Short-term & Working

memory
Introduction to Psychology
HUL261, Semester II, 2023-2024
Lecture 13
March 7, 2024

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 Outline for today
• Memory and its categorization
• Sensory memory
• Short-term memory
• Chunking
• Working memory
• Neural correlates of working memory
• Conclusions

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 What is learning and memory?
• Learning is any relatively permanent change in behavior
brought about by experience or practice
• Learning produces an engram (or memory trace) - physical
and/or chemical changes that underlie the newly formed
memory associations
• Memory refers to the processes involved in retaining, retrieving,
and using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and
skills after the original information is no longer present
• Memory is active any time some past experience has an effect
on the way you think or behave
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 Temporal Categories of Memory
• Memory can be categorized according to the
time over which it is effective
• Immediate memory is the ability of the brain to
hold onto ongoing experience for a second or so
• Short-term memory is the ability to hold and
manipulate information in the mind for seconds
to minutes while it is being used to achieve a
particular goal
• Long-term memory entails retaining information
in a more permanent form of storage for days,
weeks, or even a lifetime
• We can forget all of these memories
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 Sensory Memory
• Sensory memory is the retention, for brief periods of time, of the effects
of sensory stimulation
• Sensory memory can register huge amounts of information (perhaps all
the information that reaches the receptors), but it retains this
information for only seconds or fractions of a second
• Sensory store is important for (1) collecting information to be
processed, (2) holding the information briefly while initial processing is
going on, and (3) filling in the blanks when stimulation is intermittent
• Sensory memory gives rise to persistence of vision
• For e.g., when you move a sparkler in the air, the lighted trail is a
creation of your mind, which retains a perception of the sparkler’s light
for a fraction of a second. This retention of the perception of light in
your mind is called the persistence of vision

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 Interim summary
• Memory and its categorization
• Memory refers to the processes involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information
about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no
longer present
• Memory can be categorized according to the time over which it is effective
• Sensory memory
• The retention of the sensory information for <1 s
• Short-term memory
• Chunking
• Working memory
• Neural correlates of working memory
• Conclusions
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 Let’s test your memory
38
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5 7 3?8 1 9
What
? 6 4were
429 8 you
4 2doing
9 6 4 8 during the delay?

8 4 6?2 1 0
7 3 9 4? 6 1 8 2 73946182

3 7 9 0 1?4 8 5 2 6 3790148526
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 Short-Term Memory
• Short-term memory (STM) is the system that stores small
amounts of information for a brief period of time
• In the demo, two factors affected how much you could remember
– the length of the numbers and the duration you had to
remember it for
• Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) suggested the modal model of
memory (modal = ‘of or related to structure’)
• This model envisions a serial structure: Information coming into
sensory memory can be passed to STM and only then into long-
term memory (LTM)
• Attention helps one to focus on information that is particularly
important or interesting and moves inputs from sensory memory
to STM while rehearsal moves information from STM to LTM

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 Short-Term Memory: Duration
• The Brown–Peterson task is used to measure the duration of STM
• The participant is presented with a small number of test items which
they must report after a short retention interval. However, during this
retention interval the participant is required to perform a distraction
task (such as counting backwards in threes) to prevent rehearsal of
the test items
• They varied the recall interval between 3-18s. Participants were able
to remember about 80% of the letters after counting for 3s but could
remember an average of only 12% of the three-letter groups after
counting for 18s
• Brown & Peterson interpreted this result as a decay of the memory
trace because of the passage of time after hearing the letters
• However, others have observed that this can also be because of
interference where new information displaces old information

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 Short-term memory: Capacity
• Capacity of STM can be measured by the digit span – participants read a series
of digits and is then required to repeat them immediately, in the correct order
• According to this, the average capacity of STM is about 5 to 9 items—about the
length of a phone number. This idea that the limit of STM is somewhere between
5 and 9 was suggested by George Miller (1956) in a famous paper titled “The
Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”
• The introduction of the seven-digit phone number is often credited to the fact
that Bell Laboratories looked to Miller for advice in the 1950s
• Luck and Vogel (1997), measured the capacity of STM by flashing two arrays of
colored squares separated by a brief delay. Participants had to indicate whether
the second array was the same or different from the first array
• Performance was almost perfect for 1 to 3 squares, but decreased when there
were 4+ squares. Thus, they concluded that STM capacity is about 4 items
• These estimates set rather low limits on the capacity of STM. Then how is it
possible to hold many more items in memory in some situations, as when words
are arranged in a sentence?
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 Chunking
• Try remembering this:
• BCIFNCCASICB
• C IA FBI N BC C BS
• The answer might lie in chunking!
• Miller (1956) introduced the concept of chunking to describe the fact that small units (like
words) can be combined into larger meaningful units, like phrases, or even larger units,
like sentences, paragraphs, or stories
• A chunk has been defined as a collection of elements that are strongly associated with
one another but are weakly associated with elements in other chunks

https://im.indiatimes.in/content/2020/Oct/Aadhaar-
PVC_5f85c54d7d6ea.jpg
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 Chunking
• Chase and Simon considered chunking as an interaction between STM and LTM
• They showed arrangements of chess pieces taken from actual games, for 5s to
beginners (<100 hrs of experience) vs. experts (>10,000 hrs of experience).
Participants had to reproduce the positions they had seen
• Experts placed 16/24 pieces correctly on their first try, compared to 4/24 pieces
for beginners
• Does this result mean that experts have a more highly developed short-term
memory than the beginners?
• To test this, experts and beginners were asked to remember random
arrangements of the chess pieces. However, now the performance was similar
• Chase and Simon concluded that the experts’ advantage was due not to a more
highly developed STM, but to their ability to group the chess pieces into
meaningful chunks that they already had stored in LTM
• Thus, chunking enables the limited-capacity STM system to deal with the large
amount of information involved in many of the tasks we perform every day

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhZrQQeZ0WA
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 Interim summary
• Memory and its categorization
• Memory refers to the processes involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information
about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer
present
• Memory can be categorized according to the time over which it is effective
• Sensory memory
• The retention of the sensory information for <1 s
• Short-term memory
• The system that stores small amounts of information for a few seconds
• Chunking
• Small units can be combined into larger meaningful units
• Working memory
• Neural correlates of working memory
• Conclusions

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 1

8 2 Sequence:
83526147

What are you doing

You are using visual

6 4

5
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 Criticisms of the idea of STM
• In the modal model, STM was described mainly as a short-term passive
storage mechanism
• But in our daily lives, we not only hold parts of conversation in our minds
but also actively process and make sense of the current sentence
• According to the modal model, it should only be possible to perform one
task, which should occupy the entire STM
• But we can do two tasks at the same time
• These led Baddeley to consider alternatives to the modal model – a
model that could account for:
1. The dynamic processes involved in cognition, and,
2. The fact that people can carry out two tasks simultaneously

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 Working memory
• Hitch & Baddeley (1974) argued that the STM was more than just a temporary storage
space, and that it functioned as an active working memory (WM) - a mental workspace in
which a variety of processing operations were carried out on both new and old memories
• They found that participants could perform two WM tasks as the same time as long as the
two tasks did not use the same modality of information, i.e., visual & auditory WM tasks
could be performed at the same time.
• They concluded that WM must have separate stores for visual and auditory information
• So what’s the difference between STM and WM?
• “So far, studies … have not consistently succeeded to unequivocally differentiate between
STM and WM”. Consequently, “STM and WM are often used interchangeably in clinical
and research literature” (Aben et al., Front. Psychol., 2012;
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00301)

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 Baddeley & Hitch’s WM model
• Let’s try this task: Count the number of window in your house
• You would probably form a mental image of the building, and imagine
walking around it, counting the windows as you go – thus you are
actively processing information
• Working memory is conceptualized as a kind of mental workspace in
which a variety of processing operations were carried out on both new
and old memories
• The visuospatial sketch pad holds visual and spatial information, i.e.
creating a mental image
• The phonological loop holds verbal and auditory information, i.e. the
counting
• The central executive pulls information from long-term memory and
coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and visuospatial
sketch pad
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 Neuroscience of WM
• Early research on the frontal lobe and memory was carried out in monkeys using a
task called the delayed-response task
• In this task, the monkey had to hold on to information in WM during a delay period
• The monkey was shown a food reward in one of two food wells
• Both wells were then covered, a screen is lowered, and then there is a delay before the
screen is raised again
• When the screen was raised, the monkey had to remember which well had the food and
uncover the correct food well to obtain a reward
• Monkeys can be trained to accomplish this task. However, if their prefrontal cortex is
removed, their performance drops to chance level, so they pick the correct food well only
about half of the time
• Funahashi briefly flashed a peripheral target but the monkey had to move only
when the central fixation disappeared (i.e. memory-guided saccade). Some
neurons in the lateral PFC kept spiking (continuous action potentials) during the
delay period
• This suggests that memory about the location might be maintained in the
persistent spiking in these neurons
• However, recently others have suggested that long-range brain oscillations (i.e.
synchronized activity) in different frequencies play a role in WM
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsXP8qeFF6A
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 Conclusion
• Memory can be categorized according to the time over which it is effective
• Sensory memory is the retention of the sensory information for <1 s
• Studies have characterized the duration (15-20s) and capacity (4-9 items) of STM
• STM suffers from both decay and interference
• Chunking might allow us to hold many more items in memory in some situations
• WM has two basic functions: (i) short-term storage of information and (ii) includes
executive processes that retain no information by themselves but control what is retained
• Components of Hitch and Baddeley’s model of working memory: Phonological loop,
visuospatial sketchpad handles visual and spatial information, and the central executive
coordinates how information is used by the phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pa
• Neuroscience of WM – persistent spiking

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