Short-Term memory

Question 1

Baddeley & Hitch (1974)

Answer 1

The three subcomponents involved are:
- Phonological loop (or the verbal working memory),
- Visuospatial sketchpad (the visual-spatial working memory),
- Central executive which involves the attentional control system

Question 2

Central Executive

Answer 2

• Limited Capacity – Data arrives from the senses but it can’t hold it for long.
• Determines how resources (slave systems) are allocated.
• It involves reasoning and decision making tasks.
• They also select strategies but can only do a limited number of things at the same time.

Question 3

Phonological Loop

Answer 3

• Limited Capacity
• Deals with auditory information and preserves
  word order – Inner Ear
• Phonological store (holds words heard)
• Articulatory process (holds words heard/seen and silently repeated (looped) like an inner voice. This is a kind of maintenance rehearsal.

Question 4

Visuo-spatial sketch pad

Answer 4

Visual and/or spatial information stored here – Inner Eye
- Visual = what things look like
- Spatial = relationships between things
- Limited capacity – 3-4 objects
Logie (1995) suggested subdivision:
- Visuo-cache (store)
- Inner scribe for spatial relations.

Question 5

Episodic Buffer

Answer 5

• Baddeley (2000) added episodic buffer as he realised model needed a more general store.
• Buffer extra storage system but with limited capacity of 4 chunks
• Integrates information from all other areas.

Question 6

Word-length effect

Answer 6

• The phonological loop explains why the word-length effect occurs.
• The fact that people cope better with short words than long words in working memory (STM).
• It seems that the phonological loop holds the amount of information that you can say in 1.5 - 2 seconds

Question 7

Articulatory process

Answer 7

• Word length effect disappears if a person is given an articulatory suppression task (‘the, the, the’ while reading the words).
• The repetitive task ties up the articulatory process and means you can’t rehearse the shorter words more quickly than the longer ones, so the word length effect disappears.

Question 8

Trace Decay Theory of
Forgetting

Answer 8

• This explanation of forgetting in STM assumes that
  memories leave a trace in the brain. A trace is some form
  of physical and/or chemical change in the nervous system.
• Trace decay theory states that forgetting occurs as a
  result of the automatic decay or fading of the memory
  trace. Trace decay theory focuses on time and the limited
  duration of short-term memory.

Question 9

Retrieval failure

Answer 9

• Retrieval failure is where the information is in long-term
  memory, but cannot be accessed. Such information is said to
  be available (i.e. it is still stored) but not accessible (i.e. it
  cannot be retrieved). It cannot be accessed because the
  retrieval cues are not present.

Question 10

Tulving (1974)

Answer 10

• Argued that information would
  be more readily retrieved if the cues present
  when the information was encoded were
  also present when its retrieval is required.