On Wed, 21 Jun 2017 07:26:30 -0700, Christopher Green wrote:
Given that Gus Craik worked at the Baycrest Centre for many
years after retiring from University of Toronto, I'm guessing that
they well know about level of processing. This looks like a newsletter
for those outside of the "biz," so alerting them to phenomena that
are well-known among researchers might be understandable.
A few points:
(1) EurekAlert is a popular media service of the AAAS
and the article it contains is a press (public) release of the
Baycrest Health Sciences center about an article that was
published in the neuroscience journal "Neuroimage".
No reference is provided but after a little searching I believe
that the article that is being referred to is the following:
Meltzer, J. A., Kielar, A., Panamsky, L., Links, K. A.,
Deschamps, T., & Leigh, R. C. (2017). Electrophysiological
signatures of phonological and semantic maintenance in
sentence repetition. NeuroImage, 156, 302-314.
I would reproduce the abstract of the article but I don't think it
actually clarifies things much. The ScienceDirect website for
this article is here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811917304226?np=y&npKey=f825d12bb5243a13a2373176593e4a764e360172951b1fad4a42f29829b1ab00
(2) Quoting the EurekaAlert article:
|Past studies have looked at repetition to create short-term
|memories, but these findings suggest that using the word's
|meaning will help "transfer" memories from the short-term to
|the long-term, says Dr. Meltzer.
' "Transfer" from short-term to long-term'? Are these guys
talking about a Levels of Processing explanation or an
Atkinson & Shiffrin model because "transfer" only occurs
in the latter. Levels of processing theory rejects such mechanisms
because of their reliance on the computer metaphor of mind
which most of them reject in favor of understanding how initial
encoding affects the durability of a memory. Now this is pretty
old levels of processing theory and is known to be inadequate
because (a) the picture superiority effect among other results
demonstrate that sensory memory process can be as good
as semantic processing, (b) distinctiveness of the created
memory trace is important in reducing interference effects
(mere repetition produces proactive interference from one
item to the next while the use of the method of loci - a
nonsemantic processing strategy -- as a mnemonic strategy
can produce highly accurate memory, just ask Cicero ;-).
Meltzer sounds like a undergraduate who got a "C" in his
Memory course. He doesn't even seem to realize that
"short-term memory" as a construct is unnecessary because
one can reframe the question of how do different processing
strategies affect the durability of *long-term* memories.
(3) For a somewhat different view of what might be going on,
see the following article:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3350748/
Here's the abstract:
|Semantic memory includes all acquired knowledge about
|the world and is the basis for nearly all human activity, yet its
|neurobiological foundation is only now becoming clear.
|Recent neuroimaging studies demonstrate two striking results:
|the participation of modality-specific sensory, motor, and
|emotion systems in language comprehension, and the
|existence of large brain regions that participate in comprehension
|tasks but are not modality-specific. These latter regions, which
|include the inferior parietal lobe and much of the temporal lobe,
|lie at convergences of multiple perceptual processing streams.
|These convergences enable increasingly abstract, supramodal
|representations of perceptual experience that support a variety
|of conceptual functions including object recognition, social
|cognition, language, and the remarkable human capacity to
|remember the past and imagine the future.
The key point here is what one already knows facilitates the
retention of new information though it may go through a complex
set of cognitive processes distributed over the brain. The
"Self-Reference Effect" only requires one to have a knowledge
structure of one's self which is activated when one engages
in processing (e.g., "Does this word describe me?"). From
this viewpoint, a STM structure is irrelevant and processing
of meaning is heavily an LTM task (even non-semantic processing
like that used in the self-reference effect or long term memory
for pictures or music).
(4) I think Michael Scoles got it right. The only important thing
about the article is that it is about "Da Brain!" They really
need to get some people who are familiar with contemporary
memory theory.
-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu
..............
On Jun 22, 2017, at 9:49 AM, Mike Palij <m...@nyu.edu> wrote:
Who knew!?! Well, these folks apparently didn't; see:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-06/bcfg-lmm062017.php
Should someone tell them about Level of Processing theory and
the problems it has?
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