Английский язык учебник

Exercise 6. Arrange the following words in pairs of

(a)synonyms and (b) antonyms:

a)occurrence, solely, chunk, to recall, firmness, happen ing, to distract, piece, to practise, cluster, to retrieve, only, to suppress, to divert, group, rigor, to destroy, to rehearse;

b)encoding, inaccuracy, long term memory, to de crease, decoding, to capture, to enlarge, to remem ber, retroactive interference, short term memory, rigor, to distract, to forget, proactive interference.

SPEAKING AND DISCUSSION

Exercise 1. Answer the following questions on the text.

1.What is memory?

2.What processes does memory overlap?

3.When does information need to be stored?

4.What are the stages of memory storage?

5.When is information placed into short term memory?

6.What kind of rehearsal moves information into long term memory?

7.There are three levels of long term memory, are not there?

8.Is there any difference between recognition and free recall?

9.What is the most important cause of forgetting in long term memory?

10.Why do effortful performances often interfere with concurrent cognitive processing?

Exercise 2. Retell the text using your active vocabu lary.

Exercise 3. Give a summary of the text.

Exercise 4. Here is the flowchart for the theory of memory. Describe the process of memory and fill in the table.

Environmental stimuli

SENSORY MEMORY (SM)

Attention

SHORT TERM

MEMORY (STM)

Elaborative Retrieval rehearsal

LONG –TERM

MEMORY (LTM)

Exercise 5. Comment on the following poorly under stood, but important questions.

Impact of interruptions. Some work includes nu merous interruptions. The effect of these on memo ry has rarely been studied. The length of the inter ruption is not very important, but similarity of material processed is.

Other memorial tasks. Most of the literature concerns simply learning a list and then recall ing it sometime later. Much work related to me morial tasks involves remembering some piece of information for a short period of time, then re placing it with some similar piece of informa tion.

Support for memory. Most of the literature is about processes and architectures of memory, but our human interest is in preventing the need of memory and providing support for memory tasks. Little is known how to do this, except from com mon sense.

Exercise 6. Scan the text and do the tasks below.

ATTENTION

Not everything that stimulates our sensory recep tors is transformed into a mental representation. Rather, we selectively attend to some objects and events and ig nore many others. If we could not select, we would be automatons reduced to responding to whatever stimu lus happened to be the strongest at any moment. Our behaviour would be influenced solely by whatever thought, memory, or impulse was passing through our minds, and we would have no goal directed control over our actions. Attention, then, is an important cognitive key to planned, adaptive behaviour.

Failures of attention play a major role in several mental disorders. Children with attention deficit/hyper activity disorder are extremely distractible, presumably because they cannot ignore many external stimuli. Pa tients with obsessive compulsive disorder are unable to inhibit unwanted thoughts and impulses. People with schizophrenia describe a loss of mental control over in ternal and external events. Similarly, individuals with depression and manic depressive illness often report dif ficulties in focusing attention and in suppressing un wanted thoughts.

Psychologists have developed many ways to assess normal and abnormal attention. For example, in the “di chotic listening” task, subjects wearing earphones are asked to repeat a message sent to ear while ignoring a different message simultaneously sent to the other ear. This task is relatively difficult when presented in simi lar (e.g., both male and both female) voices, but relatively easy when the two messages are presented in different (e.g., female and male) voices. In the latter case, we are greatly helped by the difference in voice quality.

In another attentional task subjects are asked to name the ink colours in which words are printed. This task is usually done easily. But if the words are colour

names, such as red printed in ink of a different colour, such as blue, considerable interference and disruption can occur as people try to attend only to the ink colour and suppress naming the colour word.

Researchers have also examined the demands of at tention when subjects search for certain “targets” in a visual display. They have found several types of situa tions in which focused attention is required: when sepa rate objects that share potentially interchangeable fea tures must be identified and located, when the target object is defined only by its lack of a feature found in all the irrelevant objects, or when feature differences are small and difficult to discriminate. Targets are easy to find if they have unique features, such as colour, mo tion, or size. Searching for a target line among others that are slightly longer or brighter requires focusing attention on each item in turn, but a circle can easily be found in a display of lines.

Laboratory studies are examining, as well, people’s ability to divide attention. In one study of distraction by internal thoughts, subjects were asked to perform mental arithmetic while watching for a particular letter to appear in a rapid sequence of other letters. As the arithmetic problems became more difficult and required more attention, pupils of subjects’ eyes enlarged (an in dication of attention) and they were more likely to miss target letters.

Interestingly, people with some mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, tend to perform attentional tasks especially poorly. Future research of this type may de velop laboratory tasks that will diagnose attentional defi cits with the same rigor and accuracy now used in mea suring blood pressure. However, that task is likely to be completed by the finding in both normal subjects and patients that performance of one attention task is not necessarily correlated with performance of another. Attentional resources seem to be specific to particular sensory modalities. The more two tasks depend on the same modality, the more they are likely to compete.

Thus, we have the paradoxical finding that it is much easier to sight read piano music while repeating back oral sentences (using two different modalities: vision and hear ing) than it is to listen simultaneously to two different sen tences (using the same modality: hearing). Attentional problems may also arise when attention is divided between two tasks that both use the same modality. For example, skilled typists have difficulty taking dictation over ear phones while simultaneously reading a printed passage aloud, but find it easy to repeat an oral message while per forming the motor task of typing from a printed text. Fu ture research should clarify further the attentional mecha nisms through which we select and control what we see and hear, learn and remember, think and do.

NIMH Public Inquiries, 1998

Task 1. Say whether the following statements are true (T) or false (F), and if they are false, say why.

which we select and control what we see and hear.

Task 2. Pair work. Ask 5 special questions to the text while your partner will answer them.

Task 3. Develop the idea of the text using the vo cabulary.

Task 4. Give a summary of the text.

Exercise 7. Choose one of the following topics con nected with memory and attention and prepare a report on it.

1.Different kinds of memory.

2.Stages of memory storage.

3.Retrieval and forgetting.

4.Memory and attention.

WRITING

Exercise 1. Write a short summary of the report you have made.

Exercise 2. Render the following text into English.

ИНДИВИДУАЛЬНЫЕ РАЗЛИЧИЯ В ПРОЦЕССАХ ПАМЯТИ

Индивидуальные различия в памяти людей прояв ляются в особенности её процессов, т.е. в том, как осуществляется запоминание и воспроизведение у разных людей, и в особенности содержание памяти, т.е. в том, что запоминается. Эти двоякие изменения с разных сторон характеризуют продуктивность памяти каждого человека.

Индивидуальные различия в процессах памяти выражаются в скорости, точности, прочности запоминания и готовности к воспроизведению.

Скорость запоминания определяется числом повто рений, необходимых тому или иному человеку для запоминания определённого объёма материала. Прочность выражается в сохранении заученного материала и в скорости его забывания. Наконец, готовность памяти выражается в том, насколько легко и быстро человек может припомнить в нужный момент то, что ему необходимо. Эти различия в определённой мере связаны с особенностями высшей нервной деятельности, с силой и подвижностью процессов возбуждения и торможения. Особенности высшей нервной деятельности и связанные с ними инди видуальные различия в процессах памяти изменяются под влиянием условий жизни и воспитания и зависят, в первую очередь, от того, насколько сформированы у каждого человека рациональные способы запоми нания. Они связаны с привычкой к точности и акку ратности в работе, наличием ответственного отноше ния к своим обязанностям, настойчивостью в их выполнении и т.д. Готовность памяти, кроме того, зависит от систематичности в приобретении и закреплении знаний.

Петровский А.В. Введение в психологию. М.: Издательский центр «Академия», 1995, c. 194

GRAMMAR REVISION

The Sequence of Tenses

The sequence of tenses is a certain dependence of the tense of the verb in a subordinate clause on that of the verb in the principal clause: if the verb in the principal clause is in one of the past tenses, a past tense (or fu ture in the past) must be used in the subordinate clause. The main sphere where the sequence of tenses is applied is object clauses.

1.If the past action expressed in the subordinate clause is simultaneous with that expressed in the principal clause, the Past Simple or the Past Continuous is used in the subordinate clause.

e.g. She thought he had more courage than that. Она думала, что у него больше храбрости.

He had the feeling that everybody was looking at him. Ему казалось, что все смотрят на него.

2.If the past action expressed in the subordinate clause is prior to that expressed in the principal clause or lasted a certain time before that action, the Past Per fect or the Past Perfect Progressive is used in the subordinate clause.

e.g. She realized that her old life she had lived in that city was ended. Она осознавала, что прежняя жизнь, которую она вела в этом городе, закончилась.

He knew that they had been carrying out that work for two years. Он знал, что они проводили эту работу два года.

3.If the action expressed in the subordinate clause is posterior to that of the principal clause, the Future in the Past is used.

e.g. She knew that he would make that experiment by all means. Она знала, что он проведёт этот эксперимент во что бы то ни стало.