Short term and Working Memory Flashcards
Name three types of sensory memory
iconic, echoic, haptic
Also olfactory but not well researched in comparison to rodents
Describe a experimental paradigm which demonstrated a characteristic of the sensory memory by Sperling in 1960 and the results obtained from it
Partial reproduction
An array of 12 letters flash for 50 ms. Auditory tone indicates line to be remembered (e.g high pitch for top line) because by the time you ask, they will have forgotten the majority of the contents, and a visual cue also influences processing. subject repeats cued line.
If a subject gets 3/4 then you can multiply it by 3 because that’s the true contents of the memory (could have signalled any row). If you ask it without the signalling you will only repeat 4/5 total. Also performance drops with time waited.
A similar task can be done with echoic, describe it
Speakers in three different directions give four letters each. A traffic light signals which speaker to report. Same results
How long does echoic and iconic memory typically last
About 4 seconds extra material is available
How did the brown Peterson task demonstrate the limitations of the short term memory?
Three random letters which did not form a word were given for a few seconds and rather than rehearse them, they had participants do a demanding arithmetic task for a variable number of seconds, followed by some testing
It was found that percentage correct decreased over time, nearly completely gone after 15 - 18 seconds. Shows that it fades very quickly without the opportunity of mental rehearsing
Describe decay vs interference study
Wanted to know whether this forgetting was a natural decay or interference by some other cognitive process.
They had 16 digits read to participants by a male voice. The sixteenth digit (final destination of probe digit)was one that had only been repeated once before (initial destination of probe digit), the participants had to report which digit came after the probe digit upon hearing the sixteenth digit.
The digit could be in position 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12 or 14 (not known to participant.) Active rehearsal was discouraged. The more recent the probe digit was, the less ‘interfering items’ and the easier it would be to recall it.
They had a fast and slow version of this task. The idea was that a fast version would produce better performances if it was decay because it was shorter, and a more drawn out version would produce worse results if delay because it would be with a longer time frame.
What conclusions were drawn from the decay vs interference study?
Interference (how many letters in between) plays a very important role, and decay likely plays much less of a role, but there is some effect (faster is more effective than slower)
What two types of interference are there to memory?
Proactive interference- caused by all the stuff you have learned in the past
Retroactive interference is all the stuff you learn after the thing
You’re more likely to remember numbers at the start and end of a phone number, what names are given to these effects?
Primacy (more time and capacity) and recency effect
What types of memory do primacy and recency effects have and effect on?
Primacy- more long term, “secondary memory”
recency- more short term memory “primary memory”
Mostly
Describe the suffix effect
He wanted to show that the recency portion was affected by short term memory and primacy effect long.
He showed this by showing that the advantage of the last few items of a nine item list disappears when he either interfered with a loud buzzer or said ‘zero’ or something before people reported the items. The voice interfered with their processing however, while the buzzer may have startled them at first, it did not make much of a difference after getting used to it. If you have more similar sounding stuff at the end or wait long enough, the recency effect disappears.
How did Baddeley use patients to further investigate these tailed effects?
He found that amnesia patient reproduce fewer items but have a normal recency effect (short term memory)
Why was the concept of the working memory formulated?
Because it was reasoned that the function of it was the manipulation of information e.g reverse events, addition etc
Name a task to measure the short term memory
N-back task
What did Baddeley and Hitch notice while investigating the working memory?
It mattered what kind of items were being stored and if you had visual items combined with verbal items people had a much larger capacity, which you wouldn’t expect if it was just a single processor. They therefore concluded that there must be multiple components, namely a visa-spatial sketchpad (visual slave system), phonological loop (verbal slave system, 2 seconds worth) and a central executive.
