STM & Working Memory

Question 1

neurological evidence for distinctions (baddeley & warrington)

Answer 1

AMNESIACS VS. NORMAL CONTROLS
- free recall task (does recall come immediately after or after a delay?)
- amnesiac performance was extremely hurt by a delay while controls suffered but not to the same extent

Question 2

neurogical evidence for distinctions (wickelgren)

Answer 2

HIPPOCAMPUS REMOVAL
- STM was good, LTM was impacted
- certain injuries to the brain yield different results

Question 3

serial position curve

Answer 3

recency effect: items presented at the END of a list are MORE LIKELY to be remembered
primacy effect: rehearsing something multiple times sends it to LTM temporarily

Question 4

primacy portion

Answer 4

affected by AMOUNT or TYPE of rehearsal

Question 5

“thinking aloud” experiment

Answer 5

• example of rehearsal effect on primacy
• verbal evidence for how often something is rehearsed
• more rehearsal = more primacy
• rehearsal affects primacy but NOT relevancy

Question 6

chunking

Answer 6

• changes 7 +/- 2
• FrogBatPigDuck
• groups of sound-alikes

Question 7

dominant code

Answer 7

• auditory NOT visual
• iconic memory = things are confused if they look similar
• STM = things are confused if they sound similar
• rehearsal through phonological code (voice in our head)
• B C P T V = sound-alikes = more room for confusion

Question 8

tri-gram

Answer 8

• used to test STM store
• if we don’t rehearse info, it is lost over time

Question 9

proactive interference

Answer 9

• previously learned knowledge interferes with info being learned in the present
• Switching the category to be remembered (words to numbers or flowers to professions) should eliminate, or release Ps, from Proactive interference

Question 10

retroactive interference

Answer 10

current info being learned interferes with previously learned knowledge

Question 11

how do memory stores differ from one another?

Answer 11

1) temporal duration
2) storage capacity
3) forgetting mechanism
4) effects of brain damage

Question 12

brain damage’s effect of memory

Answer 12

• intact LTM with deficits associated with STM
• auditory letters/digits are forgotten more than visual stimuli
• also deficit was limited to verbal materials but not meaningful
  sounds
• problem with auditory verbal store

Question 13

central executive (WM)

Answer 13

• responsible for controlled processing in working memory, including but not limited to, directing attention, maintaining task goals, decision making, and memory retrieval
• An articulatory loop which holds information in a phonological form
• Visuo-spatial scratchpad which is specialized for spatial and/or visual coding

Question 14

articulatory loop

Answer 14

• Ps could provide immediate serial recall of approximately as many words as they could read out loud in 2 seconds
• Suggests that the capacity of articulatory loop is determined by temporal duration

Question 15

articulatory suppression

Answer 15

produced no increase in either the processing time or errors on the task
of deciding on the truth of simple statements (canaries have wings vs. canaries have gills)

Question 16

anamolies

Answer 16

syntactic: the walked boy to the store
semantic: the triangle walked to the store
- suppression increased errors for the syntactically anomalous sentences, while having modest effect on the semantic anomaly
- the articulatory loop is particularly useful in retaining information about the order of words

Question 17

advantages of WM conceptualization

Answer 17

 Concerns both active processing and passive storage
 Provides better explanation of the partial deficits of STM that have been observed
 Incorporates verbal rehearsal as an optional process that occurs within only one component