Theme 2: Working Memory
Radvansky Chapter 4: In Human Memory
STM Capacity
To fully utilise STM we use chunking. STM capacity can be increased by:
- Expertise (increases capacity for the specific field of expertise)
- Synaesthesia (when synaesthetic experience is congruent with lived one)
STM is a bottleneck not only because of its small capacity; it also retains information,
without active attention, for short periods of time.
Forgetting is attributed to decay or interference. Studies showed that interference is the
primary cause of forgetting in STM.
Theories of short-term memory retrieval:
1. Parallel search - all items in short-term memory are available more or less at
once, and accessed in parallel
→ response times should not vary with set size and there should be no
difference between the “yes” and “no” responses
Radvansky Chapter 4: In Human Memory
STM Capacity
To fully utilise STM we use chunking. STM capacity can be increased by:
- Expertise (increases capacity for the specific field of expertise)
- Synaesthesia (when synaesthetic experience is congruent with lived one)
STM is a bottleneck not only because of its small capacity; it also retains information,
without active attention, for short periods of time.
Forgetting is attributed to decay or interference. Studies showed that interference is the
primary cause of forgetting in STM.
Theories of short-term memory retrieval:
1. Parallel search - all items in short-term memory are available more or less at
once, and accessed in parallel
→ response times should not vary with set size and there should be no
difference between the “yes” and “no” responses
