Working Memory and Baddeley's Model: An Analysis of Short-Term Memory - Prof. Marc Howard, Study notes of Psychology

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• Working Memory PSY 373, Human MemoryFebruary 27,

Housekeeping

-^ You should have completed the Sternberg SearchExperiment already (24 of you had not as of3:30). •^ Experiment report due Thursday. •^ Next exam March 29.

Important stuff from last time • Methods of Sternberg task (probe, target, lure). • Robust result—linear slope RT vs set size slope40 ms/item • Implications for models—serial exhaustive search.

The first two SU Human Memory

classes (55 Ss) RT (ms)

S^ Pres^

Abs^ Avg 1 615

1 2

3 4

5 Set size Positive 900 Negative (^800700) RT (ms) 600 500

Slope about

50 ±^15

ms/item.

Three questions

-^ Empirical issues: ??? •^ Methodological issues: ??? •^ Theoretical issues: ???

Overview of today’s material • Approaches to Working Memory • Baddeley and Hitch’s Working Memory. • Data^ pertaining

to^ the

Baddeley

and^ Hitch

framework. • Focus switching and working memory

Different meanings of “working

memory”

-^ “Working memory capacity” studies. •^ “Focus of attention” theory •^ Baddeley’s working memory.

Differences between STS and“working memory” • WM emphasizes ability to manipulate information(control processes?) • WM^ emphasizes

separable

storage

areas^

for

different modalities (avl storage?) • WM studies (generally) do not describe tasks tothe degree of detail Atkinson and Shiffrin (andRaaijmakkers and Shiffrin) did.

Capacity studies of WM

-^ Construct a measure that is referred to as workingmemory capacity. •^ E.g.^ “Reading span” (Daneman and Carpenter,1980) or “Operation Span” (Turner and Engle,1989) •^ Determine if span correlates with other things.

Where have we seen the term “span”

before?

WM span measures correlate with a

lot of stuff

-^ Reading comprehension, language comprehension,spelling... •^... vocabulary learning, writing and reasoning •^ Perhaps

this^ “working

memory”

is^ a^

basic

property of human intelligence.

Operation Span task (Turner and

Engle, 1989)

-^ What do you do? •^ What do you measure?

What factors could affect performance

in operation span?

Baddeley’s Approach

-^ Short-term memory is something interesting thatshould be studied. •^ The Atkinson and Shiffrin model was taking heat(and had equations) •^ Free recall is a poor test of short-term memory. •^ Let’s use immediate serial recall as a test.