Chapter 6
Lecture 4
INFORMATION PROCESSING AND
COGNITIVE HTEORY OF LEARNING
(Chapter 6)
Main Contents
Information-Processing Models
 Understanding Our Memory
 Making Information Meaningful （有意义学
习）
 Helping Students to Learn Well

The information-processing model based
on the information-processing theory (The
main model we are going to discuss)
 Other information-processing models

1.Levels-of-processing theory(加工水平理论)
2.Dual code theory(双重编码理论)
3.Parallel distributed processing model
(并行分布加工模型)
4.Connectionist models（联结主义模型）
Understanding Our Memory
Forgetting and remembering
 How to committing information to
memory―PRACTICE(练习)
 How can memory strategies be taught？

Verbal learning
 Paired-associate learning
 Serial learning
 Free-recall learning
Factors of making it easier or
harder to remember information
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INTERFERENCE(干扰) （Individual difference in
resistance to interference）
RETROACTIVE INHIBITION (倒摄抑制)
PROACTIVE INHIBITION(前摄抑制)
FACILITATION(促进) （Proactive facilitation and
retroactive facilitation 前摄促进 和倒摄促进）
PRIMACY AND RECENCY EFFECTS (首因效应和近因
效应)
AUTOMATICITY(自动化)

MASSED AND DISTRIBUTED
PRACTICE(集中练习和分散练习)

ENACTMENT(亲历)
How can memory strategies be
taught？
Verbal learning

Paired-associate learning

Serial learning

Free-recall learning
Making Information Meaningful
(Ausubel’s approaches of learning)
Rote learning and meaningful learning（机
械学习和意义学习）
 Schema theory （图式理论）
 The importance of background knowledge
(advanced knowledge 先行组织者)

Helping Students to Learn Well

Metacogntive skills and students learning

Cognitive teaching strategies and students
learning
Part 1
Information-Processing Models
Video Show：
Working in Pair：
Question？？？
Question
What have you got from the video？
（Working in Pairs to write down your
answers）
What is an information processing
theory?
Information-processing theory is a
cognitive theory of learning that
describes the processing, storage, and
retrieval of knowledge in the mind.
Figure 6.1
Long-term
memory
Rehearsal
External
stimulus
Sensory register
Initial
processing
coding
Retrieval
Forgotten
Working
Forgotten
short-term
Forgotten
or
Elements of an informationprocessing model
SENSORY REGISTER（or Sensory
Memory）（感觉登记）
 SHORT-TERM OR WORKING MEMORY
 LONG-TERM MEMORY

sensory register（Sensory memory）

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The first component of the memory system that
incoming information meets is the sensory
register. Sensory registers receive large
amounts of information from each of our senses
(sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) and hold it for
a very short time, no more than a couple of
seconds. If nothing happens to information held
in a sensory register, it is rapidly lost.
An experiment
An experiment
Ready
one ， two，three
Go
B
Y
O
K
V
S
P
M
A
J
F
G
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Capacity, Duration, and Contents of Sensory Memory:
Capacity：
The capacity of sensory memory is very large, more information that
we can possibly handle at once. But this vast amount of sensory
information is fragile in duration.
（Think about the contents of the video you watched just now ）
Duration:
The duration of sensory register lasts between one and three seconds.
Contents of sensory memory:
The content of sensory memory resembles(类似) the sensations from
the original stimulus.
It can be Visual Sensations, Auditory Sensations and some other
sensations.
Visual Sensations are coded briefly by the sensory register as images,
almost like photographs;
Auditory Sensations are coded as sound patterns, similar to
echoes(回声)
The existence of sensory registers
has two important educational
implications.
First, people must pay attention to
information if they are to retain it.
 Second, it takes time to bring all the
information seen in a moment into
consciousness.

PERCEPTION (感知)

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The process of detecting (检测)a stimulus and
assigning meaning to it is called perception. It is
a person’s interpretation of stimuli.
Perception of stimuli is not as same as reception
of stimuli; rather, it involves mental interpretation
and is influenced by our mental state, past
experience, knowledge, motivations, and many
other factors.
For example，

consider this mark
You would say…..
“I3”
For example
AITENIION
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Attention is a limited resource
We can only pay one or several cognitively
demanding tasks at time. So we usually select
from all the possible information by pay attention
to certain stimuli and ignoring others.
Educational Implications
The first step in learning is paying attention.
Students cannot process something that they do
not recognize or perceive.
Brainstorming:
How does a teacher gains students attention
in the classroom?
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“That is important”
increasing the emotional content of material.
Unusual, inconsistent, or surprising stimuli also
attract attention.
Finally, informing students that what follows is
important to them will catch their attention.
Work after the class
Interview 10 students to collect the
Methods of obtaining students attention
in class

SHORT-TERM OR WORKING MEMORY
Short-term memory is a storage system
that can hold a limited amount of
information for a few seconds.
 Another term for short-term memory is
working memory

Working-memory tests
Fast naming
 Span-task
 Re-order task

1
2
Number span test
16）5
17）7
18）9
19）4
20）2
21）4
22）1
23）5
24）8
25）2
26）5
27）4
28）5
29）8
30）9
8 4 6
3 8 2
6 1 4
7 3 9
5 1 6
9 5 8
7 2 4
8 7 3
5 7 1
7 4 8
2 9 6
1 7 3
9 7 2
5 1 4 9
6 1 3 7
1
5
8
5
3
6
9
6
6
1
3
8
6
6
4
2
7
2
3
1 8
3 9
3 6
8 1
6 9
4 1
2 7
5 2
Sentence span test
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A)1、蝴蝶花真漂亮。
2、老师说她做得对。
3、青蛙坐在井里看天。
问题：人们常用井底之蛙比喻什么？
B) 1. 人民大会堂在北京。
2. 弟弟喜欢冷饮。
3. 海底世界真迷人。
4. 明天我们去春游。
问题： 海底有什么？
1. 妈妈端来了一盘饼。
2. 画鸡蛋是为了锻炼眼力。

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燕子的尾巴像剪刀。
张爷爷给我们讲故事。
为民做了一个小木船。
问题：画鸡蛋的故事讲的是谁？
Re-order test
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13) 奶牛 1 蛋糕 3 衬衫 6 13) 奶牛 蛋糕 衬衫 1 3 6
14) 7 蛇 肥皂 2 9 手套
14) 蛇 肥皂 手套 7 2 9
15) 8 裤子 3 老鼠 1 鸡蛋 15) 裤子 ;老鼠 鸡蛋 8 3 1
请记住，先说出词语，再说出数字。
16)椅子 4 7 帽子 糖 6 5
16) 椅子 帽子 糖 4 7 6 5
17) 2 蜘蛛 9 床 3 衬衫 1 17) 蜘蛛 床 衬衫 2 9 3 1
18) 饼干 5 8 猪 门 6 钮扣 18) 饼干 猪 门 钮扣 5 8 6
19) 4 盐 狐狸 7 炉子 2 9 鞋 19) 盐 狐狸 炉子 鞋 4 7 2 9
20)面包 1 乌龟 5 桌子 6 球 3 20) 面包 乌龟 桌子 球 1 5 6 3
21)萝卜 8 钟表 4 9 玉米 鸟 2 21) 萝卜 钟表 玉米 鸟 8 4 9 2
Capacity, Duration and Contents
of working memory

Capacity
7+(-)2 items
particular item may itself contain a great
deal of information.
 experiment

Keep this shopping list in your mind
橘子汁 芹菜 莴笋
洋葱
苹果 鸡蛋
牛奶
馒头 土豆
矿泉水
热狗 黄桃 蛋糕
面条 辣椒 香蕉
包子 黄瓜 汽水
早餐
午餐
晚餐
牛奶
面条
包子
蛋糕
热狗
馒头
鸡蛋
洋葱
黄瓜
饼干
土豆
莴笋
辣椒
芹菜
饮品 橘子汁
汽水
矿泉水
水果 苹果
香蕉
黄桃
主食
Duration:
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Duration of information in working memory
is very short, about 5-20 seconds. This is
why working memory is called short-term
memory.
You may think that that a memory system
with a 20 second time limit is not very useful,
but without this system, you cannot go
through next processing.
Contents of working memory
two working memory systems:
 language-based information
 nonverbal, spatial visual information
(Baddeley, 1986,1998)
Creatively Thinking

How can we hold the information in
working memory?

Answer: Rehearsal (复述)
Educational application
cannot present students with many ideas
at once
 the idea needs so well organized and well
connected to information already in the
student long-term memories (with
assistance from the long-term memories)

LONG-TERM MEMORY
Capacity and Duration
 Contents of long-term memory

Long-term memory

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Long-term memory is that part of our memory
system where we keep information for long
periods of time.
Long-term memory is thought to be a very largecapacity, very long-term memory store.
Some theorists believe that we may never
forget information in long-term memory; rather,
we might just lose the ability to find the
information within our memory. For this reason,
some theorists use the term permanent memory
(Byrnes, 1996).
Contents of Long-term memory
episodic memory(情境记忆)，
 semantic（语义记忆） memory,
 procedural memory（程序记忆） (Squire
et al., 1993 )

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Episodic memory is our memory of
personal experiences, a mental movie
of things we saw or heard. (情境记忆是
关于个体经历的记忆，是对我们看到或者
听到的事情的心理再现)
Some examples
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Answer my question:
Experience of remembering somebody’s image
without knowing his or her name.
When you took an exam, you said to yourself “I
should know the answer, I remember this section,
it is just on the left corner of the page of my
textbook”.
……..
Semantic memory （语义记忆）
Semantic memory is mentally
organized in networks of connected ideas
or relationships called schemata(图式)
语义记忆由相互关联的概念和图式组织起来
的网络结构） p181
Procedural memory（程序记忆）
Procedural memory is the ability to
recall how to do something, especially a
physical task（程序记忆是回忆如何做某事
的能力，主要是动作记忆的能力）
Your home work:

1. Comparison among
sensory， working，
and Long-term memory

2.Share your good
experience with your
classmates of how to
enhance long-term
memory
Type of Memory Input Capacity
Sensory
Working
Long-Term
Duration
Contents
Retrieval
Comparison among sensory， working，
and Long-term memory
Type of
Memory
Input
Capacity
Duration
Contents
Retrieval
Sensory
very fast
limited
250msc-4
sensory feature
immediate
Working
.
Very fast limited
Very brief
5-20sec
Words, images,
ideas, sentences
Immediate
Long-Term Relatively Practically Practically
Slow
unlimited
unlimited
episodic,
semantic,
procedural,
Depends on
repensentation,
organization
Other information-processing
models
1．Levels-of-processing theory(加工水平
理论)
 2．Dual code theory(双重编码理论)
 3. Parallel distributed processing
model(并行分布加工模型)
 Connectionist models（联结主义模型）

1.LEVELS-OF-PROCESSING
THEORY(加工水平理论)

levels-of-processing theory (Craik, 2000;
Craik & Lockhart,1972), which holds that
people subject stimuli to different levels of
mental processing and retain only the
information that has been subjected to the
most thorough processing.

According to levels-of-processing theory,
the more you attend to the details of a
stimulus, the more mental processing you
must do with a stimulus and the more
likely you are to remember it.
classic study by Bower and Karlin
(1974) p182
 Kaput’s (1994) study:

2.DUAL CODE THEORY (双重编码
理论)
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information is retained in long-term memory in
two forms: visual and verbal (corresponding to
episodic and semantic memory, respectively)
(Clark & Paivio, 1991; Mayer &Moreno, 1998;
Sadoski, Goetz, 8* Fritz, 1993),
This theory predicts that information represented
both visually and verbally is recalled better than
information represented only one way.
3.PARALLEL DISTRIBUTED
PROCESSING MODEL
(并行分布加工模型)

information is processed simultaneously in
the three parts of the memory system, each
part operating on the same information at
the same time.
4.CONNECTIONIST MODELS
（联结主义模型）

It emphasizes the idea that knowledge is
stored in the brain in a network of
connections, not in a system of rules or in
storage of individual bits of information.
Part 2
Understanding Our Memory
What Causes People to Remember or
Forget?
Over the years, researchers have
identified several factors that make it
easier or harder to remember information.
Factors of making it easier or
harder to remember information
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INTERFERENCE(干扰)
RETROACTIVE INHIBITION (倒摄抑制)
PROACTIVE INHIBITION(前摄抑制)
FACILITATION(促进)
Proactive facilitation(前摄促进)
Retroactive facilitation (倒摄促进）
PRIMACY AND RECENCY EFFECTS (首因效应和近因
效应)
AUTOMATICITY(自动化)
MASSED AND DISTRIBUTED PRACTICE
ENACTMENT（亲历）
Interference(干扰)
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One important reason people forget is
interference [Anderson, 1905; Dempster &
Corkill, 1999).
Interference happens when information gets
mixed up with, or pushed aside by other
information.
One form of interference occurs when people
are prevented from mentally rehearsing newly
learned information.
Peterson’s experiment

In one classic experiment, Peterson and
Peterson (1959) gave subjects a simple task: the
memorization of sets of three nonsense letters
[such as FQB). The subjects were then
immediately asked to count backward by 3s from
a three-digit number [e.g., 287, 284, 281, etc.)
for up to 18 seconds. At the end of that time the
subjects were asked to recall the letters. They
had forgotten far more of them than had subjects
who had learned the letters and then simply
waited for 18 seconds to repeat them.
Repeating Peterson’s experiment
DTG
XAK
H FY
Retroactive Inhibition（倒摄抑制）

This occurs when previously learned
information is lost because it is mixed up
with new and somewhat similar
information.
Creative Thinking:
How can we refuse the inhibition?
The first is by not teaching similar and
confusing concepts too closely in time.
 The second is to use different methods to
teach similar concepts.

Proactive Inhibition （前摄抑制）

Proactive inhibition occurs when learning
one set of information interferes with
learning later information.
FACILITATION （促进）

Learning one thing can often help a
person learn similar information.

Facilitation can be proactive facilitation
and retroactive facilitation.
Primacy and Recency Effects（首
因效应和近因效应）

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when people are given a list of words to learn
and then tested immediately afterward, they tend
to learn the first few and last few items much
better than those in the middle of the list (Stifler,
1978).
The tendency to learn the first things presented
is called the primacy effect; the tendency to
learn the last things is called the recency effect.
Educational application

Teachers should consider primacy and
recency effects, which imply that
information taught at the beginning or the
end of the period is more likely to be
retained than other information.
Automaticity(自动化)

A level of rapidity and ease such that a
task or skill involves little or no mental
effort.

Automaticity is gained though practice.
Practice
Massed and Distributed Practice
 Massed Practice Technique in which facts
and skills to be learned are repeated often
over a concentrated period of time.
 Distributed Practice Technique in which
items to be learned are repeated at
intervals over a period of time.

Enactment（亲历）

A learning process in which individuals
physically carry out tasks.

Learning by doing.
3.How Can Memory Strategies Be
Taught?

Verbal learning : Learning of the words or
facts expressed by words.

Three types of verb learning in the classroom:
Paired-associate learning
Serial learning
Free-recall learning p195
What Makes Information
Meaningful?
Which one is easy to remember?
1. Enso firs hmen matu snoi taha erso iakt siae otin tnes
esna nme.
2. Easier that nonsense information to makes than sense is
learn.
3. Information that makes sense is easier to learn than
nonsense.
What Makes Information Meaningful?
Rote learning versus Meaningful learning
 Schema theory
 Hierarchies (层级)of knowledge
 The importance of background knowledge
(Advance Organizers)

How Do Meta-cognitive Skills Help
Students Learn?
Meta-cogntive skills and students learning
P204
Note-making
Underlining
Summarizing
Writing to Learn
Outlining and Mapping
The PQ4R Method
Cognitive teaching strategies and
students learning
Making learning relevant and activating
prior knowledge
 Organizing Information
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