Connectionist Modeling And Short-Term Memory

Cognition Paper 1

The themes of cognition extend deep beyond the surface. There are many topics that can be discussed in cognitive psychology that have helped contribute to many fascinating discoveries and explain how we think about different topics. The relationship of concepts that I will talk about in this paper is the relationship between connectionist modeling and short-term memory. Both are important concepts in cognitive psychology and play important roles. I will first examine the concepts separately and then examine them as they are related to each other.

Connectionist modeling is a computational approach that uses mathematical computations to process data and finish with a result from the input to the output. There are essentially

It is what helps us interpret the information we receive from the environment. A limitation of short-term memory, however, is that we can only take in a certain amount of information at one time. This is known as the bottleneck effect. This means that we can only process information in allusion to a four-lane bridge with only one open tollgate. It is possible to overcome this effect by chunking information. This is also known as recoding as we group items together and then remember the newly formed groups. This is a mechanism that is commonly used and may be the most widely used when receiving new information from the environment. Another important mechanism in short-term memory is the concept of decay. Decay is the idea that forgetting information might be caused by the passage of time before testing a subject. It makes sense that this would happen because if a person does not make the effort to rehearse and learn something that has been presented in short term memory, it will be gone before they know what happened to it. The Brown-Peterson task was a good example of this and showed that if someone became distracted while attending to a task, they would see the process decay. Retroactive and proactive interference are important and help show the connectionist side of short-term memory as well by showing the way information progresses through the connectionist model of cognition. Short-term memory retrieval and scanning show the various ways that we can search the information that was recently presented and select what we want to present to the outside world. It is easier to recall information when we are asked to recall information freely versus freely. This may be because of the way the connectionist model is wired in our brains. Short term memory is related to a model known as the “process model.” This model is basically an analogy to the connectionist model but in a different