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3.5 Memory > Theme 2: Working Memory > Flashcards

Theme 2: Working Memory Flashcards

1
Q

Which factors can incease STM capacity (Radvansky)?

A

Expertise increases capacity for the specific field of expertise
Synaesthesia when synaesthetic experience is congruent with lived one

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2
Q

what factors make STM a bottleneck (Radvansky)?

A

its small capacity and short duration

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3
Q

what is the primary cause of forgetting in STM (Radvansky)?

A

interference

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4
Q

What does the parallel search theory of STM retrieval state?
What does it predict about memory retrieval?

A

all items in short-term memory are available more or less at once, and accessed in parallel
response times should not vary with set size and there should be no difference between the “yes” and “no” responses

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5
Q

What does the serial self-terminating search theory of STM retrieval state?
What does it predict about memory retrieval?

A

people go through things one at a time, serially, and stop when target item is found
RTs increase with increased set size. The function is twice as steep for “no” than for “yes” responses because the person always needs to go through the entire set to verify that the probe item is not there, meantime for the “yes” response they will get about halfway through the set before reaching the target item

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6
Q

What does the serial exhaustive search theory of STM retrieval state?
What does it predict about memory retrieval?

A

people going through things one at a time, but they only stop after going through the entire set
RTs increase with increasing set size but there’s no difference in the response time slope for the “yes” and “no” responses

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7
Q

evidence supports that we use the ____ method for STM retrieval

A

serial exhaustive search

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8
Q

it is generally accepted that our memory works via cascading processes. What does this mean?

A

we use both serial and parallel processing to produce a given outcome

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9
Q

What is the primacy effect and what type of memory does it depend on?

A

it is superior memory for information at the beginning and it depends more on LTM than STM

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10
Q

what is the recency effect?

A

superior memory for information at the end

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11
Q

What is depicted here?

A

the serial position curve

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12
Q

how can you reduce the primacy effect?

A

items that are difficult to name show recency effects but not primacy effects because it is harder to encode them into declarative LTM

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13
Q

explain the suffix effect and what influences it

A

the recency effect diminishes when presenting extra info at the end of a list
The size of the suffix effect relates to the nature of the suffix → larger similarity to list items = larger interference

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14
Q

What do chaining models posit about STM?

A

STM is a series of associative links. Order information is recovered by moving along the chain

Criticism: implies that forgetting is always total but IRL it can be partial

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15
Q

What do ordinal models posit about STM?

A

serial order is captured by information about where a given item occurs along a dimension relative to the others

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16
Q

What do positional models posit about STM?

A

Serial order is conveyed by associating each item with its position in a sequence. Positional models consider salient positions in a series like the first and last positions

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17
Q

What memory errors do positional models account for?

A

they account for protrusions: errors where an item from a previous series is misremembered in the current one

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18
Q

How do slot models propose WM works?

A

STM is a series of ordered slots and info is dropped into each one. Item and order info is stored together because each item is put in a slot in a predetermined order

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19
Q

How do context-based models propose that WM works?

A

Context info is stored in memory and is used to determine serial order information by reconstructing the order from the way that context is changing
Misorderings occur when contexts are similar

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20
Q

In ____, there is a ____ effect of phonological similarity and a ____ effect for semantic similarity. For ____ the reverse applies.

A

STM
big
small
LTM

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21
Q

Phonological coding is ____ and ____, and is thus effective for storing ____ information
____ encoding is ____ but results in better encoding of ____

A

rapid, automatic, serial order
semantic, slower, meaning

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22
Q

How is the similarity sandwich effect evidence against chaining models?

A

because similarity between irrelevant and remembered items is not important for the degree of disruption experienced

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23
Q

What is the Corsi block-tapping test?

A

it involves sequential presentation and recall where an array of nine blocks is scattered across a test board. The tester taps a sequence of blocks, and the participant attempts to imitate this

Corsi span ~ five

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24
Q

Is the visual pattern span the same as the spatial Corsi span?

A

no - the pattern span can be disrupted by concurrent visual processing, whereas the Corsi span is more susceptible to spatial disruption

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25
Q

In which 2 ways does Baddeley propose the CE controls action?

A
  1. Automatically, based on well-learned habits or schemata
  2. Through the supervisory attentional system (SAS) which responds to situations that cannot be handled by habit-based processes
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26
Q

How does Baddeley describe the EB, and reason its addition to his WM model?

A

The EB holds integrated episodes (chunks) in a multidimensional code. It acts as a buffer store between the components of WM & links WM to perception and LTM. Furthermore, retrieval from the buffer requires conscious awareness.

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27
Q

What is binding in WM and what are its characteristics (Baddeley)?

A

it is how chunks are stored
- binding is not attention demanding per se, but maintaining bindings against distraction is
- binding DOESN’T involve active manipulation of info within the EB

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28
Q

Describe the Three-Embedded-Components Model of Working Memory (Oberauer & Hein, 2012)

A
  1. activated part of LTM → keeps possible currently relevant info available
  2. broad focus → the region of direct access that holds some of the activated LTM info. Has limited capacity (4 chunks that can be bound)
  3. single-item focus of attention → selects one item or chunk as the target of the next cognitive operation
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29
Q

What evidence from two-cue, two-probe recognition paradigms supports the Three-Embedded Components WM model (Oberauer & Hein, 2012)?

paradigm is in notes p.22

A

At short cue-probe intervals, the set size of both lists affects RTs. At long intervals, only the size of the relevant list affects RTs ⇒ suggests that within 1-2s, the irrelevant list is removed from the capacity-limited broad focus

30
Q

Increasing the number of items in the broad focus slows down access because …

A

the items interfere with each other -> evidence for broad focus limited capacity

31
Q

What neural evidence exists supporting Oberauers WM model?

A

the contents of the broad focus are maintained by persistent neural activity during a delay period
Info outside the focus is maintained without ongoing neural activity → activated LTM is the least neurally active WM content

32
Q

Some studies have measured speed-accuracy trade-off functions for immediate recognition. What were their findings? Relate them to a component of Oberauer’s WM model

A

They found that the last item in a studied list has privileged status in WM → indicates that the last item was already in the narrow focus when the probe was presented, so no retrieval process was required, supporting the assumption that only the last item was held in the narrow focus of attention

33
Q

object-switch costs refer to slower RTs after object switches than after object repetitions. How is this phenomenon evidence for the narrow focus of attention in Oberauer’s WM model?

A

the object processed last is still held within the focus of attention when the next processing operation starts. When two items are needed for a cognitive operation, they can be accessed simultaneously by being chunked

34
Q

change detection tasks include retro-cues and pre-cues. How can such tasks be used to prove the existence of narrow focus (Oberauer’s model)?

A

When two retro-cues are presented simultaneously, highlighting two different locations associated with different objects, there is no cueing benefit ⇒ only one item can be focused on at a time

35
Q

In a visual search task, one or more target stimuli can be presented. Considering Oberauer’s model of WM, what effect do we expect to find if we compare sequentially presented visual stimuli with two targets simultaneously?

A

accuracy will decrease

36
Q

Describe resource models of WM (Ma et al., 2014)

A

they consider WM a limited resource, distributed flexibly between all items in a scene.
They don’t set a fixed item limit on the number of objects that can be stored ⇒ the metric for WM is qualitative, not quantitative

37
Q

Which two premises are resource models of WM based on (Ma et al., 2014)?
(hint: noise)

A
  1. the internal representations of sensory stimuli are noisy
  2. the level of noise increases with the number of stimuli in memory
38
Q

What do discrete representation models of WM posit (Ma et al., 2014)?

A

WM is divided into a discrete number of quanta, similarly to slot models. However, these slots are shared out between items

39
Q

What do variable precision models of WM posit (Ma et al., 2014)?

A

WM precision varies around a mean that decreases with increasing number of items as a result of limited resources. These models predict that recall errors will be made up of an infinite mixture of distributions

40
Q

Evidence indicates that memory resources can be unevenly distributed. What is the benefit of such flexible resource allocation (Ma et al., 2014)?

A

prioritised items can be stored with enhanced precision compared to other objects

41
Q

Ma et al. (2014) present evidence for flexible resource allocation in the WM. How do we know that this is done in a motivated, controlled way, and is not merely the result of some competing info prevailing?

A
  1. the allocation of limited WM storage can be controlled and updated with changing behavioural priorities
  2. a record of attended locations from eye movement is maintained to prevent re-examining previously explored locations
42
Q

during which WM processes can noise affect memory (Ma et al., 2014)?

A

at the initial stage of sensory processing, at encoding, and at maintenance

43
Q

neural signals reach an abrupt plateau at higher memory loads. How is this explaned by resource models of WM (Ma et al., 2014)?

A

load-sensitive signals might not be associated with coding of object features, but with maintenance of meta-information that is required to control resource allocation

44
Q

explain graded degredation (Ma et al., 2014)

A

as the total number of stimuli in memory increase, stimulus info that can be extracted from delay period activity decreases

45
Q

what is gain in a neuronal context?

A

neural activity amplitude

46
Q

define divisive normalisation (Ma et al., 2014)

A

activity in the neuronal population encoding an item is divided by the sum of neuron activities in all populations encoding items

47
Q

explain how the number of items in WM influences divisive normalisation and relates to neuronal gain (Ma et al., 2014)

A

the more items being encoded, the larger the sum of population activities and the lower the gain of the population encoding each item

48
Q

What is the evidence for the relationship between set size and neural activity amplitude (gain) (Ma et al., 2014)?

A
  1. firing rate decreases with increasing set size
  2. increasing set size decreases encoding precision due to non-linear neuronal firing
49
Q

Several methods have been proposed for predicting accuracy error distributions in delayed estimation, but one model makes considerably better predictions. Which model is this, and why is it better (Ma et al., 2014)?

A

the variable-precision model - it accounts for the increase in the ‘guessing rate’ with increasing set size: when a normal + uniform mixture is fitted to recall errors, low-precision trials will be absorbed into the uniform component, even though they might not represent true guesses

50
Q

How is change detection influenced by encoding noise (Ma et al., 2014)?

A

decisions must be made without exact knowledge of the stimuli in the first display and must therefore be inferred

51
Q

What is the primary influence on recall variability (Ma et al., 2014)?

A

the number of competing features in each dimension –> errors arise independently for different features of the same object

52
Q

What is the Sternberg effect (Esposito & Postle, 2015)?

A

RT for a recognition judgement about a memory probe increases linearly with the number of items concurrently held in WM

53
Q

What is the intrusion effect (Esposito & Postle, 2015)?

A

uncued items are not fully forgotten - they continue to influence ongoing processing in the form of intrusion costs on RTs when they are presented as negative (to-be-rejected) memory probes

54
Q

Which are the five neural mechanisms that underlie working memory function (Esposito & Postle, 2015)?

A
  1. persistent PFC neural activity
  2. hierarchical representations in PFC
  3. top-down signalling from PFC to other regions
  4. long-range connectivity
  5. dopaminergic modulation of frontostriatal circuitry
55
Q

Under which conditions do PFC neurons exhibit persistent activity (Esposito & Postle, 2015)?

A

during the stage of a delayed-response task where we must actively maintain info about externally absent stimuli that is relevant for completing the task

note: this neural activity directly relates to behaviour

56
Q

What does the persistent PFC activity found during WM engagement likely represent (Esposito & Postle, 2015)?

A

Either features of stimuli maintained in WM, or a broad range of task variables that aren’t directly related to the target stimuli

57
Q

fMRI studies support the notion that there is a functional gradient for action representation. In which brain region is this and how is it organised (Esposito & Postle, 2015)?

A

it is along the anterior-to-posterior axis of the frontal lateral cortex - as representations become more abstract, activation within the frontal cortex moves anteriorly

58
Q

What are the types of top-down signals in the PFC, relating to concept representations (Esposito & Postle, 2015)?

A

One enhances, and one suppresses task-relevant information, & this is done by varying the activity magnitude & processing speed

59
Q

T/F: there is a two-way information exchange between posterior and anterior PFC regions during concept representation (Esposito & Postle, 2015)

A

False, higher order regions of the PFC have a different influence and behavioural consequence depending
on which brain regions receive the signals, but the reverse is not observed

60
Q

What is the proposed role of gamma, theta, and alpha waves for WM according to Esposito and Postle (2015)?

A

Gamma waves: active maintenance of WM info
Theta waves: temporal organisation of WM items
Alpha waves: inhibition of task-irrelevant info

61
Q

What is the Dual-state theory of PFC dopamine function, as explained by Esposito & Postle (2015)?

A

a D1-dominated state favours robust online info maintenance, whereas a D2-dominated state is beneficial for flexible and fast switching among representational states

Tonic (sustained) dopamine release is mediated by D1 receptors, whereas D2 receptor–mediated effects are phasic (transient)

62
Q

How do tonic and phasic dopamine effects influence WM (Espotiso & Postle, 2015)?

A

tonic effects may increase stability of maintained representations, whereas phasic effects are gating signals indicating when new inputs should be encoded and maintained or when currently maintained representations should be updated

63
Q

What is attentional refreshing (Camos et al., 2018)?

A

a domain-general maintenance mechanism of the episodic buffer that relies on attention to keep mental representations active

64
Q

What is a prerequisite for attentional refreshing to be possible (Camos et al., 2018)?

A

the to-be-refreshed info must not have become inactive

65
Q

In which ways can attentional refreshing occur (Camos et al., 2018)?

A

refreshing occurs (a) quickly and largely outside of explicit awareness (swift refreshing) or (b) slowly & deliberately

66
Q

What is meant by the statement “Refreshing creates content–context bindings” (Camos et al., 2018)?

A

refreshing increases the links of a memory trace with its serial position within the list and with the adjacent items in the list

67
Q

What is the serial refreshing hypothesis (Camos et al., 2018)?

A

spontaneous refreshing of a memory list operates serially, with the focus of attention cycling from one item to the next

68
Q

Camos et al. (2018) suggest that attentional refreshing can also be viewed as a type of what?

A

a type of attention (reflective attention) needed to access stimuli and goal representations

69
Q

What aspect of attentional refreshing can we examine by varying the time between two retro-cues (Camos et al., 2018)?

A

we can see if a second instruction to refresh stops the refreshing of a first cued item, thus examining the operations of high-speed and deliberate refreshing

70
Q

What factors can limit attentional refreshing (Camos et al., 2018)?

A
  • increased cognitive load
  • task irregularity
  • age (younger children & older adults)
71
Q

What is the McCabe effect (Camos et al., 2018)?

A

retrieval from episodic LTM is enhanced for memoranda whose maintenance is regularly interrupted by a secondary task (compared to uninterrupted)

not supported bc this was found with covert retrieval which is not the same as attentional refreshing

72
Q

According to Baddeley’s WM model, where would attentional refreshing occur?

A

in the episodic buffer

3.5 Memory (6 decks)

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