Week 9: STM & LTM Flashcards
What evidence did George Miller provide for the capacity of STM
The absolute identification task and serial recall task
What did the absolute identification task and serial recall task find in STM?
Performance is virtually perfect until 7 items
What happens when STM capacity is exceeded?
Items are lost from STM
How many items can STM hold?
About 4 items
What is the prediction about older info in STM?
Older info should not be in STM and should not affect STM contents or retrieval
What happens to items in STM when retrieval takes place immediately?
Items are emptied out of STM without retrieval from LTM
Why should interference from older associations not affect STM retrieval?
Because older info is not in STM
What effect is associated with LTM in free recall?
Primacy effect
How do faster presentation rates or increased list length affect LTM performance?
They reduce performance/primacy but not recency
What effect is associated with SMT in free recall?
Recency effect
What is proactive interference?
The finding that performance decreases as more items or lists are learned due to interference from older material
What is PI release?
PI is less pronounced if the different lists contain different semantic item types
Why should only LTM show PI and PI release?
Because older info is not in STM, only recent info is
What is the prediction of STM models regarding the last item in a list?
The last item spends the least time in STM and should be weaker than prior items in LTM
What did testing 10 lists on immediate free recall show about negative recency?
Normal primacy and recency effect were found, but worse performance on the final item in each list in a ‘last item’ recall test
What are contiguity effects?
The tendency for subjects to make transitions between nearby items
What do contiguity effects suggest about recall?
Recall tends to progress in a forward direction
What is long term recency?
items presented at the end of a list or sequence are more likely to be remembered, even after a long delay, due to their recent position in the sequence
What did many studies show about PI with short lists of items?
That PI occurs even with very short lists of items
How does context change according to the stimulus sampling theory?
Context comprises a large set of elements that change gradually as events are experienced
How does the temporal context model (TCM) account for various phenomena using a single store?
By considering interactions between current context and stored contexts associated with each of the items
What phenomena can TCM explain?
Contiguity effects, short and long term recency, and spacing effects
What can TCM not explain?
Primacy effects
How do context based theories like TCM compare to dual store models?
They can explain more phenomena and may converge with theories of short term and working memory
What are two reasons TCM is distinct from STM theories?
Items never drop out of context the way they do from an STM buffer, and context is always used as a cue for LTM
What effects are always observed in short time scales?
Recency and contiguity effects
