Coding, Capacity And Duration

Question 1

What is coding/encoding?

Answer 1

The former in which information is stored in the various memory stores.

Question 2

What does storage mean?

Answer 2

Holding information in the memory system.

Question 3

What is retrieval?

Answer 3

Recovering information from storage

Question 4

What is capacity?

Answer 4

The amount of information that can be held in a memory store

Question 5

What is duration?

Answer 5

The length of time information can be held in a memory store.

Question 6

What are the two kinds of memory?

Answer 6

Short-term memory

Long-term memory

Question 7

What are the differences between long-term and short-term memory?

Answer 7

Coding
Capacity
Duration

Question 8

What are the three ways of coding?

Answer 8

Acoustic coding
Visual coding
Semantic coding

Question 9

What is acoustic coding?

Answer 9

The sound of a stimulus

Question 10

What is visual coding?

Answer 10

The physical appearance of a stimulus

Question 11

What is semantic coding?

Answer 11

The meaning of a stimulus

Question 12

How was research into coding in STM done?

Answer 12

Participants were shown a random sequence of five words from one of these categories:

Group 1, acoustically similar words
Group 2, acoustically dissimilar words
Group 3, semantically similar words
Group 4, semantically dissimilar words

Question 13

What was discovered in research into coding and STM?

Answer 13

When patients were asked to recall words in the correct order immediately, they did worse with acoustically similar words suggesting the STM codes acoustically.

Question 14

How was research into coding in LTM done?

Answer 14

The experiment was repeated after an interval of 20 minutes. This time semantic similarity was significantly different in results, suggesting that LTM code semantically.

Question 15

Why did doing worse on acoustically similar words for STM and semantically similar words for LTM mean that they coded that way?

Answer 15

Because errors suggest processing which suggests coding. It is the idea that when you fill a memory store up with its form of memories until it is too full, you make mistakes and forget things.

Question 16

What is the evaluation of coding?

Answer 16

Artificial stimuli was used
The word list had no personal meaning to participants, so it’s hard to generalise the findings to real life where people process more meaningful information.
Suggest limited application

Question 17

What is the capacity of LTM?

Answer 17

Limitless

Question 18

How was research into capacity of STM completed?

Answer 18

This was a serial digit spam study, where the researcher gave a number of digits and participants had to recall them all in order

The researcher would then increase the amount by one digit and the participant had to recall again until they could not recall the correct order.
This indicates their digit span

Question 19

What were the results of the digit span study for capacity in STM?

Answer 19

The main digit span for all participants was 9.3 items, the letters it was less at 7.3 letters.

Question 20

What did Miller suggest about capacity and STM?

Answer 20

That the capacity of STM is about seven items, plus or minus 2
He also suggested that we can remember five words as easily as five letters through trunking, gripping sets of digits or letters into chunks.

Question 21

What is the evaluation for capacity?

Answer 21

Jacob study has been replicated, the study is extremely old and probably lacked adequate controls. Despite this Jacob’s findings have been confirmed by other better, controlled studies since. This shows validity for Jacob’s study.

Question 22

What was the research into duration in STM?

Answer 22

This research aimed to see if rehearsal was necessary to hold information in the STM store.
Students took part in eight tests. They were given sets of three letters/constant syllables to remember. But were immediately asked count backwards in threes out loud to prevent mental rehearsal.
On each trial they were told to stop after a different amount of time increasing in threes until 18 seconds. They were then asked to recall the letters in the correct order

Question 23

What were the results of research into duration of STM?

Answer 23

From three seconds to 18 seconds the average recall went from 80% to 3%.

If too many pieces of information were stored, then displacement happens. This means at the first a piece of information stored in the STM is the first piece replaced when Mexican maximum capacity happens.

It was concluded that STM duration may be around 18 seconds without rehearsal.

Question 24

What is the research into duration of LTM?

Answer 24

Over 300 American participants age 17 to 74 from Ohio tested and high school yearbook obtained.
The tests of recall included:
A free recall test where participants tried to remember the names of people in a graduate class
Photo recognition test, consisting of 50 pictures, some from the yearbook
A name recognition test of ex school friends

Question 25

What were the results of research into duration in LTM?

Answer 25

Participants tested within 15 years of graduation, were about 90% accurate and identifying names and faces.
After 48 years they were around 70% accurate in recognition
Free recall was worse and after 15 years it was only around 60%.

However, overall, this shows that LTM last very long time.

Question 26

What is the evaluation for duration?

Answer 26

For STM, the stimuli was meaningless suggesting the day has a lack of external validity cannot be applied to real life

For LTM, he had investigated meaningful memories that people would be likely to know in real life.