Chapter 2: Sensory and Short Term Memory

What a fascinating chapter! I won't bore you with another overview...well, just a little one. In the cognitive model, there are three main modal points: sensory reception, short term/working memory, and long term memory. Each modal point has different functions and capacities. Each work together to regulate perception and create meaning: as I mentioned before, the metaphor is that of a computer.

For this post, I want to focus on cognitive psychology's fetish for computers in terms of my fascination with computers. Two things caught my attention: According to studies, our sensory registers can only store a finite number "chunks" (memories) and our working memory processes these chunks before new memories interfere with the older ones. The studies performed, that the book cited, occurred in the 70's. The era these studies doesn't bother me (although, you might have to question any study performed during the height of disco), but how it applies to children today: with kids growing up in a multitasked, hyperlinked, and interactive environment, has their cognitive style been accounted for? Are cognitive functions, like sensory registers, hardwired (I believe the expression in 7 plus or minus 2: for a maximum of 9) or can we adapt to have more?! Maybe instead of 7, it's 8 plus or minus 2 or 3! Would having more sensory registers result in less memory processing capabilities or some other cognitive capacity?! I think that's an interesting line of thought.

The second thing that caught my eye was a blurb about another cognitive theory: instead of a computer as the metaphor, this one uses a neural(computer) network as its metaphor. Metaphorically and ironically, the evolution of computers has gone from stand alone computer to a network of computers to a distributed network of computers that share processing power: maybe cognitive psychology will move in that direction too!