4.1.2 LONG TERM MEMORY

Question 1

what are the three types of long term memory?

Answer 1

• episodic
• procedural
• semantic

Question 2

what is the episodic memory?

Answer 2

• part of the LTM that relates to experiences a person has had or events from heir life
• examples being:
  a 16th birthday party
  the first time someone sees the sea
  someone’s first psychology lesson

Question 3

what is the procedural memory?

Answer 3

• part of the LTM involved in knowing how to do certain actions or skills
• examples being:
  knowing how to ride a bike
  knowing how to swim
  knowing how to make a cup of tea

Question 4

what is the semantic memory?

Answer 4

• part of the LTM that involves knowing and recalling facts, concepts and meanings
• examples:
  knowing that Paris is the capital of France
  knowing that the number 3 is between the numbers 2 and 4
  knowing that the word ‘bank’ has two meanings

Question 5

what is the capacity of the long term memory?

Answer 5

• LTM holds information indefinitely
• as far as is known, LTM has an unlimited capacity
• no way to test this as people often forget facts and information
• there has never been a known case of someone not being able to learn something new or retain a memory because their LTM is full

Question 6

what is the duration of the long term memory?

Answer 6

• research and anecdotal evidence suggests people can recall facts from childhood in their later life
• the duration of LTM is as long as a person’s lifetime
• the only time in a person’s life that they may not be able to recall is early childhood
• most cannot recall episodes from their life before the age of two
  ^ this is known as childhood or infantile amnesia

Question 7

what is the evidence for the duration of long term memory?

who and when?

Answer 7

BAHRICK (1975)
- investigated the duration of LTM in several studies using a field study method

METHOD
- he asked 392 American graduates to identify people from their high school yearbook
- shown classmate photos years later

FINDINGS
- 90% accuracy for remembering faces and names 14 years after graduation
- those recalling from 47 years were accurate 60% of the time
- this suggests LTM lasts a lifetime as such strong recall after 47 years isn’t likely to fade too much a few decades later

Question 8

how can we evaluate research into duration of the long-term memory?

Answer 8

• has good ecological validity as looking at old photos and trying to recall names is a common task
• Bahrick would have had less control over the variables in the study
• some people may have had better recall as they were still in the same town and potentially still in contact with the people in the yearbook
• others may have had poor recall as they never really knew the names of the people in the yearbook in the first place as they were less social in high school
• the study never explains why recall becomes worse over time

Question 9

what is encoding in long term memory?

Answer 9

• encoding is how the information is processed from the senses into the memory itself
• this is how the information ill be stored and ultimately recalled
• is always in the form of a modality or one of the senses
• LTM encodes semantically or by meaning
• we know this from a study by Baddeley (1966)

Question 10

what’s the evidence for encoding in long term memory?

who and when?

Answer 10

BADDELEY (1966)
- considered encoding in both STM and LTM

METHOD
- gave participants four lists of words to learn:
acoustically similar, dissimilar
semantically similar, dissimilar
- words presented visually on a screen as a powerpoint
- free recall was not allowed
- he asked for recall after 20 minutes

FINDINGS
- semantically similar words had the worst recall
getting them in the same order was very hard as they all meant the same thing
- no difference for acoustically similar and dissimilar words

• concluded that LTM relies on semantic encoding to process information

Question 11

how can we evaluate the research into encoding in the long term memory?

Answer 11

• lab experiment so is highly controlled
• extraneous variables taken care of
• lacks ecological validity as tasks don’t relate to real life
• words had little to no meaning for participants and so they were harder to recall
• information that has to be recalled in reality often has meaning and significance, making recall easier