The stage theory on memory Flashcards
Lecture 2
What is sensory memory and how long does it last up to?
Sensory information is stored in sensory memory just long enough to be transferred to short-term memory. Humans have five traditional senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. This memory last from 0.3 seconds up to 3 seconds.
Who was the most famous neuropsychology patient?
Patient Henry Molaison (H.M)
What happened to H.M?
He experienced seizures after falling of his bike when he was little. This resulted in brain damage as more neurons were activated this and this led to seizures. Surgeons believed that the medial temporal lobe caused this. They then removed those lobes, and he developed amnesia and could only remember info for about 20 seconds. This meant his STM stayed intact and his LTM disappeared. The damage produces dense anterograde amnesia with intact STM.
What did Atkinson and Shiffrin’s multi-store model of memory show?
They believed that once information enters the brain, it must be either stored or maintained and that the information which is stored goes into three distinct memory systems: the sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
What is the serial position effect?
Serial-position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst
Who came up with the serial position effect?
Hermann Ebbinghaus
What is the difference between the primacy and recency effect?
For primacy, early items were acquired and retained, and later items were never acquired. For recency, all items were acquired but only the most recent items were retained. Primacy effect is LTM and recency effect is STM.
Give the definition for bias in encoding.
This is when you remember things being better or bigger than they really were. These are things that either enhance or impair how you remember something.
Phonetic vs Semantic
In semantic fluency tasks, subjects are required to generate words belonging to a category (e.g., animals) within a limited time window, whereas in phonemic fluency tasks subjects have to generate words starting with a given letter.
Baddeley and Hitch (1974)
Baddeley and Hitch (1974) set out to test the hypothesis that the short-term store also functioned as a working memory. They did so by requiring participants to perform reasoning, comprehension or learning tasks at the same time as they were holding in STM between 0 and 8 digits for immediate recall.
Who was patient K.F?
He was in a motorcycle accident when he was 28. This resulted in brain damage which affected his STM.
What did the surgeons do to K.F?
They removed his left parietal subdural haematoma. His LTM tested with incomplete words and pictures test. LTM was then intact it showed but when remembering repetition of numbers, letters and word strings of increasing length he did not do well. This showed how working memory got knocked out and LTM was good.
What is chunking?
The recording of smaller units of info into larger, familiar units.
What is maintenance rehearsal?
This is a form of repetition in which one “say something to oneself” but does not think about it in a deep way.
Craik and Watkin
In 1973, they introduced a distinction between maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal.
