Exam 5: Short-Term Working Memory

Short-term memory's capacity is best estimated as 7 (plus or minus two):

According to Altman & Gray's new decay theory:

Serial position curves reveal the operation of two kinds of memory performance.

In some cognitive tasks, such as the Sternberg task, a ________ can be used to explain the several mental steps involved in performance.

Hasher & Zacks' inhibitory control functions suggest forgetting is a "passive" process.

Gwen has been studying her Spanish vocabulary words for hours and is making more and more errors. She decides to study her anatomy terms instead and finds she does much better. Gwen is experiencing:

In a dual-task procedure, Logie had participants do mental addition or an imaging task as one task and a letter span or visual span task as the other task. The results:

During each trial, all possible elements are scanned one by one before a decision is made. This describes which kind of search?

In remembering the letter sequence {BYGROUPINGITEMSQUICKLY}:

Forgetting in STM was first thought to be caused by ________, but later evidence suggests most forgetting is caused by ________.

It is now generally accepted that forgetting in STM occurs because of decay.

First, subjects are to attend to a to-be-remembered three-letter stimulus, then they are shown a number. They are to count backwards by threes from the number. At the end of the variable-length period of counting, the subjects were asked to report the original three-letter stimulus.

Forgetting can be thought of as:

Which of the following best describes Hasher & Zacks' inhibitory theory of working memory?

"Seven plus or minus two" is associated with:

Describe the experiment conducted by Peterson & Peterson (and also by Brown) in which trigrams of letters were used to investigate the cause of forgetting in short-term memory. Clearly note the methods and results, and what conclusions were originally drawn from this experiment. Explain the alternate conclusion reached by other researchers and how they reached their conclusion.

Short-term memory can be thought of as:

Marcus is participating in a memory experiment. He has been instructed to count backwards between the last presentation of a stimulus and recall of the stimulus. This procedure was probably designed to:

Describe the procedure and results of Cooper & Shepard's mental rotation task. How do their findings provide evidence against the exclusive use of verbal codes as the representation used by the STM system?

The bottleneck in STM can be overcome by ________.