PSYC 2700 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Interference Theory
Document Summary
Sternberg: how we retrieve information from short term memory, how long does it take to do one mental comparison. Showed people a memory set: does a probe item match an item from the set. Show the probe digit -> encode it into the system -> compare to items in memory -> give your yes/no response. Comparison process: parallel: the system looks at all the items at the same time and compares them. Serial exhaustive: looking at all the items in the set one by one, even if the match is early on. Serial self terminating: looking at all the items in the set until you find the match. Just under 40 ms between each item: 390 ms y-intercept, the amount of time to do everything but the mental comparison, 37. 9 ms is the mental comparison time. If the memory comparison stage has to deal with a degraded representation, then each comparison is going to be harder.
