Nelson Cowan; Attention and Memory
Book Page   Topic    
Cowan; Attention and Memory 27 Intricate relation between memory and attention.
Cowan; Attention and Memory 27 Visual sensory storage persists for a few hundred milliseconds, whereas auditory sensory storage persists longer, for a matter of seconds. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 27 Research suggests two phases of sensory storage    in the visual and tactile modalities.     In each modality there is persistence of sensation    for several hundred milliseconds    followed by a second phase of storage    for a number of seconds    that is perceived not as an afterimage,    but as a vivid recollection of the stimulus. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 28 Short-term memory    viewed as a linkage of currently active elements    in long-term memory. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 28 Backward masking of recognition -- identification of a brief target stimulus is impaired    by a second, masking stimulus    presented in the same modality, if it is physically similar    and follows within 200 ms. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 29 The orienting response    is a combination of transient physiological and motoric responses    that include cessation of movement,    slowing of the heart,    an increased perceptual sensitivity. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 29 A second phase of sensory memory    can be considered an activation of sensory features in long-term memory,    in a manner similar to the activation of non-sensory features    that is said to represent short-term memory. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 29 It has been suggested that what has been seen as the "selective filter" of attention     is actually intrinsic to the long-term memory activation process.     It is viewed not as active screening out    of unselected stimuli    but as habituation    of the attentional orienting response    for a repeated pattern of stimulation. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 29 The orienting response occurs for novel stimuli and sometimes for a particularly significant stimuli. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 29 With the orienting and habituation process,    the focus of attention would be controlled in two fundamentally different ways.    First, gross physical changes in the input sensory pattern    would elicit an orienting response;   or alternatively, especially significant stimuli might sometimes do this.    Second, any stimulus or any features in long-term memory    could be selected    by a voluntary attentional focus or spotlight. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 30 Nested relationship    of activated memory    as a subset    of long-term memory. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 31 Memory storage,    selective attention,    and their mutual constraints within the human information processing system    (diagram) 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 44 Habituation of orienting and its suggested role as a selective attentional filter. 13
Cowan; Attention and Memory 44 Memory storage    takes place automatically,    but explicit direct recall    of the stored material    is possible only with the presence of attention,    both at the time of encoding    and at the time of recall. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 44 Information that is attended    is supposed to be the same as information that is in one's conscious awareness. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 45 Consciousness is divisible;    patients whose corpus callosums have been severed    demonstrates separate, non-communicating minds in the left and right hemispheres. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 45 Some psychologists who have examined dissociated states    in neurologically normal individuals,    such as hypnosis,    have concluded that consciousness    is divisible into parts    that do not communicate with one another. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 45 In neurologically normal humans,    there are many separate cognitive processes,    some conscious and some unconscious,    but a core interactive process    forms a unified conscious experience. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 56 Two phases of memory storage -- A. brief afterimage lasting up to several hundred milliseconds, and a more processed (i.e. perceptually resolved) memory preserving sensory features for up to 10 or 20 seconds. 11
Cowan; Attention and Memory 56 There is a marked difference between visual and auditory modalities, with visual sensory storage lasting several hundred milliseconds, and auditory sensory stories lasting 10 to 20 seconds. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 56 There is substantial evidence of an auditory modality superiority in list recall. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 56 For recall of items at the end of a list,    performance is superior    when the items are presented    in the auditory modality. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 65 Two phases of sensory stories have been proposed -- a first, a brief phase, is a vivid afterimage of the stimulus. The second phase of sensory memory encodes some physical features of the stimulus, although encoding some features better than others. 9
Cowan; Attention and Memory 68 In the auditory modality,    sensory integration may help    to allow each phoneme of speech    to be perceptually integrated    with prior and subsequent phonemes,    which are known to affect the categorization    of a given phoneme. 3
Cowan; Attention and Memory 68 The categorization of a consonant    depends on the length and quality of surrounding vowels. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 78 Donald Hebb (1949)    suggested that new information is encoded    as a specific pattern of neural firing    or cell assembly,    which persists only temporarily but is transformed into a chemical pattern    and then consolidated    into a pattern of synaptic growth    that permanently saves aspects of the original learning. 10
Cowan; Attention and Memory 78 The new synaptic growth    would strengthen the neural pathways    involved in the original pattern of neural firing,    allowing that pattern to be reconstituted    at a later date,    resulting in "remembering." 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 93 There are two types of special status that an item and its features can have within memory.    First, a subset of items and features in long-term memory    can be in an activated state at any one time.    The items so activated    could act as primes    for the identification of related items. 15
Cowan; Attention and Memory 93 A subset of activated items and features in memory    can be in the focus of attention    at any one time. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 93 The traditional measure of activation is priming (i.e. facilitation of responding to one stimulus    by the prior presentation of a related stimulus);    it is assumed that features of memory    related to both the prime and its target    were activated by the priming stimulus. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 94 It is presumably not possible    for an inactivated element    to be in the focus of attention,    but it is possible for an activated element    to be outside of the focus of attention. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 95 It seems clear that there is an automatic analysis    of at least some of the physical features of the environment,    at least in the case of sounds. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 95 Short-term memory,    as a second phase of sensory memory,    lasting 10-20 seconds. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 97 There is both a capacity limit and a time limit for short-term memory.    Capacity limit in short-term memory, viewed as a limit in the number of items    that can be held in one's attention at the same time.    There is also a time limit in the duration    for which an item can be kept active in memory. 2
Cowan; Attention and Memory 99 Working memory involves information in the activated portions of long-term memory, in the service of the focus of attention as applied by the central executive to the solution of a specific problem. 2
Cowan; Attention and Memory 101 Serial order information is a critical part of recall. 2
Cowan; Attention and Memory 101 If the information that is about to be recalled    is represented as an activated subset of long-term memory,    then how is serial order information preserved? 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 101 Information that is in an activated state    must include new information as well as the activated sets of previously learned information. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 110 On the basis of current evidence, the central executive is at least partially localized in the frontal lobe,    whereas the focus of attention,    though directed partly by frontal lobe structures,    is itself represented in parietal lobe structures. 9
Cowan; Attention and Memory 131 Priming is a process that usually is preserved even in amnesiacs    who do not appear able to make use of contextual cues to recall. 21
Cowan; Attention and Memory 133 It is improbable that short-term memory    is a structure that is separate from    long-term memory. 2
Cowan; Attention and Memory 133 Incoming information    must make contact    with the long-term knowledge store    in order for it to be categorically coded. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 133 Some of the physical coding of input information    occurs automatically,    without the involvement of attention. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 133 Short-term memory would be viewed is a hierarchical set of processes occurring within memory.    A large amount of information can be activated and automatically held,    but with a time limit in the range of seconds.    A small subset of this activated information falls within the current focus of the person's attention. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 137 Most stimuli are 'filtered out' by the attention system before they can reach short-term memory. 4
Cowan; Attention and Memory 137 At the short-term memory stage,    all stimuli presumably are registered in sensory storage    and receive a primitive feature analysis,    but only a limited number can 'pass through the filter' and therefore receive a more complete, physical and a semantic analysis    and be included into focus of a persons attentive processing. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 139 Although there are some seemingly innate feature detectors for some physical features,    feature detectors appear to be tuned by early experience. 2
Cowan; Attention and Memory 139 Currently activated memory elements are represented as a subset of long-term memory,    and the focus of attention is represented as a subset of the currently activated memory elements. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 140 Orienting of attention    deals with the physiological and behavioral mechanisms    that accompany shifts of attention,    whether or not they happen to be under the person's control. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 140 Although many stimulus conditions may cause orienting,    they appear to reduce to two situations --    stimulus novelty,    and stimulus significance for the organism. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 141 Orienting presumably works in combination with effortful, attentive processing to define the overall distribution of attention. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 141 All incoming stimulation    makes contact with long-term memory    and activates some of the relevant features,    although it is not yet certain if this includes semantic features. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 141 Newly activated features    presumably tend to attract attention,    i.e. to cause orienting. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 141 With repetition of a stimulus or simple stimulus pattern,    there is hibituation of this orienting response    so that attention is no longer automatically recruited. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 141 After habituation of the orienting response,    a person is free to select among the activated elements    using voluntary attentional processes,    assuming no strong competition from external distractors. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 141 A compelling speaker may use the orienting response repeatedly    to direct attention    toward himself. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 141 With a monotonous speaker,    on the other hand, one must struggle harder    to maintain attention,    even if the semantic content of the speech is quite interesting. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 142 According to the habituation model,    voluntary selective attention    always requires an effortful selection process. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 144 Habituation of the orienting response    serves as a selection device. 2
Cowan; Attention and Memory 145 Habituation of orienting    to a distracting channel of stimulation    can play a role in the short-term memory task. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 145 The irrelevant speech interference effect    is said to occur because the irrelevant speech is automatically entered into phonological storage. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 145 Irrelevant speech    cannot be ignored    and was found to be more damaging    when it was phonologically similar to    the attended visual items. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 149 Habituation is predicted for novel stimulus features in an unattended channel. 4
Cowan; Attention and Memory 152 The focus of attention    is determined jointly by    automatic attentional recruitment    and voluntary "central executive processes." 3
Cowan; Attention and Memory 168 Following a cerebral accident leading to amnesia,    indirect measures of memory    reveal learning    even though direct memory measures    show more impairment. 16
Cowan; Attention and Memory 169 Procedural memory would be a knowledge of how to do something. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 169 Declarative memory would be the kind of knowledge that allows a person to state or declare that a particular stimulus event was encountered. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 169 Larry Squire's division of all memory into procedural and declarative memory. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 170 In short-term memory research, one question has been whether they are separate short and long-term stores,    or simply separate processes in essentially unitary memory system. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 170 There is one memory system,    but with processes (activation, attention) that define a short-term memory storage set    within that memory system. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 170 Short-term memory    is functionally distinct from,    but embed in,    long-term memory. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 171 There may be fundamentally only one type of memory storage medium,    but with different types of memory storage process. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 171 A distinction between memory processes    that occur automatically,    and those that occur only with a substantial investment of attention,    both at the time of encoding    and at the time of retrieval. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 171 The formation of procedural knowledge often can go on to some extent with little or no commitment of attention, although they may be susceptible to attentional effects. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 171 Conceptually driven processing and the formation of declarative knowledge typically requires considerable attention in order to occur at all. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 171 In amnesia patients,    attention itself is normal,    but there may be a disconnection between these attentive processes and the consolidation of memory that normally occurs as a result of those attentional processes. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 171 Some processes, such his recall and recognition, presumably require effort, where as other processes, such as frequency estimation,    presumably do not. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 173 Divided attention greatly impairs recall. 2
Cowan; Attention and Memory 174 Substantial memory coding can occur with only a moderate amount of attention to the stimuli.    The absence of an effect of attention suggested some memory processes are indeed fairly automatic. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory 176 The suggestion that attention is important for memory    is supported neuroanatomically by the finding that amnesia can result from frontal as well as hippocampal damage. 2
Cowan; Attention and Memory 176 Frontal lobe amnesias reflect involvement of attention and supervisory control and memory storage and/or retrieval. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 176 Frontal lobes are closely connected to hippocampal areas,    and it has been suggested that they work together. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 176 The amnesic can bring information to attention but has a problem in storing the products of that attentive act. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 176 The special connection between frontal and hippocampal areas has been noted in the research work with working memory. 0
Cowan; Attention and Memory 177 In a patient with multiple personality disorder, each of the individual personalities claimed to be unaware of the others. 1
Cowan; Attention and Memory