Part 1

Memory

Persistence of information over time, the capacity to learn from our experiences.

processes that are used to acquire, store, retain & later retrieve information

Classifications

1. Procedural memories
2. Declarative memories
Episodic memories
Semantic memories

Declarative memory

 A memory system specialized for holding & operating on information concerning objective
facts & events.
 Processing of names, dates, places, facts, events & so forth
 Conscious recollection of experiences, events & information used in everyday living.
 A person can verbalize or declare

Non- declarative memory

 Memories for procedural or skills learning: motor memory

Semantic memory

• A memory system specialized for holding & operating on information of a generalized factual
nature.
• Semantic memory allows us to make sense of the world; it provides the knowledge necessary
to organize, interpret & give meaning to ongoing events.
Episodic memory

• A memory system specialized for holding & operating on information of a personal nature &
specifying the time & place that events occurred.
• It tells us when & where events occurred & provides the basis for organizing events into a
meaningful time frame
Procedural Memory System

• A memory system specialized for holding & operating on information pertaining to the
execution of skilled behaviors & functioning at a non-conscious level. [memory of how to do
certain things]
• Riding a bike, tying your  shoes & cooking an  omelette are all examples of  procedural
memories.
Short-Term Sensory Store

• It is responsible for storing vast amounts of sensory information only long enough for some of
it to be abstracted & further processed.
Short-Term Memory

• It is a temporary holding place for information (e.g., a phone number given to you verbally).
• Unless we repeat the item, we know that this phone number will be lost from memory in a
short time.
• Rehearsal is the process by which we keep from losing information from STM.

Long-Term Memory

• It contains very well-learned information that has been collected over a lifetime.
• A vast amount of information can be stored in LTM by processing in STM (requires effort).
• To say that someone has learned something means that information was processed in some
way from STM to LTM.

Part 2

Attention and Performance

 Attention is a  resource  (or pool of slightly different resources) that is  available  & that can
be  used for various purposes.
 The ways in which attentional resources are  allocated  define how  we  use  attention.
 A way to think of attention is related to the  limitations in doing two  things at the same time.

Attention and Understanding Skilled Performance

• In many skills, there is an overwhelming amount of relevant & irrelevant information that
could be processed.
• performer's problem is how to cope with this potential overload.
• Performer must learn what to attend to & when to attend to it

To shift attention between the following:

• Events in the environment
• Monitoring & correcting his or her own actions
• Planning future actions
• Doing many other processes that compete for the limited resources of attentional capacity

Stimulus Identification Stage - Parallel Processing is sometimes possible but not in all cases
• Considering the processes occurring in the stimulus identification stage, some sensory
information can be processed in parallel & without much interference— (without attention)

• e.g., muscle & joint information processed in parallel by motor system without any attention,
stroop effect, “cocktail party” effect

SI Stage - Parallel Processing- Stroop Effect

Time to name the colour of words in list a (no relation between colour and name) much less than list
b (semantic relation)
Parallel processing of names and colours occurs, where the two processes interfere, competing for
different responses
“Cocktail Party Effect”
While focusing on your own private conversation, it is possible to get alerted at hearing your name in
the background
Cocktail party effect refers to the ability of people to focus on a single talker or conversation in a
noisy environment. (If you are talking to a friend at a noisy party, you are able to listen & understand
what they are talking about – & ignore what other people nearby are saying)

SI Stage - Inattention Blindness

 We can miss seemingly obvious features in our environment when we are engaged in
attentive visual search (e.g., Simons & Chabris,1999).
 A number of automobile accidents seem linked to this phenomenon (e.g., “looked-but-failed-
to-see” accidents).
 Likely to occur only under a restricted set of circumstances — when the viewer is engaged in a
specific search task.
 Very few cases without search instructions, or instruction to count passes by team in black
Prescience about an odd event occurring also eliminates effect
 Furley & colleagues (2010) found that highly skilled basketball players were less likely to miss
the “gorilla” than were low-skilled players.

SI Stage - Sustained Attention

 After a period of time, the task of concentrating on a single target of our attention becomes a
progressively more difficult chore.
 Factors known to affect vigilance include motivation, arousal, fatigue & environmental
factors.

RS Stage – Interfering tasks

 Uses Controlled processing as opposed to automatic processing
 E.g. Answering the telephone while pouring a jug of water
 Affect response selection - choices made among several alternative responses—hands to use
to pour the water and pick up the telephone, which ear to listen with, monitoring the water
so as to not spill any and to not pour too much, and so on.

Controlled and Automatic Processing

• Controlled processing is thought to be slow, attention demanding, serially organized, and
volitional as a large part of conscious information processing activities
– Performing two information processing tasks together can completely disrupt both
tasks.
• Automatic processing is fast, not attention demanding, organized in parallel, and
involuntary.

Developing Automaticity
• Automaticity is developed through lots of practice especially under a consistent mapping
condition.
• Although very fast processing is effective when the environment is stable and predictable, it
can lead to terrible errors when the environment changes the action at the last moment.
• It is most effective in closed skills.

Response Selection and Distracted Driving

 • Does distracted driving affect the response selection stage or the movement programming
stage?
– The assumption is that the hand operation of a cell phone interferes with the
operation of a motor vehicle (movement programming limitation).
– However, the source of the problem lies in the capacity demanded by the phone
conversation (e.g., Strayer & Johnston, 2001).

MP stage - Double Stimulation Paradigm

• The subject is required to respond, with separate responses, to each of two stimuli presented
very closely together in time.
• The delays in responding occur because of the bottleneck that arises in programming the first
and second movements together.
• Physiological refractory period
Bottlenecking in MP

Psychological Refractory Period

• The motor system processes the first stimulus of two closely spaced stimuli and generates the
first response.

• If the experimenter presents the second stimulus during the time the system is processing the
first stimulus and its response, the onset of the second response can be delayed considerably.

• How about s2 below 40 ms??

MI Stage bottlenecking example

Fake move in fencing, basketball and badminton

MI Stage - The Probe-Task Technique

  A researcher would have the subject perform one task, called the primary task. At some
strategic point in the performance of the primary task, the researcher would probe the
attention demanded in the main task by presenting a secondary task.
 Use the RT to the probe as a measure of the attention demanded by the primary task.
 Probe made at various points in the aiming action

Focus of Attention During Action

• Internal focus of attention (e.g., monitoring the ongoing movement)
• External focus of attention (e.g., a target, such as an object to be struck or the intended effect
that the action will have on the environment)
• In almost all situations, an external focus results in more skilled performance than an internal
focus of attention
Decision making under stress Inverted-U Principle
• Arousal is the level of excitement produced under stress.

• The inverted-U principle represents a view of the relationship between arousal and
performance.

• Increasing the arousal level generally enhances performance, but only to a point.

Inverted-U principle

Curves representing individual differences

Perceptual Narrowing
• It is the tendency for the perceptual field to shrink under stress with high arousal.
• This is an important mechanism because it allows the person to devote more attention to
those sources of stimuli that are immediately most likely & relevant.
Choking Under Pressure

• Occurs when performers change their normal routine or fail to adapt to a changing situation,
resulting in failed performance