Cognitive Psychology: The Acquisition of Memories and the Working-Memory System

When recalling a list of letters (e.g. T, O, D, F, P, A, E, G), participants may group the letters into syllables for future recall (e.g. TO, DIF). Which of these answers is a potential problem for this strategy?

The chunking process requires resources, and this makes rehearsal more difficult

Working memory (WM) has been likened to a desk space that holds the current information for a short period of time. The analogy is problematic in what way?

The desk analogy is too static: WM is capable of more than simple short-term storage.

Digit Span

The number of digits the person can echo back without errors. Memory capacity is typically 7 plus-or-minus 2 chunks. The term "chunk" is deliberately unscientific-sounding in order to remind us that a chunk does not hold a fixed quantity of information, this is largely up to the individual. If items are in syllable chunks rather then single items someone could remember at least a dozen letters.

A physician has just read an article about a recently invented drug. Which of the following is LEAST important in determining whether the physician will remember the article later on?

The physician expected to need the information later on and therefore employed a maintenance memorisation strategy that she believed had helped her memorise material in the past.

Acquisition phase

The process of gaining information and placing it into memory

Maintenance rehearsal

Thereby, simply focus on the to-be-rembered items themselves, with little thought bout what the items mean or how they are related to each other. This is a rote, mechanical process, recycling items in working memory simply by repeating them over and over. In many situations such as rehearsal of a phone number which then gets interrupted by a text, does not provide no long-term benefit as the phone number is then forgotten. If you think about something only in a mindless and mechanical fashion, the item will not be establish in your memory.

Free recall

Are free to report the words in any order they choose.

Mnemonic strategies

Back dates to Ancient Greece, named in honour or Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory in Greek mythology. These strategies simply provide some means of organising the to-be-remembered material. One broad class of mnemonic, often used for memorising sequences of words, links the first letters of the word into some meaningful structure such as Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge E, G, B, D, F for musical notes. Other mnemonics involve the use of mental imagery, relying on "mental pictures" to link the to-be-remembered items to each other. The images show the objects in some sort of relationship or interaction. Peg-word systems begin with a well-organised structure such as one is a bun two is a shoe three is a tree In memorising something you can hang the materials to be remembered on these pegs. Mnemonics can be enormously effective. Peg words or interactive imagery vastly outperformed students who'd used other memorising strategies. However, mnemonic use involves a trade off: If you focus your attention on just one or two memory connections, you'll spend little time thinking about other possible connections, that might help you understand the material. You'd be better served by a memory strategy that leads you to seek out multiple connections between the material you're trying to learn and things you already know. Optimal organisation of complex material is generally dependent on understanding. That is, you remember best what you understand best.

Relational or elaborative rehearsal

Involves thinking about what the to-be-remembered items mean and how they're related to each other and to other things you already know. It is vastly superior to maintenance rehearsal for establishing information in memory. Greater levels of brain activity especially in the hippocampus and regions of the prefrontal cortex were reliably associated with greater probabilities of retention later on.

Long-term memory

Is enormous as it contains all of your knowledge such as specific knowledge (how many siblings do yo have), general themes (water is wet,unicorns don't exist), and knowledge about events (early in your life). Requires work to recover information and can sometimes be effortful and slow and in some setting can fail altogether. Information remains in storage whether or not you're thinking about it right now.

Working memory

Is limited in size, is easy to get information into and out of as this memory holds the ideas you are thinking about right now, so is already available to you. If you shift your thoughts to a new topic, these new ideas will now occupy working memory, pushing out what was there a moment ago.

Jose is asked to remember the order of a previously presented list of words. Compared to an immediate recall test, what effect would you expect a 20-second delay of white noise to have on memory performance?

It would have no effect on memory, compared to an immediate recall test.

Memory Connections

Learning also need to establish some appropriate indexing, if effect pave a path to the newly acquired information, so that this information can be retrieved at some future point. Connect don't bring material into memory but they do make the material findable in long-term storage later. Connections might link some aspect of the context-of-learning to the target information, so that when you think again about the context you'll be led to other ideas. Richness of complex sentences offers the potential of many connections as it calls other thoughts to mind, each of which can be connected, in your thinking , to the target sentence. These connections, in turn , provide potential retrieval paths that in effect, guide your thoughts toward the content to be remembered. Fewer connections establish a narrower set of retrieval paths.

Operation span

Modern researcher measure of the memory capacity, designed to measure working memory when it is working. Reading span is such a measurement in which participants are asked to rad aloud a series of sentences. Immediately after reading the sentences, the participant is asked to recall each sentence's last word. If this task is successful then then they will continue with 3 and then 4 sentences and so on until the performance is located. People with greater WMC do have an advantage in many settings - in test of reasoning, assessments of reading compression, standardised academic tests and more. The link between WMC and measures of intellectual performance provides an intriguing hint about what we're measuring with tests like SAT that seek to measure intelligence. As working memory is not a passive storage box but instead a highly active information processor.

Storage phase

Once you've acquired this information, you need to hold it in memory until the information is needed.

Level of processing

Shallow processing leads to poor memory. Deeper processing (paying attention to meaning) leads to much better memory. And what matters seems to be the level of engagement; the specific intention to learn (because someone knows their memory will be tested later on) contributes little. If you do deep processing, it won't matter if you're trying hard to memorise the materials (intentional learning) or merely paying attention to the meaning because you find the material interesting, with no plan for memorising (incidental learning).

Primacy effect and recency effects in free recall

They are very likely to remember the first few words on the list know as primacy effect and they're also likely to remember the last few words on the list, a recency effect. The resulting pattern is a U-shaped curve describing the relation between position within the series or serial position and likelihood of recall. Working memory is s limited in size, capable of holding only five or six words. As participants try to keep up with the list of words heard to place into working memory, previous words will be bumped out. However, the last few words don't get bumped out, because no further input is arriving. This causes the recency effect as the last few words are easy to retrieve. As participants hear the list, they do their best to be good memorisers, and so when they hear the first word, they typically repeat it over and over to themselves. The first word has 100% attention which is then divided to 50% when the second word arrives and so on down the list. This gives the first few words on the list the privilege of time and attention in processing the information into LTM. As a result later words on the list are rehearsed fewer times than words early in the list. Earlier words have a greater chance of being transferred into LTM and being recalled after a delay which explains the primacy effect. This also explains the serial-position curve as the recency portion of the curve is coming from working memory, while the other items on the list are being recalled form LTM. An activity interpolated between the list and recall essentially eliminates the recency effect, but it has no influence on the pre-recency portion of the curve.. Merely delaying the recall fro a few second after the list's end, with no interpolated activity, a strong recency effect is detected. Using more familiar or more common words, ease entry into long-term memory and does improve pre-recency retention. Slower rate also improves pre-rency performance but has no effect on recency. Lastly, fMRI scans suggest early items on a list depends on brain areas in and around the hippocampus that are associated with long term memory, working memory specifically activates the perirhinal cortex.

Modal model

When information first arrives, it is stored briefly in sensory memory (which holds on to the input in "raw" sensory form), iconic memory (for visual inputs) and an echoic memory (for auditory inputs). A process of selection and interpretation then moves the information into short-term the place where you hold information while you're working on it. Some of the information is then transferred into long-term memory, a much larger and more permanent storage place.

You are watching TV when a commercial advertising a new pizza place in town comes on. You decide you want pizza and try to memorise the phone number given in the commercial. Just as you are about to dial, your cell phone rings and you talk on the phone for a few minutes. What is most likely to happen after you finish your call?

You have forgotten the phone number and must rewind your DVR to retrieve it.

Retrieval phase

You somehow locate the information in the vast warehouse that is memory and you bring it into active use.

Participants in an experiment were asked to keep track of the most recent word they had heard that started with a "G". Therefore, participants should report "gravy" after hearing the sequence "girl, grump, hat, scissors, whistle, pen, radio, bed, foot, glass, lantern, gravy". Later, participants are asked to report back all the "G" words they heard. Then we would expect

poor recollection of all the "G" words because the situation invites maintenance rather than elaborative rehearsal.

An experimenter reads a list of 30 words to a group of participants at the rate of one word per second. this is immediately followed by a free-recall test. A second group of participants hears the same 30 words presented at the faster rate of two words per second. We should expect that the group hearing the slower presentation will show improved memory performance for the

pre-recency portion of the list, but there will be no impact on the recency effect.

One difference between working memory and long-term memory is that

the contents of working memory depend on the content of one's current thinking, but the contents of long-term memory do not.