Lecture 13 - Memory and The Senses Flashcards
What is the modal model of memory?
- Environmental input
- Sensory register: visual/auditory/haptic
- Short term store: Temporary Working Memory via rehearsal, coding, decisions and retrieval strategies. This is where response output is formed e.g guided information
- Long term Store: permanent memory store
What do others propose?
- Visual-spatial and phonological short term stores
- There is a central executive responsible for allocating attention and makes decisions
- CE works with phonological loops for holding verbal information. Info is repeated for a few seconds to maintain it
- CE works with visuo-spatial sketchpad. Anything that you get from vision that is being passed into STM is being held and active in VSS
What was the immediate serial recall?
- Serial = list words in order, immediate = no time between presentations of words and recall
- First list is baseline: words are short and do not sound alike
- Second list have difference in one phoneme, they are phonologically similar words
- Third list are semantically similar
Positives of immediate serial recall?
- Rich
- Easy to administer
- Can manipulate what is being recalled
- Score respects to order
What is the serial position curve?
- Primacy effect: Likely to recall first words more accurately FOR IMMEDIATE AND DELAYED.
- Recency effect: Likely to recall last words more accurately ONLY FOR IMMEDIATE. Info is still in short term store.
What was an experiment testing the serial position effect?
- Introduced a suffix: irrelevant sound not part of the memory set e.g go
- Sometimes heard suffix replaced with a beep
- Beep finds typical serial position effect
- Speech suffix has no recency effect
What was this experiment an example of?
- Similarity based interference e.g beep is not similar but word is. Word makes more disruption
- Demonstrates that memories briefly retain sensory characteristics
What is echoic memory?
- Auditory sensory memory
- Briefly represents aurally perceived sounds
- Preserves auditory characteristics
- Persists for several seconds
How is echoic memory different from STM?
- EM is just an echo of auditory perception
- No built in process to sustain memory except to transfer it
- Subset of echoic memory is encoded into verbal STM
Why is verbal STM from echoic memory?
- BECAUSE Verbal info is represented in sound based form
- Giving ppts short lists of words that sound diff/sim
- Ppts remember more of dissimilar sounds
- Ppts remember more when semantically similar
What is the phonological similarity effect?
- Similar sounds of words = lower immediate recall
- No similar cost for recalling words that have similar meanings
- Words are stored in a phonological format = must be a phonological short term store to hold verbal info
Differences between echoic and Phonological store (DRAC)
- Access: E - automatic for heard sounds, P - automatic for heard words and read content
- Duration: E- 1-10 seconds, P - Brief unless rehearsed via articulation
- Capacity: E - 2 secs of aural info e.g tone, pitch etc. P - 2-3 secs via word length effect
- Relations: E - Some info passed onto STM, others decay. P - Works in conjunction with rehearsal processes to prevent decay
What are problems with a verbal STM?
- Concepts are very similar. Parsimony - theory shouldn’t contain more concepts than necessary
- Irrelevant auditory stimuli interfere with verbal STM e.g if phonological store is for words, why do tones disrupt it?
- If we have a verbal short term store, we also need a non-verbal one
- Could use rehearsal as a way of maintaining info rather than having a store
What is the irrelevant sound effect?
- Verbal STM is disrupted by concurrent fluctuating sounds, speech and music
How was the irrelevant sound effect investigated experimentally?
- List of words to remember via immediate serial recall
- Reading them, and hearing other sounds represented in echoic memory. Irrelevant sounds should not disrupt other process as they are separate processes held in doff places
- Steady state: Irrelevant sound is consistent, auditory deviant: one diff sound embedded within a consistent set
- Changing-state: fluctuating sound pattern
- Ppts remember less when diff sounds rather than consistent sound
