2. Memory Flashcards
Who made the multi-store model?
Atkinson and Shiffrin
What did Atkinson and Shiffrin make?
multi-store model of memory
What did the multi-store model suggest?
Memory is made up of three components:
- Sensory register (SR)
- short‐term memory (STM)
- long‐term memory (LTM).
Memories are formed sequentially and information passes from one component to the next, in a linear fashion.
What sections is the multi-store model separated into?
sensory register (SR),
short‐term memory (STM)
long‐term memory (LTM).
What does coding mean in the context of memory?
Refers to the way in which information is changed and stored in memory.
What does duration mean in the context of memory?
Refers to the length of time that information is held in the memory store
What does capacity mean in the context of memory?
Refers to the amount of information that can be stored.
Explain the multi-store model
- Information enters the sensory register via our senses.
- You must pay attention to this information to go into short term.
- Information that is attended to is passed to STM.
- Here you must rehearse the information so you can remember it.
- Thereafter, rehearsed information is transferred to LTM.
- This can be retrieved from the LTM to use in the STM.
- If any of the steps above are not done then the information will be forgotten by decay or displaced.
What is the capacity of the sensory register?
Unknown, but very large
What is the capacity of the STM?
Limited 7+- 2 chunks of information
Who did the study into STM capacity?
Jacobs (1997)
and
Miller (1956)
What is the capacity of the LTM?
Unlimited In theory as long as you are living.
What is the duration of Sensory Registers?
Very limited 250ms to 0.5s
What is the duration of STM?
Limited 18 - 30 seconds
Who investigated the duration capacity of STM?
Peterson and Peterson 1959
What is the duration of LTM?
Lifelime / years
Who investigated the duration capacity of LTM?
Bahrick 1975
What type of coding does the sensory register follow?
Raw / unprocessed information from all 5 senses
What type of coding does the STM follow?
Acoustic (sound)
What type of coding does the LTM follow?
Semantic (meaning)
What did Miller research support?
Supporting the idea that our STM has a capacity of 7 +- 2 chunks of information
What does Baddeley’s research support?
Supports the notion of different types of encoding in STM and LTM.
What does Peterson and Peterson research support?
Support the idea of a limited duration in STM.
What does Bahrick research support?
Supports the idea of an unlimited duration in LTM
What was the aim of Millers study?
capacity of STM
What was Millers method?
Literature review of published investigations into perception and STM from the 1930s and 1950s
7+-2 chunks
What were Millers results?
Organising stimulus input into series of chunks enabled STM to cope with about 7 chunks.
When remembering 11 digits we chunk into groups so only remember 4 chunks instead of 11 individual digits
What did Miller conclude?
Organisation (or encoding) can extend the capacity of STM and enable more information to be stored there, albeit briefly. 2+- 7
What was the aim of Peterson and Peterson’s study?
To investigate how different short intervals containing an interference task affect the recall of items presented verbally, and to infer the duration of STM.
What was the method of Peterson and Peterson’s study?
- 24 male and female university students.
- 48 three‐consonant nonsense syllables spelled out letter by letter. - ‘trigrams’. + 3 digit numbers
- Researcher spelled the syllable out and then immediately said a three‐digit number.
- The participant had to count down backwards in either 3s or 4s (as instructed) from that number.
- This prevented repetition of the trigram by participant.
- At the end of a preset interval of between 3 and 18 seconds a red light went on and the participant had to recall the trigram.
What were Peterson and Peterson’s results?
The longer the interval the less accurate the recall.
At 3 seconds, around 80% of the trigrams were correctly recalled
Whereas at 18 seconds only 10% were correctly recalled.
What conclusion did Peterson and Peterson draw?
STM has a limited duration of approximately 18 seconds. Furthermore, if we are unable to rehearse information it will not be passed to LTM, providing further support for the MSM and the idea of discrete components.
What was the aim of Bahrick’s study?
To investigate the duration of LTM
What was Bahrick’s method?
392 American university graduates were shown photographs from their high school yearbook and for each photograph participants were given a group of names and asked to select the name that matched the photographs.
What were Bahrick’s results?
90% 14 years after graduating
60% names and faces 47 years after graduation.
What were Bahrick’s conclusions?
People could remember certain types of information, such as names and faces, for almost a lifetime. These results support the MSM and the idea that our LTM has a lifetime duration (at least 47 years), and is semantically encoded.
Why was Atkindon and Shiffrin’s model often criticised for being too simplistic?
Although they made a distinction between a sensory register (SR), short‐term memory (STM) and long‐term memory (LTM), they provided no detail of the memory processing within each store.
Who proposed the Working Memory Model?
Baddeley and Hitch (1974)
How did the WMM improve upon the MSM?
Divided STM into two separate subcomponents: the phonological loop and the visuo‐spatial sketchpad
State the types of LTM
Episodic Sematic Procedural
What are the two categories of long-term memory?
explicit (declarative) implicit (non‐declarative).
What are explicit memories?
Knowledge for events and facts (knowing that)
What are implicit memories?
Skilled behaviours (knowing how), which are largely unconscious.
What category of memory is episodic?
Explicit
What is episodic memory?
Memories of personal experiences (episodes). Such as your first day at school or when you last visited the doctor. These memories are more complex than you might consider and have three specific elements including: details of the event; the context; emotions, which are all interwoven to provide a single memory.
What determines the strength of episodic memories?
Determined by the strength of the emotions experienced when the memory is coded, and a conscious effort is required to retrieve them.
What part of the brain is associated by episodic memories?
Hippocampus
What category of memory is semantic memory part of?
Explicit
What is semantic memory?
Includes memory for knowledge, facts, concepts and meaning about the world around us. For example, knowing that London is the capital of England
Why do semantic memories start as episodic memories?
As we acquire knowledge based on our personal experiences, but they are not ‘time‐stamped’ in the same way nor do they remain closely associated with a particular event (episode).
What determines the strength of semantic memories?
Determined by the strength of the emotions experienced when the memory is coded, although semantic knowledge is often less personal in its nature and can relate to abstract concepts such as language and maths.
Is episodic or semantic memories stronger?
Semantic are stronger
What part of the brain is associated with semantic memories?
Temporal lobe
What category of memories is procedural memories part of?
Implicit
What are procedural memories?
Memory of how to perform certain tasks, actions or skills, such as swimming, reading and writing which have become ‘automatic’.
How are procedural memories acquired?
Through repetition and practice
What parts of the brain are associated with procedural memory?
Cerebellum and motor cortex
What did the Working Memory Model explain?
It is a way of explaining some of the research findings that could not be accounted for by the multi‐store model (MSM), for example dual‐task studies.
What three components make up the slave system of the working memory model?
Episodic buffer Phonological loop Visuo‐spatial sketchpad.
What is the boss of the WMM?
Central Executive
What does the central executive do?
It controls attention and directs information to the slave systems. The central executive can process information from any sensory modality.
What is the phonological loop?
A temporary storage system for verbal information (held in a speech‐based form) which has two components, the articulatory control process (the ‘inner voice’) and the phonological store (the ‘inner ear’).
What are the two components of the phonological loop?
Articulatory control process (the ‘inner voice’) Phonological store (the ‘inner ear’).
What does the articulatory control process do?
Inner voice Allows for subvocal repetition of acoustic information
What is the phonological state?
A temporary storage space for coding acoustic information, which has a limited capacity.
What is the visuo‐spatial sketchpad?
A temporary storage system for visual and spatial information which also has two components, the inner scribe and the visual cache.
What are the two components of the visuo‐spatial sketchpad?
The inner scribe The visual cache
What does the inner scribe do?
Deals with the manipulation of mental images
What does the visual cache do?
Has a limited capacity for coding visual and spatial information.
What does the episodic buffer do?
Binds and integrates information from all of the components and passes the information to long‐term memory (LTM).
What type of information can be stored in the episodic buffer?
Visual and acoustic information,
What capacity does the episodic memory have?
Limited capacity
What capacity does the central executive have?
limited capacity
What capacity does the phonological loop have?
Limited capacity
What capacity does the Visuo-Spatial sketchpad have?
Limited capacity
What are the three explanations for forgetting?
Proactive Interference Retroactive interference Retrieval failure
What do interference theories suggest about forgetting?
Forgetting is caused by competing memories, either because existing memories interfere with the learning of new information (proactive interference) or because new information interferes with previously learnt information (retroactive interference).
What is proactive interference?
Proactive interference occurs when old information stored in long‐term memory (LTM), interferes with the learning of new information. Old over new This usually occurs when the new information is similar to the old information.
What are the two types of interference?
Proactive Retroactive
Who investigated proactive interference?
Keppel and Underwood - 1962
What was the aim of Keppel and Underwood study?
To investigate the effect of proactive interference on LTM.
What was Keppel and Underwood’s method?
- Similar to Peterson &Peterson
- Participants presented meaningless three‐letter consonant trigrams at different intervals (3, 6, 9 seconds, etc.)
- To prevent rehearsal the participants had to count backwards in threes before recalling.
What were the results of Keppel and Underwoods study?
Participants typically remembered the trigrams that were presented first, irrespective of the interval length.
What did Keppel and Underwood conclude?
The results suggest proactive interference occurred, as memory for the earlier consonants (which had transferred to LTM) interfered with the memory for new consonants, due to the similarity of the information presented.
What is retroactive interference?
Retroactive interference occurs when the learning of new information interferes with the recall of old information from LTM. New over old
Who studies retroactive interference?
Baddeley & Hitch (1977)
What was Baddeley & Hitch (1977) aim?
To investigate retroactive interference in everyday memory.
What method did Baddeley and Hitch use?
Two conditions:
- Rugby union players who had played every match in the season
- Players who had missed some games due to injury.
- The length of time from the start to the end of the season was the same for all players.
- Players were asked to recall the names of the teams they had played against earlier in the season.
What were Baddeley and Hitch’s results?
The players who had played the most games forgot proportionately more games than those who had played fewer games due to injury.
What did Baddeley and Hitch conclude?
Baddeley and Hitch concluded that this was the result of retroactive inference, as the learning of new information (new team names) interfered with the memory of old information (earlier team names).
What is retrieval failure due to?
The absence of cues
What did Tulving and Thomson propose?
- Encoding specificity principle
- Argued memory is most effective when information that was present at the time of coding is also present at the time of retrieval.
- Furthermore, they suggested that environmental cues and mental cues aid recall.
What is an environmental cue?
Includes the room in which you learn the information
What is a mental cue?
Includes your emotional state when information was learnt
What are the two types of retrieval failure?
Context-dependent failure State-dependent failure
What is context-dependent failure?
occurs when environmental cues are missing
What is state-dependent failure?
occurs when an individual’s emotional state is different when trying to recall information.
Who studied context-dependent forgetting?
Godden and Baddeley - 1975
What was the aim of Godden and Baddeley’s study?
To investigate the effect of contextual cues on recall (i.e. would memory for words learned and recalled in the same environment be better than memory for words learned and recalled in different environments?)
What was Godden and Baddeley’s method?
- 18 participants (13 males and 5 females)
- University diving club.
- Divided into four conditions:
- learning words on land and recalling on land
- learning words on land and recalling underwater
- learning underwater and recalling underwater
- learning underwater and recalling on land.
- Repeated measures design with each participant taking part in all four conditions, over four separate days.
- Each given 38 words, which they heard twice.
- Write all the words they could remember, in any order.
What were Godden and Baddeley’s results?
The words learned underwater were better recalled underwater and words learned on land were better recalled on land.
What did Godden and Baddeley conclude?
The environmental cues (context) improve recall.
What is state-dependent forgetting?
- When the emotional state that an individual is in serves as an aid to memory recall, there is a risk that state‐dependent forgetting will occur when the same psychological state is not experienced.
- This is often the case with alcohol intoxication and the absence of accurate memories when sober.
What is eyewitness testimony?
The evidence given in court or a police investigation by someone who has witnessed a crime or accident.
What factors can effect the accuracy of eyewitness reports?
- Misleading information
- Leading questions
- Post‐event discussion
- Anxiety.
Who investigated the effect of leading questions?
Loftus & Palmer (1974)
What was Loftus & Palmer’s aim? 1st Experiment
To investigate the effect of leading questions on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
What method did Loftus and Palmer use? 1st Experiment
- 45 American students (5 groups of 9)
- In an independent measures design
- Watched a video of a car crash and were then asked a specific question about the speed of the cars.
- Manipulated the verb used in the question, eg. smashed/ collided/ bumped/ hit/ contacted
- Finding estimated speed and verb correlates
- Smashed - 40.5mph
- Contacted - 31.8mph
What conclusions did Loftus and Palmer make? 1st Experiment
The results show clearly that the accuracy of eyewitness testimony is affected by leading questions and that a single word in a question can significantly affect the accuracy of our judgements.
What was the aim of Loftus and Palmer’s second experiment?
To investigate further how leading questions can affect eyewitness testimony.
What method did Loftus and Palmer us in their second experiment?
- 150 American students (Three groups)
- All watched one‐minute video of car accident and were then given a questionnaire to complete.
- “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?”
- “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”
- Control - was not asked about the speed of the vehicles.
- One week later the participants returned and asked more questions eg. did you see the glass?
What results did Loftus and Palmer draw in their second experiment?
- 32% smashed group reported glass
- 14% hit group reported glass
- 12% of the control group reported seeing broken glass.
What conclusions did Loftus and Palmer draw from their second experiment?
- Smashed most likely to see broken gladd due to leading questions
- The verb smashed has the connotation of faster speeds and broken glass and this question led the participants to report seeing something that was not actually present.
- Memory of original event was distorted by the question used one week earlier, demonstrating the power of leading questions.
What is a source of misleading information?
leading questions
What is a post-event discussion?
Other witnesses (co‐ witnesses), when they discuss the details of a crime or accident, following an incident.
Who investigated the effects of post-event discussions?
Gabbert et al. (2003)
What was the aim of Gabbert et al.?
To investigate the effect of post‐event discussion on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
What method did Gabbert et al. use?
- 60 students from the University of Aberdeen
- 60 older adults recruited from a local community.
- Video of a girl stealing money from a wallet.
- Either tested individually (control group) or in pairs (co‐witness group).
- Co‐witness group - told that they had watched the same video but had seen different perspectives of the same crime and only one person had actually witnessed the girl stealing.
- Participants in the co‐witness group discussed the crime together.
- All of the participants then completed a questionnaire, testing their memory of the event.
What results did Gabbert et al. draw?
- 71% of the witnesses in the co‐witness group recalled information they had not actually seen
- 60% said that the girl was guilty, despite the fact that they had not seen her commit a crime.
What conclusions did Gabbert et al. draw?
Highlight the issue of post‐event discussion and the powerful effect this can have on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
Who investigated the effect of anxiety on EWT?
- Loftus (1979)
- Reported the findings of Johnson & Scott (1976)
- Who conducted an experiment to see if anxiety affects the accuracy of eyewitness testimony and facial recognition.
What was the aim of Loftus and Johnson & Scott’s experiment?
To investigate whether anxiety affects the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
What was the method of Loftus and Johnson & Scott’s experiment?
- Laboratory (Independent groups)
- Told to wait in the reception area.
- A receptionist who was seated nearby excused herself to run an errand, leaving the participant alone.
- ‘no‐weapon’ - overheard a conversation in the laboratory about equipment failure. Individual walked past participant holding pen with greese on hand.
- ‘weapon’ - overheard heated exchange and the sound of breaking glass and crashing chairs. Individual ran past holding bloodied knife.
- Both groups shown 50 photographs and ask to identify the person who had left the laboratory.
- The participants were informed that the suspect may, or may not, be present in the photographs.
What were the results of Loftus and Johnson & Scott’s experiment?
- Non-weapon - correctly identified the target 49%
- Weapon - correctly identified the target 33% of the time.
What conclusion did Loftus and Johnson & Scott draw?
- Participants exposed to the knife had higher levels of anxiety and were more likely to focus their attention on the weapon and not the face of the target - weapon focus effect.
- Therefore, the anxiety associated with seeing a knife reduces the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
What are the problem’s with the police interview method?
A series of short, closed questions, which attempted to elicit facts and ask questions in a sequence that was not synchronised with the events that had taken place.
Who discovered the problems with police interviews?
Fisher et al. (1987)
Who developed the cognitive interview?
Geiselman et al. 1985
What key principles did Geiselman et al. develop?
- Context reinstatement (CR)
- Report everything (RE)
- Recall from changed perspective (CP)
- Recall in reverse order (RO).
What is context reinstatement?
- When a person mentally recalls the context of the event.
- These details can then act as a trigger, to help the person recall more information.
- There are clear links here between this and context‐dependent and state‐dependent remembering.
What is meant by the term report everything?
When a person recalls every detail they can remember, even those that may seem trivial.
How would you recall from changed perspectives?
When a person considers the event from someone else’s point of view. For example, they might consider what the offender saw.
How would you recall in reverse order?
Where a person recalls the events in reverse chronological order.
Who studied the effectiveness of cognitive interviews?
Geiselman (1985)
What method did Geiselman use?
- 89 students watched a video of a simulated crime.
- Two days later the students were interviewed using the standard police interview or the cognitive interview.
What results did Geiselman draw?
- Cognitive interview recalled significantly more correct information than those interviewed using the standard interview.
- In addition, the number of errors (incorrect items recalled) by both groups was similar.
- Cognitive - 41.5 correct items - 7.3 incorrect items
- Standard - 29.3 correct items - 6.1 incorrect items
What conclusion did Geiselman draw?
The cognitive interview is effective in improving the quantity of information recalled and does not lead to an increase in incorrect information.
Apart from Miller, who investigated the capacity of STM?
Jacobs - 1887
How did Jacobs study the capacity of STM?
- Using a digit span test, to examine the capacity of short-term memory for numbers and letters.
- Repeat back a string of numbers or letters. Digits increase.
- The average span of 7.3 letters and 9.3 words.
- This supported Millers 7+-2
What is procedural memories?
Knowing how to do something.
Become automatic due to repetition.
What are semantic memories?
Knowledge shared by everyone, abstract and concrete.
Required via episodic memories.
What are the episodic memories?
Personal memories for events forming a sequence.
Including details of context and emotion.
In addition to the Retroactive study what did Baddeley and Hitch do?
Aimed to show STM should be divided into several components.
Conditions
- CE occupied by repeating a word
- CE and AL occupied by repeating random number sequence.
- DV - true/false task accuracy (seconds and errors)
What were the results of the experiment into Dual-Task Performance?
Reduced accuracy when two working model areas are used together.
Concluded - the existence of Central Executive and Phonological Loop is supported and they are functionally different.
What can the phonological loop hold?
The amount of information you can say in 1.5-2 seconds
(Baddeley et al. 1975)
This is why it is harder to remember a list of long words compared to shorter words.
What study did Christianson and Hubinette do?
Bank robbery
- The more high-anxiety victims (bank tellers) remember more accurately than the bystanders.
What two studies can be used to explain anxiety effecting eye witness testimony?
- Johnson and Scott - weapon vs. pen (worse memory)
- Christianson and Hubinette - bank robbery (improved memory)
What 4 things did the cognitive improve on?
- mental reinstatement of the original context
- report everything
- change order
- change perspective
What did George Sperling experiment?
To demonstrate the existence of visual sensory memory.
Suggest human visual system is capable of retaining information even if the exposure is very brief.
Evidence for large capacity of SM - Multi store model
Explain the unique case study of HM
- Epileptic from young age - many fits and accidents.
- Removed hippocampus using a metal straw.
- stopped seizures
- no longer memories created
- visuospatial sketchpad used for the star test - subconsciously learnt actions
- lost episodic buffer
- gives evidence for the working memory model
Who experimented the serial position effect?
Glanzer + Cunitz
What is the serial position effect?
The finding that on list learning tasks the probability of retrieving an item is dependent on the item’s position in the study list.
Displayed in a normal distribution curve.
What did Goodwin investigate?
State-dependent forgetting
What study did Goodwin do?
- drunk or sober states.
- Recall best when in the initial state.
- Matched state at recall.
What study did Loftus do?
Monitored eye movements during weapon exposure.
Found that most focus was on the weapon.
Evaluate the multi store model
- economic beliefs - education - flashcards - lab study - lack mundane realism - economically valid.
- model too simple - correlation nor causation - HM disproved as star test showed procedural memories but no episodic. - not generalised - not reliable - a case study based.
- Brain-damaged patients studied - HM case study - child neglect, epilepsy and medication - fMRI scans find supporting conclusions - lack pop validity - has some external validity.
Evaluate working memory model
- disproved the multi stage model - SM as HM could have conversations - procedural memory as star test - unconscious long term memories - ecologically valid - subjective
- the fourth type of memory not described - primary or emotional association - reductionist - only used case studies - Alzheimer patients - research is on going - not the scientific method.
- brain-damaged patients studied - HM case - epilepsy - child neglect and medication - fMRI scans studied many people - support conclusions - lack pop validity - some external validity,
Evaluate the research for types of LTM
- applications in fMRI scans - Binge et al - different brain activities in different tasks. - prefrontal cortex is active in both single and double conditions. - pop validity
- the word length effect - phonological loop 1.5 - 2 s - longer hard to remember - shows at least two processes operating with works - support evidence of PL and AL
- simplistic - correlation, not causation - HM hippocampus removed no longer forms episodic - HMs have other variables like strokes.
Give an evaluation point for the interference theory
- high eco validity - real-world applications - TV adverts blacks for ads - individual difference like IQ and memory span makes it hard to generalise - results in the limited sample being used by the same memory researchers.
Give evaluation for forgetting due to retrieval failure
- Lack mundane realism - lab study - correlations found between state and context p Naime 1002 - Baddeley impossible to test - no lab is internally valid - invalid and unreliable
- successful applications - dementia - episodic memory recall using memory boxes - cues help cognitive interviews with EWT - ecological validity.
Give evaluation for EWT due to misleading information
- lack mundane realism - artificial lab study - demand characteristics - leading questions - crimes less accurate - lack ecological validity - ethical as the wrong person convicted.
- real-world applications - impossible to implant false memories using suggestive and misleading questions - Brawun et al. non-Disney chars and report if people had seen them - change memories
- individual differences - uni student sample - similar ages and level of intellect limits generalisation and pop validity.
Evaluation EWT on anxiety
- alternative explanation of simplicity - lack internal validity - Yerkes and Dodson curve - decline after anxiety passed - catastrophe theory more recent
- correlation not causation - not WFE causes anxiety - replication found chicken higher - poor eco validity as most crimes not violent - mundane realism
- individual difference - PPTs took personality test and had neurotic tendencies - other differences like age - lacks pop validity
Evaluation of EWT on cognitive interview
- research support - excellent internal validity - meta analysis 34% increase in the correct recall - report everything and mental reinstatement most useful - eco validity
- *expensive and time-consuming -** kebbel and wagstall more time than available - prefer deliberate strategies to get only necessary - extra training needed which is impossible with budget cutes - not widespread - ecological problems
- ethics - pop validity - Wiseco - low IQ, M+P difficulties misinformed by police - wrong convictions - specific training so reduce intensity of interviews - more ethical and accuracy improved
