Sensory Memory - Human Memory - Fall 2003 | PSY 400, Assignments of Psychology

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• PSY 400, Human Memory, Fall 2003Sensory MemoryJanuary 21,

• • Taxomonical approach to human memory.Memory or perception?Overview of today’s material
• • Iconic Memory:(incl demo)Echoicstore. memory, The Partial Report Experimentthe precategorical acoustical

• Weber-Fechner LawImportant stuff from last time
• • • Who was Ebbinghaus?Ebbinghaus’ evidence for remote associations.Ebbinghaus’ forgetting function

• One of the tendencies in memory research is toTaxonomical Approach to MemoryResearch
• • “categorize” memory performance.This is kind of like the approach to Biology earlyin the last century.Animals/plants, vertebrates/invertebrates,

mammals/reptiles/birds, etc

1. Short-term memory/long-term memoryTypes of Memory

2. Episodic/semantic memory3. Declarative/procedural memory4. Explicit/implicit memory

Over the next couple of weeks we will study threememory “stores.”The Modal Model

1. Sensory registers2. Short-term memory3. Long-term memory

These stores differ along dimensions of peripheral-ness/central-ness, capacity and the time scale.

• 1. Visual sensory memory, “iconic” Sensory memorySensory Memory

2. Acoustic sensory memory, “echoic,” precategoricalacoustic store (PAS)

Where do you Draw the line betweenmemory and perception?

An illustration

An illustration

• What if we show just a red light?Think about this for a second
• • The light in the middle can only existsecond light is shown.The dot in the middle is a memory phenomenon,over the scale of hundreds of milliseconds. after the

• CountingpresentedEarly Studies of Visual Memory small numbers of objects quickly
• • • Averbach, 1963 (See Figure 2.1).The longer an image is presented, the better wecan evaluate it.This saturates around 200 ms
• “Spanmemory + counting ability of apprehension” depend on vision +

• In fact, it doesn’t look like that.Subitizing
• • You are very fast for numbers up to about 5 orso.Presumably you recognize the pattern—think ofdice, or shapes.
• The “constellation” of beans is perceived andremembered.

• • Hypothesis 1:store that can only hold 4-5 “things”Hypothesis 1a:Why a limit to subitizing capacity? Maybe there’s a very fast visualMaybe there’s a very fast visual
• store that can only code a small number of pixelsor features.Hypothesis 2: Maybe we have a very fast visualstorefeatures, but it decays fast and we can’t recognize that can code a great many pixels or

patterns of 8 as easy as 3.