Short-Term and Working Memory. experiment

• The thin edge of the present is what is happening right at this
moment, but a moment from now the present will become the past,
and some of the past will become stored in memory.
• What you will read in this chapter and the two that follow supports
the idea that “everything in life is memory” and shows how our
memory of the past not only provides a record of a lifetime of events
we have experienced and knowledge we have learned, but can also
affect our experience of what is happening right at this moment.

What Is Memory?
• The defi nition of memory provides the fi rst indication of its
importance in our lives: Memory is the processes involved in
retaining, retrieving, and using information about stimuli, images,
events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no longer
present.

The Purposes of Memory
• The fact that memory retains information that is no longer present
means that we can use our memory as a “time machine” to go back just
a moment—to the words you read at the beginning of this sentence—or
many years—to events as early as a childhood birthday party.
• This “mental time travel” afforded by memory can place you back in a
situation, so you feel as though you are reliving it, even to the extent of
experiencing feelings that were occurring long ago. But memory goes
beyond reexperiencing events.
• We also use memory to remember what we need to do later in the day,
to remember facts we have learned, and to use skills we have acquired.

• If you were asked to create a “Top 10” list of what you use memory for,
what would you include? When I ask my students to do this, most of their
items relate to day-to-day activities.
• The top five items on their list involved remembering the following things.
• 1. Material for exams
• 2. Their daily schedule
• 3. Names
• 4. Phone numbers
• 5. Directions to places

• Remembering material for exams is probably high on most students’
lists, but it is likely that people from different walks of life, such as
business executives, construction workers, homemakers, or
politicians, would create lists that differ from the ones created by
college students in ways that reflect the demands of their particular
lives.
• Remembering the material that will be on the next cognitive
psychology exam would be an unlikely entry on a construction
worker’s list, but remembering the procedure for framing a house
might be on that list.

• One reason I ask students to create a “memory list” is to get them to
think about how important memory is in their day-to-day lives.
• But the main reason is to make them aware of how they don’t include
many important functions on their lists, because they take them for
granted.
• A few of these things include labeling familiar objects (you know you are
reading a “book” because of your past experience with books), having
conversations (you need memory to keep track of the flow of a
conversation), knowing what to do in a restaurant (you need to
remember a sequence of events, starting with being seated and ending
with paying the check), and finding your way to class.

• The list of things that depend on memory is an extremely long one because just about everything
we do depends on remembering what we have experienced in the past.
• But perhaps the most powerful way to demonstrate the importance of memory is to consider
what happens to people’s lives when they lose their memory. Consider, for example, the case of
Clive Wearing (Annenberg, 2000; D. Wearing, 2005).
• Wearing was a highly respected musician and choral director in England who, in his 40s,
contracted viral encephalitis, which destroyed parts of his temporal lobe that are important for
forming new memories.
• Because of his brain damage, Wearing lives totally within the most recent one or two minutes of
his life. He remembers what just happened and forgets everything else. When he meets someone,
and the person leaves the room and returns three minutes later, Wearing reacts as if he hadn’t
met the person earlier.
• Because of his inability to form new memories, he constantly feels he has just become conscious
for the fi rst time

• This feeling is made poignantly clear by Wearing’s diary, which contains
hundreds of entries like “I have woken up for the fi rst time” and “I am alive”
(Figure 5.1).
• But Wearing has no memory of ever writing anything except for the
sentence he has just written.
• When questioned about previous entries, Wearing acknowledges that they
are in his handwriting, but because he has no memory for writing them, he
denies that they are his. It is no wonder that he is confused, and not
surprising that he describes his life as being “like death.”
• His loss of memory has robbed him of his ability to participate in life in any
meaningful way, and he needs to be constantly cared for by oth

• In this chapter we will begin describing the basic principles of memory so we
can understand both cases like Clive Wearing’s and also the basic principles
behind normal memory processes (Figure 5.2).
• We begin by describing a model of memory we introduced in Chapter 1 called
the modal model (see p. 20).
• After describing the modal model, we will focus on the short-term components
of the model, first looking at properties of sensory memory and short-term
memory and then at research that has led to a more modern way of looking at
the short-term stage of memory, which is called working memory.
• Finally, we will describe research on where some of the mechanisms of
working memory are located in the brain.

The Modal Model of Memory
• The modal model of memory, which was proposed by Richard
Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968), is shown in Figure 5.3.
• As we noted in Chapter 1, this model, which was proposed 40 years
ago, is too simple to explain many of the things that have been
discovered about memory since the model was proposed, but it does
provide a way to introduce many of the basic principles of memory.
• We will, therefore, use the modal model as our starting point, and will
update the model later in this and subsequent chapters

• The stages of the modal model are called the structural features of the
model.
• There are three major structural features:
• 1. Sensory memory is an initial stage that holds all incoming information for
seconds or fractions of a second.
• 2. Short-term memory (STM) holds 5–7 items for about 15–30 seconds.
• We will be describing the characteristics of short-term memory in this
chapter.
• 3. Long-term memory (LTM) can hold a large amount of information for years
or even decades. We will describe long-term memory in Chapters 6 and 7.

• Atkinson and Shiffrin also describe the memory system as including control
processes, which are active processes that can be controlled by the person
and may differ from one task to another.
• An example of a control process is rehearsal—repeating a stimulus over and
over, as you might repeat a telephone number in order to hold it in your mind
after looking it up in the phone book.
• Other examples of control processes are
• (1) strategies you might use to help make a stimulus more memorable, such
as relating the numbers in a phone number to a familiar date in history, and
• (2) strategies of attention that help you selectively focus on other
information you want to remember.

• To illustrate how the structural features and control processes operate, let’s
consider what happens as Rachel looks up the number for Mineo’s Pizza in the
phone book (Figure 5.4).
• When she first looks at the book, all of the information that enters her eyes is
registered in sensory memory (Figure 5.4a).
• But Rachel focuses on the number for Mineo’s using the control process of
selective attention, so the number enters STM (Figure 5.4b), and Rachel uses the
control process of rehearsal to keep it there (Figure 5.4c).
• After Rachel has dialed the phone number, she may forget it because it has not
been transferred into long-term memory. However, she decides to memorize the
number so next time she won’t have to look it up in the phone book.

• The process she uses to memorize the number, a control process we will discuss in
Chapter 6, transfers the number into long-term memory, where it is stored (Figure
5.4d).
• A few days later, when Rachel’s urge for pizza returns, she remembers the number. This
process of remembering information that is stored in long-term memory is called
retrieval because the information must be retrieved from LTM so it can reenter STM to
be used (Figure 5.4e).
• One thing that becomes apparent from our example is that the components of memory
do not act in isolation. Long-term memory is essential for storing information, but
before we can become aware of this stored information, it must be moved back into
STM.
• We will now consider each component of the model, beginning with sensory memory

Sensory Memory
• Sensory memory is the retention, for brief periods of time, of the effects of
sensory stimulation.
• We can demonstrate this brief retention for the effects of visual stimulation
with two familiar examples: the trail left by a moving sparkler and the
experience of seeing a film.
• The Sparkler’s Trail and the Projector’s Shutter It is dark, sometime around
the Fourth of July, and you place a match to the tip of a sparkler. As sparks
begin radiating from the hot spot at the tip, you sweep the sparkler through
the air, and create a trail of light (Figure 5.5).
• Although it appears that this trail is created by light left by the sparkler as
you wave it through the air, there is, in fact, no light along this trail.

• 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.
Something similar happens while you are watching a fi lm in a darkened movie theater. You may
see actions moving smoothly across the screen, but what is actually projected is quite different.
• We can appreciate what is happening on the screen by considering the sequence of events that
occur as a fi lm is projected. First, a single fi lm frame is positioned in front of the projector lens,
and when the projector’s shutter opens, the image on the fi lm frame is projected onto the
screen.
• The shutter then closes, so the fi lm can move to the next frame without causing a blurred
image, and during that time, the screen is dark. When the next frame has arrived in front of the
lens, the shutter opens again, flashing the next image onto the screen. This process is repeated
rapidly, 24 times per second, so 24 still images are flashed on the screen every second, with
each image separated by a brief period of darkness (see Table 5.1)

• A person viewing the fi lm sees the progression of still images as
movement and doesn’t see the dark intervals between the images
because the persistence of vision fills in the darkness by retaining the
image of the previous frame.
• If the period between the images is too long, the mind can’t fill in the
darkness completely, and you perceive a flickering effect.
• This is what happened in the early movies when the projectors
flashed images more slowly, causing longer dark intervals. This is why
these early films were called “flickers,” a term that remains today,
when we talk about going to the “flicks.”

Sperling’s Experiment: Measuring the Visual
Icon
• The persistence of vision effect that adds a trail to our perception of moving
sparklers and fi lls in the dark spaces between frames in a fi lm has been
known since the early days of psychology (Boring, 1942).
• This lingering of the visual stimulus in our mind was studied by Sperling
(1960) in a famous experiment in which he fl ashed an array of letters, like the
one in Figure 5.6a, on the screen for 50 milliseconds (ms; 50/1,000 second)
and asked his participants to report as many of the letters as possible.
• This part of thE experiment used the whole report method because
participants were asked to report as many letters as possible from the whole
matrix. When they did this they were able to report an average of 4.5 out of
the 12 letters.

• At this point Sperling could have concluded that because the exposure was brief, participants
saw only an average of 4.5 of the 12 letters. However, there is another possibility:
• Perhaps participants saw most of the letters immediately after they were presented, but their
perception faded rapidly as they were reporting the letters, so by the time they had reported
4–5 letters, they could no longer see the matrix or remember what had been there.
• Sperling devised the partial report method to determine which of these two possibilities is
correct.
• In this technique, he flashed the matrix for 50 ms, as before, but immediately after it was
flashed, he sounded one of the following cue tones, to indicate which row of letters the
participants were to report (Figure 5.6b):
• High-pitched: Top row
• Medium-pitched: Middle row
• Low-pitched: Bottom roW

• Note that because the tones were presented after the letters were turned off, the
participant’s attention was directed not to the actual letters, which were no longer
present, but to whatever trace remained in the participant’s mind after the letters
were turned off.
• When the cue tones directed participants to focus their attention onto one of the
rows, they correctly reported an average of about 3.3 of the 4 letters (82 percent) in
that row.
• Because participants saw an average of 82 percent of the letters no matter which row
was cued, Sperling concluded that the correct description of what was happening was
that immediately after the display was presented, participants saw an average of 82
percent of the letters in the whole display, but were not able to report all of these
letters because they rapidly faded as the initial letters were being reported.

• Sperling then did an additional experiment to determine the time course of this fading. For this
experiment, Sperling devised a delayed partial report method in which the presentation of cue
tones was delayed for a fraction of a second after the letters were extinguished (Figure 5.6c).
• The result of the delayed partial report experiments was that when the cue tones were
delayed for about half a second after the fl ash, participants were able to report only slightly
more than 1 letter in a row, or a total of about 4 letters for all three rows—the same number of
letters they reported using the whole-report technique.
• Figure 5.7 plots this result in terms of the number of letters available to the participants from
the entire display, as a function of time following presentation of the display. This graph
indicates that immediately after a stimulus is presented, all or most of the stimulus is available
for perception.
• This is sensory memory. Then, over the next second, sensory memory fades, until by 1 second,
less than 5 of the 12 letters in the matrix can be reported. Note that this corresponds to the
number of letters that were reported in the whole report technique.

• Sperling concluded from these results that a short-lived sensory
memory registers all or most of the information that hits our visual
receptors but that this information decays within less than a second.
• This brief sensory memory for visual stimuli is called iconic memory or
the visual icon (icon means “image”), and corresponds to the sensory
memory stage of Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model.
• Other research, using auditory stimuli, has shown that sounds also
persist in the mind. This persistence of sound, which is called echoic
memory, lasts for a few seconds after presentation of the original
stimulus (Darwin et al., 1972).

• Thus, sensory memory can register huge amounts of information (perhaps all of the information
that reaches the receptors), but it retains this information for only seconds or fractions of a second.
• There has been some debate regarding the purpose of this large but rapidly fading store (Haber,
1983), but many cognitive psychologists believe that the 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.
• Sperling’s experiment is important not only because it reveals the capacity of sensory memory
(large) and its duration (brief), but also because it provides yet another demonstration of how
clever experimentation can reveal extremely rapid cognitive processes that we are usually unaware
of.
• (See the discussion of illusory conjunctions in Chapter 3, page 67, for another example of how
cognitive psychologists studied a rapid process that occurs without our awareness.)

Short-Term Memory
• Whatever you are thinking about right now, or remember from what
you have just read, is in your short-term memory.
• As we will see shortly, most of this information is eventually lost, with
only some of it reaching the more permanent store of long-term
memory.
• Because of the brief duration of STM, it is easy to downplay its
importance compared to LTM.
• In my class survey of the uses of memory, my students focused almost
entirely on how memory enables us to hold information for long
periods,

• such as remembering directions, people’s names, or material that might appear on
an exam
• Certainly, our ability to store information for long periods is important, as attested
by cases such as Clive Wearing’s, whose inability to form LTMs makes it impossible
for him to function independently. But, as we will see, STM (and working memory,
which we will describe later) is also crucial for normal functioning.
• Consider, for example, the following sentence. The human brain is involved in
everything we know about the important things in life, like music and dancing. How
do we understand this sentence?
• First, the beginning of the sentence is stored in STM. We then read the rest of the
sentence and determine the overall meaning by comparing the information at the
end of the sentence to the information at the beginning.

• But what if we couldn’t hold the beginning of the sentence in STM? If the information
in the first phrase faded before you completed the sentence, you might think that the
topic of the sentence is music and dancing and wouldn’t realize that the sentence is
really about the brain.
• Holding small amounts of information for brief periods is the basis of a great deal of
our mental life. Everything we think about or know at a particular moment in time
involves STM because short-term memory is our window on the present.
• (Remember from Figure 5.4e that Rachel became aware of the pizzeria’s phone
number by transferring it from LTM to STM.)
• Early research on STM focused on answering the following two questions:
• (1) What is the duration of STM? And
• (2) How much information can STM hold

What Is the Duration of Short-Term Memory?
• John Brown (1958) in England and Lloyd Peterson and Margaret Peterson (1959) in the
United States carried out experiments to determine the duration of STM. In their
experiments participants were given a task similar to the one in the following
demonstration.
• Demonstration Remembering Three Letters
• You will need another person to serve as a participant in this experiment. Tell the person
that you are going to read three letters followed by a number. Once the person hears the
number he or she should start counting backward by 3’s from that number, and then
when you say “Recall,” the person should write down the three letters heard at the
beginning.
• Once the person starts counting, time 20 seconds and say, “Recall.” Note the accuracy
and repeat this procedure for a few more trials, using a new set of letters and a new
three-digit number on each trial.

• Peterson and Peterson found that their participants were able to remember about 80
percent of the letters after a 3-second delay (left bar in Figure 5.8a), but could
remember an average of only 10 percent of the three-letter groups after an 18-second
delay (right bar in Figure 5.8a).
• Peterson and Peterson initially interpreted this result as demonstrating that participants
forgot the letters because their memory trace decayed during the 18 seconds.
• However, when G. Keppel and Benton Underwood (1962) looked closely at Peterson
and Peterson’s results, they found that if they considered the participants’ performance
on just the first trial, there is little falloff between the 3-second and the 18-second delay
(Figure 5.8b).
• However, when they analyzed the results for the third trial, they began seeing a drop-
off in performance between the 3-second and the 18-second delay (Figure 5.8c).

• Why would memory become worse after a few trials? Keppel and Underwood suggested
that the drop-off in memory was due not to decay of the memory trace, as Peterson and
Peterson had proposed, but to proactive interference
• (PI)—interference that occurs when information that was learned previously interferes
with learning new information.
• The effect of proactive interference is illustrated by what might happen when a frequently
used phone number is changed. Consider, for example, what might happen when Rachel
calls the number she had memorized for Mineo’s Pizza, 521-5100, only to get a recording
saying that the phone number has been changed to 522-4100.
• Although Rachel tries to remember the new number, she makes mistakes at fi rst because
proactive interference is causing her memory for the old number to interfere with her
memory for the new number. The fact that the new number is similar to the old one adds
to the interference and makes it harder to remember the new number.

• What does it mean that the reason for the decrease in memory is
proactive interference, rather than decay? From the point of view of
understanding the basic mechanisms underlying memory, it is
important to know that interference is a basic mechanism of forgetting.
• From the point of view of our everyday life experience, it is easy to see
that interference is happening constantly, as one event follows the next
(and even when nothing is “happening,” we are usually thinking about
something).
• The outcome of this constant interference is that the effective duration
of STM, when rehearsal is prevented, is about 15–20 seconds.

What Is the Capacity of Short-Term Memory?
• Information is not only lost rapidly from STM, but there is a limit to how much information can be held there. One
measure of this capacity is provided by the digit span— the number of digits a person can remember.
• Digit Span You can determine your digit span by doing the following demonstration.
• Demonstration Digit Span Using an index card or piece of paper, cover all of the numbers below.
• Move the card down to uncover the ﬁrst string of numbers. Read the numbers, cover them up, and then write them down
in the correct order. Then move the card to the next string and repeat this procedure until you begin making errors.
• The longest string you are able to reproduce without error is your digit span.
• 2 1 4 9
• 3 9 6 7 8
• 6 4 9 7 8 4
• 7 3 8 2 0 1 5
• 8 4 2 6 1 4 3 2
• 4 8 2 3 9 2 8 0 7
• 5 8 5 2 9 8 1 6 3 7

• If you succeeded in remembering the longest string of digits, you have a digit span of 10.
• The typical span is between 5 and 8 digits. According to measurements of digit span, the
capacity of STM is 5–8 items.
• But what exactly is an item? George Miller (1956) considered this question in a famous
paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” Miller expanded the
definition of an item beyond digits by considering how we remember words and
combinations of words.
• Consider, for example, trying to remember the following words: monkey, child, wildly, zoo,
jumped, city, ringtail, young. How many units are there in this list? There are 8 words, but if
we group them differently, they can form the following 4 pairs: ringtail monkey, jumped
wildly, young child, city zoo.
• We can take this one step further by arranging these groups of words into one sentence:
The ringtail monkey jumped wildly for the young child at the city zoo

Chunking
• Is the sentence about the child watching a monkey at the zoo 8 items, 4
items, or 1 item? Miller 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 (Gobet et al., 2001).
• In our example the word ringtail is strongly associated with the word
monkey but is not as strongly associated with the other words, such as
child or jumped.

• Research has shown that chunking in terms of meaning can increase
our ability to hold information in STM.
• Thus, we can recall a sequence of 5–8 unrelated words, but arranging
the words to form a meaningful sentence so that the words become
more strongly associated with one another increases the memory
span to 20 words or more (Butterworth et al., 1990).

• K. Anders Ericcson and coworkers (1980) demonstrated an effect of chunking by
showing how a college student with average memory ability was able to achieve
amazing feats of memory.
• Their participant, S.F., was asked to repeat strings of random digits that were read to
him. Although S.F. had a typical memory span of 7 digits, after extensive training (230
one-hour sessions), he was able to repeat sequences of up to 79 digits without error.
• How did he do it? S.F. used chunking to recode the digits into larger units that formed
meaningful sequences. For example, 3492 became “3 minutes and 49 point 2
seconds, near world-record mile time,” and 893 became “89 point 3, very old man.”
• This example illustrates an interaction between STM and LTM, because S.F., who was
a runner, created some of his chunks based on his knowledge of running times that
were stored in LTM.

• Another example of chunking that is based on an interaction between STM and
LTM is provided by an experiment by William Chase and Herbert Simon (1973a,
1973b) in which they showed chess players pictures of chess pieces on a
chessboard for 5 seconds.
• The chess players were then asked to reproduce the positions they had seen. Chase
and Simon compared the performance of a chess master who had played or
studied chess for over 10,000 hours to the performance of a beginner who had less
than 100 hours of experience.
• The results, shown in Figure 5.9a, show that the chess master placed 16 pieces out
of 24 correctly on his fi rst try, compared to just 4 out of 24 for the beginner.
• Moreover, the master required only four trials to reproduce all of the positions
exactly, whereas even after seven trials the beginner was still making errors.

• We know that the master’s superior performance was caused by chunking because it
occurred only when the chess pieces were arranged in positions from a real chess game.
• When the pieces were arranged randomly, the chess master performed as poorly as the
begin ner (Figure 5.9b). Chase and Simon concluded that the chess master’s advantage
was due not to a more highly developed short-term memory, but to his ability to group
the chess pieces into meaningful chunks.
• Because the chess master had stored many of the patterns that occur in real chess
games in LTM, he saw the layout of chess pieces not in terms of individual pieces but in
terms of 4 to 6 chunks, each made up of a group of pieces that formed familiar,
meaningful patterns.
• When the pieces were arranged randomly, the familiar patterns were destroyed, and
the chess master’s advantage vanished (also see DeGroot, 1965; Gobet et al., 2001

• Chunking is an essential feature of STM because it expands the
capacity of STM so it can handle 5–8 chunks rather than just 5–8
items.
• This enables the limited-capacity STM to deal with the large amount
of information involved in many of the tasks we perform every day,
such as chunking letters into words as you read this, remembering the
first three numbers of familiar telephone exchanges as a unit, and
transforming long conversations into smaller units of meaning.

How Is Information Coded in Short-Term
Memory
• Coding refers to the way information is represented. Remember, for
example, our discussion in Chapter 2 of how a person’s face can be
represented by the pattern of fi ring of a number of neurons.
Determining how a stimulus is represented by the fi ring of neurons is
a physiological approach to coding.
• We can also take a mental approach to coding by asking how a
stimulus or an experience is represented in the mind. For example,
imagine that you have just finished listening to your cognitive
psychology professor give a lecture.

• We can describe different kinds of mental coding that occur for this
experience by considering some of the ways you might remember
what happened in class.
• Remembering the sound of your professor’s voice is an example of
auditory coding. Imagining what your professor looks like, perhaps by
conjuring up an image in your mind, is an example of visual coding.
Finally, remembering what your professor was talking about is an
example of coding in terms of meaning, which is called semantic
coding (see Table 5.2).

Auditory Coding
• One of the early experiments that investigated coding in STM was
done by R. Conrad in 1964. In Conrad’s experiment, participants saw a
number of target letters flashed briefly on a screen and were told to
write down the letters in the order .

• they were presented. Conrad found that when participants made errors, they were
most likely to misidentify the target letter as another letter that sounded like the target.
• For example, “F” was most often misidentifi ed as “S” or “X,” two letters that sound
similar to “F.” Thus, even though the participants saw the letters, the mistakes they
made were based on the letters’ sounds.
• From these results Conrad concluded that the code for STM is auditory (based on the
sound of the stimulus), rather than visual (based on the visual appearance of the
stimulus).
• This conclusion fits with our common experience with telephone numbers.
• Even though our contact with them in the phone book is visual, we usually remember
them by repeating their sound over and over rather than by visualizing what the
numbers look like in the phone book (also see Wickelgren, 1965).

Visual Coding
• Some tasks, such as remembering the details of a diagram or an
architectural fl oor plan, require visual codes (Kroll, 1970; Posner &
Keele, 1967; Shepard & Metzler, 1971).
• This use of visual codes in STM was demonstrated in an experiment
by Guojun Zhang and Herbert Simon (1985), who presented Chinese
language symbols to native-speaking Chinese participants.
• The stimuli for this experiment were “radicals” and “characters”
(Figure 5.10a). Radicals are symbols that are part of the Chinese
language and that are not associated with any sound. Characters
consist of a radical plus another symbol, and do have a sound.

• When participants were asked to reproduce a series of radicals
presented one after another, or a series of characters, they were able
to reproduce a string of 2.7 radicals, on the average, and a string of
6.4 characters, on average (Figure 5.10b).
• The participants’ ability to remember the radicals must be due to
visual coding because the radicals have no sound or meaning.
• The participants’ superior memory for the characters is most likely
due to the addition of auditory coding because each character is
associated with a sound. Thus, both visual and auditory coding can be
involved in STM

Semantic Coding
• There is also evidence for semantic coding in STM. This is illustrated
by an experiment by Delos Wickens and coworkers (1976). Table 5.3
shows the experimental design for Wickens’ experiment.
• He used three different groups of participants—a “professions”
group, a “meat” group, and a “fruit” group. Participants in each group
listened to three words (for example, banana, peach, apple for the
fruit group), counted backward for 15 seconds, and then attempted to
recall the three words.
• They did this for a total of four trials, with different words presented
on each trial.

• The basic idea behind this experiment was to fi rst create a decrease
in memory for all three groups by starting Trials 2 and 3 with different
words from the same category as was presented in Trial 1 (to cause
proactive interference, which we discussed on page 147).
• This result is shown in Figure 5.11, which indicates that participants
in all three groups remembered about 87 percent of the words on
Trial 1 (Figure 5.11a), and the performance for all three groups
dropped on Trials 2 and 3 (Figures 5.11b and c), so by Trial 3 they
remembered only about 30 percent of the words

• The crucial trial in the experiment was Trial 4, because on this trial all three groups were
presented with names of fruits.
• From Figure 5.11d we can see that performance remained low for the fruit group because
proactive interference continued for that group. But something different happened for the
other two groups.
• Performance increased for the meat group and the professions group because shifting to
fruits eliminated the proactive interference that had built up on Trials 1–3 for the names of
meats and professions.
• The resulting increase in performance is called release from proactive interference, or
release from PI.
• Figure 5.11d also indicates that the release from PI is not as pronounced for the switch
from meats to fruits because meats and fruits are more similar to each other than are
professions and fruits.

• What does release from PI tell us about coding in STM? The key to
answering this question is to realize that the release from PI that
occurs in the Wickens experiment depends on the words’ categories
(fruits, meats, professions).
• Because placing words into categories involves the meanings of the
words, the results of the Wickens experiment demonstrate the
operation of semantic coding in STM.

Working Memory: The Modern Approach to
Short-Term Memory
• In Chapter 1 we noted that models are used in cognitive psychology to organize data that
has been generated in many experiments and also to pose questions to be answered by
additional experiments. By these criteria, the modal model has been one of the most
useful models in cognitive psychology, because it explains a great deal of data and has
resulted in thousands of experiments.
• But as happens with most models, new results emerge that can’t be easily explained by
the model. This leads either to revision of the model or proposal of an entirely new one.
• In the case of the short-term memory components of the modal model, new results
prompted Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch (1974) to propose that STM be replaced by
working memory—a mechanism that consists of a number of specialized components.
• One of the main results that led to the proposal of working memory was the observation
that under some conditions participants could do two tasks at once. You can see this for
yourself by doing the following demonstration.

Demonstration Reading Text and
Remembering
• Numbers Keep these numbers in your mind (7, 1, 4, 9) as you read the
following passage.
• Baddeley reasoned that if STM had a limited storage capacity of about
the length of a telephone number, ﬁlling up the storage capacity
should make it difﬁcult to do other tasks that depend on STM.
• But he found that participants could hold a short string of numbers in
their memory while carrying out another task, such as reading or
even solving a simple word problem.
• How are you doing with this task? What are the numbers? What is
the essence of what you have just read?

• Because Baddeley’s participants were able to read while
simultaneously remembering numbers, he concluded that the short-
term process must consist of a number of components that can
function separately.
• In the demonstration, the digit span task in which you held numbers
in your memory was handled by one component while
comprehending the paragraph was handled by another component.
• Based on results such as this, Baddeley decided the name of the
short-term.

• process should be changed from short-term memory to working memory.
Baddeley (2000b) defines working memory as follows: Working memory is a
limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information
for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning.
• From this definition we can see that working memory differs from STM in two
ways:
• 1. Short-term memory is a single component, whereas working memory consists
of a number of parts.
• 2. Short-term memory is concerned mainly with holding information for a brief
period of time, whereas working memory is concerned with the manipulation of
information that occurs during complex cognition.

• Thus, working memory is concerned not just with how memory
operates, but with how information is processed in the service of
various forms of cognition, such as problem solving, thinking,
attention, and language (Baddeley, 2000b).
• Working memory accomplishes the manipulation of information
through the action of three components: the phonological loop, the
visuospatial sketch pad, and the central executive (Figure 5.12).

The visuospatial sketch pad holds visual and spatial information. When you form a picture in your
mind or do tasks like solving a puzzle or finding your way around campus, you are using your
visuospatial sketch pad (Figure 5.13b).
• As you can see from the diagram, the phonological loop and the
visuospatial sketch pad are attached to the central executive

The phonological loop
• The phonological loop holds verbal and auditory information. Thus,
when you are trying to remember a telephone number or a person’s
name, or to understand what your cognitive psychology professor is
talking about, you are using your phonological loop (Figure 5.13a).

• The central executive is where the major work of working memory
occurs. The central executive pulls information from long-term
memory and coordinates the activity of the phonological loop and
visuospatial sketch pad by focusing on specific parts of a task and
switching attention from one part to another.
• One of the main jobs of the central executive is to decide how to
divide attention between different tasks.
• For example, imagine you are driving in a strange city, and a friend in
the passenger seat is reading you directions to a restaurant while the
news is being broadcast on the car radio.

• As your phonological loop takes in the verbal directions, your sketch pad is
helping visualize a map of the streets leading to the restaurant (Figure
5.14), and the central executive is coordinating and combining these two
kinds of information.
• In addition, the central executive might be helping you focus your
attention on the directions and ignore the messages from the radio.
• As we describe working memory, keep in mind that it is a hypothesis about
how the mind works that needs to be tested by experiments.
• A number of experiments have been conducted to illustrate how the
phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad work in different situations.

The Central Executive
• The central executive does most of the work of working memory
because it coordinates the operation of the phonological loop and
visuospatial sketch pad. Because of the complexity of this task,
memory researchers are just beginning to understand the operation
of the central executive. One function of the central executive is
controlling the suppression of irrelevant information.
• This can be important when carrying out a task that involves paying
attention to relevant information while ignoring irrelevant
information such as when the driver in Figure 5.14 had to ignore the
car radio so she could listen to the directions.

• In an experiment that considered this suppression function of working memory, Adam
Gazzaley and coworkers (2005) showed participants stimuli like the ones in Figure
5.21.
• In the “face relevant” task, participants were told to remember the faces and ignore the
scenes when the four cue stimuli (two faces and two scenes) were presented, and then,
after a 9-second delay, to indicate whether the face presented during the test period
matched one of the cue faces. In the “passive” task, participants just looked at the
pictures and pressed a button indicating the direction of the arrow during the test.
• During the first part of the “face relevant” task, when participants were supposed to be
ignoring the scene, Gazzaley measured the fMRI response of an area in the temporal
cortex that responded to scenes. During the second part of the experiment, Gazzaley
measured how accurately participants were able to indicate whether the test face
matched the cue faces .

• From the results of the fMRI measurements, Gazzaley was able to divide his
participants into two groups. The “good suppressors” showed less brain
activity when they were supposed to be ignoring the scenes than during the
passive condition.
• The “poor suppressors” showed greater brain activity when they were
supposed to be ignoring the scenes than during the passive condition. Figure
5.22, which compares the two groups’ performance in the test, shows that
the good suppressors correctly identified 89 percent of the faces, whereas
the poor suppressors correctly identified only 67 percent of the faces. This
demonstrates that the ability to suppress irrelevant information, which is a
central executive function, results in better memory for relevant information.

Update on the Working Memory Model:
Addition of the Episodic Buffer
• We have seen that the working memory model can explain a large number of results.
However, just as new data led Baddeley to propose the working memory model to replace
the STM component of the modal model, additional data led Baddeley to propose changes
in the original working memory model. As Baddeley and other researchers did experiments
to test the working memory model, they noted that the model couldn’t explain some results.
• For example, consider the phenomenon of articulatory suppression, in which saying “the,
the, the . . .” decreases the memory span. The explanation for this decrease in memory span
was that saying “the, the, the . . .” eliminated rehearsal in the phonological loop. The
problem with the data, however, is that in most experiments the memory span decreased
only slightly—from about 7 words to 5 words. Baddeley felt that the effect should be larger
if saying “the, the, the . . .” was preventing rehearsal. Baddeley also noted that some
patients with poor STM, so their digit span is only 1, could repeat back 5–6 words if they
formed a sentence (Vallar & Baddeley, 1984; Wilson & Badde ley, 1988)

• Both of these results indicate that performance is better than would be expected based
on the working memory model. To deal with these results, Baddeley (2000a) has added
an additional component to the model, called the episodic buffer (Figure 5.23).
• The episodic buffer is basically a “backup” store that communicates with both LTM and
the components of working memory. An important property of the episodic buffer that
helps explain the better-than-expected performance on some tasks is that it can hold
information longer and has greater capacity than the phonological loop or visuospatial
sketch pad.
• If you think this description of the episodic buffer is a little vague, you’re right. The
episodic buffer is, like the STM and the original working memory model, a model that
needs to be tested and revised based on further experiments (Repovs & Baddeley,
2006). The important message, for our purposes, is that models designed to explain
mental functioning are constantly being refined and modifi ed to explain new results.

Working Memory and the Brain
• Early physiological studies of the short-term component of memory
demonstrated that behaviors that depended on working memory can be
disrupted by damage to specific areas of the brain, especially the prefrontal
cortex (Figure 5.24).
• The prefrontal cortex receives input from the sensory areas, which are involved
in processing incoming visual and auditory information. It also receives signals
from areas involved in carrying out actions and is connected to areas in the
temporal cortex that are important for forming long-term memories (see • Color
Plate 2.3 for location of the temporal lobe). Thus the “wiring diagram” of the
prefrontal cortex is exactly what we would expect for the operation of a memory
system like working memory that has to take incoming information from the
environment and pass some of this information on to longer-term storage.

The Delayed-Response Task in MonkeyS
• Early work on the physiology of working memory used a task called the
delayedresponse task, which required a monkey to hold information in
working memory during a delay period. Figure 5.25 shows the setup for
this task. The monkey sees a food reward in one of two food wells.
• Both wells are then covered, a screen is lowered, and then there is a
delay before the screen is raised again. When the screen is raised, the
monkeys must reach for the correct food well to obtain a reward.
Monkeys can be trained to accomplish this task, but 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

• This result supports the idea that the prefrontal (PF) cortex is important
for holding information for brief periods of time. In fact, it has been
suggested that one reason we can describe the memory behavior of
very young infants (younger than about 8 months of age) as “out of
sight, out of mind” (when an object that the infant can see is then
hidden from view, the infant behaves as if the object no longer exists) is
that their frontal and prefrontal cortex does not become developed
until about 8 months (Goldman-Rakic, 1992).
• The idea that PF cortex is important for working memory is also
supported by experiments that have looked at how single neurons in PF
cortex respond during a brief delay.

Neurons That Hold Information
• One of the requirements for any physiological system for memory is
the ability to record and hold information after the original stimulus is
no longer present. Shintaro Funahashi and coworkers (1989)
conducted an experiment in which they recorded from neurons in a
monkey’s PF cortex while it carried out a delayed-response task. For
the task, the monkey first looked steadily at a fixation point, X, while a
square was flashed at one position on the screen (Figure 5.26a).
• In this example, the square was flashed in the upper left corner (on
the other trials, the square would be flashed at different positions on
the screen). This causes a small response in the neuron.

• After the square went off, there was a delay of a few seconds. The nerve firing
records in Figure 5.26b show that the neuron was fi ring during this delay. This fi
ring is the neural record of the monkey’s working memory for the position of the
square.
• After the delay, the fixation X goes off. This is a signal for the monkey to move
its eyes to where the square had been flashed (Figure 5.26c). The monkey’s ability
to do this provides behavioral evidence that it had, in fact, remembered the
location of the square.
• The key result of this experiment was that Funahashi found neurons that
responded when the square was flashed in a particular location and that the
neurons continued responding during the delay. For example, some neurons
responded only when the square was flashed in the upper right corner and then
during the delay, and other neurons responded only when the square was
presented at other positions on the screen and then during the delay. The fi ring of
these neurons indicates that an object was presented at a particular place, and this
information remains available for as long as these neurons continue fi ring (also
see Funahashi, 2006).

• Research has also found neurons in other areas of the brain that
respond during the delay in a working memory task. Neurons with
these properties have been found in the primary visual cortex, which
is the first area of the brain that receives visual signals (Super et al.,
2001), and the inferotemporal cortex, which is a visual area
responsible for perceiving complex forms (Desimone et al., 1995).
• Thus, although the PF cortex may be the brain area that is most
closely associated with working memory, other areas are also
involved.

Brain Imaging in Humans
• The conclusion that many brain areas are involved in working memory has
been confirmed by research using imaging techniques such as PET and fMRI to
measure brain activity in humans. These studies show that as a person carries
out a working memory task, activity occurs in the prefrontal cortex (Courtney
et al., 1998) and in other areas as well (Fiez, 2001; Olesen et al., 2004).
• Figure 5.27, which summarizes the data from many experiments, shows that in
addition to the prefrontal cortex, other areas in the frontal lobe and also areas
in the parietal lobe and the cerebellum are involved in working memory. As we
continue our study of the physiology of memory in the next chapter, we will
see that a similar situation exists for long-term memory: One or two structures
are especially important for long-term memory tasks, but many structures,
distributed across the brain, are involved as well.

Short-Term and Working Memory. experiment

More Related Content

Similar to Short-Term and Working Memory. experiment (20)

More from ChAli93 (12)

Recently uploaded (20)

Short-Term and Working Memory. experiment