Chapter 4 (working memory)

Chapter 4 summery and Reflection
1.Summery
George Miller’s “Magical Number seven”; people can remember between 5 and 9 items. The Miller’s article suggested that the items can be a letter or a number.
In the Brown/Peterson and Peterson technique, people forget materials that were held in the memory less than a minute. In another technique, Recency effect, we recall items that appear at the end of a list. Serial position effect is the relationship between the position of a word and the probability to recall the word. So the way to measure short-term memory is to tally the number of words/items recalled at the end of a list.
Baddeley proposed Working-memory approach that is a working memory is a temporary location where we hold and manage information when cognitive tasks are executed.
Phonological Loop: the sound related section of working memory for a short period of time. It then explains different aspects of Phonological loop based on research studies. Acoustic confusion is when we might confuse similar sounding stimuli. Visuospatial Sketchpad is another model of Baddeley’s working memory that store visual information that has been encoded from verbal stimuli.
In Brandimonte study, acoustic coding when using sketchpad interfered with the amount of items we store in our working memory. Participants in her study were able to remember more when visual coding was used. Central Executive working memory model incorporates phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad and episodic buffer. In short Central executive is a model where the working memory decides what is relevant to the received information, prioritize tasks and pay attention to information with the highest importance. Episodic Buffer is a temporary space that includes the visuospatial sketchpad, phonological loop and long-term memory to interpret and explain new events.
2. How does it fit into what I have learned already in this course?
I think it adds to the information we learned in the last 2 chapters. At first it was how we perceive objects we see, sounds we hear, on the next chapter after that, we looked at how cognitive tasks attention and consciousness in relation to cognitive processes. This chapter extends to another part of cognitive process with bounded ability of our cognitive process in limited memory called Working memory.
3. What am I still not clear on?
I think that Central Executive and Episodic Buffer should be under the same working memory model. Central Executive uses long-term memory to make decisions from my understanding; both share similar models except the long-term memory which I think both utilize but in the book it does not include long-term memory in Central executive.
4. How would apply this to my own teaching/work?
It is difficult at this point to apply the concepts here at work. I think the studies and concepts the author gives are basic, it gives an understanding of working/short-term memory and how it works, it would give us an idea why our students/trainees have hard time remembering materials we talked about 20min ago. In Semantic Similarity of the items in working memory research: Proactive interference (PI) caught my attention to apply when a scenario like the following occurs. It gives an idea on why students do not accept new information when there is conflicting information in their long-term memory.
When I was showing how to use flash drive at a community college to adult learners and freshman students, most of the class had a prior knowledge of accessing the files in a flash drive. The knowledge is first open the application then click on file and select the drive. My lesson suggested they open it from My computer and double click on G or F drive based on the number of drives each machine have. I explained to them that if we want a quick access without opening the application we can get to it from My computer as well as check to see if our computer is reading the Drive correctly.


5. What proof does the author offer that makes me believe this is valid? Do I believe it? Why?
On some of the ideas the author offer I agree and on some I don’t. For example I agree on the “acoustically similar” study; on Wickelgren study the author offer with phonological loop that people cannot recall the last letter or word they would pick a similar sounding letter or word to substitute them. As I mentioned above, I don’t quite agree with separating the idea of Central Executive model and Episodic Buffer. In addition to that when the author did not quite explain the research methods used except on some of them, age group of the participants, sampling method and so on; it just says classic research and the name of the researcher. An example for a “good” description of research method and description is on Maria Brandimonte’s study in Visual coding in working memory.

6. Why is this important? What does it help improve or explain or predict?
It explains why we don’t remember if we only had a certain information for less than a minute. It explain that working memory is like a scratch paper we work on it for a short while and it goes away if we don’t repeat the task after the first time.
7. When would I actually use this – under what kind of circumstances and for what kind of students?
I think working memory is used every where around us during training/teaching any subject. When preparing lessons/workshops I would design the workshop in such a way that students have less confusion when to use visual coding and acoustic coding.
8. Are there other ways to accomplish the same thing that are faster, cheaper, and/or better?
It would be good to include recent studies or specific targets such as elementary education, High school and college level so we would have a better idea of how memory or other cognitive processes work with different age groups.