Chapter 5

The word-length effect shows that it is more difficult to remember

a list of long words than a list of short words.

Which of the following represents the most effective chunking of the digit sequence 14929111776?

1492 911 1776

The effective duration of short-term memory, when rehearsal is prevented, is

15-20 seconds or less.

The "magic number," according to Miller, is

7 plus or minus 2.

Using the partial report procedure in his "letter array" experiment, Sperling was able to infer that participants initially saw about ____ percent of the 12 letters in the display.

82

Conduct an experiment where participants see a number of target letters flashed briefly on a screen and are told to immediately write down the letters in the order they were presented. It is most likely that the target letter "P" will be misidentified as

C

Brief sensory memory for sound is known as

echoic memory.

Lamar has just gotten a new job and is attending a company party where he will meet his colleagues for the first time. His boss escorts him around to small groups to introduce him. At the first group, Lamar meets four people and is told only their first names. The same thing happens with a second group and a third group. At the fourth group, Lamar is told their names and that one of the women in the group is the company accountant. A little while later, Lamar realizes that while remembers the names of the people in the fourth group, he can no longer recall the names of anyone he met earlier in the party. Lamar's experience demonstrates

increase the capacity of short-term memory by grouping small units into larger meaningful units

When a sparkler is twirled rapidly, people perceive a circle of light. This occurs because

the length of iconic memory (the persistence of vision) is about a fraction of a second.

Suppose you (a student) are asked by a teacher to learn a poem you will recite in front of your class. Soon after, both you and a classmate, J.P., are asked by another teacher to learn the lyrics to an unfamiliar song. When you and J.P. are later asked to remember the song lyrics, you have a much more difficult time recalling them than J.P. does. This impairment of your performance is most likely attributable to

proactive interference

A task with the instructions "Read the following words while repeating 'the, the, the' out loud, look away, and then write down the words you remember" would most likely be studying

articulatory suppression.

Peterson and Peterson studied how well participants can remember groups of three letters (like BRT, QSD) after various delays. They found that participants remembered an average of 80 percent of the groups after 3 seconds but only 10 percent after 18 seconds. They hypothesized that this decrease in performance was due to _____, but later research showed that it was actually due to _____.

decay; interference

Information remains in sensory memory for

seconds or a fraction of a second

Funahashi et al.'s work on monkeys doing a delayed response task examined the role of neurons in the

prefrontal cortex.

Research on monkeys has shown that the part of the brain most closely associated with working memory is the

prefrontal cortex.

If a person has a digit span of two, this indicates that he has _____ memory.

poor short-term

Models designed to explain mental functioning are constantly refined and modified to explain new results. Which of the following exemplifies this concept based on the results presented in your text?

Replacing the STM component of the modal model with working memory

According to the model of working memory, which of the following mental tasks should LEAST adversely affect people's driving performance while operating a car along an unfamiliar, winding road?

Trying to remember the definition of a word they just learned

Funahashi and coworkers recorded neurons in the PF cortex of monkeys during a delayed response task. These neurons showed the most intense firing during

delay.

The primary effect of chunking is to

increase the capacity of short-term memory by grouping small units into larger meaningful units

Sperling's delayed partial report procedure provided evidence that

information in sensory memory fades within 1 or 2 seconds.

STM's capacity is best estimated as seven (plus or minus two)

meaningful units.

Neural ________ refers to a neural response, usually brain activation measured by fMRI, to determine what a person is perceiving or thinking.

mind reading

It is easier to perform two tasks at the same time if

one is handled by the sketch pad and one is handled by the phonological loop

Articulatory suppression causes a decrease in the word-length effect because

saying "the, the, the" fills up the phonological loop.

The three structural components of the modal model of memory are

sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory.

Imagine yourself walking from your car, bus stop, or dorm to your first class. Your ability to form such a picture in your mind depends on which of the following components of working memory?

the visuospatial sketch pad