Midterm 1 Concepts - Atkinson & Shiffrin Model / Working Memory / Encoding Specificity Theory

encapsulates lectures 1 - 6

• why is the temporal lobe considered an important area of the brain with respect to this class?

• which area of the temporal lobe specifically do we really care about?

• The temporal lobe houses the hippocampus which is heavily implicated in the formation of memories

  • specifically in the medial temporal lobe

which part of the brain processes sensory input?

• the whole brain processes different sensory inputs

  • different areas of the brain are designated for specific types of information such as smell, taste, touch, etc.

where are long-term memories stores?

• It will be stored in the places that your brain was activating at the time of the memory

• Think of memory as the simultaneous reactivation of multiple areas of your multi modal monkey brain

Describe Sperling’s iconic memory experiment and follow up experiment. What are the results? What are the conclusions?

• First Experiment

  • Background

    • presented matrix of letters for 50ms

    • asked participants to report as many letters as possible

  • Results

    • subjects recall only half of the letters

  • Conclusions

    • people suck at memory

• Follow up Experiment

  • Background

    • sounded low, medium, or high tone immediately after matrix disappeared (each tone corresponds with specific row to report) [partial report]

  • Results

    • recall of that row was almost perfect

  • Conclusions

• why is it important that the tone sounded AFTER the letters flashed instead of before in Sperling’s iconic memory experiment?

• what if we were to delay sounding the tone after the letters flashed (instead of playing the tone immediately)?

• Sperling was testing their capacity to intake information. Playing a tone prior to the flashing of letter will cue participants to a specific row which is NOT testing capacity but rather their ability to pay attention to specific rows.

• We would expect that they would decrease their ability to recall the information because of how quickly we lose information in our sensory memory.

  • when tested we see that even as little as a SECOND makes us decrease our iconic memory by 1/2

• There are five letters per row, and five rows total. A tone tells someone to report the letters in the fourth row. They report two letters.

  • how many letters are in this person’s iconic memory / sensory memory?

  • do you think the tone was played immediately after the icon was flashed

• 2 letters reported x 5 rows = 10 letters in iconic memory

• Tone most likely played after 1 second because we observe less than half of the row’s letters being reported

what are the three different types of tasks that Yilmaz describes relating to word list experiments?

• Overt Rehearsal

  • subjects asked to rehearse out loud

  • first few items receive the most rehearsal

• Incidental Learning

  • subjects unaware of impending memory test (no rehearsal)

  • no primacy effect

• Speeded List

  • less opportunity to rehearse

  • primacy effect reduced, recency unaffected

• how would you expect classic amnesics to perform on word list experiments?

• what is interesting with regard to the recency effect? why?

• you would expect for rehearsal to not be helpful because they cannot store anything into long-term memory

  • reduced primacy effect because of this

• in case studies, we observe a preserved recency effect because the recency effect is a short term memory phenomenon

  • STM occurs prior to LTM meaning the recency effect should be unaffected which is what is observed in research

• what are the three different types of recall tasks?

• what does the recency effect look like in each of these tasks?

• Immediate Recall

  • strong recency effect

• Delayed Recall

  • no recency effect

• Final Free Recall

  • unexpectedly ask participants to recall list again 1 hour later

  • everything that is remembered is recalled from LTM

  • “negative recency” effect

    • decrease level of performance for words at the end of the list

what two conclusions can we make regarding the recency effect observed in the immediate, delayed, and final free recall experiments?

1) The recency effect is a short-term memory phenomenon temporarily maintained in a “buffer” using rehearsal

2) The negative recency effect is a long-term memory phenomenon (the less rehearsal an item receives, the less likely it is to get encoded into LTM)

Initially we concluded that in final free recall the last few items of a list receive the least amount of rehearsal (which explains the negative recency effect).

• If we change the procedure so that the last few items receive the most amount of rehearsal what would we see?

  • why does this happen? what does this mean for our hypothesis that rehearsal puts information into long-term memory?

• When running a final free recall, we STILL observe a negative recency effect even when participants rehearse the last few items more than the other items in the list.

  • This disproves the idea that rehearsal puts things into LTM. Researchers theorized that it must be that the type of rehearsal you are doing is what matters and not just repetition

• Describe the depth of processing in relation to word recognition experiment. What do the results of the experiment tell you about rehearsal and long-term memory?

• Craik and Tulving conducted incidental memory test and presented list of items to participants that varied in depth of processing. Had participants analyze each item either structurally, phonemically, or semantically.

• Results

  • Percentage of words recognized was highest for semantic followed by phonemic and structure.

• Conclusion

  • Shows that a higher level of understanding or deeper level processing is what will put things into long-term memory

• how does depth of processing relate to the primacy effect?

• why do we see that effect?

• We are able to deeply encode at the start of the list but it becomes more difficult the more words you add

  • this explains increased performance for first few items in word list

what is the capacity of short term memory?

• People thought it was 7 plus or minus 2

• Cowan disproved that and it’s actually FOUR

what experiment helped rework Baddeley’s memory model to prove the existence of a separate short term store called the visuospatial sketchpad?

• Background:

  • two groups: phonological loop suppression (repeat word aloud) AND visual-sketchpad suppression (push keys on a calculator

  • had each one memorize chess position followed by their corresponding distractor task

  • then asked to reproduce chess positions

• Results:

  • Controls performed the best, followed by phonological loop suppression (comparable to controls), recall dropped severely for visual-sketchpad suppression group

• who is patient P.V.? what are the relevant facts about her?

• what do P.V’s results tell us about the purpose of a phonological loop?

• woman with a left hemisphere stroke which means she has NO PHONOLOGICAL LOOP

• she performs well on paired-associate word task AND fails at a paired-associated nonword task

• phonological loop exists for language acquisition which is shown in research (she tried to learn foreign words but epically failed haha)

• How does patient P.V. perform on a paired associate non-word task when presented visually to her?

• what can we make of these results?

• she performs worse than controls but still shows an ability to learn the words (different from non-visual version where her results were at floor)

• P.V. is using her visuo-spatial sketch pad which is not optimized for speech processing in order to learn the non words

• what is the size of our visual STM?

• what experiments allowed us to figure this out?

• Size is from 3-4

• Luck & Vogel did visual working memory task where they showed participants squares with certain colors then another image of squares with colors. They asked if the second image was the same or different from the previous one.

• what is another way of thinking about the capacity of the phonological loop proposed by Baddeley? (no a slot based memory model)

• He proposed that the verbal WM capacity is equal to the # of items you can say in ~2 seconds

what are the two properties of encoding and retrieval (LTM)?

• memory is constructive (encoding) and reconstructive (retrieval)

• memory retrieval is cue-dependent

Describe the Bransord & Johnson experiment about how schemas affect our ability to comprehend and recall information.

• Background

  • Had 3 groups read an ambiguously worded paragraph

    • no context group

    • context given after

    • context given before

• Results

  • no context and context after groups showed same level of recall and comprehension

  • context before group showed highest level of recall and comprehension

• Conclusion

  • having context prior to reading a paragraph makes it easier to understand which makes it easier to recall

• what is the misinformation effect?

• describe the experiment related to the misinformation effect? (Loftus and Palmer)

• misinformation effect: incorporating misleading information into one’s memory of an event

• background

  • showed participants videos of cars getting into a car accident

  • different groups asked the same question about video but wording of questions was changed slightly

    • hit vs smashed vs contacted

    • was there glass?

• results

  • smashed = 41mph; hit = 34mph; contacted = 32mph

• conclusion

  • people are shown to be adding/changing details to the videos they were shown just based off of one word change. simple act of remembering (retrieving) reconstructs the memory and it is not a perfect one-to-one match of what happened

• What is the Tulving Encoding Specificity Principle?

• What experiment was used to come to this finding?

• Encoding Specificity Principle: A cue facilitates retrieval only if it was encoded with the to-be-remembered item

• Cue-Dependent Nature of Retrieval Study

  • Background

    • study paired-associate word list task

      • list had weak associates such as “lady-queen” or “butter-smooth”

    • cued recall by prompting with “lady-” or “butter”

    • after 4 repeat they used “strong” cues such as “king-” expecting queen and so on and so forth

  • Results

    • strong cues: 25% recalled

    • weak cues: 75% recalled

  • Conclusion

    • strong cues weren’t generating high recall because that was not how the memory was encoded in their brain. Even if it makes more sense intuitively to remember the word through a more semantically related word that is not how memory works DUMBASS.

• who was Karl Lashley?

• what experiments was he known for?

• what were his theories regarding the storage of episodic memories?

• what did Wilder Penfield believe

• Studied the effect of brain lesions on the ability of rats to learn or remember a maze

• Believed in two concepts:

  • 1) Equipotentiality: the capacity of any cortical area to substitute for any other area for learning and memory

  • 2) Mass Action: the reduction in memory is proportional to the amount of brain tissue destroyed

• Wilder Penfield believed in specific parts of brain being dedicated to specific tasks.

  • during surgery for epilepsy, studied temporal lobe neurons using electrical stimulation

  • ~5% of patients reported vivid memories (more so than when other parts of the brain were stimulated)