Psychological Mechanisms and Types of Processes Flashcards
Describe the Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) memory sistem model
Atkinson and Shiffrin described the memory system in terms of a multi-store model with three types of memory storage:
1) The sensory store: this is divided into the echoic and iconic store and it is the part of the memory that is in direct contact with the environment
2) Short-term store/working memory: takes information from the sensory store and saves what’s important
3) Long-term memory store: it is ‘who’ we are as it includes all of our knowledge, experience, …It is divided into declarative (episodic and semantic) and non-declarative memory
The Atkinson and Shiffrin multi-store model contains the iconic store. The characteristics of the iconic store are:
A) It holds information for about half second.
B) The information is highly interpreted due to differences in our visual systems
C) The information that enters is already meaninful because we directed our view there.
D) The information is held in a relatively raw and uniterpreted form.
Correct answers:
A) It holds information for about half second.
D) The information is held in a relatively raw and uninterpreted form.
How would you test that the iconic store only holds information for a brief moment after the stimulus is presented?
I would conduct Sperling’s partial report task. In this task, participants are asked to look at and remember a grid of letters (3x3) for a very brief time. Participants can usually only report a partial number of letters because we only hold information for a short amount of time.
The Atkinson and Shiffrin multi-store model contains the iconic store and echoic store. Why is the capacity of the echoic store much longer (2-4s compared to 0.5s) than the iconic store?
This is because it is neccesary for us to hold sound longer in order to engage in conversation. We could not follow along if it only held information for 0.5 seconds.
Fill in.
After conducting the digit span tests, researchers found the ____ and ____________ effects, which say that recall is much higher for the first and last few items on the list than for others. They also discovered the fragility of storage, which says that …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
After conducting the digit span tests, researchers found the primacy and recency effects, which say that recall is much higher for the first and last few items on the list than for others. They also discovered the fragility of storage, which says that any distraction usually causes forgetting.
When conducting the Digit span test, reasearchers saw that participants had an easier time remembering [1940202485] than [8054289353]. Explain why.
8054289353 is much harder to chunk into meanigful units, unlike 1940202485, which we can chunk into a date (for example: 1940, 2024, 8, 5). Chunking therefore plays a significant role in our working memory capacity.
It’s also because dates can be semantically encoded, i.e. we can link them to existing knowledge in our long-term memory making recall much easier (which, arguably, could be more important thank chunking but okay)
A research conducted by Swets, Desmet and Fererira (2005) showed that people have a preference for either low or high attachment in structurally ambigous sentences. How would someone with a high-attachment preference chunk this sentence? What about low?
Someone shot the sister of the actress who was on the balcony
Someone shot the sister of the actress who was on the balcony
High attachment ->Someone shot the sister [of the actress] who was on the balcony (the sister was on the balcony)
Low attachment -> Someone shot the sister [of the actress who was on the balcony] (the actress was on the balcony)
Explain the results.
Swets, Desmet&Fererira (2005) did an experiment where they predicted people with low working memory would prefer a preference for low attachment and people with high working memories high attachment.
Results:
High span: [Someone shot the sister of the actress who was on the balcony] (the actress was on the balcony)
Low span: Someone shot// the sister of the actress// who was on the balcony (the sister was on the balcony).
The researchers thought that people with a high attention span would prefer high attachment, but the results were the opposite because they actually prefered low attachment. The same happened with low span people (prefer high attachment). It is presumed that in high span individuals, they choose the most salient/recent entity (predicted by recency accounts) while low span individuals prefer to chunk more and the sister is more salient due to chunking.
What we can conclude is that the way we chunk can determine our understanding of a word.
Cohen et. al proposed that we divide long term memory into two subdivisions. Name and explain the two divisions.
Long term memory is divided into declarative and procedural memory. Declarative memory is that, which we can talk about and is further divided into episodic (what happened to us) and semantic (facts about the world). Procedural memory, on the other hand, concerns mostly implicit memory of motor and cognitive skills (riding a bike).
There is a double dissociation between long-term and short term memory (remember patient H&M)
Fill in.
The information processing view of memory draws an analogy between the human brain and a ————. According to this view, information enters the system, is ———– and
——– in various ways and then is stored in buffers that have different capacities and durations.
The information-processing view of memory draws an analogy between the human brain and a computer . According to this view, information enters the system, is processed and coded in various ways, and is then stored in buffers that have different capacities and durations.
According to serial processing, …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… On the other hand, according to parralel processing, ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
According to serial processing, a group of processes take place one at a time (we make the best guess based on partial information and revise if neccessary). On the other hand, according to parralel processing, a group of processes takes place simultaneously (activating all possibilites on the basis of partial information and then choosing the best candidate).
A word is an ———– relationship between ——– and ———-.
A word is an arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning
Explain the steps in serial and in parallel processing.
In serial processing, we have an input, which we phonologically process. Then, we activate our lexical access and perform syntactic parsing.
In parallel processing, we have an input but then we simultaneously process phonologically, syntactically and lexically.
You would like to know if we process serially or parallelly. What experiment would you conduct?
I could try the speech shadowing task, in which participants repeat back speech exactly as they hear it. Results from these experiments show that even close shadowers (250ms delay) make constructive errors (errors that fix what was structurally inappropriate), which indicates analysis is parallel to phonological information and lexical access.
Example:
It was beginning to be light enoush so I could see -> shadower: It was beginning to be light enough so that I could see.
Does the acoustic signal constrain meaning?
Yes. This is a bottom-up influence (hearing ‘bread’ will lead you to understand ‘bread’ not ‘koala’)
