2 Memory

Question 1

What are the 3 types of memory?

Answer 1

Sensory register,
Short-term memory (STM),
Long-term memory (LMT).

Question 2

What is the sensory register?

Answer 2

The sensory register temporarily stores information from our senses (sight, sound, touch, taste and smell) - it’s constantly receiving information from around us.
Unless we pay attention to it, it disappears quickly through spontaneous decay - the trace just fades.
The sensory register has a limited capacity, and a very limited duration (e.g. we can remember a little information for a very short).
Information is coded depending on the sense that has picked it up - e.g. visual, auditory or tactile.

Question 3

What is short-term memory?

Answer 3

Short-term memory has a limited capacity and a limited duration (e.g. we can remember a little info for a short time). Coding is usually acoustic (sound).

Question 4

What is long-term memory?

Answer 4

Core memories (inside out)
Long-term has a pretty much unlimited capacity and its theoretically permanent (e.g. it can hold lots of info forever). Coding is usually semantic (the meaning of the info).

Question 5

What are the 3 different types of long-term memory?

Answer 5

Episodic memory,
Semantic memory,
Procedural memory.

Question 6

What is episodic memory?

Answer 6

Stores information about events that you’ve actually experienced, such as a concert or a visit to a restaurant. It can contain information about time and place, emotions you felt, and the details of what happened. These memories are declarative - this means they can ne consciously recalled.

Question 7

What is sematic memory?

Answer 7

Stores facts and knowledge that we have learnt and can consciously recall, such as capital cities and word meanings. It doesn’t contain details of the time or place where you learnt info - it’s simply knowledge.

Question 8

What is procedural memory?

Answer 8

Stores the knowledge of how to do things, such as walking, swimming or playing the piano. This information can’t be consciously recalled.

Question 9

What studies have looked at the duration of memory?

Answer 9

Sperling (1960),
Peterson and Peterson (1959),
Bahrick et al (1975).

Question 10

What was the method that Sperling used?

Answer 10

In a lab, participants were shown a grid with 3 rows of 4 letters for 50 ms. They then had to immediately recall either the whole grid, or a randomly chosen row indicated by a tone played straight after the grid was shown.

Question 11

What were the results of Sperling’s investigations?

Answer 11

When participants had to recall the whole grid - they only managed to recall 4/5 letters.
When a particular row was indicated, participants could recall an average of 3 letters no matter which row was picked.

Question 12

What is the evaluation of Sperling?

Answer 12

Laboratory experiment - highly scientific. The variables could be controlled and it would be easy to replicate.
However, artificial setting of the study means that it lacks ecological validity - people don’t have to recall letters in response to a sound, so might not represent the real world.

Question 13

What was the method that Peterson and Peterson used?

Answer 13

Participants were shown nonsense trigrams (3 random consonants, e.g. CVM) and asked to recall them either after 3 to 18 seconds. During the pause, they had to count backwards in threes from a given number. This was an ‘interference task’ to prevent them from repeating the letters internally.

Question 14

What were the results of Peterson and Peterson?

Answer 14

3 seconds - could recall 80% of trigrams correctly.
18 seconds - only about 10% recalled correctly.

Question 15

What is the evaluation of Peterson and Peterson?

Answer 15

Results likely to be reliable - lab experiment where variables can be tightly controlled.
However, nonsense trigrams are artificial, so the study lacks ecological validity. Meaningful memories may last longer in STM. Only one type of stimulus used - duration may depend of type of stimulus.

Question 16

What studies have looked at the capacity of memory?

Answer 16

Jacobs (1887),
Miller (1956).

Question 17

What was the method Jacobs used?

Answer 17

Participants were presented with a string of letters or digits. They had to repeat them back in the same order. The number of digits or letters increased until the participants failed to recall the sequence correctly.

Question 18

What were the results of Jacobs?

Answer 18

Most of the time, participants recalled about 9 digits and about 7 letters. The capacity increased with age during childhood.

Question 19

What is the evaluation of Jacobs?

Answer 19

Artificial and lacks ecological validity - it’s not something you’d do in real life. Meaningful info may be recalled better, perhaps showing STM to have an even greater capacity.

Question 20

What did Miller do?

Answer 20

He reviewed research into the capacity of STM and found people can remember about 7 items.
He argued that the capacity of STM is 7 +/- 2.
He suggested that we use ‘chunking’ to combine individual letters or numbers into larger, more meaningful units.

Question 21

What is coding?

Answer 21

The process of converting info into a format that can be stored and retrieved from memory.

Question 22

Who investigated coding in the STM and LTM?

Answer 22

Baddeley (1966).

Question 23

What method did Baddeley do?

Answer 23

Participants were given 4 sets of words that were either acoustically similar (e.g. man, mad, mat), acoustically dissimilar (e.g. pit, cow, bar), semantically similar (e.g. big, large, huge) or semantically dissimilar (e.g. good, hot, pig). The experiment used an independent groups design. They were asked to recall either immediately after or after a 20-minute task.

Question 24

What were the results of Jacobs?

Answer 24

Participants had problems recalling acoustically similar words when recalling the word list immediately. If recalling after an interval, they had problems with semantically similar words.

Question 25

What is the multi-store model?

Answer 25

It was proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). They suggested that memory consisted of 3 stores - a sensory register, a short-term memory and a long-term memory, and information has to move through these stores to become a memory.

Question 26

How does the multi-store model work?

Answer 26

Information from our environment (e.g. visual or auditory) initially goes into the sensory register. You don’t really notice much of this stuff. However, if you pay attention to it, or think about it, the information will pass into short-term memory.

Question 27

What are the strengths of the multi-store model?

Answer 27

One strength of the multi-store model is that it gives a good understanding of the STM. This is good because this allows researchers to expand on this model.
The case of HM also supports the MSM as he was unable to encode new long-term memories after surgery during which his hippocampus was removed but his STM was unaffected.

Question 28

What are the weaknesses of the multi-store model?

Answer 28

The model is oversimplified. It assumes there is only one long-term and one short-term store. This has been disproved by evidence from brain damaged patients, suggesting several different short-term stores, and other evidence suggesting different long-term stores.

Question 29

What is the working memory model?

Answer 29

Baddeley and Hitch developed a multi-store model of the STM called the ‘working memory model’. Their model proposed that STM, rather than being a single store, is an active processor which contains several different stores.

Question 30

What is the working model made of?

Answer 30

The central executive, the episodic buffer, the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad.

Question 31

What is the central executive?

Answer 31

It is a key component and can be described as attention. It has a limited capacity and controls ‘slave’ systems that also have limited capacity.

Question 32

What is the phonological loop?

Answer 32

It holds speech-based information - it’s made of a phonological store (the inner ear) and an articulatory process (the inner voice, which rehearses information by repeating it.

Question 33

What is the visuo-spatial sketchpad?

Answer 33

It deals with the temporary storage of visual and spatial information.

Question 34

What is the episodic buffer?

Answer 34

It briefly stores information from the other subsystems and integrates it together, along with information from LTM, to make complete scenes or ‘episodes’.

Question 35

What are the strengths of the working memory model?

Answer 35

The model has less emphasis on rehearsal than the multi-store model of memory. Rather than being the key process, rehearsal is just one possible process in the working memory model. This can therefore help to explain why, in real life, things end up in our long-term memory even though we haven’t rehearsed them - it suggests that other processes are at work.

Question 36

What are the weaknesses of the working memory model?

Answer 36

Some people believe the central executive is simplistic and vague. The model doesn’t really explain exactly what the central executive is, apart from being involved in attention.
The model only explains how information is dealt with in short-term memory. It doesn’t explain how it is transferred to LTM.
Ecological validity is reduced because all the studies supporting the WMM have been lab experiments and may not represent what happens in the real world.