Lecture 6 Flashcards
working memory (25 cards)
What are the three components of Atkinson & Shiffrin’s Modal Model (1968)?
Sensory registers
Short-term store (STS)
Long-term store (LTS)
What is the primacy effect in free recall?
Better recall of early items due to rehearsal and transfer to long-term memory.
What is the recency effect in free recall?
Better recall of recent items, assumed to still be in short-term memory (STS).
What evidence challenged the idea that rehearsal leads to LTM storage?
Craik & Watkins (1973) showed that rehearsal does not guarantee recall; repetition alone isn’t enough
What is long-term recency, and which study supports it?
Recency effect that occurs without STS involvement; shown in Bjork & Whitten (1974) under distracting conditions.
What did Patient KF’s case suggest about STS and LTM?
Despite poor STS, he could still form new long-term memories, suggesting STS isn’t essential for LTM.
What is the Working Memory model and who proposed it?
A multi-component system for temporary storage and manipulation of information, proposed by Baddeley & Hitch (1974).
What are the three core components of Baddeley & Hitch’s WM model?
Phonological Loop
Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad
Central Executive
What is the phonological loop responsible for?
Storing and rehearsing verbal/auditory information.
What are the four effects that support the phonological loop?
Phonological similarity effect
Word length effect
Articulatory suppression
Irrelevant speech effect
What does the visuo-spatial sketchpad do?
Stores and manipulates visual and spatial information (e.g., location, shapes, movement).
What task supports the existence of the visuo-spatial sketchpad?
The Brooks matrix task and Corsi block task—spatial tasks that interfere with visual WM.
What is the central executive responsible for?
Directing attention, coordinating subsystems, and managing cognitive tasks.
What evidence supports the WM model’s multi-component structure?
Dual-task experiments: reasoning and learning tasks are only mildly disrupted by memory loads → implies parallel systems.
What is the phonological similarity effect?
Items that sound similar are harder to recall due to confusion in the phonological store.
What is articulatory suppression?
Repeating irrelevant speech (e.g., “the, the, the…”) disrupts rehearsal and prevents encoding in the phonological loop.
What are two major criticisms of the WM model?
Trace decay inconsistencies (e.g., variable word length effect)
Lack of coverage for LTM influence, modality effects, and complex span tasks
What is the Embedded-Processes Model (Cowan, 1999)?
Working memory is an activated part of LTM, with a focus of attention for currently relevant information.
What is the TBRS model (Barrouillet & Camos)?
Working memory depends on time-based sharing of attention between processing and refreshing memory traces.
What is the “ratio rule” in recency effects?
Recency is determined by the ratio of time since an item appeared to the retention interval—not just STS.
Which of the following statements about the Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968, 1971) Modal model of memory is incorrect?
(c) The model proposes that memory benefits from the depth of processing.
. Which of the following findings represents a problem for the Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968, 1971) Modal model of memory?
(c) The long-term recency effect in continuous distractor free recall.
. Crowder proposed a ratio rule to explain the magnitude (or steepness) of recency effects at different timescales. According to this account, the magnitude of recency effects will be greatest when________________.
(d) The presentation rate is slow and the delay between study and test is short
A student performs their research dissertation examining the serial recall of lists of 5 words. They observe that participants find it harder to recall the 5-word sequence “mad, man, mat, map, cad” compared to “doctor, rabbit, nightmare, pencil, loopy”. This is probably due to ______________.
(c) The phonological similarity effect.
