Ms. de Bari November 17, 2009

Ms. de BariNovember 17, 2009

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuvF113uty4

Active, readily available information you retain temporarily (no longer than one minute)

Holds the information you are thinking about or are aware of at any given moment

Also known as:Short term storageTemporary memoryPrimary memoryWorking memory

Short-term memory is the older term and it is simpler

Working memory is much newer and suggests more mental effort

Short-term memory is thought to be only one of several components of working memory

Short-term memory has two primary tasks:

To store new information briefly

To work on that (and other) information

Short-term memory is thought to only hold 7 +/- 2 pieces of information

Get out a scrap piece of paper and something to write withI’m going to show you a list of 15 words, one word at a timeWhen all the words are shown, write down all the words you can rememberGOOD LUCK!!

sunshine

mirror

wheel

orange

tea

calm

fountain

library

mostly

pyramid

jeans

airplane

tired

dog

pencil

soccer

Finished!

How many did you remember?

Statistics for this same test:The average 20-year-old remembers 7 of the 15 wordsThe average 80-year-old remembers 4 of them

How many of you remembered…Sunshine?Airplane?Soccer?

Serial Position EffectPeople recall more words either at the beginning or the end of a list than they do words in the middle

Two types:Primacy Effect

People remember early items better

Recency EffectPeople remember the last one or two words too

Let’s try another example…• I’m going to give you a list of 12 letters• After giving you a few seconds to read through

them, see if you can repeat them back to me• Hope you still have your scrap piece of paper

and pencils out!

TJYFAVMCFKIB

Finished!

How many did you remember?

• In all likelihood, you probably didn’t do as well with that one

• Now try this set of 12 letters instead…

TV FBI JFK YMCA

Finished!

Did you do better this time?

• Almost certainly, you did much better, even though these were the same 12 letters as before

• What made this time around so much easier?

• The second time, the letters were grouped into four separate “words”

• This way of grouping and organizing information so that it fits into meaningful units is called chunking

• The 12 letters have been chunked into 4 meaningful elements that can readily handled by short-term memory

• Some information can “displace” other information, making the former hard to retrieve

• Example:– Think of a really cluttered desk– At the beginning of the semester, the desk is clean,

but as the semester goes on, papers build up– Papers placed on the desk earlier in the semester

get buried since the later papers “displace” them– All the papers are still there, but the early ones get

harder and harder to find

• Happens when something you have already done or got past interferes with something you are doing now

• Put another way, it occurs when current information is lost because it is mixed up with previously learned, similar information

• Example:– Learning about WWI and then learning about WWII– Proactive Interference occurs when you have

trouble remembering events of WWII

• Newer information interferes backward in time with your recollection of older items

• Example:– Imagine you learn Spanish– After you learn Spanish, you learn Italian– If the new language interferes with the language

you knew before, that is Retroactive Interference at work!

• Retrograde Amnesia

– Loss of memory for the events occurring before the brain injury

• Anterograde Amnesia

– Loss of memory for the events occurring after the brain injury

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD-uQreIwEk

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErjP5xMTc8I

• What type of amnesia does Jason Bourne suffer from?

• What type of amnesia does Drew Barrymore’s character suffer from?

• Jason Bourne suffers from…

– Retrograde Amnesia

• Drew Barrymore’s character suffers from…

– Anterograde Amnesia

• Why?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrI8ibsiiZ4