Working Memory

Baddeley, A.D. (1992). Working memory. Science, 255, 556-559.

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) suggested working memory being necessary for learning, for remembering past information and for cognitive tasks.

The author suggests a tripartite system for working memory instead of a single unitary system with two slave systems, phonological loop and visuospatial sketch, respectively, and one central executive.
Central executive coordinates the slave systems.
Slave systems act as a dual system and one is is responsible for learning by means of visuospatial imagery while the other by rote repetition.

The phonogical loop:

-acoustic similarity effect:  similar words are more difficult to recall then dissimilar (not the meaning)

-the irrelevant speech effect: recalling a visual item presented by a irrelevant speech would be poor

-the word-length effect: people can rehearse as many words as they can in 2 seconds

-articulatory suppression: let the subject utter an irrelevant. This removes word-length effect and acoustic similarity effect, and prevents the recall of visual.

Cognitive Information Processing 2

Driscoll, M. (2005). Psychology of Learning for Instruction (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. [pp. 77-91]

Sensory Memory:
Perceptual storage in the information processing storage. It is temporary and limited. The limited capacity suggests more research on the attention.
Selective attention: learner’s ability to select certain information and ignore some other. The factors that how a learner selects some information over another:
1- the meaning of the information for the individual, e.g., your name spoken in a crowd
2- similarity between competing tasks, e.g., two people talking at the same time
3- task complexity , e.g., one can watch a tv comedy, talk to family and eat at the same time, since all three are simple tasks
4- age, hyperactivity, intelligence, learning disabilities
How to use this in instruction materials: use of color, text bold or underlined, etc
Automaticity: When tasks are overlearned or source of information became habitual, the attention requirements became minimal, and automaticity occurs. e.g. driving a car
For automaticity in reading LaBerge and Samuels (1974) developed a theory: decoding words should be automatic and they shouldn’t pay attention on one word’s meaning but on the whole text.
Pattern recognitnion and perception: Information should also be analyzed and familiarized by some patterns.
1- Template matching: mental copies of environmental stimuli are stored in memory. Pattern recognition is by matching incoming information to the templates in memory
2- Prototype model: not an exact copy but more general. Pattern recognition is by comparing  the information with prototype
3- Feature analysis: specific, distinctive features is stored in memory

Working memory:
Second stage of information processing, and is about making sense of the incoming information. There are limits in time and capacity.
George Miller (1956) ‘s concern about number 7 because the WM can hold up to 7 numbes, phone numbers are 7 digit, etc.
Chunking is the important process for increasing working memory’s capacity. This can be done by organizing the information into chunks.
Rehearsel: repeating phone number over and over is an example. By repetition in working memory, information is maintained there for longer.
The items that come in as series can be processed as beginning of the list can be rehearsed and the others can’t. But the end of the list stays in the working memory since they came last. So one can remember the beginning and the end of the list but not the middle.
Encoding: process of relating information to concepts and idea already in memory. People group related information in categories, they relate the information as mnemonics and they also can mediate unrelated words in a story to help the information stay in the long term memory. ALso, imaginary is a very important part of encoding.

Cognitive Information Processing 1

Driscoll, M. (2005). Psychology of Learning for Instruction (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon. [pp. 71-77]
With the birth of computers, concepts came with behaviorism, interpreted such that  stimuli became inputs and behavior became outputs. The process between an input and output is considered as information processing, cognitive information processing (CIP).
Learning occurs when an information from an environment is processed and stored in memory and output as a learning capability.
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), suggested multi stage theory of memory which consists of three steps of information processing system, as information goes through sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory.
Sensory memory is when the information is received by the sensors and processed to be delivered to working memory.
Working memory is the stage when the information is held briefly to be sent to long term memory. Things to be held here are limited and the duration is also limited.
Long term memory is the permanent storage for the information.
While learning, the information attracts the learner’s attention by visual, auditory etc, and gets into the sensory memory. From here, it is transferred to the working memory and is coded  conceptually by attaching a meaning.