PSYCH-128 Exam 2

According to measurements of digit span (George Miller)

-"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two," -the average capacity of STM is about five to nine items: about the length of a phone number.

Sensory Memory

A brief stage of memory that holds information for seconds or fractions of a second. It is the first stage in the modal model of memory.

Priming

A change in response to a stimulus caused by the previous presentation of the same or a similar stimulus.

episodic buffer

A component added to Baddeley's original working memory model that serves as a "backup" store that communicates with both LTM and the components of working memory. It holds information longer and has greater capacity than the phonological loop or visuospatial sketch pad.

Systems consolidation

A consolidation process that involves the gradual reorganization of circuits within brain regions and takes place on a long time scale, lasting weeks, months, or even years.

Working memory

A limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning.

Short-term memory (STM)

A memory mechanism that can hold a holds five to seven items for about 15 to 20 seconds, unless there is rehearsal (such as repeating a telephone number) to maintain the information in short-term memory. Short-term memory is one of the stages in the modal model of memory.

Long-term memory (LTM)

A memory mechanism that can hold large amounts of information for long periods of time. Long-term memory is one of the stages in the modal model of memory.

Cued recall

A procedure for testing memory in which a participant is presented with cues, such as words or phrases, to aid recall of previously experienced stimuli.

Free recall

A procedure for testing memory in which the participant is asked to remember stimuli that were previously presented.

Classical conditioning

A procedure in which pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response causes the neutral stimulus to elicit that response.

Remember/know procedure

A procedure in which subjects are presented with a stimulus they have encountered before and are asked to indicate remember, if they remember the circumstances under which they initially encountered it, or know, if the stimulus seems familiar but they don't remember experiencing it earlier.

Cognitive interview

A procedure used for interviewing crime scene witnesses that involves letting witnesses talk with a minimum of interruption. It also uses techniques that help witnesses recreate the situation present at the crime scene by having them place themselves back in the scene and recreate emotions they were feeling, where they were looking, and how the scene may have appeared when viewed from different perspectives.

Synaptic consolidation

A process of consolidation that involves structural changes at synapses that happen rapidly, over a period of minutes.

Reconsolidation

A process proposed by Nader and others that occurs when a memory is retrieved and so becomes reactivated. Once this occurs, the memory must be consolidated again, as it was during the initial learning. This repeat consolidation is reconsolidation.

Reactivation

A process that occurs during memory consolidation, in which the hippocampus replays the neural activity associated with a memory. During reactivation, activity occurs in the network connecting the hippocampus and the cortex. This activity results in the formation of connections between the cortical areas.

Release from proactive interference

A situation in which conditions occur that eliminate or reduce the decrease in performance caused by proactive interference.

Amygdala

A subcortical structure that is involved in processing emotional aspects of experience, including memory for emotional events.

delayed-response task

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

visual imagery

A type of mental imagery involving vision, in which an image is experienced in the absence of a visual stimulus.

Mental time travel

According to Tulving, the defining property of the experience of episodic memory, in which a person travels back in time in his or her mind to reexperience events that happened in the past.

phonological similarity effect

An effect that occurs when letters or words that sound similar are confused. For example, T and P are two similar-sounding letters that could be confused.

event-related potential (ERP)

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 presented and that can be linked to different functions.

Cognitive hypothesis

An explanation for the reminiscence bump, which states that memories are better for adolescence and early adulthood because encoding is better during periods of rapid change that are followed by stability.

echoic memory

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

iconic memory (visual icon)

Brief sensory memory for visual stimuli that lasts for a fraction of a second after a stimulus is extinguished. This corresponds to the sensory memory stage of the modal model of memory.

flow diagram for attention

Broadbent

chunking

Combining small units into larger ones, such as when individual words are combined into a meaningful sentence. Chunking can be used to increase the capacity of memory.

phonological store

Component of the phonological loop of working memory that holds a limited amount of verbal and auditory information for a few seconds.

Retrieval cue

Cues that help a person remember information that is stored in memory.

Change Detection (Steven Luck and Edward Vogel)

Detecting differences between pictures or displays that are presented one after another.

perseveration

Difficulty in switching from one behavior to another, which can hinder a person's ability to solve problems that require flexible thinking. Perseveration is observed in cases in which the prefrontal cortex has been damaged.

Testing effect

Enhanced performance on a memory test caused by being tested on the material to be remembered.

Recognition memory

Identifying a stimulus that was encountered earlier. Stimuli are presented during a study period; later, the same stimuli plus other, new stimuli are presented. The participants' task is to pick the stimuli that were originally presented.

control processes

In Atkinson and Shiffrin's modal model of memory, active processes that can be controlled by the person and that may differ from one task to another. Rehearsal is an example of a control process.

Primacy effect

In a memory experiment in which a list of words is presented, enhanced memory for words presented at the beginning of the list.

Recency effect

In a memory experiment in which a list of words is presented, enhanced memory for words presented at the end of the list.

Serial position curve

In a memory experiment in which participants are asked to recall a list of words, a plot of the percentage of participants remembering each word against the position of that word in the list.

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.

What is the Duration of Short-Term Memory?

John Brown and Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson: 15 to 20 seconds or less.

Cultural life script

Life events that commonly occur in a particular culture.

Semanticization of remote memory

Loss of episodic details for memories of long-ago events.

Retrograde amnesia

Loss of memory for something that happened prior to an injury or traumatic event such as a concussion.

Sperling's Experiment

Measuring the Capacity and Duration of the Sensory Store 1. Whole report method 2. Partial report 3. Delayed partial report

Self-reference effect

Memory for a word is improved by relating the word to the self.

Paired-associate learning

Memory for doing things that usually involve learned skills.

Skill memory

Memory for doing things that usually involve learned skills.

Procedural memory

Memory for how to carry out highly practiced skills. Procedural memory is a type of implicit memory because although people can carry out a skilled behavior, they often cannot explain exactly how they are able to do so.

Generation effect

Memory for material is better when a person generates the material him- or herself, rather than passively receiving it.

Autobiographical memory

Memory for specific events from a person's life, which can include both episodic and semantic components.

Explicit memory

Memory that involves conscious recollections of events or facts that we have learned in the past.

Hippocampus

Memory that occurs when an experience affects a person's behavior, even though the person is not aware that he or she has had the experience.

Implicit memory

Memory that occurs when an experience affects a person's behavior, even though the person is not aware that he or she has had the experience.

Neural mind reading

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

Propaganda effect

People are more likely to rate statements they have read or heard before as being true, just because of prior exposure to the statements.

whole report method

Person saw all 12 letters at once for 50 ms and reported as many as he or she could remember.

Partial report

Person saw all 12 letters, as before, but immediately after they were turned off, a tone indicated which row the person was to report.

Delayed partial report

Person saw all 12 letters, but immediately after they were turned off, a tone indicated which row the person was to report. but with a short delay between extinguishing the letters and presentation of the tone.

Deep processing

Processing that involves attention to meaning and relating an item to something else. Deep processing is usually associated with elaborative rehearsal.

Shallow processing

Processing that involves repetition with little attention to meaning. Shallow processing is usually associated with maintenance rehearsal.

Standard model of consolidation

Proposes that memory retrieval depends on the hippocampus during consolidation, but that once consolidation is complete, retrieval no longer depends on the hippocampus.

articulatory rehearsal process

Rehearsal process involved in working memory that keeps items in the phonological store from decaying.

Maintenance rehearsal

Rehearsal that involves repetition without any consideration of meaning or making connections to other information. Compare to Elaborative rehearsal.

Elaborative rehearsal

Rehearsal that involves thinking about the meaning of an item to be remembered or making connections between that item and prior knowledge.

mental rotation

Rotating an image of an object in the mind.

Personal semantic memory

Semantic components of autobiographical memories.

tree types of modal model of memory

Sensory memory, Short-term memory, Long-term memory

Spacing effect

The advantage in performance caused by short study sessions separated by breaks from studying.

Persistence of vision

The continued perception of light for a fraction of a second after the original light stimulus has been extinguished. Perceiving a trail of light from a moving sparkler is caused by the persistence of vision.

Results of Sperling's (1960) partial report experiments.

The decrease in performance is due to the rapid decay of iconic memory (sensory memory in the modal model).

Coding

The form in which stimuli are represented in the mind. For example, information can be represented in visual, semantic, and phonological forms.

Levels of processing theory

The idea that memory depends on how information is encoded, with better memory being achieved when processing is deep than when processing is shallow. Deep processing involves attention to meaning and is associated with elaborative rehearsal. Shallow processing involves repetition with little attention to meaning and is associated with maintenance rehearsal.

Multiple trace model of consolidation

The idea that the hippocampus is involved in the retrieval of remote memories, especially episodic memories. This contrasts with the standard model of memory, which proposes that the hippocampus is involved only in the retrieval of recent memories.

Depth of processing

The idea that the processing that occurs as an item is being encoded into memory can be deep or shallow. Deep processing involves attention to meaning and is associated with elaborative rehearsal. Shallow processing involves repetition with little attention to meaning and is associated with maintenance rehearsal.

Constructive nature of memory

The idea that what people report as memories are constructed based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as expectations, other knowledge, and other life experiences.

Long-term potentiation (LTP)

The increased firing that occurs in a neuron due to prior activity at the synapse.

modal model of memory

The model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin that describes memory as a mechanism that involves processing information through a series of stages, including short-term memory and long-term memory. It is called the modal model because it contained features of many models that were being proposed in the 1960s.

word length effect

The notion that it is more difficult to remember a list of long words than a list of short words.

Digit Span

The number of digits a person can remember. Digit span is used as a measure of the capacity of short-term memory.

central executive

The part of working memory that coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketch pad. The "traffic cop" of the working memory system.

phonological loop

The part of working memory that holds and processes verbal and auditory information.

visuospatial sketch pad

The part of working memory that holds and processes visual and spatial information.

State-dependent learning

The principle that memory is best when a person is in the same state for encoding and retrieval. This principle is related to encoding specificity.

Encoding specificity

The principle that we learn information together with its context. This means that presence of the context can lead to enhanced memory for the information.

Encoding

The process of acquiring information and transferring it into memory.

Retrieval

The process of remembering information that has been stored in long-term memory.

rehearsal

The process of repeating a stimulus over and over, usually for the purpose of remembering it, that keeps the stimulus active in short-term memory.

Consolidation

The process that transforms new memories into a state in which they are more resistant to disruption.

A sparkler can cause a trail of light when it is moved rapidly.

This trail occurs because the perception of the light is briefly held in the mind.

Cryptomnesia

Unconscious plagiarism of the work of others. This has been associated with errors in source monitoring.

chunk

Used in connection with the idea of chunking in memory. A chunk is a collection of elements that are strongly associated with each other but weakly associated with elements in other chunks.

Graded amnesia

When amnesia is most severe for events that occurred just prior to an injury and becomes less severe for earlier, more remote events.

Repetition priming

When an initial presentation of a stimulus affects the person's response to the same stimulus when it is presented later.

proactive interference

When information learned previously interferes with learning new information. See also Retroactive interference.

retroactive interference

When more recent learning interferes with memory for something that happened in the past.

Transfer-appropriate processing

When the type of task that occurs during encoding matches the type of task that occurs during retrieval. This type of processing can result in enhanced memory.

Sensory memory

is an initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second. (input)

Memory

is the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer present.

The result originally presented by Peterson and Peterson STM

showing a large drop in memory for letters with a delay of 18 seconds between presentation and test. These data are based on the average performance over many trials.

Analysis of Peterson and Peterson's results by Keppel and Underwood STM

showing little decrease in performance if only the first trial is included.