Cognitive Psychology: Chapter 5

Which task should be easier: keeping a sentence like "John went to the store to buy some oranges" in your mind AND

saying "yes" for each word that is a noun and "no" for each word that is not a noun?

A person with a reduced digit span would most likely have a problem with _______ memory.

short-term

Observations that people may actually process and manipulate information rather than simply store it for brief periods of time challenged the conceptualization of

short-term memory.

Given the different theoretical components of working memory, the code for visually-presented letters is most likely based on the _____ the stimulus.

sound

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.

The word-length effect reveals that

the phonological loop of the working memory model has a limited capacity.

Chess

Masters of chess can remember actual game positions better than beginners; but, Maters of chess and beginners were poor at remembering random game positions.

What is memory?

Memory is the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original is no longer present. -Key processes: encoding, storage, retrieval Two key properties: the duration and capacity

Short Term Memory: Capacity

"The Magical Number 7" (Miller) - Found uses the digit span test -Measured with digit span task, STM capacity is 7 +/- 2 -Using different stimuli: "The magical number 4" (Luck & Vogel; Cowan) (change detection) Capacity depends on... 1. Chucking 2. Complexity Contemporary View of STM: working memory -A limited capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning (Baddeley & Hitch)

Determining the connection between cognitive functioning and the brain

1. Analysis of behavior after brain damage, either human or animal (Method: double dissociation and brain ablation) 2. Recording from single neurons in animals (Method: recording from a neuron) 3.Measuring activity of the human brain (Method: Brain Imaging) 4.Recording electrical signals from the human brain (Method: Event-related potential)

Mechanisms of forgetting

1. Decay: Fading over time 2. Retroactive Interference (NEW): Newer information interferes with memory for older information -ex. occurs when learning spanish makes it more difficult to remember the french words you have learned earlier 3. Proactive Interference (OLD): Older information interferes with learning newer information -ex. when learning a large number of of french vocabulary words makes it more difficult to learn a list of spanish vocabulary words a little later because the french words you have just learned interfere with the spanish words -Release from proactive interference... -Wickens experiment: The basic idea behind this experiment was to create proactive interference - the decrease in memory that occurs when previously learned information interferes with learning new information by presenting words from the same category on a series of trials.

E.P.

1. Lost his ability to make new memories -suffered from a virus that damaged his brain 2. He can copy complex drawings and he can repeat lists of words 3. Not aware that he repeats stories -Computer used to be huge and now its small 4. He is aware on some level that the researches have tested him before 5. He cannot remember a list of words from a few minutes ago (15 min) 6. Damage was to the hippocampus in the temporal lobe and surrounding brain tissue

Baddeley's working memory model

1. Phonological loop -Verbal and auditory information > store information -composed of two components: the phonological store which has a limited capacity and holds information for only a few seconds and the articulatory rehearsal process, which is responsible for rehearsal that can keep items in the phonological loop from decaying 2. Central executive -Higher order to combine the two > active manipulation (active manipulation is important) -pulls information from long-term memory and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad by focusing specific parts of a task and deciding how to divide attention between different tasks -focuses attention on relavant message Patients with frontal lobe damage have trouble controlling their attention -A typical behavior of frontal lobe patients is preservation - repeatedly preforming the same action or thought even if it is not achieving the desired goal 3. Visuospatial sketch pad -Visual and spacial information > store information -i.e. forming a picture in your head or solving a puzzle, recalling visual patterns

Why is WM Important?

1. Seat of consciousness 2. Predicts higher - level abilities like reasoning, problem solving, and reading comprehension 3. Predicts distractibility, inhibition (i.e. stroop effect and cocktail party phenomenon) 4. Development trajectory: hits it peak for a very small amount of time (25 years old) declines at age (30 years old) big decline of working memory at age (60 years old) 5. Mental workspace > fluid intelligence (reasoning tests)

Atkinson and Shriffrin modal model of memory

1. Sensory Memory: is an initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second. 2. Short-term memory: holds five to seven items for about 15 to 20 seconds. 3. Long-term memory: can hold a large amount of information for years or even decades. All three are called structural features of the model. These memory processes do not work independently but rather all together

Clive Wearing

1. Worst case of amnesia ever known 2. Less than 30 seconds of memory -sometimes as little as 7 seconds or forgets what he was talking about in the middle of a sentence 3. "It's been like death, i've never seen a human being before" 4. When he gives you the answer to a question he has already forgot the questions

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

Working Memory (Baddeley and Hitch)

A limited capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning and reasoning. -Short terms memory is mainly concernerd with storing information for a brief period of time, whereas working memory is concerned with the manipulation of information that occurs during complex cognition -The fact that STM does not consider dynamic processes that unfold over time is what led Baddeley and hitch to propose the name working memory

Delayed response task

A task in which information in provided, a delay is imposed, and then memory is tested. This task has been used to study short term memory by testing monkey's ability to hold information about the location of a food reward during a delay.

Event-related potential (central executive)

An electrical potential, recorded with disc electrodes on a person's scalp, that reflects the response of many thousands of neurons near the electrode that fire together. The ERP consists of a number of waves that occur at different delays after a stimulus is present and that can be linked to different functions.

Echoic memory

Brief sensory memory for auditory stimuli that lasts for a few seconds after a stimulus is extinguished.

Iconic memory

Brief sensory memory for visual stimuli that lasts for a fraction of a second after a stimulus is extinguished.

The episodic buffer

Can store information and is connected to LTM. right in the middle of the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. -still a work in progress

Short Term Memory: Duration

Classic paradigm: Brown-Peterson task -Consonant trigram, distractor task, recall -The longer the distractor delay the worse people did on the task -It may last 10-30 sec

Atkinson and Shriffrin control processes

Dynamic processes associated with the structural features that can be controlled by the person and may differ from one task to another. -Example of a control process -1. Rehearsal: repeating a stimulus over and over, as you might repeat a telephone number in order to hold it in your mind after looking it up in a telephone book or the internet. -2. Strategies you might use to help make a stimulus more memorable, such as relating the digits in a phone number to a familiar date in history -3. Strategies of attention that help you focus on information that is particularly important or interesting.

Articulatory suppression

Interference with operation of the phonological loop that occurs when a person repeats an irrelevant word such as "the" while carrying out a task that requires the phonological loop

Short-term memory

Is the system involved in storing small amounts of information for a brief period of time. -Whatever you are thinking right now or whatever you remember from what you just read is in your short term memory. -Recall is important when discussing short-term memory

Articulatory suppression does all but which of the following?

It interferes with semantic coding.

Sensory Memory

Memory lasts for about 1 second -The retention, for brief periods of time, of the effects pf sensory stimulation. We can demonstrate this brief retention for the effects of visual stimulation with two familiar examples: the trail left by a moving sparkler and the experiences of seeing a film. -This retention of perception of light in your mind is called the persistence of vision -Its capacity is large but its duration is brief

Neural mind reading

Refers to using a neural response, usually brain activation measured by fMRI, to determine what a person is perceiving or thinking. (Harrison and Tong)

WM: The Phonological Loop

Specialized system for language: Phonological loop as language acquisition device Phonological Similarity Effect -Lower recall for words that sound the same vs. different -Word length effect (Baddeley) -Remember more short words than long words -Digit span = how many you can pronounce approx. seconds *U.S. digit span is higher because our numbers are short

Sperling's Experiment: Measuring the capacity and duration os the sensory store

Sperling wondered how much information people can take in from briefly presented stimuli. - In the experiment he flashed an array of letters on the screen for 50 milliseconds and asked his subjects to report as many letters as possible. -Sperling used 3 methods to calculate his results 1. Whole report method- subjects were asked to report as many letters as possible from the entire 12-letter display. Average was 4.5 out of 12 letters 2.Partial report method: subjects saw the 12 letter display for 50 milliseconds, as before, but immediately after it was flashed, they head a tone that told them which row of the matrix to report. Average was about 3.3 out of 4 letters 3. Delayed partial report method: the letters were flashed on and off and then the cue tones were delayed for 1 second after the flash, subjects were able to report only slightly more than 1 letter in a row. This trial accurately depicts sensory memory

Sensory memory

Sperling's (1960) research -Large capacity - how much it can hold -Brief duration - how long does the info hold -less than a second (not conscious)

Short Term Memory (located in the prefrontal cortex)

System that holds small amounts of information for brief periods of time. -Smallest capacity memory system -longer than sensory memory, shorter than long term -Conscious awareness -Mis of new and old information -Bottom up + Top down processing Reading uses working memory prefrontal cortex is important for working memory

Persistence of vision

The continued perception of a visual stimulus even after it is no longer present. The persistence lasts for only a fraction of a second, so it isn't obvious in everyday experience when objects are present for long periods. The persistence of vision effect is noticeable for brief stimuli, like moving sparkler or rapidly flashed pictures in a movie theater. A person viewing a film doesn't see the dark intervals between images because the persistence of vision fills in the darkness by retaining the image of the previous frame.

Alvarez and Cavanagh's change detection experiment

The stimuli range from low information (colored squares) to high information (cubes). The researchers concluded that the greater the amount of information in an image, the fewer items that can be held in short term memory. The colored boxes were higher than the cubes

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

Compared to the whole-report technique, the partial-report procedure involves

a smaller response set.

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

a. 14 929 111 776 b. 149 29111 776 c. 14 92 91 117 76 d. 1492 911 1776 Correct

Given what we know about the operation of the phonological loop, which of the following word lists would be most difficult for people to retain for 15 seconds?

a. SAY, BET, PIN, COW, RUG b. PIG, DOG, RAT, FOX, HEN c. MAC, CAN, CAP, MAN, MAP Correct d. BIP, TEK, LIN, MOD, REY

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.

The research by Ericsson and colleagues (1980) examined the ability of a college student to achieve amazing feats of memory by having him remember strings of random digits that were recited to him. They found that this student used his experience with running times to help him retain these strings of numbers. The significance of this finding was that

chunking requires knowledge of familiar patterns or concepts.

Imagine you are driving to a friend's new house. In your mind, you say the address repeatedly until you arrive. Once you arrive, you stop thinking about the address and start to think about buying a housewarming gift for your friend. To remember the address, you used a(n) _______ process in STM.

control

Brown 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

Funahashi and coworkers recorded neurons in the PF cortex of monkeys during a delayed response task. The reason the researchers concluded that the PF cortex is important for working memory is that these neurons showed the most intense firing during

delay.

The primary effect of chunking is to

increase the efficiency of short-term memory.

Sperling's delayed partial report procedure provided evidence that

information in sensory memory fades within 1 second.

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

prefrontal cortex.