Unit 2 Information Processing in Learning and Memory
Unit 2 Information Processing in Learning and Memory
Unit 2 Information Processing in Learning and Memory
“The mechanisms of learning and memory are at the essence of how the brain
works.”
— Brown
Structure
2.0 Introduction
2.1 Objectives
2.2 Learning and Memory
2.3 Cognitive Information Processing
2.3.1 Principles of the Information Processing
2.4 Information Processing in Learning and Memory
2.4.1 Cognitive Information Processing Model of Learning
2.4.2 Development of Memory and Information Processing
2.5 Theories of Information Processing
2.5.1 Designing Instruction that Incorporate Best Practices for Information Processing
2.5.2 Bloom’s Taxonomy of Cognitive Domain
2.5.3 Sternberg’s Information Processing Approach
2.6 Let Us Sum Up
2.7 Unit End Questions
2.8 Suggested Readings and References
2.0 INTRODUCTION
One of the most fascinating and mysterious properties of the brain is its capacity
to learn, or its ability to change in response to experience and to retain that
knowledge throughout an organism’s lifetime. The ability to learn and to establish
new memories is fundamental to our very existence; we rely on memory to engage
in effective actions, to understand the words we read, to recognise the objects we
see, to decode the auditory signals representing speech, and even to provide us
with a personal identity and sense of self. Memory plays such an important and
ubiquitous role that it is often taken for granted—the only time most people pay
attention to their memory is when it fails, as too often happens through brain
injury or disease.
2.1 OBJECTIVES
After reading this unit, you will be able to:
• Define the concept of learning and memory;
• Explain types of memory;
• Explain cognitive information processing; and
• Explain the theories of information processing.
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Information Processing
2.2 LEARNING AND MEMORY
Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviours, skills, values, preferences or
understanding, and may involve synthesising and processing different types of
information. Benjamin Bloom (1965) has suggested three domains of learning
1) Cognitive – to recall, calculate, discuss, analyse, problem solve, etc.;
psychomotor – to dance, swim, ski, dive, drive a car, ride a bike, etc.; and
affective – to like something or someone, love, appreciate, fear, hate, worship,
etc. These domains are not mutually exclusive. For example, in learning to
play chess, the person will have to learn the rules of the game (cognitive
domain); but he also has to learn how to set up the chess pieces on the
chessboard and also how to properly hold and move a chess piece
(psychomotor). Furthermore, later in the game the person may even learn to
love the game itself, value its applications in life, and appreciate its history
(affective domain).
2) Memory is usually divided into three storage systems: sensory, short-term,
and long-term.
i) Sensory Memory - Sensory memory is affiliated with the transduction
of energy (change from one form of energy to another). The environment
makes available a variety of sources of information (light, sound, smell,
heat, cold, etc.), but the brain only understands electrical stimulation.
The body has special sensory receptor cells that transduce this external
energy to something the brain can understand. In the process of
transduction, a memory is created. This memory is very short (less
than 1/2 second for vision; about 3 seconds for hearing).
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Miller’s Magic Number - George Miller’s classic 1956 study found Information Processing in
Learning and Memory
that the amount of information which can be remembered on one
exposure is between five and nine items, depending on the information.
Applying a range of +2 or -2, the number 7 became known as Miller’s
Magic Number, the number of items which can be held in Short-Term
Memory at any one time. Miller himself stated that his magic number
was for items with one aspect. His work is based on subjects listening
to a number of auditory tones that varied only in pitch. Each tone was
presented separately, and the subject was asked to identify each tone
relative to the others s/he had already heard, by assigning it a number.
After about five or six tones, subjects began to get confused, and their
capacity for making further tone judgments broke down. He found this
to be true of a number of other tasks. But if more aspects are included,
then we can remember more, depending upon our familiarity and the
complexity of the subject (in Miller’s research, there was only one
aspect — the tone). For example, we can remember way more human
faces as there are a number of aspects, such as hair color, hair style,
shape of face, facial hair, etc. We remember phone numbers by their
aspects of 2 or more groupings, i.e. chunking. We don’t really remember
“seven” numbers. We remember the first group of three and then the
other grouping of four numbers. If it is long distance, then we add an
area code. So we actually remember 10 numbers by breaking it into
groups of three.
Within STM, there are three basic operations:
Iconic memory - The ability to hold visual images.
Acoustic memory - The ability to hold sounds. Acoustic memory can
be held longer than iconic memory.
Working memory - Short-term memory is also called working memory
and relates to what we are thinking about at any given moment in time.
In Freudian terms, this is conscious memory. It is created by our paying
attention to an external stimulus, an internal thought, or both. An active
process to keep it until it is put to use (think of a phone number you’ll
repeat to yourself until you can dial it on the phone). Note that the goal
is not really to move the information from STM to LTM, but merely
put the information to immediate use.
Also, on a more concrete level, the use of chunking has been proven to be a
significant aid for enhancing the STM transfer to LTM. Remember, STM’s
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Information Processing capacity is limited to about seven items, regardless of the complexity of those
items. Chunking allows the brain to automatically group certain items together,
hence the ability to remember and learn better.
The knowledge we store in LTM affects our perceptions of the world, and
influences what information in the environment we attend to. LTM provides the
framework to which we attach new knowledge. It contrasts with short-term and
perceptual memory in that information can be stored for extended periods of
time and the limits of its capacity are not known.
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The first is the assumption of a limited capacity of the mental system. This means Information Processing in
Learning and Memory
that the amount of information that can be processed by the system is constrained
in some very important ways. Bottlenecks, or restrictions in the flow and
processing of information, occur at very specific points (e.g., Broadbent, 1975;
Case, 1978).
Schacter and Tulving (as cited in Driscoll, 2001) state that “a memory system is
defined in terms of its brain mechanisms, the kind of information it processes,
and the principles of its operation”. This suggests that memory is the combined
total of all mental experiences. In this light, memory is a built store that must be
accessed in some way in order for effective recall or retrieval to occur. It is 23
Information Processing premised on the belief that memory is a multi-faceted, if not multi-staged, system
of connections and representations that encompass a lifetime’s accumulation of
perceptions.
Eliasmith (2001) defines memory as the “general ability, or faculty that enables
us to interpret the perceptual world to help organise responses to changes that
take place in the world”. It is implied by this definition that there must be a
tangible structure in which to incorporate new stimuli into memory. The form of
this structure has been the source of much debate, and there seems to be no
absolute agreement on what shape a memory structure actually takes, but there
are many theories on what constitutes both the memory structure and the
knowledge unit.
Winn and Snyder (2001) attribute the idea that memory is organised into structures
to the work of Sir Frederick Charles Bartlett. Bartlett’s work established two
consistent patterns regarding recall. First, memory is inaccurate. His second
finding, though, brought about somewhat of a revolution in traditional thinking
about memory. Bartlett suggested that the inaccuracy of memory is systematic.
A systematic difference makes allowable the scientific study of inaccuracy, and
this suggestion led to an entirely new mode of thought on memory. What
accounted for systematic inaccuracies in memory were the intervening influences
of previous information and the experiences of the person. This demonstrates
that knowledge units are not simply stored and then left alone, but that they are
retained, manipulated, and changed as new knowledge is acquired.
One of the basic types of categorisation is the grouping of specific events, ideas,
people, things, etc. into concepts. Rosch and his colleagues (e.g., Mervis & Rosch,
1981; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976) demonstrated two
fundamental features to the development of concepts: the ease of identifying
similarities of members of the concept and distinguishing differences between
members that are not. For example, the development of the concept of animal
would be more difficult than developing the concept of dog or cat because it
would be easier to identify similarities among dogs or cats and differences between
cats and dogs than it would be to identify similarities among all animals or to
differentiate all animals from all plants.
This has important implications as we design learning activities for children and
youth that can help them develop their organisational and storage capacities.
Storage and Retrieval - How much information can be stored and retrieved
relative to a stimulus or event also changes over time. For example, prior to
about age 7 months an infant will not seek an object that has been shown and
then removed from view. The infant has encoded the object (such as a rattle) and
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Information Processing will reach for it, but seems to lose interest as soon as it is no longer in view. At
about 7 months attains what is called “object permanence” and will begin to
seek the object if it is removed from view.
A series of studies by Bauer, Mandler and associates (as cited in Flavell et al.,
2002) demonstrates a child’s increasing ability to perform simple multiple-act
sequences. By age 13 months infants can reproduce three-act sequences; by age
24 months this has increased to five-act sequences; and by age 30 months to
eight separate actions. As children gain language skills, their ability to store and
recall more complex events increases. This is shown first in autobiographical
accounts of daily activities and then to events they may have witnessed or heard
about.
Flavell et al. (2002) made four observations about strategy development:
Strategy development is not linear. When developing any particular strategy,
development will often stall or even regress before it becomes systematically
and correctly used.
A strategy will continue to develop after it is first demonstrated in its mature
form. This continued development may take months or even years.
Children show considerable variability in their use of strategies. Children often
go back and forth in their use of strategies, changing strategies even after they
have been found to work well.
Children differ in their abilities to integrate different strategies into a coherent
pattern for successful learning. Children must be given ample opportunity to
create successful learning programs that work for them.
Research has confirmed that the first four levels are indeed a hierarchy, while
there seems to be a problem with the ordering of the two highest levels (Hummel
& Huitt, 1994). Anderson and Krathwohl (2000) propose that the ordering is
reversed, with evaluation being less difficult than synthesis, while Huitt (2000)
proposes that they are both at the same level of difficulty though they incorporate
different types of processing. There seems to be consensus that both synthesis
and evaluation are based on analysis or the ability to compare and contrast parts
of a whole and understand the relationship among parts.
These theories all work under the assumption that new information can most
effectively be learned if the material can be matched to memory structures already
in place (Winn and Snyder, 2001). Most theories hold that the mind contains
some type of framework into which new information is placed. This structure is
multi-leveled and has varying degrees of specificity. New information can be
matched with, compared to, contrasted to, joined with, or modified to fit with
existing structures. This in-place structural system allows for differing levels of
complexity of information processing. The formation of and continual building
of these structures, then, is critical in order for learners to process information in
various ways and at higher levels.
Memory is usually divided into three storage systems: sensory, short-term, and
long-term.
We then discussed Miller’s Magic number. We pointed out how within STM,
there are 3 basic operations, viz., iconic memory, acoustic memory and working
memory. Long Term Memory has been then presented which includes schemas
etc. Then the principles of information processing was taken up and and
highlighted the limited capacity of the mental system and secondlhy the control
mechanism is required to oversee the encoding, transformation, processing storage
etc.
References
http://www.well.com/user/smalin/miller.html]
Hunt, R. R., & Ellis, H.C. (2006). Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology. New
Delhi: Tata McGraw Hill.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits
on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
[Available online from Classics in the History of Psychology:
Stillings, N, Feinstein, M., Garfield, J., Rissland, E., Rosenbaum, D., Weisler,
S., & Baker-Ward, L. (1987). Cognitive Science: An Introduction. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
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