Memory and Language Flashcards
What is the multi-store model?
Atkinson and Shiffrin
A model of memory consisting of modality-specific sensory stores, a short-term store of very limited capacity, and a long-term store of essentially unlimited capacity capable of holding information over time.
What is the sensory store of the multi-store model?
Consists of an
iconic store - visual.
Echoic store - auditory
What was Sperling’s experiment?
Investigating iconic store. Briefly present letters in a grid array. Participants could only report 4 or 5 letters correctly, but in a ‘partial’ report condition, could report most of the letters from the requested line if the delay between removal of the array and presentation of the prompt was less than 1s
What was Treisman’s study on the echoic store?
Dichotic listening. Auditory message to one ear, asked to repeat back while ignoring a second message from the other ear. If the second message was identical to the first, but started at a different time, participants only noticed if they started within 2s of each other. Suggests unattended information persists for approx. 2s.
What was Miller’s experiment?
- Miller: short term memory span Asked subjects to recall digit strings. Typically, could recall 7+-2 digits, same for letters and even words. Words being treated the same as letters suggests that short term memory holds 7+-2 chunks. Can retain information by rehearsing it.
What was Peterson and Peterson’s experiment?
- Peterson and Peterson: asked participants to remember a stimulus for a few seconds while counting backwards in 3s to prevent rehearsal. Ability to remember a stimulus diminished rapidly, suggesting information decays from the short term store within seconds.
What was Waugh and Norman’s experiment?
manipulated speed with which digits were presented to participants, and found that digit recall was more or less unaffected, suggesting that short-term memory forgetting is due to interference from exposure to additional information, rather than the passage of time
Decay hypothesis: fast>slow
Interference hypothesis: fast = slow
What was Rundus’ experiment?
Rundus: made people rehearse out loud. The more frequently a word rehearsed, the better it was remembered.
What were the criticism’s of the multi-store model?
- Model says processing in the short-term store is required for encoding into long-term memory - Patient KF
- Assumes short and long term stores are unitary, operating in a single way - patient KF
Who was patient KF?
Parieto-occipital lobe damage. Defective short term memory (digit span) but preserved long-term learning and recall. Had worse short-term memory for auditory letters and digits than for visual stimuli - suggests that there may be distinct short-term memory stores for different types of material.
What was the model created aiming to improve the multistore model?
Baddeley & Hitch Working memory model
What are the components of the Working Memory model?
3 primary components:
- Auditory-verbal phonological loop (speech-based)
- Visuo-spatial sketchpad
- Modality free central executive
What is the role of the central executive?
Selecting and initiating cognitive processing routines e.g. manipulation beyond simple repetition
What is the evidence regarding a speech based temporary store existing?
- Treisman
- Miller
- Peterson and Peterson
- Rundus
- Baddeley’s word length and phonological similarity effects
What is the phonological similarity effect?
Baddeley
Serial recall of a list of phonologically similar words is significantly worse than from a list of phonologically dissimilar words.
Suggests speech based representations are used in storing the words and that recall requires discrimination between memory traces, which is more difficult for phonologically similar words.
What is the word-length effect?
Baddeley
Recall of a list of long words is worse than a list of short words
Confirmed depended on phonological loop by asking participants to silently mouth digits (articulatory suppression) during presentation and recall of words. Eliminated the word-length effect, suggesting that phonological storage capacity is determined by rate of rehearsal.
How did Baddeley structure the phonological loop?
Phonological store perceives speech
Articulatory control process linked to speech production that gives access to the phonological store
How does Baddeley’s structure of the phonological loop explain the phonological similarity effect and the word-length effect?
Confusions between similar representations in the phonological store
Takes longer to rehearse longer words via the articulatory control process
What did Baddeley do to elucidate a difference between auditory-verbal and visuospatial short term memory?
asked participants to encode material using either rote verbal learning or an imagery strategy. When task was combined with pursuit rotor tracking, performance using the imagery based strategy was disrupted, but not the verbal.
How did Baddeley and Lieberman divide the visuospatial sketchpad?
- Baddeley and Lieberman: asked participants to encode material using either rote verbal learning or an imagery strategy again. Split concurrent task into visual (making brightness judgments) and spatial (pointing at a moving pendulum while blindfolded, guided by an auditory tone). Learning of the imagery-based strategy was most clearly disrupted by the spatial concurrent task, whist the visual task did not interrupt significantly
What did Logie argue?
That the visuospatial sketchpad should be divided into two components: visual cache (passively stores information about visual form and colour, subject to decay and interference by new visual information), and an inner scribe (processes spatial info and allows active rehearsal of information in the visual cache).
Who is patient NL?
Preserved perceptual skills, but could not describe details of a scene from memory (fine visual cache, but no inner scribe?)
Who is patient LH?
Performed better on spatial processing tasks than visual imagery tasks
How do we measure memory?
1. Conscious behavioural methods: Objective: accuracy/reaction time Subjective: remember/know, confidence, qualitative measures 2. Unconscious behavioural methods: priming, conditioning, habits - Psychophysiological GSR/HR - Electrophysiological EEG ECG EMG MEG - Haemodynamics PET SPECT fMRI