Working Memory - Lecture Notes | PSY 400, Study notes of Psychology

Download Working Memory - Lecture Notes | PSY 400 and more Study notes Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!

Working Memory

PSY 400, Human Memory

February 22, 2005

Housekeeping

• You should have done the Sternberg task by now.
• Sternberg experiment report due 3/1.
• Hope to get you something back by Thursday.

Our Results (10 participants) as of

11:22 last evening

RT (ms) S Pres Abs Avg 1 535 700 620 3 715 745 730 5 820 795 810 (^5001 2) Set size 3 4 5

600

700

800

RT

Positive Negative Average

All SU Results (55 Ss since Fall ’03)

RT (ms) S Pres Abs Avg 1 615 720 665 3 785 790 790 5 890 900 890 1 2 3 4 5 Set size

500

600

700

800

900

RT (ms)

Positive Negative

Slope about 50 ± 15 ms/item in our version of exp.

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 to the degree of detail Atkinson and Shiffrin (and Raaijmakkers and Shiffrin) did.

Capacity studies of WM

• Construct a measure that is referred to as working memory capacity.
• E.g. “Reading span” (Daneman and Carpenter,
  1980. or “Operation Span” (Turner and Engle,
• 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 that should 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.