Short-term memory

Question 1

Short-term memory definition

Answer 1

The capacity for holding something in the brain for short period of time. It is active readily available state

Question 2

Serial position chart

Answer 2

When listening to a list, you will remember the first and last thing you hear
- primacy effect – early words can be rehearsed more often time for deeper encoding
- recency effect – last words still in memory. (Reduced when doing task during retention interval.)

Question 3

Three stages of short-term memory

Answer 3

1. Item presentation
2. Retention interval.
3. Recall.

Question 4

Memory in general stages

Answer 4

Encoding – storage – retrieval

Question 5

Chunking hypothesis

Answer 5

Small units can be combined into larger Meaningful units. Chunks are based on a prior knowledge.

Question 6

Chunking- Miller

Answer 6

5 to 9 chunks
Physically, the amount of information doesn’t really matter, but how you can chunk into groups .
Evidence for this is that 3 letter cvc nonsense words are equivalent to three, 3-letter words
Chunk determines performance not # of letters

Question 7

What are some reason reasons why we forget?

Answer 7

1. Passage of time/competing stimuli
2. Proactive interference- what you know makes it hard to learn new information. I.e. Your language makes it hard to learn a new language.
3. Retroactive interference: new learning comes in the way of old learning. I.e. New phone number have problem, remembering old phone number.

Question 8

Modal model of memory

Answer 8

Memory is in multiple stores
1. Sensory stores – very brief unique to each sense.
2. Short-term memory: limited capacity. Seconds –> minutes.
3. Long-term memory: long periods unlimited capacity.

Question 9

Active control process

Answer 9

1. Rehearsal.
2. Strategies to make stimulus memorable.
3. Attention strategies.

Question 10

What is working memory?

Answer 10

The ability to hold information in your mind and manipulate that information

Question 11

Give an example of evidence for the working memory model

Answer 11

Dual task paradigm: two tasks at the same time.
- Primary task: variety of complex resources, demanding tasks – this involves reasoning.

Question 12

Shouldn’t you not be able to do reasoning and recall at the same time?

Answer 12

The STM stores and processes all of the information simultaneously. It can be done in parallel.
This shows up a lot in attention deficit

Question 13

What are the two parts of the phonological loop?

Answer 13

1. Phonological store- holds items passively online in acoustic format.
2. Rehearsal process – refresh memory, in phonological store item by item

Question 14

Two parts of the VSSP

Answer 14

1. Visual cachet – holds visuospatial information.
2. Internal scribe – carries out cognitive operations of this information. (I.e. rotates it)
   VSSP has separate mechanisms to process the information