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PSYCHOLOGY IN EVERYDAY LIFE
AUTOMATIC PROCESSING sounds. But with experience and prac- a low tone, the bottom row. With these
AND IMPLICIT MEMORIES tice, your reading became automatic. cues, they rarely missed a letter, show-
Imagine now learning to read sentences ing that all nine were briefly available for
LOQ 7-4 What information do we in reverse: recall.
process automatically? This fleeting sensory memory of the
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Your implicit memories include auto- luftroffE flashed letters was an iconic memory. For
matic skills (such as how to ride a bike) At first, this requires effort, but with a few tenths of a second, our eyes retain
and classically conditioned associations. practice it becomes more automatic. We a picture- image memory of a scene. Then
If once attacked by a dog, years later you develop many skills in this way: driving, our visual field clears quickly, and new
may, without recalling the conditioned texting, and speaking a new language. images replace old ones. We also have
association, automatically tense up With practice, these tasks become a fleeting sensory memory of sounds. It’s
when a dog approaches. Such memories automatic. called echoic memory, because the sound
are implicit because we react automati- echoes in our mind for 3 or 4 seconds.
cally and without conscious effort. IN YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE Short- Term Memory Capacity
You also automatically process infor- Does it surprise you to learn how much of your
mation about memory processing is automatic? What might LOQ 7-6 What is our short- term
• space. While studying, if you are life be like if all memory processing were memory capacity?
reading visually, you often encode the effortful? Recall that short- term memory — and
place on the page or screen where working memory, its processing
certain material appears. Later, you Sensory Memory manager — refers to what we retain for
may visualize its location when you LOQ 7-5 How does sensory memory but a few seconds. The related idea of
want to retrieve the information.
work? working memory also includes our active
• time. While you are going about your processing, as our brain makes sense of
day, your brain is working behind the Sensory memory (recall Figure 7.2) is incoming information and links it with
scenes, jotting down the sequence of the first stage in forming explicit mem- stored memories. What are the limits of
your day’s events. Later, if you realize ories. A memory- to- be enters by way of what we can hold in this middle, short-
you’ve left your phone somewhere, the senses, feeding very brief images, term stage?
you can call up that sequence and echoes of sounds, and strong scents Memory researcher George Miller
retrace your steps. into our working memory. But sensory (1956) proposed that we can store about
memory, like a lightning flash, is fleet-
• frequency. Your behind- the- scenes seven bits of information (give or take
mind also keeps track of how often ing. How fleeting? In one experiment, two) in this middle stage. Miller’s Magical
things have happened, thus enabling people viewed three rows of three letters Number Seven is psychology’s contribu-
you to realize, “This is the third time each for only one- twentieth of a second tion to the list of magical sevens — the
I’ve run into her today!” (FIGURE 7.3). Then the nine letters disap- seven wonders of the world, the seven
peared. How many letters could people
Your two- track mind processes infor- recall? Only about half of them. seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven
mation efficiently. As one track auto- Was it because they had too little time colors of the rainbow, the seven- note
matically tucks away routine details, the to see them? No. People actually could see musical scale, the seven days of the
other track focuses on conscious, effort- and recall all the letters, but only briefly week — seven magical sevens. After
ful processing. This division of labor illus- (Sperling, 1960). We know this because the Miller’s 2012 death, his daughter recalled
trates the parallel processing we’ve also researcher sounded a tone immediately his best moment of golf: “He made the
seen in Chapter 2 and Chapter 5. Mental after flashing the nine letters. A high tone one and only hole- in- one of his life at
feats such as thinking, vision, and mem- directed people to report the top row of the age of 77, on the seventh green . . .
ory may seem to be single abilities, but letters; a medium tone, the middle row; with a seven iron. He loved that” (quoted
they are not. Rather, your brain assigns by Vitello, 2012).
different subtasks to separate areas for Other research confirms that we can,
simultaneous processing. K Z R if nothing distracts us, recall about seven
bits of information. But the number varies
EFFORTFUL PROCESSING by task; we tend to remember about six
AND EXPLICIT MEMORIES letters and only about five words (Baddeley
Q B T et al., 1975; Cowan, 2015). How quickly do our
Automatic processing happens effort- short- term memories disappear? To find
lessly. When you see familiar words, out, researchers asked people to remem-
you can’t help but start to register their S G N ber groups of three consonants, such as
meaning. Learning to read was not auto- CHJ (Peterson & Peterson, 1959). To prevent
matic. You at first worked hard to pick rehearsal, researchers distracted partici-
out letters and connect them to certain FIGURE 7.3 Total recall — briefly pants (asking them, for example, to start

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