Psych memory

• Sensation


  Physiological process involving sensory receptors detecting and responding to the presence of stimuli. An automatic physical reaction to a stimulus that is the same for everyone.
• Processes of sensation


  1. Reception

  2. Transduction

  3. Transmission
• Reception


  When sensory receptor cells detect a stimulus (or change). If the stimulus is strong enough to activate a response, then transduction begins.
• Transduction


  The conversion of stimulus energy into electrochemical energy. This is necessary because the nervous system can only transmit and process electrochemical energy.
• Transmission


  When electrochemically charged neural impulses leave the receptor sites and travel along specific nerve fibers to specialized areas of the brain.
• Perception


  The mental process of organising and interpreting sensory stimuli sent from the senses so it achieves a meaningful form, forming a mental representation.
• Processes of perception


  1. Selection

  2. Organisation

  3. Interpretation
• Selection


  The brain can't process all the information it receives so it pays attention to the important pieces and ignores the rest. Any ignored stimuli receive no further processing. The selected stimuli contain important pieces of information about the original stimulus. As this information exists as separate impulses, individually they have no meaning.
• Organisation


  The reassembling of features of sensory stimuli to make a whole or a meaningful pattern.
• Interpretation


  The brain now gives meaning to the reassembled pattern so we understand what the stimuli represents about the external world.
• Sensory modalities


  • Electromagnetic radiation- sight- eyes
  • Sound waves- audition- ears
  • Chemical energy- olfaction- nose
  • Chemical energy- gustation- tongue
  • Mechanical and thermal energy- touch, pressure, pain, temperature- skin
• Attention


  A voluntary or involuntary tendency to focus awareness on a specific stimulus and ignore other stimuli. It is part of our executive function and decision making processes. It allows us to focus on internal or external stimuli that may be of importance.
• We tend to select stimuli for attention if it is unusual or intense, we are motivated to or expect to encounter a particular stimulus, it is personally significant, it is moving or changing, or it becomes repetitious
• Selective attention


  Involves being able to choose what stimuli to focus on and ignore all other stimuli. It allows you to focus on what's important and ignore what's not. For example when crossing a busy road, you need to focus on moving cars but ignore other sights and sounds. Can be intentional or automatic and makes it difficult to focus on/pay attention to more than one thing at a time.
• Divided attention


  Refers to rapidly switching focus between 2 or more stimuli simultaneously. It is dependent on the types of tasks (how difficult they are, how similar they are and if they involve automatic or controlled processes) You don't change your focus from one stimulus to another completely; you divide your attention between them. EG: buttering toast and having a conversation. Dividing attention when trying to learn something causes you to share your cognitive load between multiple sources and is not efficient.
• Cocktail party effect


  The ability for an individual to be aware of multiple conversations occurring around them at the same time using divided attention, as well as using selective attention, where their focus is on one conversation and the rest are neglected.
• Experiment one - Cocktail party effect


  1. Participants used both ears when presented with two different spoken messages simultaneously. No headphones were worn for this experiment and the two speech recordings of entirely different topics were on the same tape.

  2. Participants were tasked with singling out and repeating one of the speeches word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase. While participants could play back the tape as often as they liked, the task was to be completed verbally and they were unable to write anything down. Researchers marked down on the scripts the words and phrases that were correctly recognised by the participants. While participants described the task as extremely difficult, with some replaying the tape up to twenty times, participants were generally successful in separating the speeches.
• Experiment two - Cocktail party effect


  Two recorded speeches were played concurrently to participants via headphones with one speech presented to the right ear and a different speech presented to the left ear. Participants were asked to verbally repeat back one of the messages while simultaneously listening to it. Participants were able to complete this task easily, understandably with a slight delay behind the recording. It was trickier to recall what the speech was about, even though they repeated it correctly. Participants were unable to describe what they were played in the other ear.
• Memory


  The cognitive function through which information and past experiences are actively processed, stored and retrieved.
• Processes of memory


  1. Encoding

  2. Storage

  3. Retrieval
• Encoding


  The process that converts information into a useable form that can be stored and represented in the memory system. The active processing of short term memory.
• Storage


  The retention of information in the memory system over time. Encoded information is then stored (held or retained) in the memory system for a period of time.
• Retrieval


  The process of brining relevant information from long term memory into short term memory/back into conscious awareness.
• Multi-store model of memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968)


  • Consists of multiple memory stores, through which a stream of data flows for processing. The memory system is divided into sensory register, short term memory, and long term memory.
  • Features: Duration, Capacity, Decay
• Sensory register


  The purpose is to hold information just long enough for us to attend to it. If information is attended to, it will transferred to STM. New sensory information in the form of sight, sound, taste, smell and touch, enters memory when it is registered in sensory memory. If we ignore information that enters our sensory memory, it fades rapidly.
• Sensory register


  • Duration: brief, less than a second
  • Capacity: unlimited capacity
  • Encoding: visual and acoustic (mostly) but all sensory information can be encoded
• Iconic


  Stores visual information (icon) - with a duration of less than a second
• Echoic


  Stores auditory information (echo) - with a duration of less than 4 seconds
• Short-term memory


  Holds all the thoughts, information and experiences that you are aware of at any given point in time and receives information from sensory memory and long-term memory. To give this information meaning, your short-term memory immediately starts comparing it to the existing information you gained from past experience that is stored in long-term memory. In this way, short-term memory also manages the retrieval of information from long-term memory. If information is not attended to, it simply drops out of the system. If it is attended to, further processing and encoding occurs.
• Short-term memory


  • Duration: approximately up to 30 seconds
  • Capacity: brief capacity of only 7 (+ or -2) pieces of information (magic number)
  • Encoding: mostly acoustic/ the inner voice
• Chunking


  Grouping separate items or numbers to form a larger single information unit (chunk) so our short-term memory can hold more than the usual seven single items of information at any given moment.
• Long-term memory


  When information is required at a later date, we retrieve information by locating it in long-term memory and returning it to conscious awareness. Information in long-term memory is an organised manner based on its meaning and importance. The reasons we cannot remember every long-term memory we have formed relate to an inability to retrieve information, not to the fact that those memories have dropped out of or been lost from long-term memory.
• Long-term memory


  • Duration: relatively permanent
  • Capacity: unlimited
  • Encoding: visual, auditory and semantic via elaborate rehearsal
• Procedural memory


  A type of long-term memory for learnt actions and skills that can usually only be expressed as actions. Although we store these memories in our long-term memory, they often involve complicated sequences of movements that we are usually unaware of or that we are unable to articulate. Procedural memories appear to register in low brain areas that are beyond conscious control.
• Declarative memory


  A type of long-term memory for specific factual information that can be expressed in words. The long-term memory store for factual information, such as names, faces, words, dates and ideas. Declarative memories are expressed as words or symbols.
• Semantic memory


  A type of declarative memory for impersonal factual knowledge about the world. Semantic memory holds the factual information we use for making meaning so we understand the world around us. Semantic memory involves general factual information about the world that does not involve the memory of personally significant events or episodes that are tied to a specific time or place.
• Episodic memory


  A type of declarative memory for personally significant events associated with specific times and places. vivid episodic memories are termed flashbulb memories which involve recalling exactly what you were doing and where you were when a particularly important, exciting or emotional event happened.
• Working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 2000)

  • Central executive, phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer
• Working memory


  The subsystem of short-term memory that temporarily stores and manipulates a limited amount of information needed to perform cognitive tasks. In doing this, working memory encodes the information into long-term memory and also retrieves it from long-term memory. Working memory holds all the information needed for cognitive activities, such as thinking, planning and analysis. In this way, working memory provides the focus of consciousness, in that it holds the information you are consciously thinking about now.
• Central executive


  An area of working memory that monitors, coordinates and integrates information received from the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad and episodic buffer. it plays a major role in attention and controls which items move in and out of short-term memory by deciding which information arriving from sensory memory will be attended to, and by controlling the retrieval process from long-term memory. The central executive plays a major role in planning and controlling behaviour as it switches attention between tasks and selects strategies to tackle the problem being worked on.