Chapter 5: STM

Question 1

Memory

Answer 1

mechanism that allows us to retain, retrieve, and use information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills over time; both passive and active processes

Question 2

Stages of memory

Answer 2

encoding, consolidation, retrieval, reconsolidation

Question 3

Encoding

Answer 3

initial perception of an event, including attention and pattern recognition

Question 4

Consolidation

Answer 4

laying down and strengthening of memories in short-term or long-term

Question 5

Retrieval

Answer 5

calling memories back up to consciousness

Question 6

Reconsolidation

Answer 6

adaptive update mechanism allowing new information to be integrated into the initial memory representation; happens to all memories after retrieval

Question 7

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s modal model of memory

Answer 7

input enters sensory memory, gets stored in short-term memory with rehearsal, then can be stored and retrieved from long-term memory

Question 8

Sensory memory

Answer 8

brief persistence of the effects of sensory stimulation; initial stage that holds incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second

Question 9

When is memory active?

Answer 9

any time a past experience has an effect on the way you think or behave now or in the future

Question 10

Short-term memory

Answer 10

information that stays in our memory (5 to 9 items) for brief periods (10-20 s) of time without rehearsal

Question 11

Long-term memory

Answer 11

information that is stored for long periods of time, from minutes to a lifetime

Question 12

Control processes

Answer 12

dynamic processes associated with the structural features (types of memory) that can be controlled by the person and may differ from one task to another

Question 13

Rehearsal

Answer 13

control process that operates on STM; repeating a stimulus over and over

Question 14

2 strategies used that are examples control processes

Answer 14

strategies that help make a stimulus more memorable (e.g. chunking); strategies of attention that help you focus on particularly interesting or important information

Question 15

Persistence of vision

Answer 15

the continued perception of a visual stimulus that lasts for a fraction of a second even after it is no longer present (e.g. trail of light left by a sparkler or pictures flashed in a movie theatre)

Question 16

Whole report method (Sperling)

Answer 16

participants were tasked to report as many letters as possible from 12-letter display for 50 ms; reported an average of 4.5/12

Question 17

Partial report method (Sperling)

Answer 17

participants tasked to report letters from a row once cued by a tone (high, medium, low) after the 50 ms 12-letter display; reported an average of 3.3/4 in a row

Question 18

Delayed partial report method (Sperling)

Answer 18

letters were displayed then the cue tone was presented after a short delay; reported an average of 1/4 in a row after 1s delay

Question 19

Iconic memory or the visual icon

Answer 19

brief sensory memory for visual stimuli

Question 20

Echoic memory

Answer 20

persistence of sound that lasts for a few seconds after presentation of the original stimulus

Question 21

Recall

Answer 21

participants are presented a stimuli then are asked to report back as many as possible after a delay; recollecting life events or facts

Question 22

Digit span

Answer 22

the number of digits a person can remember

Question 23

Luck and Vogel’s findings on digit span from change detection

Answer 23

participants are able retain about 4 items in their STM; the more items, the greater the decline in performance

Question 24

Chunking (Miller)

Answer 24

small units like words can be combined into larger meaningful units like phrases and sentences; increases our ability to hold information in STM by relying on preexisting knowledge in LTM

Question 25

Chunk

Answer 25

a collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another but are weakly associated with elements in other chunks

Question 26

Alvarez and Cavanagh's findings on change detection

Answer 26

participants' ability to make the same/difference judgement depended on the stimuli's complexity; greater amount of information, fewer items held in visual STM

Question 27

Working memory

Answer 27

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

Question 28

Components of working memory (Baddeley and Hitch)

Answer 28

phonological loop, visuospatial sketch pad, central executive

Question 29

Phonological loop or verbal STM

Answer 29

holds verbal and auditory information; consists of the phonological store and the articulatory rehearsal process

Question 30

Phonological store or inner ear

Answer 30

passive; linked to speech perception and internally hearing words; holds information for 1-2 s

Question 31

Articulatory rehearsal/control process or inner voice

Answer 31

active but subvocal (no sound actually made); linked to speech production and used to maintain verbal information from the phonological store

Question 32

Visuospatial sketchpad or visual STM

Answer 32

maintains visually presented information like drawings and kinesthetic movements; contains the visual cache and inner scribe

Question 33

Visual cache or inner eye

Answer 33

passive; temporarily stores visual information that comes from perceptual experience and contains information about its form and color

Question 34

Inner scribe

Answer 34

active; refreshes all stored information from the visuospatial sketchpad and briefly stores spatial relationships associated with bodily movement

Question 35

Central executive

Answer 35

a control system that pulls information from LTM and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad by dividing attention between tasks ("attention controller")

Question 36

Phonological similarity effect

Answer 36

the confusion of letters or words that sound similar; more likely to misidentify a visually displayed letter with other letters similar in sound rather than in appearance

Question 37

Word length effect

Answer 37

memory is better for lists of short words than long words, which takes longer to rehearse and produce during recall

Question 38

Articulatory suppresion

Answer 38

repetitively saying an irrelevant sound, which overloads the phonological loop and interferes with rehearsal; eliminates the word length effect

Question 39

Evidence for phonological loop

Answer 39

phonological similarity effect, word length effect, articulatory suppression

Question 40

Visual imagery

Answer 40

the creation of visual images in the mind without a physical visual stimulus

Question 41

Shepard and Metzler's findings on mental rotation

Answer 41

it takes longer to identify if objects are the same or different when there is a greater difference in their orientation

Question 42

Evidence for visuospatial sketchpad

Answer 42

ability for mental rotation and memory for visual displays that are difficult to code into language

Question 43

Perseveration

Answer 43

a breakdown in the central executive's ability to control attention due to frontal lobe damage wherein a person repeatedly performs the same action or thought even if it's not achieving the desired goal

Question 44

Episodic buffer

Answer 44

provides extra capacity by storing information and temporal order; an integrative system that places events occurring in the loop and sketchpad into a coherent sequence or episode; connected to LTM

Question 45

What limits VSTM capacity?

Answer 45

the number of items and the amount of information or complexity

Question 46

Contralateral delay activity

Answer 46

EEG/ERP signal that increases as more items are stored in visual working memory; a neurological marker of working memory load ; measured in posterior parietal and temporal lobes 300-900 ms after onset

Question 47

How do individual differences in selective attention affect working memory?

Answer 47

high efficiency individuals filter out irrelevant information or distractors while low efficiency individuals don't

Question 48

Serial position effect

Answer 48

items at the beginning and end of a list are more likely to be remembered

Question 49

Primacy effect

Answer 49

items at the beginning of a list are rehearsed for a longer time and have less competition with other information

Question 50

Recency effect

Answer 50

items at the end of a list are new in STM so they take less time to decay, and are usually recalled first; is eliminated as time between encoding and retrieval increases

Question 51

Maintenance rehearsal

Answer 51

rote rehearsal that remains items in STM

Question 52

Elaborative rehearsal

Answer 52

thinking about meaningful relationships among the items you're encoding

Question 53

Retroactive interference

Answer 53

something in the present makes it difficult to recall something you have learned previously

Question 54

Proactive interference

Answer 54

something in the past makes it difficult to recall something you have learned recently