Memory Flashcards
What does cogntive mean?
mental processing
What is cognitive psychology?
how the mind deals with information
it assumes that behaviour is influenced by how you process information from the world around you
What does attention mean?
you focus on something to the exclusion of other things
What is a model?
a way of representing a psychological process that is complex in a more simplified way
not exact diagrams of what happens biologically
a way of explaining an idea so that it can be tested in experiments
Who came up with the Multi-store model of memory ?
Attkinson and Shiffrin
What is the multi-store model of memory?
a representation of how memory works in terms of 3 stores = sensory register, STM and LTM
also describes how information is transferred from one store to another
What are the 3 features of the memory stores?
coding
duration
capacity
What does coding mean?
the format information is stored in memory
What does capacity mean?
the amount of information that can be held in memory
What does duration mean?
the length of time information can be held in memory
What does semantic mean?
the meaning of words, something has a meaning
What does unitary mean?
each store is its own part and they are all seperate, they do not interact with the other stores
What is an iconic memory?
What something looks like
What is a echoic memory?
what it sounds like = acoustic
What does decay mean in terms of memory?
it has been forgotten
What is the sensory stores role?
all stimuli from the environment pass into the sensory store
there is a store for each sense
selects what relevant information we should pay atttention to and discards the rest
What is attention?
determins which information is transferred into the STM
What is the duration of the sensory store?
1/4 of a sec or 250 milliseconds
What is the coding in the sensory store?
modality specific = depends on the sense
What is the capacity of the sensory store?
very large
What was Sperling’s basic method and findings for studying the sensory register in thr MSMM?
displayed visual arrays to participants containing 3 rows of 4 letters
they were displayed for very short time
participants could recall 4 or 5 letters and reported a presence of others
proves how the sensory store has a large capacity but short duration
What was sperling’s further study on the sensory store using tone of voice and its findings?
used a report procedure
trained his participants to recognise 3 tones - 1 for each row
presented them with the visual arrays of 3 rows of 4 letters
participants recalled a lot more with the tone = 75% of letters were recalled
What was sperling’s findings?
a large amount of information is available so the capacity of the sensory register is very large but it decays very rapidly so duration is short
What is the capacity of STM?
between 5 and 9 chunks of information
7 +/- 2