psych 258 midterm 2

what are the two hypothesises of forgetting in short term memory?

decay and interference

what is decay?

forgetting because of time

interference

new info comes into memory and displaces older info

retroactive interference

forget something from past

proactive interference

info prevents you from learning something in the future

keppel and underwood

• short term memory

• reanalyze brown-peterson task

• for first few trials- memory of trigram-up to 15 sec with high accuracy

• later trials after participants see many previous trigrams, decay over time occurs

  • interference and decay

Lewandowsky et al.

• studied decay without interference

• used computer keyboard typing recall task

  • participants memorize and type a few letters then have to stop

  • no decay from passage of time

• no effect of speed at which participants had to repeat the letters on their recall of the items

• found that passage of time alone, without interference, does not cause decay in short-term memory

what model did Baddeley develop

The working memory model- visio-spatial sketchpad, central executive, and phonological loop

difference between short-term memory and working memory

working memory is a store with much higher capacity and duration

Conrad 1964

• when people had to memorize list of letters they had more difficulty when the letters sounded more similar to one another than when they didnt

  • referred to these errors as acoustic confusions

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