L6 - Memory

Question 1

What is thinking?

Answer 1

• Cognitive behaviour in which ideas, images, mental representation or other hypothetical elements of thought are experienced or manipulated
• Includes imagining, remembering, problem solving, daydreaming, free association, concept formation and many other processes

Question 2

What is sensory memory?

Answer 2

• Mental representation of how environmental events look, sound, feel, smell and taste
• Sensory memory fade very quickly (less than a second)

Question 3

What is short term memory?

Answer 3

• Also known as working memory
• Ensemble of mental components that hold limited info temporarily in a heightened state of availability for use in ongoing info processing

Question 4

What is immediate serial recall?

Answer 4

• Ppt are asked to remember a sequence of items presented sequentially and immediately after their presentation they must report back the item in the original presentation order

Question 5

What is long-term memory?

Answer 5

Brain’s repository of what one has learned over a lifetime

Question 6

What are two important brain regions?

Answer 6

• Temporal cortex & hippocampus: associated with storage of new memories
• Prefrontal cortex: associated with encoding new memories and retrieving old memories

Question 7

What is the multi-store model?

Answer 7

• Sensory stores: system that keeps sensory info from each modality
• Attention: essential to select the info transfers from sensory stores to the short term store
• Short term store: system that keeps a very limited amount of info
• Long term store: system that is unlimited
• Sensory stores need attention for it be to in the STM, then rehearsal to be in LTM, if info leaves from sensory stores = decay, if leaves in STM = displacement, if leaves LTM = interference

Question 8

Studies looking at multi-store model of memory?

Answer 8

1) Asked ppt to rehearse out loud, results show that the more that participants rehearsed an item, the more likely they were to remember it.
2) Manipulate the number of rehearsal opportunity for lists of 6 words
- Examined the performance proportion of correct responses
- No diff between performance despite important diff between rehearsal opp
- Results are difficult to account by multi-store model

Question 9

What is the working memory model?

Answer 9

• Central executive: attentional system primarily responsible for coordinating activity within the cognitive system
• Phonological loop: system that processes and stores info briefly in phonological form
• Visuo-spatial sketchpad: processes and stores spatial and visual info
• Episodic buffer: passive system that integrates info from diff systems

Question 10

What does the phonological loop contain?

Answer 10

• Articulatory process: inner voice = rehearses verbal info = auditory info can enter phonological store directly but visual info must be rehearsed
• Phonological store: inner ear that stores info in phonological form

Question 11

What is the word length effect?

Answer 11

• Support for articulatory loop
• Ppts performance is better for words they are faster to repeat relative to slower to repeat (shorter words than longer ones)

Question 12

What is Jalbert do?

Answer 12

• In all previous demonstrations, short words had more orthographic neighbours (words of same length that differ by one letter - bat/cat)
• Words with more orthographic neighbours are better remembered
• Word length effect is absent if short/long words are controlled for orthographic neighbours
• Results challenge Working memory model

Question 13

What is consciousness?

Answer 13

Anything and everything one experiences, including but not limited to the experience of the external world and the experience of oneself

Question 14

What Is awareness?

Answer 14

• Refers to the conscious experience that something exists
• Specific form of conscious experience

Question 15

Can we learn info without awareness?

Answer 15

• Cells that fire together wire together
• Ppts study sequence of 9 digits and every three trials 1 list is repeated, ppts are unaware of the repetition = performance in repeated list gradually improve = do not need to be conscious to learn
• Directly measuring repetition awareness = awareness invariably preceded or co-occurred with learning = awareness enhances learning

Question 16

What is STM affected by?

Answer 16

• Word frequency: high frequency words are remembered better than low frequency words e.g milk remembered more than banjo
• Concreteness: concrete words are remembered better than abstract words (how easy it is to create a mental picture of a word) = house is easier to remember than honour

Question 17

What components make up emotional stimuli?

Answer 17

• Valence: refers to whether a word is seen as being positive or negative
• Arousal: refers to whether a word is seen as calm or exciting
• Dominance: refers to whether a word is generally at the level of control from submissive (lobotomy) to more in control (successful)

Question 18

What was a study looking at valence and memory?

Answer 18

• NEVER model says that negative words will be remembered better than positive ones
• Asked ppts to study lists of 7 emotional words either pos/neg
• Performance did not differ = emotional stimuli does not affect memory performance

Question 19

What is the study looking at arousal and memory?

Answer 19

• Asked ppts to study lists of 6 emotional words (low/high arousal)
• Unlike valence, arousal affects memory performance
• Some emotional words affect memory performance