History of Memory
Theory and Research
Tend to think of it as some
kind of place where things
or pieces of information
are stored
Plato. Memory is a wax tablet
Plato. Memory is an aviary
Locke. Memory is a cabinet
Pear (1922) memory is a grammaphone
broadbent (1950’s) memory is like a
telephone system
Simon and Figenbaum (1960’s) memory is
like a computer.
Romans (Cicero, 106-43 bce and
quintillian (40-96 ce)
350-ish CE. – Augustine ---Two kinds
of memory
Middle ages. (1200s)
the renaissance Vives 1492-1540
bacon. (1561-1626).
Hobbes (worked for Bacon)
Descartes (1596-1650)
the 1700s Locke
the 1800’s. Gustav Fechner
ebbinghaus
After ebbinghaus – the 1900s
what does memory research
have to do with the real
world?
Neisser (1978) asked this question. in
1976, he wrote Cognition and Reality
critical of the methodology of much
cognitive psychology, faulting it for
being "ecologically invalid."
What’s the typical way to
study memory?
The Experiment
IV – vary:
Task or Processing strategies
Classes of stimuli
Quality of stimuli
Conditions of study
Type of test
How do we test memory?
Recall
Free recall: “tell me what you remember from what you
studied”
Cued recall (recall with some hint): “Tell me the furniture
words you studied” or “Tell me the words you studied that
start with “b” “, etc
Serial Recall: “tell me what you remember from what you
studied, but report them in order”
Recognition
o Yes/no recognition (also called old/new
recognition): “For each item in the test, indicate whether it is
OLD (studied) or NEW (unstudied)
o Forced-choice recognition: “From these two (or
three or four or six, etc) choices, pick the item you studied”
How do we test memory?
Indirect Memory tests
Stem Completion CHA----
Partial cuing C-A-I--
The DV - WHAT gets
measured?
Accuracy of response
Speed of response
Response bias.
Number of intrusions
Response confidence
Nature of the intrusions
Order of responses
Accuracy measures
An accuracy score is meaningless
unless you know the accuracy one
could expect from chance
performance – what a person could
get from pure guessing with no
memory whatsoever.
Consider the following
The subject studies 20 words.
The test includes the 20 studied
words, and 10 new words.
Three response strategies
Our subject responds “old”,”new”,
“old”,”new”, etc in perfect alternation
because he/she has no idea.
he or she responds “old” to every item
on the list.
he or she responds “new” to
everything
All three Ss had no
memory for the items
Our subject responds “old”,”new”,
“old”,”new”, etc in perfect alternation
because he/she has no idea. (50%
accuracy)
he or she responds “old” to every item
on the list. (67% accuracy)
he or she responds “new” to
everything (33% accuracy)
Solution #1. Average the percent-
correct for old and for new.
Solution #2. Subtract incorrect
answers from correct answers
Stimulus Response Label
Old Old Hit (correct)
New New Correct rejection (correct)
Old New Miss (incorrect)
New Old False alarm (incorrect
If we take the Hit rate, and subtract the FA rate, we have a
corrected calculation of what they’ve remembered.
Scenario 1: 50%-50% = 0
Scenario 2: 100% - 100% = 0
Scenario 3: 0% - 0% = 0
Accuracy in a free recall test
Chance in a cued-recall test
New Lecture: Sensory
Memory
1. something that looks or sounds like
the stimulus continues to be present
for a little while after it goes away –
stimulus persistence
2. information can be extracted from a
stimulus for a short time after it has
been taken away – information
persistence
when the persistence is visual – iconic
memory,
and when its auditory, its echoic
memory.
Javon – 1871 span of apprehension
with beans
Sperling (1960) more complicated
stimuli. Letters in 3x4 matrix
Sperling’s Experiment
Presented matrix of letters for 1/20
seconds K Z R
Report as many letters as possible
Q B T
Subjects recall only half of the
letters S G N
Was this because subjects didn’t
have enough time to view entire
matrix? No
How did Sperling know this?
Sperling showed people can see and recall ALL the
letters momentarily
Sounded low, medium or high tone immediately
after matrix disappeared
– tone signaled 1 row to report
– recall was almost perfect
Memory for image fades after 1/3 seconds or so,
making report of entire display hard to do
Sensory Memory Store
Sensory memory forms
Sensory automatically, without
Sensory attention or
Input
Memory interpretation
Attention is needed to
transfer information to
working memory
We mentioned stimulus and
information persistence earlier. Are
both of them the same thing?
Sperling’s task Ss identified numbers and
letters – were interested in info persistence,
and their data suggested that the
information was available for about 200 ms,
maybe up to almost a second.
Haber and Standing (1969)– flashing circle.
Increase speed until it looks like its not
flashing anymore. About the same amount
of time.
http://
www.johnsadowski.com/big_spanish_c
astle.php
if iconic memory is an afterimage,
people should make mistakes when
they are asked to report the colours of
letters.
Banks and Barber (1977) it doesn’t
happen, the original colour is
maintained.
So for example:
ARPY
LPKQ
BELP
Turvey (1973) used brightness and
pattern masking.
– Brightness masking – after letter is
presented, its followed by flash of light
– Pattern masking – after letter, followed
by features – look like Chinese writing.
Present letter and brightness mask to
same eye, get mask, if different eyes,
no mask.
When you use pattern mask, you get it
when letter presented to one eye and
mask to the other.
Bar probe task (Averbach
& Coriell, 1963)
Show string of letters for 200 ms
TYPOIUGB
Mask it
&&&&&&&
Probe a position and ask S to report
letter
&&&&&&&
Problems with iconic
memory.
iconic memory has a precategorical
view of the original stimulus.
item vs location information
Accuracy in Bar Probe task
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Accuracy in Bar Probe task
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Echoic memory
Similar kind of phenomena with auditory
stimuli. Echoic memory. Neisser (1967)
Similar to iconic memory, echoic memory is
a system that receives auditory stimuli and
preserves them for a short amount of time
Usually noticed as the cocktail party effect
People have tried to study
it the same way that
iconic memory is studied
How many letters can the
subject report?
0 sec 1 sec 4 sec 5 sec
Partial 4.86 4.75 4.4
Whole 4.2
Other studies: tended to div up echoic
memory into two study of two types of
persistence – stimulus and information
persistence
1. Stimulus persistence: Efron (1970) tones. Range in
duration from 30 to 100 ms. S adjusts a light to turn off
when they perceive the tone to have ended. Found that
regardless of tone duration, Ss subjective duration was
about 130 ms.
1. Information persistence. The suffix and modality effects
Modality effect.
Conrad and Hull. Ss read a list of 7
digits. One group reads them aloud,
the other reads them silently. Then,
have to recall them in order.
The curves are similar, but find that
the performance for the aloud group is
better for last couple items than for
the silent group.
Modality Effect
0.9
0.8
Read aloud
0.7 Read silently
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Suffix Effect
0.9
0.8
buzzer
0.7
speech
0.6
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Morton, Crowder, Prussin (1991)
the suffix effect not affected by :
1. practice : you keep getting it no
matter how many trials you have the S
run.
2. meaning or predictability of suffix
3. whether it was /uh/ or /zero/
4. semantic relatedness to rest of list
5. word frequency of suffix
6. emotionality of suffix
Was REDUCED when
1. acoustic info changed. E.g., different
spatial location or pitch of suffix
2. when the sex differed of speaker from
items to suffix
3. when speaker differed
4. suffix was visually presented.
Probs with the PAS?
1. Is it really precategorical?
Ayres et al (1979)
Neath, Suprenant & Crowder (1993)
2. Spoehr & Corin (1978) found that you get the suffix
effect if the suff is mouthed—shouldn’t happen if the
PAS stores acoustic info
3. You get the suffix effect during articulatory suppression.
Saying /the/ while the list is being presented.
4. You get a suffix effect when followed by distractor
activity. Shouldn’t happen.
Next Time:
Where does the information go when
it leaves Sensory Memory?
SHORT TERM MEMORY
