Primary vs Secondary Memory: Understanding Decay, Interference, and Distinctions, Exams of Psychology

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Primary Memory

PSY 373, Human Memory

January 29, 2008

Housekeeping

• Brown-Peterson experiment should be completed by Friday.
• First exam will be Wed, Feb 13.
• Will try to have a review session Mon, Feb 11.

Overview of today’s material

Primary/secondary memory

• Miller (1956) and the James/Broadbent model
• The Brown-Peterson Task.
• The Waugh-Norman task.

The Modal Model

James’ (1890) Primary memory

“ The objects we feel in this directly intuited past differ from properly recollected objects. An object which is recollected, in the proper sense of the term, is one which has been absent from consciousness altogether, and now revives anew... But an object of primary memory is not thus brought back; it never was lost; its date was never cut off in consciousness from that of the immediately present moment. In fact, it comes to us as belonging to the rearward portion of the present space of time, and not to the genuine past.”

Early work on memory “span”

• Span of apprehension: number of objects we could reliably count with tachistoscopic presentation
• Memory span: Number of items we can recite back perfectly without error.
• Forward and backward memory span are still used as a neuropsychological measure.

Absolute Identification

• Name a unidimensional stimulus.
• When the number of stimuli is about 7 ± 2 , this becomes impossible to do perfectly.
• Doesn’t depend on the range of the stimuli!
• An example.

The central thesis of Miller (1956)

Do memory span and absolute identification have anything to do with each other? Most authors would say no (e.g. Nosofsky, 1993). Others are not so sure (Brown, Neath, and Chater, in press).

Other contributions of Miller (1956)

• Introduced notion of “chunk.”
• Popularized information theory for the study of memory.

Broadbent’s (1958) model

• S-system: like iconic and echoic memory
• P-system: conscious awareness
• secondary memory: long-term storage.
• S+P are primary, or immediate memory (limited capacity)
• Rehearsal necessary to maintain information in immediate memory.

Brown-Peterson task, Methods

• No shocking!
• Present consonant trigram.
• Count backwards by threes.
• Variable delay to recall.

What is the purpose of the distractor?

• Prevent rehearsal.
• If Broadbent’s theory is correct, then we should be looking at decay from primary memory.

What does forgetting depend on?

Decay versus interference

We forget over time, but why?

• Decay postulates that forgetting happens because of time per se
• Interference means that other information comes in and obscures or displaces older information.
• Think about our snowman (and those evil squirrels)... or about rust.