Английский язык учебник

DEVELOPING VOCABULARY

Exercise 1. Translate the following word combina tions into Russian paying attention to your active vocabulary.

Seven chunks of information; attitude cluster, cor relation cluster; to clarify the statement, to clarify fur ther the attentional mechanisms, sudden clarification; a distracting influence; elaborative rehearsal; encoding of spatial location; the subjects’ pupils enlarged; episodic memory; free recall test; goal directed control; visual sense modality, sensory modalities; obsessive compulsive disorder; frequency of occurrence, unexpected occur rence; recognition memory; to retain tension; the process of retrieving information; storing information; condi tioned suppression; time dependent decay; tip of the tongue phenomenon.

Exercise 2. Translate the following sentences into Russian paying attention to your active vocabulary.

1.Ability to recall is affected by encoding, retention and retrieving processes. More meaningful processing at encoding seems to lead to longer, more reliable memo ries.

2.A range of disorders, including schizophrenia, ob sessive compulsive disorder and attention deficit, in volve failures in the control of attention.

3.Attempts to suppress unpleasant thoughts and im ages often backfire.

4.Short term memory (STM) has a limited capacity.

STM acts to provide continuity from moment to moment in our activities. It also acts as the mecha nism for transferring data to long term memory (LTM).

5.Chunking involves grouping a number of items into a unit that is then processed as a whole.

6.Retrieval of information can be fast. It is affected by cues present at the time of retrieval.

7.Sensory memory makes your visual world seem smooth and continuous despite frequent blinks of your eyes. Sensory memory maintains the visual im ages so that you are not aware of these interruptions.

8.Do not distract me with your silly questions. He loves her to distraction.

9.You can perform a skill, even if you have not been engaged in it for many months or years, by recalling the knowledge from procedural memory.

10.Repeating and making associations is called elabo rative rehearsal and will likely result in encoding the information into long term memory.

11.When you take an exam, you recall information about mental representations of objects, facts, and rela tionships from semantic memory.

12.Storage is the second step in memory, the process of retaining information in memory system for some time.

READING

MEMORY

Memory is the process of encoding, storing, and re trieving information that is learned. The process of memory overlaps the processes of perception (perceiv ing stimuli that are learned), learning (acquiring asso ciations among stimuli), and consciousness (being aware of certain information at any point in time).

The first step in memory is encoding, the process of placing information into the memory system. Variables

that influence encoding include attention, motivation, and meaningfulness of information. Once the informa tion has been encoded, it needs to be stored. Storage is the second step in memory, the process of retaining in formation in the memory system for some time. Cur rently it is generally believed that three separate memory stores exist: sensory, short term, and long term memory.

The third step is retrieval, the process of pulling infor mation out of the memory system. Methods used to test retrieval include recognition, recall, and savings.

Currently, memory theories are dominated by the information processing theory of memory, which relies on computer models to describe the flow of information through the memory system. One of the most popular theories of memory is the separate storage model. Sen sory memory refers to the memory store that sensory information first enters in the memory system. The in formation in the sensory memory is a fairly accurate rep resentation of the environmental stimulus. Sensory memory has a large capacity, but maintains information for a very brief time, less than one second. Most studies have focused on iconic (visual) memory and echoic (au ditory) memory. Information is placed into short term memory when an individual attends to a stimulus. This is where we hold the information we are aware of at any one point in time. The capacity of short term memory is about seven chunks (pieces) of information. The dura tion is less than 30 seconds before the information is lost, unless we use maintenance rehearsal and repeat the in formation over and over.

Through elaborative rehearsal we think about the meaning of the information and try to form associations with already learned memories. Elaborative rehearsal moves information into long term memory. The capac ity of long term memory appears unlimited. One can dis tinguish three kinds of long term memory. Procedural memory is at the base of this division. This type of memory permits retention of stimulus response connec

tions, response chains, and general adaptive responses to environmental events. Semantic memory refers to in ternal representations of environmental events that are not perceptually present. In effect, this type of memory allows for mental representations of events. Episodic memory refers to the development and retention of events experienced personally and includes temporal and spa tial information related to those events.

One influence of the analogy between human memory and that of an electronic computer has been an increas ing emphasis on the retrieval stage as important for a complete understanding of memory. The fact that infor mation cannot always be retrieved is illustrated by the familiar tip of the tongue phenomenon. The success of memory retrieval depends critically on the specificity of cues that are available on the retention test. Consider two common experimental situations, in both of which a list of words is first presented for memorization. In rec ognition memory, subjects are then presented with test words and asked to indicate which ones were in the list. In free recall, subjects are simply asked to remember as many words from the list as they can. Recognition per formance is typically much better than free recall per formance, because the words themselves are available as retrieval cues. But free recall subjects apparently con struct their own retrieval cues, as is illustrated by the phenomenon called clustering. Semantically related words tend to be recalled together (in clusters), even when they were not presented together in the list.

A central problem in the study of memory is the analysis of the causes of forgetting. Early psychologists assumed that forgetting was due to time dependent de cay. Although some modern investigators attribute loss of short term memory to decay – a matter of consider able debate – it is now generally accepted that the most important cause of forgetting in long term memory is interference from other, similar material. The effects of information stored prior to the encoding of the to be

remembered material are called proactive interference; those caused by information stored afterward are called retroactive interference. Experimental findings suggest that proactive interference takes place primarily at the retrieval stage and is partly due to confusion regarding which memory traces are more recent. Retroactive in terference, by contrast, appears to involve both storage and retrieval. The effect on storage seems akin to par tial destruction of the memory trace during the learn ing of the interfering material. The degree of effort ex pended during encoding may also interfere with concur rent cognitive processing. Effortful performances (im agery, rehearsal, organization, mnemonic techniques) often interfere with concurrent cognitive processing, whereas automatic performances do not. Examples of automatic performances include encoding of spatial lo cation, time, frequency of occurrence, and word mean ing. Mnemonic devices are tools that are applied selec tively to information that one especially wants to be able to recall. The various methods stress elaboration of the to be remembered information and transformations of the form in which it is encoded, with the goal of aiding later retrieval of the information from memory. Most mnemonic devices rely on one or more of the following:

(1) relationships with previously learned material, (2) rhymes, and (3) visual imagery.

The Encyclopedia Dictionary of Psychology,

Gilford, US, 1991, pp. 173–175

COMPREHENSION CHECK

Exercise 1. Say whether these statements are true (T) or false (F), and if they are false, say why.

T F 1. The first stage in memory is storage, the process of retaining information in the memory system for some time.

member as many words from the list as they can.

Exercise 2. Read the text again, divide it into logical parts, and give names to each of them.

Exercise 3. Make up questions to the following an swers.

1.

The process of memory overlaps the processes of perception and consciousness.

2.

Storage is the second step in memory.

3.

Information is placed into short term memory when an individual attends to a stimulus.

4.

We think about the meaning of information.

5.

Maintenance rehearsal and elaborative rehearsal.

6.

Elaborative rehearsal moves information into long term memory.

7.

Procedural memory permits retention of stimu lus response connections, response chains, and general adaptive responses to environmental events.

8.

Effortful performances often interfere with con current cognitive processing.

LANGUAGE FOCUS

Exercise 1. Match the words in the left hand column with the definitions in the right hand co lumn.

Exercise 2.

A.Guess the meaning and give the appropri ate translation of the following English ter minological word combinations.

memory: collective ~, constructive ~, image ~, musical ~, unconscious ~, inherited ~;

attention: distracted ~, narrow ~, primary ~, visual ~, selective ~, undistracted ~;

modality: auditory sense ~, cold sense ~, odor sense ~, pain sense ~, tactual sense ~, visual sense ~;

disorder: functional ~, nervous system ~, perceptual ~, per sonality ~, speech ~, vision ~, voice ~;

interference: associative ~, habit ~, reproductive ~, so cial ~;

suppression: conditioned ~, monocular ~; decay: moral ~, temporal ~, ~ of sensation;

phenomenon: acoustic ~, arousal ~, mental ~, psychophysic ~.

B.Convey the meaning of some terms above in your own words.

Exercise 3. Fill in the columns with the proper deriv atives of the following words whenever possible.

Exercise 4. Put the words from the following box into the gaps making necessary changes.

Procedural memory, short term memory, rehearsal, sensory memory, to recall, retroactive interference, attention, retention, chunking, memory

1.We cannot process the meaning of something with out _____.

2.Ability _____ is affected by encoding, retention and retrieval processes.

3.The interval between encoding and retrieval is

_____.

4.There are two kinds of _____ and only one kind is likely to encode information into long term memory.

5._____ has a limited capacity.

6.By _____ individual letters into seven meaningful words, you can easily keep this information active.

7.Short term memory refers to the process of attend ing to information in _____.

8.Power of keeping facts in conscious mind is called

_____.

9.You can perform a skill, even if you have not engaged in it for many months or years, by recalling the knowledge from _____.

10.When the new information interferes with the pre viously learned one, it is called _____.

Exercise 5. Below are some statements about three basic kinds of memory. Indicate in each case which type is being described.