Cognitive Psychology Exam 2

In 1956, George Miller wrote a famous article entitled

"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information."

According to a famous article by Miller (1956), short-term memory (or working memory) has a capacity limitation of about:

7 ± 2 chunks of information.

executive attention network

A cognitive system that is responsible for the kind of attention one uses when a task focuses on conflicting information, for example on the Stroop task.

release from proactive interference

A memory phenomenon in which proactive interference is reduced when a person switches to a new stimulus category, leading to increased recall.

The functioning of the phonological loop: a)may give rise to acoustic confusions in working-memory tasks, especially when rehearsal is involved. b) is related to a person's "inner voice," or his or her use of subvocalization to per-form a task. c) involves activation or information storage in the left hemisphere of the brain, including frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. d) All of the above are correct.

D

long-term memory

Long-term memory has a large capacity and contains your memory for experiences and information that have accumulated throughout your lifetime.

semantics

Meaning of words and sentences

short-term memory

Short-term memory refers to the memory system that is responsible for holding onto a small amount of information that has been recently taken in from the environment.

example of proactive interference.

Suppose you had previously learned three items—XCJ, HBR, and TSV—in a Brown/Peterson and Peterson test of memory. You will then have trouble remembering a fourth item, KRN, because the three previous items keep interfering. However, if the experimenter shifts the category of the fourth item from letters to, say, simple geometric shapes, your memory will improve. You will experience a release from proactive interference.

working memory doesn't simply store information. Consistent with its name, it actively works with that information

True

Chunk

a memory unit that consists of several components that are strongly associated with one another

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

a neuroscience technique that uses a magnetic eld to brie y stimulate a specific location on the cortex (no surgery or other invasive procedures are involved). This stimulation interferes—very briefly—with information processing, but it does not harm the brain.

short-term memory holds

approximately seven chunks. For example, we could remember a random sequence of about seven numbers or else a random sequence of about seven letters.

Working memory is:

brief memory for information that a person is currently processing. b) involved in coordinating a person's cognitive activities. c) a term that is now used more often instead of a similar term—short-term memory. d) All of the above are correct. Answer:d

phonological loop

can process a lim-ited number of sounds for a short period of time. The phonological loop processes language and other sounds that you hear, as well as the sounds that you make.

Memory is limited in both its

duration and capacity when you must remember new information

The rst short-term memory experiments used backward counting by threes, or a similar task, in order to:

ensure that a person is not able to rehearse during the delay.

Brown/Peterson and Peterson technique

involves presenting participants with some items that they are instructed to remember. Participants then perform a distracting task. After spending some time on the distracting task, participants are then asked to recall the original items.

Memory is limited even when the delay

is less than 1 minute

Working memory

is the brief, immediate memory for the limited amount of material that you are currently processing; part of working memory also actively coordinates your ongoing mental activities. In other words, working memory lets you keep a few items active and accessible.

Miller had examined previous research, and he proposed that we can hold

only a limited number of items in short-term memory. Specifically, he suggested that people can remember about seven items (give or take two). In other words, we can usually remember between five and nine items.

working-memory approach (proposed by Baddeley

our immediate memory is a multipart system that temporarily holds and manipulates information while we perform cognitive tasks. Baddeley's model of working memory is different from earlier models because he proposed multiple components for our working memory

central executive

part of Alan Baddeley's model of working memory that oversees the visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop, and episodic buffer. Responsible for shifting and dividing attention

Proactive interference (PI)

people have trouble learning new material because previously learned material keeps interfering with their new learning.

On a short-term (working) memory task, release from proactive interference (PI) on the nal trial occurred when:

previous trials required a person to remember words from a different semantic category

serial-position effect

refers to the U-shaped relationship between a word's position in a list and its probability of recall.

If people are presented a series of items (such as words), their percent recalled typically shows a U-shaped function across serial positions. The recency effect seen in such data is usually attributed to information

remains in short-term memory at the time of recall.

Peterson and Peterson (1959), for example, asked

research participants to study three unrelated letters of the alphabet, such as CHJ. Then the participants saw a three-digit number, and they counted backward by threes from this number for a short period. This counting activity prevented them from rehearsing the three-letter sequence during the delay. In the first few trials, people recalled most of the letters. However, after several trials, the previous letters produced interference, and recall was poor. After a mere 5-second delay—as you can see from Figure 4.1—people forgot approximately half of the letters they had seen.

episodic buffer

serves as a temporary storehouse that can hold and combine information from your phonological loop, your visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory

subvocalization

silently pronounce the words that you are reading.

Incidentally, the visuospatial sketchpad has been known by a variety of different names,

such as visuospatial working memory, and short-term visual memory. You may encounter these alternate terms in other discussions of working memory

the central executive is responsible for

suppressing irrelevant information

acoustic confusions

that is, people are likely to confuse similar-sounding stimuli

What does short-term memory actually accomplish for our cognitive processes? (according to 1970s, Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch)

that its major function is to hold several interrelated bits of information in our mind, all at the same time, so that a person can work with this information and then use it appropriately

Rehearsal

the process of keeping information in short-term memory by mentally repeating it

Working memory is short-term memory. The term "short-term memory" is now considered outdated in modern day cognitive psychology

true

Working memory is, thus a more popular reconceptualization of short-term memory that places an emphasis on simultaneous processing and storage of information

true

Working memory was historically conceptualized as an information storehouse with a number of shelves to hold partially processed information until it moves on to another location

true

these studies have shown that phonological-loop tasks activate part of the frontal lobe and part of the temporal lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain

true

your working memory is an active process.It is like a workbench where material is constantly being handled, combined, and transformed.

true

self-instruction

when you silently remind yourself about something you need to do in the future or how to use some complicated equipment. In fact, talking to yourself—in moderation!—is a useful cognitive strategy

visuospatial sketchpad

which processes both visual and spatial information. This kind of working memory allows you to look at a complex scene and gather visual information about objects and landmarks. It also allows you to navigate from one location to another

primacy effect,

with an enhanced recall for items at the beginning of the list. These early items are presumably easy to remember for two reasons: (1) They don't need to compete with any earlier items; and (2) People rehearse these early items more frequently

recency effect

with better recall for items at the end of the list.

The effects of proactive interference are decreased

you shift to a different category of items to learn.