WEEK 4: STUDY GUIDE

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What key finding from Waugh & Norman’s (1965) study challenged the idea that forgetting in short-term memory is due to decay?

Memory performance was better when using visual rather than auditory stimuli.

Faster presentation rates did not improve memory performance, suggesting interference plays a larger role. (correct)

Participants could recall early items but struggled with later ones, supporting a primacy effect.

Increasing the time delay between stimuli led to improved recall performance.

How did Wickens’ (1972) “release from proactive interference” experiment demonstrate the role of semantic coding in short-term memory?

Participants performed better when given a new category of words, reducing interference from previous trials. (correct)

Performance improved when words were repeated across multiple trials, strengthening memory traces.

The experiment showed that interference is solely due to phonological similarity rather than meaning.

Recall performance was unaffected by category shifts, indicating that STM relies only on acoustic encoding.

Which of the following best describes the experimental method that Waugh and Norman (1965) used to study decay in short term memory?

Participants were shown a list of digits at different speeds, then were shown a random icon, then were asked to write down the exact list of digits.

Participants were given a list of digits at different speeds and were asked to recall the specific digit that showed after the probe digit. (correct)

Participants were given a list of digits then were immediately shown a random icon to interfere with their memory. After, they were asked to write down all of the digits they had seen previously.

Participants were given a list of different words every second, then immediately after they were shown a three digit number that they had to count backwards from. After the distracting task, they had to list all the initial words shown at the beginning.

In an early demonstration, R. Conrad (1964) flashed a series of target letters on a screen and instructed his participants to write down the letters in the order they were presented. What did they observe?

Participants wrongly remembered the letters based on similarities in phonological characteristics such as confusing 'S' with 'X'. (C) Signup and view all the answers

The Additive Factors Model occurs in what order?

Read and encode probe, Compare probe to memory set, Decide if there is a match, Execute the appropriate response (C) Signup and view all the answers

How does increasing the complexity of shapes affect capacity of short-term memory?

It decreases capacity as more complex shapes require more cognitive resources (C) Signup and view all the answers

Which one of the following is an example of proactive interference?

You used to drive on the right side of the road. When you travel to a country where they drive on the left, you find it difficult to drive (B) Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following is the most accurate description of the relationship between STM and LTM?

Sufficient rehearsal time benefits LTM more than STM. (D) Signup and view all the answers

In regards to the relationship between short term memory and working memory what statement can be deemed TRUE?

Short term memory has infinite capacity while working memory has a limited capacity (A) Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following factors most significantly affects the accuracy of information stored in short term memory?

Presence of competing information or distractions (C) Signup and view all the answers

Remembering a phone number for your doctor’s office and repeating it until you're finished dialling it; would be a task done primarily by which part of the working memory? FIND ANSWER TO THIS

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Which of the following statements is FALSE about WORKING memory?

Main cause of forgetting is via decay. (C) Signup and view all the answers

Sternberg’s (1966) study on memory retrieval challenged the assumption that:

The brain searches through memory sets all at once (parallel search). (B) Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following is an example of retroactive interference?

George moves out of his childhood home and when someone asks for his old address, he can only think of his new one. (C) Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following is a key contribution of Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch (1974) to the study of memory?

They shifted the focus from short-term memory as a passive storage system to working memory as an active processing system. (B) Signup and view all the answers

Brooks (1968) found that performance suffered more when the required response was in the same format as the primary scanning task. Specifically, it was harder to do a response while scanning the outside corners of a letter, and harder to do a response while scanning a sentence for nouns.

pointing; verbal (A) Signup and view all the answers

A group of researchers replicate Sternberg's study on working memory retrieval using recognition. In this study, they observed a participant, Participant A, who had went through each item, responding faster when recognizing an item, and slower when not recognizing an item. Another participant, Participant B, who had also went through each item, had responded in a slower but consistent time in both responses of recognizing or not recognizing an item. What search/scan method did each participant use?

Participant A - Serial Self-Terminating Search; Participant B - Serial Exhaustive Search (B) Signup and view all the answers

How does Baddley think differently than Atkinson and Shiffrin, in relation to the memory box?

Baddley believes that the memory box has multiple components (B) Signup and view all the answers

According to Sternberg's (1996) memory scanning paradigm, which of the following best describes the pattern of response times when participants retrieve items from their short-term memory?

Response time increases linearly with set size, supporting a serial exhaustive search model (B) Signup and view all the answers

Wickens' (1972) "release from proactive interference" experiment demonstrated that short-term memory encoding relies on:

Semantic codes, as evidenced by improved recall when the category of items changed (C) Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following will NOT improve scores on the serial position curve?

Using lower frequency words (D) Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following statements describes the difference between sensory memory (SM) and working memory (WM)

SM stores raw sensory input while WM stores phonological information (C) Signup and view all the answers

In Alvarez and Cavanaugh’s (2004) study, what did they find about the capacity of short-term memory?

it can hold more complex objects but fewer simple items (B) Signup and view all the answers

What did the findings of Waugh and Norman’s (1995) study suggest about loss of information in STM?

Forgetting in STM is due to retrospective interference, where new information disrupts backward in time with your older memories. (D) Signup and view all the answers

Which of the following terms describe “chunking”?

Combining small units into larger ones, such as when individual words are combined into a meaningful sentence – chunking can be used to increase the capacity of memory (D) Signup and view all the answers

Choose the best example of proactive interference given the material: dog, cat, horse, rabbit

Bird, fish, moose, penguin (C) Signup and view all the answers

Which statement best represents how Sensory Memory is described?

Initial stage that holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second. (A) Signup and view all the answers

In Sternberg's study on a memory revival (1966), which of the following were the founded results when participants scanned a set of digits?

Retrieval time increased with set size when scanning one item at a time (B) Signup and view all the answers

Capital of France (example flashcard)

Paris