STM and WM PDF

Reminders! • Make It Stick Reflection 1 due TONIGHT! • Special Topics papers by class time on Monday! Short-Term and Working Memory Ch. 5 Assessing the Capacity of Sensory Memory • Whole-report Method: recalled 4.5 letters (of 12) on average • Partial-report Method: recalled 3.3 letters (of 4) o...

Reminders! • Make It Stick Reflection 1 due TONIGHT! • Special Topics papers by class time on Monday! Short-Term and Working Memory Ch. 5 Assessing the Capacity of Sensory Memory • Whole-report Method: recalled 4.5 letters (of 12) on average • Partial-report Method: recalled 3.3 letters (of 4) on average What do these results suggest? • Sensory memory registered most of the letters, but unable to report them all because they rapidly faded from memory as reporting them • Output interference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cQT4urTlXM Sperling (1960) Sternberg Search! Leaving Behind STM Atkinson & Shiffrin’s Modal Model of Memory 26 6+7 = 10 14 4+ 12 = 16 41 3 x 6 = 21 8 14 – 6 = 8 What was the sequence of numbers? 26 14 41 8 Operation-Span (O-Span) Task How does this task differ from the digit span task? What does this suggest? https://www.psytoolkit.org/experime nt-library/touch_nback2.html Working Memory + Individual Differences • Working Memory Capacity: an assessment of how much information can be processed and stored at the same time • Individuals with higher WMC tend to exhibit… • More fluid intelligence (Kovacs & Conway, 2016) • Greater attentional control (McVay & Kane, 2012) • Better academic performance (Engel de Abreu et al., 2014) Baddeley’s Working Memory Model Phonological Loop: What’s the Evidence? In a recall task, is the letter ‘F’ more likely to be misidentified as ‘S’ or ‘E’? • Phonological Similarity Effect: Confusion of letters or words that sound similar Which word would it be easier to recall: dog or frequency? • Word Length Effect: Short words are remembered better than long ones • Why? Takes longer to rehearse long words and to produce them during recall Articulatory Suppression eliminates the word-length effect and reduces the phonological similar effect, suggesting the importance of rehearsal as an active control process Visuospatial Sketchpad: What’s the Evidence? • Mental Rotation Task • Tasks that called for greater rotation, took longer • Participants solved the problem by rotating the image in their mind • Visual Patterns Test (Matrix) • Participants able to complete patterns of 9 shaded squares before making mistakes • Individual squares combined into sub-patterns (chunking) Two Specialized Systems? Demonstration: Instructions • Write “Yes” on the left side of a piece of paper and “No” on the right side • Memorize sentence • Recall sentence and decide whether each word is a noun • Response is either • Visuospatial: point to Yes if word is a noun and No if word is not • Phonological: say out loud Yes if it is a noun and No if it is not The cute striped cat sat on the window ledge. Point to Yes if word is a noun and No if it is not The blue shirt looked good with the black coat. Say Yes if it is a noun and No if it is not Was one of the tasks easier? What does that suggest about the two systems? • Memorizing the sentence involved the phonological loop • Pointing response involved the visuospatial sketch pad • Verbal response involved the phonological loop • If the task and the response draw on the same WM component, performance is worse than if the task and the response are distributed between WM components Working Memory is set up to process different types of information simultaneously Reflection! • Describe the key differences between short-term and working memory in your own words. Bonus points for a good analogy or two!