PY 385 Exam 2: Ch 5

Sperling's delayed partial report procedure provided evidence that

information is sensory memory fades within one or two seconds

Stockes (2015)

information is stored in short-term changes in neural networks

Sensory Memory

initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second -retention, for brief periods of time, of effects of sensory stimulation -information decays very quickly

Phonological Similarity Effect

letters or words that sound similar are confused

A property of control processes in the modal model of memory is that they

may differ from one task to another

On what factor do working memory and short-term memory most differ?

activity

Short-Term Memory

holds five to seven items for about 15 to 20 seconds

Working Memory and Individual Capacity

-Vogel and coworkers (2005) determined participants' WM -high-capacity WM group -low-capacity WM group -shown either simple or complex stimuli -measured ERP responses -high-capacity participants were more efficient at ignoring the distractors

Activity-Silent Working Memory

-activity state: information to be remembered causes neurons to fire -synaptic state: neuron firing stops, but connections between neurons are strengthened

The Central Executive

-acts as the attention controller -focus, divide, switch attention -controls suppression of irrelevant information -perseveration: repeatedly performing the same action or thought even if it is not achieving the desired goal

The Episodic Buffer

-backup store that communicates with long-term and working memory components -hold information longer and has greater capacity than phonological loop or visuospatial sketch pad

Echoic Memory

-brief sensory memory of the things that we hear -responsible for persistence of sound

Iconic Memory

-brief sensory memory of the things that we see -responsible for persistence of vision

Visuospatial Sketch Pad

-creation of visual images in the mind in the absence of physical visual stimulus -Shepard and Metzler (1971) -mental rotation task -tasks that called for greater rotations took longer

Capacity of Short-Term Memory

-digit span: how many digits a person can remember

Working Memory

-limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning -concerned with the storage, processing and manipulation of information, and is active during complex cognition -process different types of information simultaneously

Sperling (1960)

-measuring the capacity and duration of sensory memory -array of letters flashes quickly on a screen -participants asked to report as many as possible

Word Length Effect

-memory for lists of words is better for short words than for long words -takes longer to rehearse long words and to produce them during recall

Whole Report Method

-participants asked to report as many as could be seen -avg. of 4.5 out of 12 letters

Partial Report Method

-participants heard tone that told them which row of letter to report -avg. 3.3 out of 4 letters -participants could report any of the rows

Working Memory and the Brain

-prefrontal cortex responsible for processing incoming visual and auditory information -monkeys without a prefrontal cortex difficulty holding information in working memory -neurons responded when stimulus was flashed in a particular location and during delay -information remains available via these neurons for as long as they continue firing

Delayed Partial Report Method

-presentation of tone delayed for a fraction of a second after the letters were extinguished -performance decreases rapidly

Chunking

-small units can be combined into larger meaningful units -chunk is a collection of elements strongly associated with one another but weakly associated with elements in other chunks

Articulatory Suppression

-speaking prevents one from rehearsing items to be remembered -reduces memory span -eliminated word length effect -reduces phonological similarity effect for reading words

Modal Model: Short-Term Memory

-stores small amounts of information for a brief duration -includes both new information received from the sensory stores and information recalled from long-term memory

Persistence of Vision: retention of the perception of light

-trail of light from a moving sparkler -frames in film

Ericsson and coworkers (1980)

-trained a college student with avg memory ability to use chunking -initial digit span of 7 -after 230 one hr training sessions, student could remember up to 79 digits

Alvarez and Cavanagh (2004)

-used colored squares as well as complex objects -used the change detection procedure

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

Who invented the Modal Model of Memory?

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)

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?

BIP, TEK, LIN, MOD, REY

Which of the following stimuli will last longer in the receiver's sensory memory?

a lion's roar at the zoo

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

a smaller response set

Control Processes

active processes that can be controlled by the person -rehearsal -strategies used to make a stimulus more memorable -strategies of attention that help you focus on specific stimuli

Which of the following is not a stage in the information processing model of memory?

episodic memory

Long-Term Memory

can hold a large amount of information for years or even decades

Which of the following stimulus characteristics most challenges the processing capacity of short-term memory?

complexity

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

Chantal has frontal lobe damage. She is doing a problem-solving task in which she has to choose the red object out of many choices. She can easily complete this repeatedly, but when the experimenter asks her to choose the blue object on a new trial of the task, she continues to choose the red one, even when the experimenter gives her feedback that she is incorrect. Chantal is displaying

perseveration

Physiological studies indicate that damage to the brain's___________can disrupt behaviors that depend on working memory.

prefrontal cortex

Memory

processes involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present -active any time some past experience has an impact on how you think or behave now or in the future

Digit span is one measure of capacity of

short-term memory

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

Suppose you're on the phone with a customer support representative who gives you a ticket number for your records. You're later transferred to a different representative who asks for your ticket number, but you've forgotten it. This probably occurred because the number was only temporarily stored in your

short-term memory

Funahashi and coworkers (1989)

single cell recordings from monkey's prefrontal cortex during a delayed response task

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

the length of iconic memory is about a fraction of a second

Which term best reflects the core concept of echoic memory?

time

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

If working memory were an actual workplace, which of the following best describes the members of Baddeley's model?

workers and manager