Cognitive Psychology Chapter 5

What is the capacity and duration of STM?

15-30 seconds

How is delayed responds task used to show us where working memory is located

It showed us where it was located, when we removed the monkeys' prefrontal cortex. They were only able to get the food reward by chance, so they only picked correctly about 50% of the time. Thus the results prove that working memory is in the prefrontal cortex.

How is mental rotation related to the visusospatial sketchpad

Its connected because it involves visual rotations through space

What are the components of working memory?

Phonological loops, Visuospaital sketchpad, and the central executive

Modal Model Memory flow chart

Sensory Memory → Short-term memory (rehearsal; returns to STM)→ output/ [→/←] Long-term memory

What were Sperling's results?

The graph (figure 5.6_ showed the percentage of letters available to participants vs. delay of tone (seconds). It indicates that immediately after a stimulus is presented, all or most of the stimulus is available for perception (sensory memory). Then over the next second, sensory memory fades until by 1 second, the number of letters is about the same as the number of letters that were reported using the whole report method.

Visuospatial sketchpad

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

Central Executive

The part of working memory that that coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad

How is working memory different than STM?

Working memory is concerned with manipulation of information, while short-term memory is concerned with storing information for brief periods of time. They're also different because STM consist of a single component, while working memory consist of multiple components

Phonological loops

consist of two components; the phonological store and articulatory rehearsal process. Phonological store is a component of the phonological loop of working memory that holds and processes verbal and auditory information. Articulatory rehearsal process is a rehearsal process involved in working memory that keeps items in the phonological store from decaying.

What did Sperling's experiment on sensory memory show us?

he wondered how much information people could take in from a briefly presented stimulus. He tested this by flashing an array of letters on a screen for 50 milliseconds and then asked participants to report as many letters as possible. In his experiment, used whole report method, where participants were only able to recall 4.5 of the 12 letters and partial report method

Word length effect

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

Mental rotation

is a phenomenon is were a participant solves a problem by rotating an image of one of the objects in their minds

Delayed responde task

is a task in which information is provided, a delay is imposed, and then memory is tested. This task had been used to study STM by testing monkeys' ability to holding information about a location of a food reward during a delay.

Phonological similarity effect

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

Sensory memory

is the initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second.

How does chunking help STM?

it combines smaller units into larger ones, such as when individual words are combined into a meaningful sentence. It can be used to increase the capacity of memory.

How is the central executive in working memory related to attention?

it pulls information from long-term memory and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and visuospatial task and switch attention from one part to another. One of the main jobs is for it to decide how to divide attention between different tasks.

What did the partial report show us that the whole report didn't?

it showed that participants were able to focus their attention on one of the rows; they correctly reported 3.3 of 4 letters (82%) in that row. Because participants saw an average of 82% of the letters no matter which row was cued, Sperling concluded that the correct description of what was happening was that immediately after display was presented, participants saw an average of 82% of the letters in the whole display, but were not able to report all of these letter because they rapidly faded as the initial letters were being reported.

What is the Brown-Peterson task ?

it's a recall test in which participants are presented with stimuli and then, after a delay, are asked to remember as many of the stimuli as possible. and is used to determine the duration of STM

Whole report method

participants were asked to report as many letters as possible from the whole matrix

Where is working memory is located in the brain?

prefrontal cortex

Example of proactive interference

remembering a phone number and then finding out it changed. It takes a few times to remember the new number because proactive interference is causing her memory for the old number to interfere with the new number.

Delayed partial report method

same as partial report method, but the presentation of cue tones was delayed for fractions of a second after the letters were extinguished.

Partial report method

same as whole report method but immediately after he sounded a cue to tones (high pitched (top row), Medium pitched (middle row), low pitched (bottom row)), which indicate which row of letters the participants were to report.

Digit Span

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

What is the neural mechanism that allows working memory to occur?

the primary visual cortex, which is the 1st area of the brain to receive visual input, and the temporal and parietal areas, where visual information is transmitted from the primary visual cortex.

Modal model memory

was proposed by Atkinson & Shiffrin that describes memory as mechanisms that involves processing information through a series of stages. The stages or structural features of the model are sensory, short-term, long-term memory.

Proactive interference

when information learned preciously interferes with learning new information

What's Sperling's methods?

whole report method, partial report method, and delay partial method