orking Memory

orking Memory holds a limited number of sounds and unless rehearsed they decay within seconds. The second component visuospatial sketchpad stores visual and spatial information and like phonological loop the capacity of the sketchpad too is limited. The third component, which Baddeley calls the Central Executive, organises information from phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad as well as from the long-term memory. Like a true executive, it allocates attentional resources to be distributed to various information needed to perform a given cognitive operation and monitors, plans, and controls behaviour.

memory stores. As suggested earlier, all informations which our senses receive are not registered; if that be the case, imagine the kind of pressure that our memory system will have to cope with. Only that information which is attended to enters the STM from sensory registers and in that sense, selective attention, as you have already read in Chapter , is the first control process that decides what will travel from sensory registers to STM. Sense impressions, which do not receive attention, fade away quickly.

The STM then sets into motion another control process of maintenance rehearsal to retain the information for as much time as required. As the name suggests, these kinds of rehearsals simply maintain information through repetition and when such repetitions discontinue the information is lost. Another control process, which operates in STM to expand its capacity, is Chunking . Through chunking it is possible to expand the capacity of STM which is otherwise + .

For example, if you are told to remember a string of digits such as 194719492004 (note that the number exceeds the capacity of STM), you may create the chunks as , , and and remember them as the year when India became independent, the year when the Indian Constitution was adopted, and the year when the tsunami hit the coastal regions of India and South East Asian countries. From the STM, information enters the long- term memory through elaborative rehearsals . As against maintenance rehearsals, which are carried through silent or vocal repetition, this rehearsal attempts to connect the ‘to be retained information’ to the already existing information in long-term memory. For example, the task of remembering the meaning of the word ‘humanity’ will be easier if the meanings of concepts such as ‘compassion’, ‘truth’ and ‘benevolence’ are already in place.

The number of associations you can create around the new information will determine its permanence. In elaborative rehearsals one attempts to analyse the information in terms of various associations it arouses. It involves organisation of the incoming information in as many ways as possible. You can expand the information in some kind of logical framework, link it to similar memories or else can create a mental image.

Figure . , that presents the stage model of memory, also depicts the arrows to show the manner in which information travels from one stage to another. Experiments, which were carried out to test the stage model of memory, have produced mixed results. While some experiments unequivocally show that the STM and LTM are indeed two separate memory stores, other evidences have questioned their distinctiveness.

For example, earlier it was shown that in the STM information is encoded acoustically, while in LTM it is encoded semantically, but later experimental evidences show that information can also be encoded semantically in STM and acoustically in LTM. I. Try to remember the following list of digits (individual digits) Now try to memorise them in the following groups: Finally memorise them in the following manner: What difference do you observe? II.

Read out the lists given below in a row at the speed of one digit per second to your friend and ask her/him to repeat all the digits in the same order: List Digits ( digits) - - - - - ( digits) - - - - - - ( digits) - - - - - - - ( digits) - - - - - - - - - ( digits) - - - - - - - - - - - Remember that your friend will recall the digits as soon as you finish the list. Note how many digits are recalled. The memory score of your friend will be the number of digits correctly recalled by her/him. Discuss your findings with your classmates and teacher.