Intro to Cognitive Psychology- Chpt. 5

The emphasis of the concept of working memory is on how information is

manipulated

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.

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

15-20 seconds or less

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

a smaller response set

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

Brief sensory memory for sound is known as

echoic memory

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

prefrontal cortex

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

retroactive interference

e function of ____ is to pull information out of long-term memory.

the central executive

The word-length effect reveals that

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