Attention and Memory 1 Flashcards
What is a critical aspect of memory?
Sometimes it isn’t how much we are exposed to a stimulus for it to remain in our memory, it is also if we are paying attention to it.
What is encoding?
The transformation of basic sensory stimuli into a form that can be utilised in memory.
How is encoding an attention related?
They are critically intertwined as attention acts as a filter.
How does attention act as a filter?
It can be an unconscious or autonomic response that filters sensory information. Filtering out irrelevant sensory information, and filter in information that we require or that is important to us.
What is Broadbent’s theory of attention?
He argued that the attention filter happens early on in the selective attention process. Meaning that there would be no cocktail party phenomenon because all irrelevant stimuli would be filtered out before the brain facilitated any meaning to the sounds.
How does Broadbent’s theory relate to the ‘cocktail party phenomenon’?
Due to Broadbent’s theory the ‘cocktail party phenomenon’ would not be true. This is because Broadbent believes in the early selection model of attention meaning all relevant stimuli would be filtered out before the brain facilitated any meaning.
What are the different stages of attention filters, how do they work?
The filter could happen at different points in time.
Early selection model of attention. Stimuli is filtered out before the brain facilitates meaning.
Late selection model of attention. The brain processes more stimuli more deeply before it is filtered out and we focus on what we are interested in.
Somewhere between early selection and late selection there is a process where we understand meaning. The place in the middle where all sounds of the conversation is processed but the meaning associated with the sound.
What is the role of attention in encoding?
The amount/ type of attention determines quality of encoding.
What are the two rehearsal types that we use to process stimuli?
Maintenance rehearsal.
Rote repetition of information, without transformation into a deeper more meaningful code.
Elaborative rehearsal
Meaningful processing of information, deepening processes that relates to the world, perhaps through identifying the same words to other meaningful situations.
What does the Craik and Tulving research tell us about how we learn?
The meaning of words, their semantic properties, creates deeper learning. It wasn’t about how much attention we paid but the type of attention we pay which allows us to encode new stimuli.
What was the common pattern of words in the Craik and Tulving research?
The questions associated with the words facilitated the depth of learning. Those recalled the most had questions about the meaning of the words. Opposed to the superficial and phonological properties of the word.
What are some ways to enrich encoding?
Elaborative rehearsal
Thinking about the material while trying to memorise.
Visual imagery
Concrete objects recalled better than abstract items
Self-reference encoding
Applying information processed to own self
Drawing on a few modalities of sensory input
if we are trying to learn a list of words we add to the auditory property of the words with a visual association
What is Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model of memory?
Suggests that how we go from a stimulus to a memory is a process that processes through a sensory register, a short term memory store and a long term memory store.
Information that could be lost at each point is an influential aspect of this model.
What is the sensory register in Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model and what are its two types, as well as their duration and capacity?
Argues we have a sensory system that registers (and briefly holds) information from the senses.
Two types. 1. Iconic memory Related to the visual system. Duration of this memory is about 1/2 a second. A capacity of around 9 to 10 items.
- Echoic memory
Related to the auditory system
Duration of echoic memory is about 2 seconds.
Has a capacity of ~5 items.
Roger Sperling was an influential scientist in experimenting with sensory registers, specially iconic memory. What is the whole report task and its findings?
Sperling asked participants to recall as many letters that they could, called the whole-report task.
No matter the amount of letters presented, participants couldn’t recall more than 4.5 letters on average.
What was Sperling’s partial report task, why was it created?
It was created to find wether the limit of 4.5 reflected the amount the participants could see or the amount they could recall.
Participants viewed a matrix of letters for a brief time. After letters disappeared participants were presented with a sound to tell them which row to recall (partial-position report task). The participants reported only what they remembered from the probed row.
What were the findings of the partial position report task?
Sperling argued that the proportion of letters recalled from a given row must reflect the proportion of letters seen in the whole display.
Sperling found that the participants could recall about 75% of the letters in any row.
Thus, Sperling extrapolated that the participants must have ‘seen’ 9 of the 12 letters in the display.
What is the partial category report?
presented matrices containing an equal number of both constants and digits and used two auditory probes to tell participants to report either the letters or the digits.
Sperling did not observe a partial report superiority effect when he used this partial category report task.
This suggests that the contents of the icon are not yet “recognised: - that the icon is just “raw visual imagery”.
What is short term memory (STM)?
Intermediate storage system that briefly holds information prior to consolidation
What were the findings of a digit span task in relation to STM?
We are very good at remembering up to a certain number of digits
When we move past 7 numbers of items, our short term memory starts diminishing, it has been found that there is a magic number of items that can exist in the short term memory, this is 7 +/- 2
This information stays in the STM ~20 seconds in duration with the 7 +/- 2 can be inflated
How are STM and LTM associated?
We facilitate our short term memory by what is in our long term memory.
What is chunking?
The process of units of subjective organisation. Like phone numbers.
What are the traditional features of short term memory?
Duration can exceed 20s with rehearsal
Without rehearsal information is lost, called decay.
Information is also lost through interference.
How did Baddeley formulate his theory of working memory?
He speculated that there are other products at work in short term memory, that it isn’t just a unitary system. He experimented by creating a dual-task technique where a concurrent memory task (e.g. digits) was combined with a task dependent on STM (reasoning)
