Sensory Memory and Short Term Memory Flashcards
Sensory Memory is
info from a sense that is briefly stored during perception
3 types of sensory memory
iconic: visual
echoic: auditory
haptic: touch
research questions
why do we even have sensory memory? what is the span/ duration? how is info lost? purpose?
Sperling 1960
briefly presented letters of arrays, typically only 4-5 letters were rememberd
he wanted to know if this was because of short duration or short span
Sperling 1960 partial report
cued larger arrays with bigger and more letters
sensory memory has a really large span but the duration is very short
as stimulus gets larger people can encode more but just cant report anything
Sperling 1960 Delay Results
even if we are holding info in sensory memory it kind of just decays away. Sensory memory is not meant to hold lots of info for a long period of time
Turvey 1973
wanted to know what interfered with sensory memory?
brightness masking: a bright rectangle is presented before the letters
pattern masking: insensitive to brightness works if presented in either eye
brightness mask increases w brightness, works only if presented the same eye as array
sensory memory summary
span of sensory memory is very large
duration is very short
info is lost due to decsay
purpose is to maintain info briefly while it is passed to central memory sources
Short term memory
typically 5-9 chunks
3674892- 7 chunks because no associatinos can be made
217961360
The phonological loop
a component of working memory model that deals with spoken and written material.
short term store: items begin to fade after a few sec
rehearsal: refreshers items before they decay
short term store: Peterson & Peterson
how long can info stay in STM without being rehearsed ?
short-term memory has a limited duration of approximately 18 seconds.
Phonological Loop predictions
prediction 1: items that sound similar are going to be more confusable. so like B and V and M and N
prediction 2: word that take longer to pronounce decay faster
Conrad 1964
phonological similarity affect
letters that are related as sounding similar are also more likely to me misremembered
as each other
acoustic similarity also makes some lists more difficult
Baddley, Thomas, Buchanan (1975)
word learning effect:
if the lists is short with short syllabus we can remember more words,harder to pronounce
for longer word even if they are just they decay faster because they are long
summary
verbal STM representations are sound based
representations are maintained through a speech like process, has a limited capacity
capacity can be improved w chunking
Primacy and Recency
primacy: the tendency to recall information presented at the start of a list better than information at the middle or end. the result of words being stored in LTM and rehearsed
recency; 2 kinds
short term recency; Items are more retrievable
