PSYC10003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 28: Endel Tulving
5. Short Term Memory
Early Accounts of STM
• Limited capacity: 3-7 items
• Duration: seconds to minutes
o Info lost rapidly unless kept active with maintenance rehearsal
• Without rehearsal
o Memory trace will decay rapidly
o And/or information will suffer interference
The Brown-Peterson Task: Memory Decay Theory
• Remember 3 consonants: D, P, R
• How long can you retain this info if you prevent rehearsal?
• Give consonants, give number (eg. 97) to count backwards i 3’s from and then asked at one point
“top, eall
• The retention interval was manipulated systematically:
o Memory probed after 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 seconds
• Rapid decay
• After 3 seconds, probability of recall is 50%
• Original findings suggest STM traces decay with the passage of time
Interference
• It is possible that forgetting occurs due to interference as well as decay
• Retroactive interference: new information interferes with past information
• Proactive interference: past information interferes with present information
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Document Summary
Early accounts of stm: limited capacity: 3-7 items, duration: seconds to minutes. Info lost rapidly unless kept active with maintenance rehearsal: without rehearsal, memory trace will decay rapidly, and/or information will suffer interference. It is possible that forgetting occurs due to interference as well as decay: retroactive interference: new information interferes with past information, proactive interference: past information interferes with present information. The capacity of stm 7 2: george miller (1956, stm capacity often assessed using a digit-span task, recall sequence of digits in order presented (serial recall), this fi(cid:374)ds pe(cid:396)so(cid:374)s (cid:862)digit-spa(cid:374)(cid:863) Serial effect: primacy effect: better recall for items at the beginning of a study list. Items presumed to have been rehearsed and transferred to ltm: recency effect: better recall for items at the end of a study list. Evidence for levels of processing: craik & tulving (1975, participants asked to notice:
