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Attention is what enables people to process information about the world around us, and is constructed of channels. A channel is a single event or stream of information that enters a persons senses. A person can only attend to one channel at a time, filtering out all other sensory information. Someones attention to one channel can be disrupted by interference, which occurs when multiple items or events compete for our attention. Since people have limited resources, their attention suffers when they are distracted. People must attend to something in order to commit it to memory (the retention and use of prior learning), whether it be short-term or long-term.
Within a persons short-term are an inner ear and an inner voice, which make up a phenomenological loop. The phenomenological loop is the part of short-term memory that rehearses verbal information. Short-term memory helps us keep information in mind over a short period of time. Language is a system of communication based on symbols or gestures that can vary across individuals and allow for new forms and meanings. In order to understand and use language properly, one must attend to the rules of the language and commit them to memory. Languages are composed of a particular syntax (the rules of sentence structure that determine how people interpret and understand phrases and sentences in a particular language).
Another important component of language is called a phoneme, which is a unit of sound that is used in spoken language. Each letter of the alphabet represents one or more phonemes, such as a and b, and there are also combination phonemes such as ch and sh.
The results showed that more interference occurred from the spoken words than the written words, and more interference from the written words than the pictures. This makes sense, since spoken words would interfere with the list the subject was hearing to a great extent, as they both require verbal and auditory processing, while there was less interference between the pictures and the list being spoken on the headphones, since they had very little in common and so used very different mental processes for comprehension and memorization. Another experiment on attention is called the Stop Task. In this empirical study, subjects are shown a series of words one at a time. Each word is printed in a different color, and the subjects task is to say the color of the ink as quickly as possible. When the word being read is the name of a color that is different from the color of ink it is printed in, subjects responded significantly more slowly.
Since their performance was disrupted more for color names than any other words, this provides good evidence that reading is automatic, and that the process of reading cannot be prevented or interrupted. One empirical study for short-term memory involved investigating the interference of different types of background noise on how many digits a person could hold in their short-term memory. When the subject was asked to remember a certain amount of digits and there was silence in the room, there was no interference. When the subject was exposed to unrelated syllables being said, there was some interference. Hearing another person recite numbers had the worst effect, as the subject recalled the least amount of digits when subjected to this. These results support the theory that rehearsal in short-term memory is controlled by a phenomenological loop.
Syntax has been tested empirically through experiments such as the following: subjects are asked to hear a recorded word or sentence in which one phoneme has been deleted and replaced with static. After hearing this, the subject is unable to tell that any part of the sentence or word was missing. The subjects report hearing the entire word or sentence, including the missing phoneme. This is an example of how context and prior knowledge can influence a persons perception in language.
In another study, subjects were asked to listen to auditory tapes of sentences that were stopped at random places. When the tape stopped the subject was asked to repeat as much of the sentence as possible from memory. Often times, the subjects were able to repeat word-for-word the phrase that had been playing when the tape stopped, but their memory was much worse for the words that they had heard before this phrase. It seems that as the subjects worked on committing the current phrase to memory, they felt that they needed to know it verbatim until they figured out its meaning. After they had gone on to the next phrase, they no longer needed to remember the last phrase word-for-word, so their verbatim memory for the phrases that they had heard previously was worse. For example, the following sentence can be divided into three phrases -- noun, verb, and object -- that are each underlined: "The terribly spoiled girl should not have discarded her expensive sequined dress. " If this sentence were stopped at "sequined, " the subject listening would definitely recite "her expensive sequined" with no errors.
However, the subject might make a few mistakes in the previous two phrases, and would perhaps saying something like, "The horrible spoiled girl shouldn't have thrown away her expensive sequined. " This shows that short-term memory only lasts for a few seconds, and that the recall of even very recent information from it is often times unreliable.
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Research essay sample on Short Term Memory H 2
