On Thu, 25 Aug 2016 07:47:39 -0700, Michael Ofsowitz wrote:
Hey Mike...
Hey Mike....
as original poster you'll notice I never mentioned the number 7.
Actually, I did notice this and wondered why weren't being specific.
Not to act as a copy editor but I would have requested that you
re-phrase your request to ask something like "how do people
teach the storage limitations of short-term/immediate memory,
such as the "magic number 7" versus "magic number 4".
It could just be me but I think most older teachers will think of
the "magic number 7" because (a) they are familiar with it,
and (b) Cowan's work really hasn't been covered all that
well in the undergrad textbooks.
I'm aware of some of Cowan's work, so I took your post as
being tangential.
Oh, in that case "sorry for being tangential".
Yes, 4, 7, or whatever packs into 2sec. But is it relevant?
What about the less-easily quantifiable? (Visual experience,
or implicit memories like "who am I? Where am I? What am
I doing?") What do people with a strong background in cog
psych teach when they cover ST/working memory in intro or
intro-cog courses?
It will depend upon the instructor's goals and their attitudes
towards *what* they are teaching, that is, a bunch of currently
accepted "facts" and interpretations or a historical context
in which shows how research and theories about memory
developed, say, from Ebbinghaus to Underwood's "single
memory system" where Proactive Inhibition (PI) was the
most significant mechanism of forgetting to Peterson &
Peterson's (using what we now call the Brown-Peterson
task) demonstration of decay as a potential forgetting
mechanism, providing an empirical basis for distinguishing
short-term memory (STM) from long-term memory (LTM)
to Keppel & Underwood response that PI was also operating
in STM to Wicken's work on the "Release from PI task" that
demonstrated semantic processing in STM to the develop
of the Atkinson-Shiffrin "structural model of memory"
to Craik-Lockhart-Tulving "processing model of memory"
to Baddeley's Working Memory (WM; which did not have much
impact until the 1980s; the previously mentioned research
being pre-1980) to approaches that essentially ignore the
role of STM/WM, such as the work of Endel Tulving who
focused primarily on LTM, such as the episodic-semantic
distinction, and so on.
Of course, I've left out some other significant research that has
traditionally been covered such as George Sperling work
on Very Short-term visual memory (what Ulric Neisser would
call "Iconic memory"; do people still cover this, if not, how do
they explain what sensory registers are in the Atkinson-Shiffrin
model or have they stopped teaching that too?), Saul Sternberg's
memory scanning research on the amount of time it takes to
examine an item in STM (and whether it is really serial processing
or a parallel process horse race -- a still undecided issue), Roger
Shepard's mental rotation studies (does this take place in STM,
like Badeley's visual-spatial sketchpad, or, if you don't believe
that analog representations like visual images have cognitive
reality and everything is in an abstract cognitive code, like Jerry
Fodor's "language of thought" which is consistent with a
Chomskyan view of cognition), STM as simply the activation
of LTM at a particular time for a particular task/situation
(Wayne Wicklegren), Anders Ericsson's long-term working
memory that plays an important role in the process of
deliberate practice, and so on. There also is the more
general issue of whether the STM-LTM distinction is
theoretically valid, the serial position effect notwithstanding.
I guess it's all up to the instructor: does the instructor limit
the information that is presented in class to just a bunch
of de-contextualied facts and explanations or does the
instructor try to provide enough information to allow the
student to realize how tentative our knowledge is, info
that will allow them to read the older research literature
and understand to some degree why researchers asserted
the interpretations they provide, and possibly point the
way to which questions need additional examination in
future research?
But what do I know, right?
--> Mike O.
->Mike P.
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
P.S. Again, sorry for being tangential.
On 8/23/16 1:00 AM, Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) digest
wrote:
Many people in the field follow the research of Nelson Cowan
who has argued that the "Magical Number" is actually 4
(range 3-5) and not seven. This is hardly news as he laid
out his argument for this position in 2001....
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