Psych Final Study Guide: Chapter 5 (SENSORY + WORKING MEMORY)

Visual Short Term memory

-The intermediate memory store between iconic memory and long-term memory • Testing people with material at greater than one second revealed that people readily encode meaningful stimuli at a categorical level. • Researchers alternately used meaningless visual materials to test for a short-term visual memory store • Subjects were shown two test patterns in rapid succession and indicated whether they were the same or different Visual short-term memory capacity: Traditionally considered to be a limited capacity- About four objects • Encoding and/or capacity is subject to object complexity

Mental Rotation

-is an example of operation of visuospatial sketch pad because it involves visual rotation through space.

Concurrent Articulation (Articulatory Suppression)

A requirement that someone speak or mime speech while dong some other task. in many cases, the person is required to say "Tah-Tah-Tah" over and over or "1, 2, 3." These procedures occupy the muscles and control mechanisms needed for speech, and so they prevent the person from using these resources for subvocalization. With concurrent articulation, the loop isn't available for use, so we are now measuring the capacity of working memory without the rehearsal loop. -reduces memory span dramatically -suggests that the model needs to incorporate speech mechanisms. -reduces words from the phonological store.

Baddeley working memory system

divided into three components: • Central executive - makes decisions, plans responses, and coordinates helper components • phonological loop - verbal and auditory information. - visuospatial sketch pad: visual and spatial information. ------------------------ Phonological Loop: consists of two components in the phonological store - phonological store: limited capacity and holds information for only a few seconds. Articulatory rehearsal process: responsible for keeping information in phonological store from decaying. attached to central exec. Ex: when you are trying to remember a telephone number, a person's name or to understand what your professor is speaking about you're using the phonological loop. one way in which the phonological loop has been studied is by determining what happens when its operation is disrupted. This occurs when the person is prevented from rehearsing the items to be remembered by repeating irrelevant sounds (articulatory suppression) VISUOSPATIAL SKETCH PAD: visual and spatial information. attached to central exec. Ex: when you form a pic in your mind or solve a puzzle or find your way around campus. CENTRAL EXECUTIVE: -pulls info from long term memory and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop + visa spatial sketch pad by focusing on specific parts of a task and deciding how to divide attention between tasks. It is like the traffic cop of working memory system. EPISODIC BUFFER (was later added to this system)> -Holds temporary information about oneself • Backup store that communicates with LTM and WM components • Hold information longer and has greater capacity than phonological loop or visuospatial sketch pad -increasing storage capacity and communicating with LTM.

Atkinson Shiffrin model (modal model) - types of memory -attention -encoding -retreival.

three-stage model of memory includes a) sensory memory, b) short-term memory , and c) long-term memory. -they also proposed control processes associated with structural features that can be controlled by the person and may differ : 1. rehearsal: repeating a stimulus over and over. 2. strategies you might use to help make a stimulus more memorable - relating phone number to date in history. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Attention: moves information from sensory memory to short term memory. 2. Encoding: moves information from short-term to long term. 3. Retrieval: gets information from long term memory to short term memory.

Chunking

• Chunking reduces information into meaningful units that are easier to remember. refers to a repackaging of the information held in working memory -Working memory can hold 7 +/- 2 chunks of information • Effort and attentional resources are required to repackage the input • Does not increase the size of working memory itself ------------ chunking describes the fact that small units (words) can be combined to LARGER meaningful units, like phrases or even larger phrases. -chunking increases our ability to hold info in the STM. -s giving you the code (6527852389), your phone dies. -So, as your dad was reciting the code, you were mentally grouping the long strings of digits into smaller, easier to remember chunks of information. 652, 785, 2389 is