Also:
Control processes and Varieties of Sensory Memory ( visual/iconic memory and Auditory/ echoic memory
What happens inside the Multi-store Model of Memory
Sensory Memory: our senses pick up a ton of information from our environment, visual, hear, taste, and touch. That information comes into our sensory memory - however, its easily lost if not attended to.
Working Memory/ short term: This is the memory system where all the action is. Here we can become conscious of information, can manipulate it, it’s the workbench of our memory.
- If we don’t maintain/rehearse the info - it won’t be retained for very long
Long-Term Memory: Our repository for all the knowledge we have, events that matter to us. This is all preserved at the forefront of our consciousness but isn’t easily accessible at every given time. We must have a trigger to retrieve it.
Control processes: How our memory systems interact with each other. Sensory M moves into Working M, and working M moves into Long-term M.
- As our SM moves into our WM we can manipulate whatever is in there - problem-solving, planning, reasoning
- As our WM moves into our LM, it can trigger what it needs from our LM to help with WM.
What are William James Book’s names for memory?
Primary Memory: a lot like working memory
Secondary Memory: long-term Memory
What are the features of Sensory Memory?
Function: takes in info from all of our senses, registering it momentarily
Capacity: contains heaps of information/ large capacity - unless attended to we forget it
Duration: brief, 200-300 mls/ a third of a sec for visual. 2-3 sec for auditory.
Code: It’s a raw copy of the info.
Forgetting: caused by rapid decay of info
What are the features of Working Memory?
Function: conscious real-time thoughts, planning problem solving, reasoning, info is at the forefront of our brain.
Capacity: quite small. We can lose our ideas quickly if we don’t use techniques to retain them. We can only deal with a limited amount of info, we’d get overloaded if we didn’t forget stuff.
Duration: stays while its being processed/ worked on.
Code: acoustic- articulatory code, i.e inner voice.
Forgetting: Interference with current thought, replaced by new info
What are the features of long-term Memory?
Function: To store information permanently - info that’s meaningful, impactful, knowledge
Capacity: Limitless as long as your brain is healthy
Duration: Relatively permanent. As long as the info has been consolidated/made stronger, should stay for ages.
Code: Semantic, or by meaning. Has some importance.
Forgetting: Losing access, everything is stored but it’s retrieval is determined by an appropriate cue
What are the features of Control Processes?
Attention: If info is attended to in the sensory memory store, it moves to WM.
Rehearsal: Maintenance vs elaborative rehearsal
- Maintenance Rehearsal - repeating things to yourself (not the best for retaining)
Elaborative- if we embellish or elaborate on a memory it helps to encode it more durably. Assign it to something we already occupy in our memory.
Encoding: Controls the movement of info from WM to LM
Retrieval: The access from our LM and placing it in our WM
How did Sperling (1960) discover Visual Sensory Memory? And what are the elements of it?
Referred to as Iconic Memory. The iconic store - visual sensory store.
- holds much info - lost if unattended.
They discovered this by briefly presenting stimuli using the Whole Report Procedure
- eg. a visual array of letters for 50ms and asking to recall information.
Or the Partial Report Procedure: Just before the image is shown, a tone indicates which row to focus on, and then they recall
This is called: The Span of Imprehension: where they analysed letter recall after exposing the patient to an array of letters.
- The letters quickly dissipate, only able to recall 4-5 of 12 letters in whole report.
In partial report there was more success.
Barriers: To recall or write down, time is elapsing during that process - meaning you forget as time goes on
Conclusion: We have all the information but as time goes on we lose it.
Duration Time: calculated by testing different time gaps and comparing different recall amounts. - depending on different delays, recall rate was impacted
Eriksen and Collins Iconic Memory study
Display: They flashed two visual patterns of random dots, one after the other, with a short time gap between them.
Task: Participants were asked to identify a letter or a shape formed by combining the two patterns.
Results: Participants could successfully identify the combined shape only if the time gap between the two patterns was very short (less than about 250 milliseconds).
This experiment showed that iconic memory retains visual information for a very brief period, allowing the integration of two successive images into a coherent perception if the interval is short enough.
What did Warren and Warren (1970) Echoic Memory experiment consist of and find?
Participants listened to a sentence and a certain word was muffled at the beginning - each participant filled in the gap in relation to what the rest of the sentence was. Our brain fills in gaps while the word lingers in our echoic memory, and disambiguates it based on the subsequent word.
When people were told of this intentional sentence flaw, they took a guess at the word.
What is attention?
It is the passage to consciousness.
Selective Listening
Selective Viewing
What is the Paradox of Attention?
On one hand, we want to be able to focus well without being distracted.
On the other hand, we need to be able to be distracted due to potential dangers in our environment - or just things that are more important than the current task
Our attention must be successful at doing both
What are the Mechanisms of attention?
To be able to focus mental resources on the task at hand without being distracted by irrelevant stimuli.
To be able to monitor stimuli that are irrelevant to the task and to be able to shift immediately if its important
What does the generalised model of attention consist of?
It is a representation of how our attention operates.
- All sorts of info is picked up through our sensory memory (bottom-up processes).
- But only some of it is passed through the gate to our working memory.
- We use top-down processes to control what we allow into our working memory
- Attention facilitates encoding
What is the Cocktail Party Phenommenna and who tested it?
The cocktail party phenomenon is the ability to focus on a single conversation in a noisy environment while filtering out other background noise. It also includes the ability to quickly shift attention if something personally relevant, like your name, or logically relevant to a specific topic, is mentioned in the background. Found by Colin Cherry through his own experience and then further lab testing.
