Cognitive Psychology, 2 nd Ed.

1. Cognitive Psychology, 2nd Ed. Chapter 5

2. Basic Processes of Memory • Encoding concerns perceiving, recognizing, and further processing an object so that it can be later remembered. • Storage refers to transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory. • Retrieval concerns searching long-term memory and finding the event that has been stored and retrieved.

4. Sensory Memory • Refers to brief persistence of stimuli following transduction. Its function is to permit stimuli to be perceived, recognized, and entered into short-term memory. • Duration of 250 ms and large capacity. • Iconic vs. echoic sensory memory are similar but estimates of echoic duration were distorted by retrieval from short term memory.

6. Short- vs. Long-Term Stores:Behavioral Dissociations • Serial position effect with primacy caused by retrieval from rehearsed items stored in long-term memory; recency benefits from short-term store. • Rapid presentation eliminates primacy but preserves recency. • Delayed recall eliminates recency but preserves primacy.

9. Short- vs. Long-Term Stores:Neurological Dissociations • Anterograde amnesia refers to difficulty in remembering events that occur after the onset of amnesia; disruption in transfer from short- to long-term store. • Retrograde amnesia refers to the loss of memory of events that occurred prior to the onset of the illness; disruption in long-term storage or retrieval of past events.

12. Differences Among 3 Memory Stores • Capacity—only short-term memory is severely limited in capacity, namely, to 4 chunks. • Duration—differences are an order of magnitude or more among sensory (250 ms), short-term (20 s), and long-term (20 years or more).

16. Similarities Among 3 Memory Stores • Difficult to distinguish sensory and short-term memory on the basis of coding. • Short- as well as long-term stores use semantic coding, although acoustic-articulatory coding dominates short-term memory as seen in the phonemic similarity effect.

18. Similarities among 3 Memory Stores • Forgetting follows the same power function regardless of whether the duration is 20 s or 20 years. • Retrieval may be serial and exhaustive in short-term memory and parallel in long-term memory, but the evidence is mixed.

21. Working Memory • Refers to the system for temporarily maintaining mental representations that are relevant to the performance of a cognitive task in an activated state. • Reading span measures the capacity of working memory when attention must be paid to comprehension of sentences and to remembering a list of words.

22. Models of Working Memory • Baddeley proposed a phonological loop and a visual-spatial sketch pad coordinated by a central executive. • The loop stores and rehearses verbal representations whereas the sketch pad does the same for visual/spatial representations. • Central executive focuses and switches attention, supervises and coordinates the storage components, and retrieves representations from long-term memory.

24. Neurological Dissociations and Working Memory • Case studies suggest (1) a semantic component separate from the phonological or verbal component, and (2) a spatial store separate from a visual store. • Neuroimaging confirms separate spatial, visual, and verbal stores.