Pg 309-349
I.
An information processing model of the brain
A. Memory- all of the information in a persons mind and the minds capacity to store
and retrieve that information
1. Modal model of the mind-three different types of memeory
a. Memory stores-sensory memory, working or short term memory, and
longer term memory
b. They are characterized by the function, capacity and duration
2. Control processes-attention rehearsal encoding, retrieval- govern the
processing of information within stores and the movenet of information from
one store to another
B. Sensory memory
1. Sensory memory- the ability to trace sensory inputs and hold them in your
information processing system for a period of time
2. Each sensory system is believed to have itws separate sesnosry memory
store
3. Held on long enchough for it to be analyized by unconcisous mental
processes and for a decision to be made about whether it should be brought to
the working memory
C. Working memeory
1. Working memory- information in sensory store that is attended to moves to
this next compartnment
a. Major work place of the mind and place of conscious thought
b. All feelings, perceiving, comparing, computing, and reasoning take place
here
c. Also called short term memory- calls attention to fleeting nature of info in
this tore
2. Info can enter working memeory from both sensory memory store and long
term memory store
a. Makes it central processing unit
D. Long term
1. Long term memory- once an item has passed from sensory memory into
working memory it may or may not be encoded in this
a. Stored representation of all that the person knows
b. Items in it live dormant and we can recall it
c. Minds library of information
E. Control processe
1. Movement of info from one memory to another store is regulated by the
control processes of attention, encoding, and retrieval
2. Attention-process that controls flow of information from the sensory store into
working memory
a. Must restrict flow
3. Encoding- movement from working memory into long term storage
a. Usually occurs accidnelty as a side effect of paying attention to
something
4. Retrieval- flow of info from long term into working memeory
a. Call it remembering or recalling
II.
Sensory memory and attention
A. Attention is displayed as a gate standing between sensory and working
memeory
1. All info in this model that is picked up by senses enters briefly into the
sensory and is analyzed to determine the revelence of its ongoing task and its
potential significance
a. Called preattentive processing-all that conscious thought
B. Selective listening
1. Cocktail party phenonmenon- ability to listen and understand one persons
voice while disregarding others that are equally as loud or louder
C. Selective viewing
1. We can attend selectively to different , nearby parts of a visual scene
2. Gutman and Rock presented a rapid sucesssion of a series of slides to
viewers whose eyes were fixed on a spot at the center of the screen
a. Slides contained overlapping forms and had to attend to a color
b. People could recognized most of ones with color but not when there
wasnt color
3. Subjects fail to see large objects in their sight
a. Only 50% of ppl saw person in gorilla suit whne asked to count amount of
times people pass a basketball
D. Ability to shift attention to significant stimuli
1. Our ability to shift attention depends on our capacity to listen or look backwar
in time and hera and see stimuli that were recorded a moment earlier in
sensory memory
2. Another purpose of sensory memory is to hold onto info long enough that if
we want to turn our attention to it we can
E. Shifting attention to meaningful info in auditory sensory memory
1. Auditory sensory memory is also called echoic memeory; brief memory trace
for a specific sound is called an echo
2. Subjects asked to focus theur attention a particular task like read a passage
and then that task is intterptued by a signal and they have to repeat the list
spoken to them after it
a. They shift attention to spoken words after signal
b. Subjects can repeat last few words in the list
F. Shifting attention to meaningful info in visual sensory memory
1. Visual sensory memory is also called iconic memory; brief memory trace for a
specific visual stimulus is called an icon
2. George Sperling found that when slides with rows of letters were flashed,
people could read the letters up to third or second letter
a. Memory store must hold visually presented information for about a third
of second beyond termination of the physical stimulus
G. Effect of practice on attentional capacity
1. Gate between sensory and working mem is narrow
2. If an array of visual stimuli is flashed quickly on a screen and then a bright
patterned stimulus (masking stimulus) is flashed afterwards, most people can
indemnify about three of the stimuli in the orginal array
a. Evidence that capacity can be improved through practice
3. Shawn Green and Bavelier compared visual attention capacity of young men
who regularly played action games with those who rarely played video games
a. Videogamers outperformed the other group in all tests
4. Feng found that men outperform women on tests of ability to locate target
stimuli quickly amind distracting stimuli but it dif went away when both spent
10 hours of training with video games
H. Unconcious priming of mental conceots
1. Priming- activation by sensory input of info that is already stored in long term
memory
a. Info becomes more available to the person, altering the persons
perception or chain of thought
2. Researchers showed students either of two visual stimuli with three 1 second
flashes
a. When asked to draw the scene those seeing the duck containing stimulus
were more likely to draw a scence containing a duck
3. Selective hearing experiment where they had to repeat what they heard in
one ear but ignore the other ear
a. They threw stones at the bank and then chose sentence they threw
stones at the savings and loan association
I. Automatic obligatory processing of stimuli
1. Mind has the capacity to perform routine tasks automatically
a. Minds ability to process releveant stimuli preattentively, unconsciously
and use results to guide behaovir
b. Ex is driving we can drive and talk at same time and read street signs
2. Stroop interference effect- presented words or shapes printed in colored ink
to subjects and asked them to name ink color
a. Subjects slowest in naming ink colors that were diff from it
b. Depends on peoples inability to prevent themselves from reading the
color words
c. We have preattentive processes in reading so automatic that we can not
stop them from occurring when looking at a word
J. Brain mechanism of preattentive processing and attention
1. Stimuli are not attended to nevertheless activate sensory and perceptual
areas of the brain
a. FMri studies show that when words are flashed on screen to quickly to be
consciously activate neurons in portions of the occipital, parietal, and
frontal
2. Attention magnifies the activity that task relevant stimuli produce in sensory
and perceptual areas of the brain and it diminishes the activity that task
irrevlant stimuli produce
3. Neural mechanism in anterior (forward) portions of the cortex are responsible
for control of attention
III.
Working memory-the active conscious mind
A. Baddley divides working memory into serpate components
1. Phonological loop-responsible for holding verbal information
2. Visuospatial sketpad- resp for holding visual and spatial info
B.
C.
D.
E.
F.
G.
H.
3. Central executive- resp for coordinating the minds activites and for bringing
new info into the working mem from sen and LT stores
Verbal working memory
1. Span of short term memory- the number of prouncable items that a person
can keep in mind and report back accurately after a brief delay
2. Also depends on how fast you can say them back
Visual working memory
1. Kosslyn showed people drawings and later asked them to visualize each
drawing from memory
a. Focus on one side of drawing and answer whether a certain component
was in the drawing
b. Farther away from the focus the longer it took to respond bc they were
searching in the mental image
Testing the limits of working memory dual task performance
1. Ppl better at multi tasking if one task involves the phonological group and the
other involves the visuosketpad
2. Ppl asked to remember digits and black and white checkerd board and they
made about same number of mistakes on both
a. More errors if both tasks had to do with digit span or vice versa
b. Baddely concluded that phono and visuopad are two separate
components of the working memory
3. Accident rate with cellphone use increased bc talking also brings up mental
images
Brain areas involved in working memory
1. Holding info in phonological loop involves internalized process that is similar
to actually speaking words and listening to spoken words
2. Holding visual info in visuospatial sketchpad involves mental processes for
looking and seeing
3. Working memory tasks are involved in prefrontal cortex
a. Neural activity greatest here when info was held successfully
Encoding
1. Maintenance rehearsal- process by which a person holds information for a
period of time
2. Encoding rehearsal- process by which person encodes info into long term
memory
Elaboration promotes encoding
1. We remember things that capture out interest and stimulate our thought
2. More we think about something the more we remember it
3. To tie the item to a structure of info that already exists in the long term
memory process is called elaboration
a. Is not to memorize but to understand
b. Learning techniques centering on elaboration capitalize on the tendency
to remember things that conform some sort of logic
Lab evidence for value of elab
1. Craik and Tulving showed subjects a long series of printed words one at a
time for each word and asked a question that required a different form of
thought about the word
I.
J.
K.
L.
M.
N.
O.
P.
a. Subjects rememeberd more words when they had been asked questions
that focused on the meaning of the word
Elab for school leraning
1. Bransford found that students who receive high marks in school were more
likely to use elaborative rehersal than those who used low marks
a. Study about boomerangs and more successful students didnt just read
passage but thought about hwat a non returning kind would look like
Chunking
1. Group adjacent items that are first perceived as separate thus making them a
single item
Role of chunking in expert memory
1. Better at forming long term memory for info within rather than outside our
realm of experience
2. Ericson poisted the existence of long term working memory-interrelated set
of items that is crucial for solving problems or completing a task at hand
a. This is due to chunking bc people have a great deal of well established
info on this subject in long term mem already
b. Provides a foundation for chunking of new items of info
Hierarchical organization
1. Halpern gave subjects a char listing 54 well known song titles to be
memorized
a. People organized chart recalled it more than those who didnt organize it
Visualization promote encoding
1. We can encode pictures or visual scenes in our long term memory
2. People can improve verbally presented info if they can encode it visually as
well
3. Study of new stories accompanied by releveant pics improved the memory of
the stories
4. Improves memory by:
a. Giving a distinct visual trace to supplement the verbal memory trace
The case of H.M a man unable to encode new long term memories
1. HM underwent surgery for treatment of epilesey in which portions of brain
were removed
2. He could remember events that occurred before the operation
3. He could converse, solve problems, keep new info if attention span
concentrated on it
a. Minute he was distraction he would lose all information
Involvement of temporal lobe structures and prefrontal cortex encoding
1. Temporal lobe amnesia-areas of destruction are usually with the hippocampus
and cortical and subcortical structures closely connected to the hippocampus
in both halves
2. When asked to memorize new info, increased activity in hippocampus and
adjacent parts of temporal lobe
Retrograde amenisa and evidence for gradual consolidation of long term
memories
1. Anterograde-loss of capacity to form long term memories of events that occur
after an injury
Q.
R.
IV.
A.
B.
C.
2. Retrograde amnesia-loss of memories of events that occurred before the
injury
a. Greatest for memories that occurred right before the injury
b. Time graded
3. Time graded suggests that long term memory is encoded in two diff formsliable easily interrupted and stable not easily interrupted
4. Process by which liable memories form is converted into the stable form is
called consolidation
5. Liable form of LT mem involves neural connections in hippocampus and that
the stable form involes neural connections in various parts of the cerebral
cortex
Role of retrieval in mem consolidation and modification
1. Memory consolidation involves modification of exsiting synaptic connections
and growth of new synaptic connections in the brain
2. Memories that are recalled and used repeatdelly over long periods of time are
the ones most likely to be consolidated into a form that resists disruption
3. Animal research shows that every time a memory is recalled and put to use,
the neural trace for that memory of events enters temporarily into a new liable
stage where it can be modified
Role of sleep in memory consolidation
1. Sleep shortly after learning helps consolidate newly acquired memories,
making them more easy to retrieve and less suspectible to disruption
2. Improved learning correlates with amount of slow wave sleep not amount of
REM sleep
3. Sleep also improves quality of memories which can help achieve new insights
4. Subjects had training to solve prpblem before and after they went to sleep
a. Subjects before they went to sleep were twice as likely to solve the
problem
Retrieving information from the long term mem
Mental associations and memory retrieval cues
1. Associations- each item is linked to many other items through connections
2. Retrieval cue- a stimulus or thought that primes a particular memory
Mental associations as foundations for retrieval
1. Association by contiguity-some concepts are associated because they occur
together contiguously in the persons previous experience
2. Association by similarity- items that share one or more properties in common
are linked in memory whether or not they were ever experienced togehetr
3. William James pointed out that ass by similiart can be understood as
derivative of the more primitive and fundamental principle of ass by contiguity
a. Contiguity allows us ot think of the properites of the given objects and to
think of other objects that hae same properites, leading to ass of
similarity
b. Apple leads to red, red to rose, apple to rose (sim)
Network models of memory organization
1. Aristole depicted minds storehouse of knowledge as a vast netwok of mental
concepts linked by assocations
D.
E.
F.
G.
H.
I.
2. Collins and Loftus developed a specific diagram to explain the results of
experiemtns concerned with peoples abilities to recognize or recall specific
words very quickly after exposure to other words
a. Strength of association is located by length of path
Why elaborative rehearsel creates easily retrievable memories
1. The more mental assocations you make in learning a new item, the more it
will be available for you to retrieve
2. Mantyla presented 500 nouns one by one in a very long session and asked
them them to write down either one or three words that were regarded as
properites of the obkect
a. People had to recall words and could use their properties
Contextual stimuli as retrevial cues
1. Environmental context that we find ourselves in at any given moment
provides retrival cues that prime our memories for our paste experiences in
that context
Memory contruction as a source of distortion
1. Remembering is an active inferential process guided by a persons knowledge
and intuitions about the words and cues of the present environment
2. We have ability to construct the past
Effects of pre-exsisting beliefts
1. Schema- ones generalized mental representation or concept of any given
class of obkects, scenes, or events
a. Bartlett
2. Used it in terms that vary from culture to culture and that involve spatial or
remproal relationships amoung invidual units of object, scene, or event.
3. Scripts- schemas that invole the organization of evnets in time, rather than
objects in space
4. Schemas dont just help recognize and label objects,scences and events, they
affect the way we remember them later
5. Barlett asked students to listen to native American story and asked them to
recall it from memory
a. Details lost and essentials over exaggerated
False eyewitness memories:effects of suggestion
1. False convictions came about because of highly confident eyewitnesses
2. Loftus and Palmer had adults view film depicting a traffic accident
a. Asked question with smash or hit for how fast car was going people who
hear smash said it was going faster
False memories of childhood experiences: effects of suggestion and
imaginatation
1. Tehcniques of suggestion, encouragement, and imagination can create false
memories of childhood experiences
2. Elizabeth Loftus and Pickrell led adults to believe that age 5 they had been
lost in a certain shopping mall and had been helped and comforted by an
elderly women
a. 25% maintned that this event had happened in questionng and follow up
interviews
3. False memory construction can be abetted by imagination
4. One study reseachers told subject that according to their parents had
experienced an embarrassing incident
a. In imagination condition were asked to form vivid mental images of the
event
b. In control condition were asked to think about event as a way of
remembering it
c. 38% in imagination condition calimed to remember the inicident
J. Source confusion and social pressure as causes of false memory construction
1. Basic cause of false memory construction is source confusiona. We acquire info from various sources and our minds organize them in
ways that may be meaningful but that obscure the ties between each
item and the orginal source
2. Social pressure
a. In experiemtns subjects were led to believe they should remember the
events
b. A person who feels pressured to come up with a memory they more
likely they are to pretend to recall it
V.
Multiple memory systems: beyond the modal model
A. Distinction among explicit and implicit memory systems
1. Explicit memory- type of memory that can be brought into a persons
consciousness
a. Provides conscious thought and is highly flexible
b. Tested whwere people asked to report directly what he or she remembers
about a particular entity or event
c. Also called declarative memory because the remembered info can be
declared
2. Implicit memory is a type of memory that does not enter into the contents of
consciousness
a. All unconscious means through which previous experiences can influence
a persons actions or thoughts
b. Nondeclarative memory because ppl do not report in words the relevant
information
c. More closely tied to the contexts to which they were acquired
B. Varietes of explicit memory:episodic and semantic
1. Episodic memory- explicit memory of ones own past experiences
a. Have a personal quality
2. Semantic memory- explcity memory that is not tied mentally to a particular
past experience
a. Knowledge of words meanings, ideas, facts, schemas about general
understanding of the world
b. Came from past experiencecs but remembering it does not depend on
those past experiences
c. Recalling mem from this is like searching an encyclopedia
C. Varieties of implicit memory
1. One subclass is classical conditioning- the internal changes that lead a person
or animal to respond to a condition stimulus
2. Procedural memory- includes motor skills, habits, and unconciouslly learned
rules
a. Use artificial grammar to demonsrate rule based
3. Third subclasss is priming- acitivation is not experienced consciously yet
influenes subsequent conscious perception and throught and thus provides a
link between implicit and explicit memory
a. Keeps our stream of thought running along consistent logical lines
b. Classified as implicit bc occurs independently of the persons conscious
mem for the priming stimulus
D. Implicit memory remains intact in temporal lobe amnesia
1. HM and other temporal lobe amnesia deficits are with the explicit memory
a. Implicit memory is in tact
b. Impltict memory manifested even whem the amnesic subjects can not
consciously remember what they leraned
E. Semantic memory without episodic memory in some amensic patients
1. Severe temporal lobe amnesia entails loss of both eposiodc and semantic
memory encoding
2. Developmental amnesia-bilateral damage to the hippocampus but to
structure surrodining it, caused by loss of blood flow to brain at time of birth or
early childhood
3. Varghakadem have identified and studied several ppl with this disorder
a. If asked what happen a few hours ago, their last bday or yesterday can
recall little to nothing
b. These ppl attended schools and passed tests
F. Other evidence of semantic memory without episodic memory
1. People know things without knowing how they know
a. Young children and elder
2. Poor episodic memory realted to prefrontal cortical functioning
a. Develops slowly in young age and damages in old age
