PSYC 221 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Unitary Representation, Sensory Memory, Subvocalization

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 221
• Professor: Thomas Spalek

Document Summary

Used to think 4. 5 items, partial report shows it can be an unlimited store. Sensory memory - info quickly fades away (decays). Sperling - differentiating between letters and digits (conclusion that the info is raw, mostly only physical characteristics and features). Attention grabs info from sensory memory and then pattern recognition transfers info in to working/short-term memory. Experiment where people learn sequence of items, then tried to recall them. Magical number 7 plus or minus 2 (stm can hold about 7 items). Chunk - collection of elements that are strongly associated with one another, but weakly associated with elements of other chunks. Anything in working memory which has a unitary representation in long-term memory. Within stm you have 7 slots, so can assign slots to a single digit, letter, word, name, etc. Recoding - packing more info into each chunk, given that the # of chunks is limited. Like the 10011010 example or 18 29 20 13.