PSYC 5140

Cognitive Psychology

Lecture 5:
Short-Term Memory and
Working Memory

Fall 2020
Instructor: Urs Maurer
 What Is Memory?

• Memory: processes involved in

retaining, retrieving, and using
information about stimuli, images,
events, ideas, and skills after the original
information is no longer present

• Active any time some past experience

has an impact on how you think or
behave now or in the future

Memory is not just

Memory has to do with the past
affecting the present, and possibly one thing.
the future It comes in many
forms.
 Memory: Key Terms

• Memory: Active system that

stores, organizes, alters, and
recovers (retrieves) information
• Encoding: Converting
information into a useable form
for storage
• Storage: Holding this
information in memory
• Retrieval: Taking memories out
Computer scientists had to think a lot
of storage harder about short-term vs. long-term
memory when RAM maxed out at 16KB.
 Tree of Memory

Memory

Sensory Short Term Long Term

Declarative Procedural

Episodic Semantic
 Modal Model of Memory

• Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)

• Three different types of memory:
1. Sensory Memory – Initial stage that holds all incoming information
for seconds or fractions of a second
2. Short-term Memory – Holds 5 to 9 items for about 15 to 20 seconds.
3. Long-term Memory – Can hold a large amount of information for
years or even decades
 Modal Model of Memory

• Control processes: active

processes that can be controlled
by the person
– Maintenance rehearsal:
repeating a stimulus over and
over
– Strategies used to make a
stimulus more memorable
– Strategies of attention that
help you focus on specific
stimuli

“Building” a “memory palace” is an ancient

strategy for making information more memorable.
 Everyday Examples of Sensory Memory

• Sensory Memory: The retention, for brief

periods of time, of the effects of sensory
stimulation.
– Information decays very quickly
• Persistence of vision: retention of the
perception of light
– Sparkler’s trail of light
– Frames in film

• Holds large amount of information for a

short period of time
– Collects information
– Holds information for initial processing
– Fills in the blank
 Sensory Memory

• Sensory Memory: Storing an exact copy of incoming information for

less than a second; the first stage of memory

• Icon: A fleeting mental image or visual representation

• Echo: After a sound is heard, a brief continuation of the sound in

the auditory system
 Modal Model of Memory: Sensory Memory

• Measuring the capacity and duration of sensory memory (Sperling,

1960)
– Array of letters flashed quickly on a screen
– Participants asked to report as many as possible
• Whole report method: participants asked to report as many as could
be seen
– Average of 4.5 out of 12 letters (37.5%)
NEXT YOU WILL SEE A 34 MATRIX OF
LETTERS PRESENTED VERY BRIEFLY
+
L X G K
Q M T R
Z C V D
 A. Whole Report Technique

• What are the letters that you have seen?

• Write it down now…
 Sperling (1960): Iconic Memory

Whole report condition

XMLT
AFNB X
F D
CDZP Z C
 Modal Model of Memory: Sensory Memory

• Partial report method: participants heard tone that told them which
row of letters to report
– Average of 3.3 out of 4 letters (82%)
– Participants could report any of the rows
• Delayed partial report method: presentation of tone delayed for a
fraction of a second after the letters were extinguished
– Performance decreases rapidly
+
Y P B N
R Q L G
F M D K
 Sperling (1960): Iconic Memory

Partial report condition

XMLT
AFNB X M
L T
CDZP
 Sperling (1960): Iconic Memory

Partial report delayed

XMLT condition

AFNB
M
CDZP
Modal Model of Memory: Sensory Memory
 Modal Model of Memory: Sensory Memory

• Whole report method: participants asked to report as many as could

be seen
– Average of 4.5 out of 12 letters (37.5%)

• Partial report method: participants heard tone that told them which
row of letters to report
– Average of 3.3 out of 4 letters (82%)
– Participants could report any of the rows

• Delayed partial report method: Same as partial report, but with a

short delay between the display of letters and the tone
– Average of 1 out of 4 letters (25%)
 Sperling (1960): Iconic Memory

• What’s the point?

– Sperling was studying visual sensory memory
– Before his study, people thought that visual sensory memory could
only hold 4-5 items (full report cond)
– The other conditions in his study showed that
• It’s true that people can only report 4-5 items before memory decays (or
fades away)
• BUT sensory memory actually encodes the whole scene

• Conclusion: Sensory Memory has a large capacity, but fast decay

 Sperling (1960): Timing of Decay

• What’s the point?

– Sperling wanted to get a clearer picture of just how fast sensory
information decays
• Stronger support of his hypothesis that sensory memory has large
capacity and fast decay

– Conclusion: Within just 1 second, most of sensory memory decays,

leaving only what was moved to STM via attention.
 Modal Model of Memory: Short-Term Memory

• Stores small amounts of information for a brief duration

• Includes both new information received from the sensory stores and
information recalled from long-term memory
– Understand sentences
– Do arithmetic
– Dial a phone number
– Navigate from one place to another
– Know where we are and what we’re doing right now

• STM is responsible for a great deal of our mental lives

• Everything we think about or know at a particular moment in time
involves STM because short-term memory is our window on the
present
 Clive Wearing

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipD_G7U2FcM

• Memento: http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1368785177/
 Issues with STM

• Just as with Sensory Memory, two important issues are

– Duration (how long things stay in memory)
– Capacity (how many things fit in memory at a time)

• Studying Short-Term-Memory is complicated because people use control

processes a lot
– Rehearsal seems to extend duration
– Chunking seems to extend capacity
 Duration of Short-term Memory

• Brown (1958) / Peterson & Peterson (1959)

– Same studies at the same time, same results

• Step 1: three letters + one number given

• Step 2: count backward from number by 3s (e.g,, 45, 42,…)
• Step 3: 3-18 seconds delay (while counting backward)
• Step 4: recall three letters

Trial 1: F Z L 45
Trial 2: B H M 87
Trial 3: X C G 98
 Duration of Short-term Memory

• Brown (1958) / Peterson & Peterson (1959)

– Same studies at the same time, same results

Percent
Recalled FIRST TRIAL
ONLY

3 18
Delay
 Duration of Short-term Memory

• Brown (1958) / Peterson & Peterson (1959)

– Same studies at the same time, same results

THIRD TRIAL
Percent ONLY
Recalled

3 18
Delay
 Duration of Short-term Memory

• Brown (1958) / Peterson & Peterson (1959)

– Same studies at the same time, same results

Percent MANY
TRIALS
Recalled
LATER

3 18
Delay
 Duration of Short-term Memory

• Brown (1958) / Peterson & Peterson (1959)

– Same studies at the same time, same results

AVERAGE
Percent OVER ALL
TRIALS
Recalled

3 18
Delay
 Duration of Short-term Memory

• The studies by Brown and Peterson & Peterson show that the percentage
of letters recalled decreases with longer delays

• BUT this pattern interacts with where in the series of trials the individual
trial occurs
– Recall of letters after long delays decreases as the series of trials gets
longer
 Duration of Short-term Memory

• What’s the point?

– Peterson & Peterson / Brown were interested in decay of short term
memory
• Memory trace vanished because of decay that occurred with the passage
of time

– It turns out, their studies demonstrate that another type of forgetting

that happens in STM: proactive interference
• What is already in STM affects ability to add new things

– Larger point is that forgetting in STM occurs through both decay and
interference – effective duration is 15-20s.
 Interference Theories

• “Memories interfering with memories”

• Forgetting NOT caused by mere passage of time
• Caused by one memory competing with or replacing another
memory
• Two types of interference

Types of Interference

Retroactive Proactive
Interference Interference
 Retroactive Interference

• When a NEW memory interferes with remembering OLD

information
• Example:
– When new phone number interferes with ability to remember
old phone number
– English: «committee», German: «Komitee»
 Proactive Interference

• Opposite of retroactive interference

• When an OLD memory interferes with remembering NEW information

• Example:
– Mandarin: «1», Cantonese: «2» (for teacher)
 Capacity of Short-term Memory

• Not only is information lost rapidly from STM, but there is a limit to how
much information can be held there

• Capacities can vary from person-to-person, measured by digit span

 Capacity of Short-term Memory

2149 If you did this example in the

39678 text…
649784 How many digits were in the
7382015 longest row that you got
84261432 completely right?
482392807
5852981637 That’s your digit span.
 Change Detection

• There may be multiple, modality- (or even domain-) specific forms of

working memory. (How many and how specific is something theorists
argue about.)

• Visual Short Term Memory (VSTM), as measured with the change

detection task, may have a smaller capacity than memory for lists of digits,
unrelated words, etc.
Note how accuracy falls off
dramatically when there are
more than four items.

Thus, it seems that we can

only hold about three to
four items in visual working
memory at a time.

Visual working memory

stores integrated objects,
rather than just features.
 Capacity of Short-term Memory

• Miller (1956): People can remember 7±2 ….

– Digits
– Words
– Numbers (with multiple digits)
– Phrases

• Some researchers have suggested that rather than describing memory

capacity in terms of “number of items”, it should be described in terms of
“amount of information”

• Alvarez and Cavanaugh (2004)

– Used colored squares as well as complex objects
– Used the change detection procedure
 Short-Term Memory

Subjects’ ability to make the same/different judgment

depended on the complexity of the stimuli

Radicals rather than characters (and a mistake?)

 Chunking

• We can hold much more in short term memory when things are organized
into chunks.
– Chunking is combining smaller units into larger meaningful units, to
improve capacity
• Ericson and coworkers (1980)
– College student had digit-span of 79 after training
• Chunked digits into meaningful times for running, a sport he was familiar
with
• Chase and Simon (1973)
– Chess players chunk information based on meaningful points within a
game of chess
 Chunking

• Chase & Simon (1973)

Meaningful Random
Arrangements Arrangements

Correct
Piece
Placements

Master Beginner Master Beginner

 Working Memory

• Similar concept to short-term memory

• Baddeley and Hitch (1974)
• Working memory: limited capacity system for temporary storage and
manipulation of information for complex tasks such as comprehension,
learning, and reasoning
 Working Memory

• Working memory differs from STM

– STM holds information for a brief period of time
– WM is concerned with the processing and manipulation of
information that occurs during complex cognition
 Working Memory
• “multiply 43 times 6 in your head”

– Visualize: 43*6
– Multiply 3*6=18
– Hold 8 in memory, while carrying the 1 over the 4
– Multiply 6*4=24
– ….

This operation involves both storage (holding 8 in memory) and active

processes (carrying the 1)
 Working Memory

• Phonological Loop
– Phonological store: holds verbal and auditory information
– Articulatory rehearsal process: responsible for rehearsal that can keep
items in the phonological store from decaying
• Visuospatial Sketch Pad
– Holds visual and spatial information
• Central Executive
– Pulls info from long-term memory, coordinates other components,
directs and maintains attention
 Phonological Loop

• Phonological similarity effect

– Letters or words that sound similar are confused

• Word-length effect
– Memory for lists of words is better for short words than for long
words
– Takes longer to rehearse long words and to produce them during
recall
 Phonological Loop

• Articulatory suppression
– Say «the, the, the,…»
– Prevents one from rehearsing items to be remembered
• Reduces memory span
• Eliminates word-length effect
• Reduces phonological similarity effect for reading words
 Visuospatial Sketch Pad

• Visual imagery: The creation of visual

images in the mind in the absence of
a physical visual stimulus

– Shepard and Metzler (1971)

– Mental rotation task
– Tasks that called for greater
rotations took longer
Visuospatial Sketch Pad
 Visuospatial Sketch Pad

• Brooks (1968) – the “F” demo

– Memorize a shape (in this case an F)
– Indicate whether each corner is an «inside
corner» or an «outside corner»
• Condition 1: by speaking
• ¨condition 2: by pointing
– Results: speaking is easier than pointing (the
opposite what happened before)
– Explanation: Sketch pad was busy with image, but
phonological loop was free
 Phonological Loop and Visuospatial Sketch Pad

• Tasks are easier when the information being held in mind and the
operation being performed on it involve different types of short-term
memory
– Verbal / phonological
– Visual / spatial

• That means the two types of short-term memory are somewhat

independent
– At the least, separate capacities
 The Central Executive

• The Central Executive does the «work» of

working memory
– Directing and maintaining attention
• Focus, divide, switch attention
– Controls suppression of irrelevant
information
– Coordinating sketchpad and phonological
loop
– Performing calculations
 Episodic Buffer

• Backup store that communicates with LTM and WM components

• Hold information longer and has greater capacity than phonological loop
or visuospatial sketch pad
 WM and the Brain: Individual Differences

• Vogel et al. (2005)

• Determined participants’ WM
– High-capacity WM group
– Low-capacity WM group
• Shown either simple or complex stimuli
• Measured ERP responses
• Results
– High-capacity participants were more efficient at ignoring the
distractors
 Working Memory and the Brain

• Prefrontal cortex responsible for processing incoming

visual and auditory information
– Monkeys without a prefrontal cortex have difficulty
holding information in working memory
 Working Memory and the Brain

• Funahashi et al. (1989)

– Single cell recordings from monkey’s prefrontal cortex during a delay-
response task

• Neurons responded when stimulus was flashed in a particular location

and during delay
• Information remains available via these neurons for as long as they
continue firing
 Working Memory and the Brain

• Brain imaging studies with humans: PFC is active when we use working
memory
– BUT it isn’t the only area that’s active!
• Other areas in the frontal lobe
• Areas in the parietal lobe
• Areas in the cerebellum
– Activity occurs in many areas simultaneously

And also in primary sensory

cortex

(Harrison & Tong, 2009)