ElmCore Journal of Educational Psychology October, 2014 | Page 42

Science-Fellows®

Sensory memory. Sensory memory
represents the initial stage of stimuli perception. It is
associated with the senses, and there seems to be a
separate section for each type of sensual perception,
each with its own limitations and devices. Obviously,
stimuli that are not sensed cannot be further processed
and will never become part of the memory store. This
is not to say that only stimuli that are consciously
perceived are stored; on the contrary, everyone takes
in and perceives stimuli almost continuously. It is
hypothesized, though, that perceptions that are not
transferred into a higher stage will not be incorporated
into memory that can be recalled. The transfer of new
information quickly to the next stage of processing is
of critical importance, and sensory memory acts as a
portal for all information that is to become part of
memory. This stage of memory is temporally limited
which means that information stored here begins to
decay rapidly if not transferred to the next stage. This
occurs in as little as ½ second for visual stimuli and
three seconds for auditory stimuli. There are many
ways to ensure transfer and many methods for
facilitating that transfer. To this end, attention and
automaticity are the two major influences on sensory
memory, and much work has been done to understand
the impact of each on information processing.

ElmCore® Journal of Educational Psychology

Attention is defined by Suthers (1996) as the
“limitations in our perceptual processing and response
generation: to attend to one this is to not attend to
others” (p. 1). To attend to a stimulus is to focus on it
while consciously attempting to ignore other stimuli,
but it is not totally exclusive of these competing
others. Treisman (as cited in Driscoll, 2001) “showed,
however, that attention is not an all-or-nothing
proposition and suggested that it serves to attenuate, or
tune out, stimulation” (p. 81). Attention does facilitate
the integration and transfer of the information being
attended, but it is impacted by many factors including
the meaningfulness of the new stimulus to the learner,
the similarity between competing ideas or stimuli, the
complexity of the new information, and the physical
ability of the person to attend.
Automaticity is almost the exact opposite of
attention. Driscoll (2001) says that “When tasks are
overlearned or sources of information become
habitual, to the extent that their attention requirements
are minimal, automaticity has occurred” (p. 82).
Automaticity allows attention to be redirected to other
information or stimuli and allows for the ability of
multi-tasking without distracting totally from the
acquisition of new information.

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