Memory: Yes I

Remember or Wait I
Know
Naveen Kashyap, PhD
Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati
Email: [email protected]
 Forming & Using Memory Trace
Memory is one of the most basic processes that we use in our daily
life. Right from the first hour of the morning to the last hour before sleep
memory plays….”the most important” part in the smooth running of our
lives.
Psychologists define memory as “memory is an organisms ability
to store, retain and recall information”. The loss of memory can be
extremely devastating to people. Alan Baddeley (1990) describes the case
of a musician broadcaster who suffered from intense amnesia.

….his amnesia was so dense that he could remember

nothing for more than a few minutes before. He was
often found writing down time and events. The
amnesia was so intense that if his wife returned after
a few minutes he would greet her with great joy
declaring that it was so long that they were
meeting…..
Metaphors of memory
Memory has been conceived as many different entities. Neath
(1998) noted that Plato wrote about memory, comparing it variously to an
aviary and to a wax tablet on which impressions are made. During the
middle ages memory was compared to a cave, an empty cabinet etc.
In 1950’s memory was compared to telephone systems and later in
the 1960’s to computer system. Cognitive psychologists found an important
fact about memory in the 60’s and 70’s that there are different types of
memory according to the length of time the information is stored.
The modal model of memory – assumes information is received,
processed and stored differently for each kind of memory. Unattended
information presented very quickly is stored only briefly in “sensory
memory”. Attended information is held in “short term memory” for periods
up to 20-30 seconds. Information needed for longer periods of time – exam
related knowledge or the name of our fourth grade teacher – is transferred
to “long term memory”
Sensory memory
Sensory memory is closely connected to what we call “perception”. This
kind of memory has been described as a record of our percepts, because it refers to
the initial brief storage of sensory information – what you might retain after a quick
glance to an object field.
Separate sensory memories exists for different modalities. For visual there
is the icon, for auditory it is the echo, for touch it is haptic and so on…

The Icon
Neisser (1967) called the icon a very brief visual memory. The icon is a
sensory memory storage system for visual material, holding information for up to
about 1 second. The information it holds is in a relatively unprocessed form.
The best demonstration of iconic memory can be done using Sperling’s
partial report technique (1960). Averbach & Coriell (1961) showed that the icon
can be “erased” by other stimuli presented immediately after the icon, a
phenomenon known as “masking”
The Echo
There is also a sensory memory for auditory material, which Neisser
(1967) called the echo. Moray, Bates & Barnett (1965) offered a clever
demonstration of the echo. Participants were given a “four-eared” listening
task, similar to dichotic listening. Using Sperling’s partial report technique
with lights the participants were made to perform the task. They too found
added performance increase in partial reports as compared to whole reports.
Darwin, Turvey & Crowder (1972) replicated Moray’s experiment
with better controls and found a much smaller partial report advantage.
However their study revealed that
1) Echoic memory has larger capacity than Iconic Memory
2) Echo’s can last about 20 seconds longer than Icons (Watkins &
Watkins, 1980)
Sensory memory can currently best be described by a number of
properties
1) sensory memories are modality specific.
2) sensory memory capacities appear large but the length of
time that information can be stored there is quite short much less
than a second
3) the information that can be stored appears relatively
unprocessed, meaning most of it has to do with physical aspects of
the stimuli rather than with meaningful ones
Short term memory
Most of the time when people think about memory they think
about holding onto information for longer than a second or two. This
type of memory where information can be held for brief periods of
time is called “short term memory”.
short term/primary/active memory is the capacity for holding
a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available
state for a short period of time.

Capacity of STM
A classic paper by George Miller (1956) holds the capacity for
STM to be 7 ± 2 chunks of items. Chunking is the process of
combining smaller units of items into bigger meaningful units. For
example consider the chunk
 FB I NSAK G B C BI C IAM I 5 BN D
The total string can be learnt by breaking it into initials for
security agencies around the world

Coding in STM
The term coding refers to the way in which information is
mentally represented; that is, the form in which information is held.
When given a phone number how does one remember it? Conrad
(1964) tried to address this question by presenting people with visual
letters to remember. He found that people often committed errors
while retrieving by replacing the original letter with similar sounding
letters (e.g., Target: B, Errors: C, G, E etc). Later Neath (1998) found
that people use the acoustic code dominantly for STM storage and
recall
 Short Term Memory
• Brown/Peterson & Peterson (1959)
• Trigram task

KHR

0 – 18 Delay / Distractor (947, 946, 945

seconds . . . 939)

Recall Trigram
Brown-Peterson Results
Trigrams
K X J

P L G

S Y T

H Z R
The results from both Brown’s and Petersons study interpreted that
failure to recall occurring due to “decay of memory traces” within
about 20 seconds. The decays in STM happens as the items are not
rehearsed.
A group of cognitive psychologists however challenged the
decay theory of forgetting in memory and proposed a different
mechanism called “interference” for forgetting from STM. The theory
of interference proposes that
some information can “displace” other information making
the former hard to retrieve.
Waugh & Norman (1965) – Probe digit task for explaining
interference
In the task participants were given 16-digit numbers such as
1596234789024815. The last digit in the number is a cue for the
participant to report the number that first came after the first
occurrence of the cue in the number.
Waugh & Norman presented the numbers either quickly, at the
rate of 4 digits per second or slowly at the rate of 1 digit per second.
Their reasoning was that if decay caused forgetting in STM, then
participants receiving a slow rate of presentation should not be as
good at recalling digits from early in the number.
Keppel & Underwood (1962) found that forgetting in the
Brown-Peterson task doesn’t happen until after a few trials. They
suggested that over time, proactive interference builds up.
Digit Probe Task: Waugh & Norman
(1965)

16 digits -----> probe digit

519635142867394

9837571493862752
Effect of Presentation Rate vs. Number of Interfering
Items on Recall (Waugh & Norman, 1965)
Is forgetting from STM a decay or Interference related
phenomenon
This is a badly posed question as it rules out the possibility for loss
by both the phenomenon. Baddeley (1990) argues that some trace decay
does occur form STM. Altmann & Gray (2002) proposes that decay does
occur and in fact is essential to avoid catastrophic proactive interference.
These authors believe that when information must be updated
frequently in memory, its current value decays to prevent interference with
previous values.

Retrieval from STM

How do we retrieve information from STM when we need it?
Saul Sternberg (1966, 1969) conducted a series of experiments and found
some interesting facts relating to retrieval from STM. Retrieval from STM
can be either using
a) Parallel Search – where comparison of the probe is done with all
items stored in the STM at the same time
b) Serial Search – where comparison of the probe is done with all
items stored in the STM one at a time. Further serial search can either be
a) self – terminating search – which stops when a match to
the probe is found
b) exhaustive search – where even if the match is found all
item are checked with the probe
Sternberg’s result argue for serial exhaustive search as we retrieve
information from STM
A review study done by Hunt (1978) found that people of all sorts showed
results consistent with the idea that retrieval from STM uses serial
exhaustive search, although search rate changes with the group.
Similarly DeRosa and Tkacz (1976) demonstrated that with certain
stimuli people apparently search STM in a parallel way.
De Rosa stimuli consisted of ordered sequences of pictures. It
became clear from further research on De Rosa’s stimuli that
a) if the memory set consisted of some randomly selected subset of
the nine picture – 1, 4, 6, 8 & 9 – from any of the sets the results were
similar to Sternberg’s result
b) If memory set consisted of an ordered subset of the original
sequence pictures – 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 – then it took participants no longer to
search through five items than it did through two.
This result suggests that STM does treat organized material differently
from unorganized material. Also memory processes apparently work
differently as function of the material (stimuli) to be remembered
Working Memory
The information processing model of Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968)
describes information processing as being a two part process
a) the information representations being stored called either as
“STM / LTM”
b) the structure storing it describes as “STS / LTS”

These authors conceived STS not only as a store for seven or

fewer pieces of information for few seconds but found that information in
STS somehow activates relevant information from LTS and gathers some
of this information into STS.
They equates STS with consciousness and saw it as the location of
various control processes that govern the flow of information such as
rehearsal, coding, integration and decision making.

Baddeley & Hitch (1974) performed a series of experiments to

test the model described above. The design was to have participants
temporarily store a number of digits while simultaneously performing
another task such as reasoning or language comprehension. The
hypothesis was that if the STS capacity is taken up by stored digits
fewer resources are available for other tasks so performance on other
tasks suffer
Reasoning Task with Letter Recall

AB

‘A’ precedes ‘B’? T or F

‘B’ is preceded by ‘A’ . T or F

‘B’ does not precede ‘A’. T or F

Reasoning Speed and Letter Recall
Experiment 1:

0, 1, 2 items preloaded

reasoning task

letter recall

Experiment 2:

0 or 6 items

reasoning task

letter recall
Reasoning Times & Letter Recall Results
Baddeley Working Memory Model
Working memory consists of a limited capacity “workspace” that
can be divided between storage and control processing. Baddeley
(1981, 1986, 1990) conceived of WM as consisting of three
components.
a) The first is central executive – this component directs the
flow of information, choosing which information will be operated on
when and how
b) The phonological loop – which is used to carry out sub
vocal rehearsal to maintain verbal material
c) The Visuospatial sketchpad – which is used to maintain
visual material through visualization.
 What about daydreams?
• Daydreams are stimulus-independent thoughts
(SITs).
• Neither the phonological loop nor the
visuospatial sketchpad is solely responsible for
SITs.
• Producing SITs appears to involve the central
executive.