Cognitive

Question 1

The working memory model

Answer 1

Baddeley and Hitch (1974) is an explanation of how short term memory is organised and how the it functions. The model is concerned with the ‘mental space’ that is active when we temporarily store information. The model consists of 4 main components, a central control system assisted 3 ‘slave’ subsystems.

Question 2

The central executuive

Answer 2

It is an attentional process that has a ‘supervisory’ role. It focuses, divides and switches our limited attention. It monitors incoming data, makes decisions and allocates slave subsystems to tasks. The CE has very limited processing capacity and does not store information, even very briefly.

Question 3

The phonological loop

Answer 3

It is a slave subsystem. It deals with auditory information like sounds of languages and so the encoding is acoustic. It preservers the information in which it arrives.
Subdivided into the:
- Articulatory process (AP) which allows maintenance rehearsal. The capacity of this loop is 2 seconds worth of what you can say
- Phonological store (SP) which stores auditory information

Question 4

The visuo-spatial sketchpad

Answer 4

It is a slave subsystem. It can temporarily store visual and/or spatial information. Limited capacity of 3-4 objects (Robert Logie-1995). It is divided into:
- Visual cache, which stores visual data (images)
- Inner scribe, which records the arrangement of objects in the visual field. It is a process that allows you to rehearse visual/spatial information, to maintain it in the visual cache

Question 5

The episodic buffer

Answer 5

It is a slave subsystem. It was added to the model in 2000. It is a temporary store that integrates acoustic, visual, and spatial information processes by other subsystems. It maintains a sense of time sequencing, basically recording events (episodes) that are happening. It has a limited capacity of about 4 chucks (Baddeley 2012). It combines the information from the other subsystems with long term-memory and links to wider cognitive processes such as perception.

Question 6

Evaluation of the working memory model (strengths)

Answer 6

Support from other research. Baddeley (1975) found that participants performed a visual and verbal (dual-task performance), performance on each was no worse that when they did it separately. However, when doing two visual tasks, performance on both declines as the tasks compete for the same subsystem, whereas when they are doing one visual and one auditory task there is no competition.
Also the case study of patient KF shows that there are different subsystems. He got amnesia after a brain injury. He had poor short term memory for auditory information but could process visual information relatively normal. For example, his immediate recall of words and digits was better if he read them than read out to him.

Question 7

Evaluation of the working memory model (weaknesses)

Answer 7

Lack of clarity over the central executive. Baddeley (2003) said that the central executive ‘is the most important role but the least understood’. It needs to be more clearly specified that just simply ‘being attention’. Some researchers (including Baddeley) believe that is consists of separate subcomponents. It is not fully explained.
Another explanation for this is the multi store model of memory which is a linear which believe that memory is encoded from the sensory register to the short term memory to the long term memory.

Question 8

Application of the Working memory model

Answer 8

Understanding more about the nature of a clinical memory disorder, amnesia with patients like KF. It shows that amnesia is not necessarily a ‘global’ disorder that affects all memory.

Question 9

The multi store model of memory

Answer 9

By Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968, 1971) it was described to be how information would get into the memory system (encoding) through storage (in working the memory/short term memory), how it remains there (long term memory) and how it gets out again.
Stimulus from the environment- sensory register-attention- short term memory (response or displacement) / rehearsal- transfer - longer term memory (displace/decay or retrieval)

Question 10

The sensory register

Answer 10

All stimuli from environment pass into the sensory register. Five sense, Iconic = visual, Echoic = acoustic and touch, taste, smell. Duration is less than half a second but has a very high capacity. However, very little goes into the sensory register. Key process is attention

Question 11

What is short term memory?

Answer 11

It is temporary store. It has a limited capacity because it can only only contain a certain number of ‘things’. Miller magic number 7 plus or minus 2. Baddeley found that is what encoded acoustically. He found that when people recall words from a list immediately, any mistakes are acoustic. Lloyd and Peterson found that the duration is between 18-30 seconds. So information is forgotten quickly but it can be extended through maintenance rehearsal.

Question 12

What is long term memory?

Answer 12

It is a potentially permanent memory store for material that has been rehearsed for a prolonged period of time. It has a unlimited capacity. Baddeley found that the encoding is semantic, giving information meaning. Bahrick et al (1975) found that participants were still able to recall names and faces of school mates 50 years on.

Question 13

What does informational processing suggest?

Answer 13

Suggests that information flows through human cognitive system in a sequence of stages including input, storage and retrieval. It sound like how a computer works by psychologists believed they were similar.

Question 14

Multi store model of memory (strengths)

Answer 14

MSM is supported by research. Baddeley (1966 a, b) found that we mix up words that sound similar when we are using our STM but we mix up the words that have a similar meaning when we use our LTM.
HM who a seizures as a child had his hippocampus removed was unable to form long term memories but could form short term memories. This shows that they are separate stores.

Question 15

Multi store model of memory (weaknesses)

Answer 15

The STM is simplistic and reductionist. For example the case study KF who suffered from amnesia had better performance when recalling information that he read rather that is being read out to him, showing that the STM is too simple.
Another explanation is the working memory model which divides into slave subsystems and for different information like visual and acoustic.

Question 16

Application of the multi store model of memory

Answer 16

Improving memory by chunking larger information into smaller information so it can be stored in the short term memory.

Question 17

What is the idea of long term memory (by Tulving)?

Answer 17

Tulving (1972) was one of the first cognitive psychologist to realise that the multi-stores model’s view on long-term memory (LTM)was too simplistic and inflexible. He proposed that there are in fact at least two LTM systems, containing quite different types of information. He called one episodic memory and semantic memory.

Question 18

What is episodic memory?

Answer 18

It refers to our ability to recall events from our lives. This is likened with diary, which records daily happenings. Autobiographical because they are personal events like going to a concert or a class you had.

Question 19

What are the key features of episodic memory?

Answer 19

First they are timed stamped, like remember when they happened (last week, this morning). We also store information about how they relate to each other in time. Second, single episode includes several elements (people, places, objects, and behaviours) all of them are interwoven to produce a single memory. Third, episodic memory allows us to ‘time travel’. We can thick to past events and relive them. May not recall them to exact detail but immediately aware that it is our personal experience, and not a dream, Tulving (1985) called this a form of awareness autonoetic consciousness.

Question 20

What is semantic memory?

Answer 20

This includes our knowledge of the world include facts. Combination of an encyclopaedia and a dictionary. For example, the taste of an orange or the meaning of words.

Question 21

What are the key features of semantic memory?

Answer 21

Necessary for us to use language. It stores your organised knowledge of language and contains an impressive range and number of concepts. Allows us to mentally represent things that are not present like people, places, objects, etc. It is less vulnerable to distortion and forgetting than semantic memory. Not time-stamped. More about facts. Immense collection of material which, given its nature is constantly being added to.

Question 22

What did Tulving add in 1985?

Answer 22

Procedural memory identified a third type of long term memory. This is our memory for action, or skills, or basically how we do things. We recall these memories without conscious awareness or a great deal of effort. Example, walking, driving a car, riding a bike. After much practice become procedural memory and we might find it hard to explain it someone else. Allow us to learn (like store associations between stimuli, the basics of classical conditioning) and to respond to the environment.

Question 23

Strengths of Long Term Memory

Answer 23

Case study like HM, who had their hippocampus removed, had difficulty recalling events from his past but his semantic memory was relatively unaffected. He could not recall owning a dog but didn’t need the concept of a ‘dog’ to be explained to him.
Baddeley (1966b) supports the existence of the semantic memory as participants found it difficult to recall words with similar meanings and unrelated words were not difficult. This shows that a least a part of the LTM works semantically.

Question 24

Weaknesses of the Long Term Memory

Answer 24

Some psychologist do not accept that episodic and semantic memory is entirely different forms of the LTM. Tulving 2002 came to view episodic memory as a ‘specialised subcategory’ of semantic memory. In his research of amnesic patients. Fully functioning semantic memory with a damaged episodic memory but it cannot be the other way around. They know that something has happened but cannot re-experience it. This shows it is more complex.
It is hard to define semantic and episodic memory is a measurable way. Tulving’s concepts can’t be operationalised (used).
Squire and Zola (1998) looks a amnesic children (no semantic memory) and adults (who had semantic and episodic memories before brain damage) and found they were equally impaired (linked or same thing)

Question 25

Application of the long term memory?

Answer 25

Belleville et al. (2006) worked with older people had had mild memory impairment. They patients undertook a training programme to improve their episodic memories. Compared with the control group, these participants performed better on the test of episodic memory after the training. Also favours there being different types.

Question 26

Reproduction vs reconstructive

Answer 26

Many people believe they can accurately recall events from their past. Psychologists also thought that memory is a simple act of reproduction- without alterations. Bartlett (1932) challenged this view, by arguing that memories are not reproductions but reconstructions. He saw memory as an active process in which we store fragments of information. When we need to recall something we build (reconstruct) these fragments into meaningful whole. The result is that some elements are missing, some are distorted, and the memory is not completely accurate record of what happened.

Question 27

The ‘War of the Ghosts’ story

Answer 27

Bartlett showed British participants a story, ‘War of the Ghosts’ a folk tale from a very different culture (Indigenous Americans), so it would have been unfamiliar. He showed it and then left and asked them to reproduce it 15 mins later. Then showed Bartlett the new version to another person and asked them to recall it a short time later, and repeated this chain with further participants- serial reproduction. He found that the story transformed over time. For example, the phrases were altered - rationalisations, ‘canoe’ often became ‘boat’. It got shorter through omissions (unfamiliar details left out). Not random- they had an effect of making the story more conventional, coherent and meaningful to the participant. Scheme theory.

Question 28

What is the ‘Schema theory’?

Answer 28

Bartlett believed that what we remember is governed by our schemas. It is a mental structure of memory, a ‘packaging’ containing all our stored knowledge of aspects of the world (people, situations, objects, actions, events, abstract concepts). For example, showing people’s schemas could be shown as everyone in a class asked to write down words relating to a bank robbery. There would be similarities and differences. During everyday experiences, the relevant schema is activated. The schema allows us to process information about the situation more efficiently by making some guesses about what the situation is probably like, based on our past experiences. They can be changed by new knowledge and experiences.

Question 29

Schemas and memory

Answer 29

Schemas and memory in two main ways- what you encode/store and what you retrieve. New knowledge that conflicts with an existing schema could easily fail to be encoded in the first place. It just doesn’t fit in with what you expect, so you don’t notice it or it doesn’t ‘register’ in memory. Later, when you try to recall a memory, you might recall only those elements that fit with the relevant schema. Other elements that don’t fit are either forgotten altogether or are recalled in a distorted form.

Question 30

Strengths of Reconstructive memory

Answer 30

It is based off of evidence found with the ‘War of the Ghost’ story. This makes it more realistic than a lot of other memory research. Before they used more artificial materials to be learned (rarely use our memory to deal with these situations). More relevant to real life memory process.
Schemas explain false memories, 2005 John Charles De Menezes was mistaken for the terrorist and shot by police following the 7/7 London Bombings. Many eyewitnesses of the shooting had different recollections and were often exaggerated.

Question 31

Weaknesses of Reconstructive memory

Answer 31

It suggests that all memories are inaccurate or affected by schemas. Other studies have shown that memory can be very accurate like for situations that are personally important and there were some examples in the ‘War of the Ghosts’.
‘War of the Ghosts’ can not be generalisable as the participants are from one demographic. Bartlett’s study didn’t follow standardised procedure and getting his students to reproduce the story as of when and had no scoring system. Conclusions are subjective.

Question 32

Application of reconstructive memory

Answer 32

It can be used to explain problems with eye witness testimony. Give accurate picture of what happened. Eye-witness might swear under oath that they had seen a particular person commit a crime but later evidence can challenge this. Include expectations of what might happen. People do not always recall what they see or hear accurately.

Question 33

Classical study: Baddeley (1966b)- Aims

Answer 33

Baddeley conducted a study where he showed that recall of acoustically similar words from short term memory was poor. However, STM was not affected by semantically similar words. In the study we are considering he aimed to apply the same procedure to find out if a similar pattern of results existed for long-term memory (LTM).

Question 34

Classical study: Baddeley (1966b)- Procedure

Answer 34

This was a laboratory experiment using an independent group design with 4 conditions of the independent variable. All 75 participants were young servicemen (Army). A hearing test was given before the the procedure and 3 participants were excluded.
- List A: Acoustically similar words
- List B: Acoustically dissimilar words
- List C: Semantically similar words
- List D: Semantically dissimilar words
Four separate groups of participants learned one list each. Numbers of participants recalling each list was 18 for A, 17 for B, 20 for C, 20 for D. Each list was presented aloud on tape, one word every three seconds. Participants had 40 seconds to write down as many ten words that they could recall, in the order they had heard them in. Carried out 4 times.
Each participant spent 20mins carrying out an unrelate task (recalling sequences of 8 digits). After this time, they again had to recall the ten words in correct order. This was an unexpected test.

Question 35

Classical study: Baddeley (1966b)- Findings

Answer 35

Each participant’s performance was measured by the number of words they recalled in the correct position in the list. Differences in performance on the four lists were compared using a Mann-Whitney U test.
On the learning trails (STM), recall of the acoustically similar list (A) was consistently lower than that of acoustically dissimilar words (B). But recalling 20 mins later (LTM), there is no significant difference in the acoustically similar words, but acoustically dissimilar decreased a lot. There was no difference between the recall between the 2 semantic lists and for the recall test 20 mins later.

Question 36

Classical study: Baddeley (1966b)- conclusion

Answer 36

Finding were ‘puzzling’ according to Baddeley. Due to the results not being expected, this was not the end of the study. The experiment was not a true test of the LTM as material was influenced by the STM. This led him to carry out more experiments to find out the true precise nature of LTM encoding.

Question 37

Classical study: Baddeley (1966b)- Strengths

Answer 37

It has high internal validity. They used well-controlled procedures. Lists A and B and C and D were matched in terms of how frequently they appear in the English language. This meant that the results could not be explained by participants being able to remember more familiar words.
It was standardise and it can be easily replicated.

Question 38

Classical study: Baddeley (1966b)- Weakness

Answer 38

A limitation to the experiment is that the confounding variables were not controlled. Procedure did not rule out STM influence on later recall from the LTM because the participants could still rehearse the words before the learning trails. This is why Baddeley conducted 2 further experiments and experiment 1 could not fully test his hypothesis.
Another limitation is that as it was so tightly controlled that they were artificial and unlike real life. STM and LTM usually won’t interact in this way.

Question 39

Classical study: Baddeley (1966b)- Application

Answer 39

Encoding in the LTM is mostly semantic can help to improve long term recall of information. Used for students revising for exams, rather than repeating, students are better advised to think about the information, to reorganise it and try to relate it to things they already know. Meaning of the material, which matches the form of encoding to the LTM.

Question 40

Contemporary study: Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012)- Aims

Answer 40

Development of the phonological loop in the working memory model. Verbal digit span as their measure of loop capacity. Confirm the findings of the studies with Anglo-Saxon children as their digit span increased to 15 years old. Compare Spanish children with Anglo-Saxon elderly with dementia.

Question 41

Contemporary study: Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012)- Procedure

Answer 41

Field setting. Independent variable is the year of schooling and the dependent variable was mean verbal digit span. 575 children from pre, primary, and secondary schools (public and private) in Madrid. All born in Spain. Selected for 13 years of school. No child had repeated a year and no child had hearing, reading, or writing difficulties or any cognitive impairment. Tested individually during break times. Material used consisted of random digits that gradually increase by one in length each time. They were read aloud to them. The task began with 4 digits 3 different time, listened then asked to repeat in order. Completed a practice. Digit span was the longest sequence the child could recall, 2/3 presented, in the right order without error.

Question 42

Contemporary study: Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012)- Findings

Answer 42

Showed a clear increase in digit span with age. Youngest (5) had a significantly lower digit span on average of 3.76 than the other age groups. Increased smoothly until 11 years (mean=5.28), slow and stabilised at 17 (mean= 5.91). Compared to Anglo-Saxon elderly, healthy elderly and elderly with dementia had a significantly higher digit span than that of 5-6 years old.

Question 43

Contemporary study: Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012)- Conclusion

Answer 43

Spanish increased up to 17 but Anglo-Saxon increased up to 15. Average digit span was lower in Spanish children than Anglo-Saxon children. Word length effect- more time to rehearse longer words, more information is likely to be lost. Spanish words tend to be longer than English words. Comparison of dementia groups, healthy elderly and schoolchildren suggest the phonological loop is more affect by age than dementia.

Question 44

Contemporary study: Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012)- Strengths

Answer 44

It was a large sample shows that it is more generalisable to the population.
It is reliable as they had a standardised procedure.
Valid due to the control variables

Question 45

Contemporary study: Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012)- weaknesses

Answer 45

Not generalisable due to all the children coming for one area of Spain and there were more females than males in the study.
There may have been extraneous variables from school.
Doesn’t actually show how the short term memory works, not a full explanation.

Question 46

Contemporary study: Sebastian and Hernandez-Gil (2012)- Application

Answer 46

Used to understand specific cognitive abilities. Longer digit span= better reading=Higher IQ, lower digit span associated with learning disorders like dyslexia.

Question 47

Key question: How can psychologist’s understanding of memory help patients with dementia?

Answer 47

Facts:
- 1 in 14 over 65 and 1 in 6 over 80 have dementia
- over 850,000 people have dementia expected to rise to 1 million in 2025
- Costs £30,000-£80,000 per year (tax payer)
- Costs UK about £34.7billion each year
- Alzheimer’s there is no cure (most common)- destroys neurons in entorhinal cortex and hippocampus (long term memory)
- Dementia impaired ability to remember, interferes with everyday activities
- Parkinson’s effects movement- tremors
- Tulving- episodic memories- help by showing pictures and give hints
- Short term memory capacity smaller- harder to have conversations- stressful- give one piece of information at a time.
- Not making sense- reconstructive memory- schema and mixing up their episodic memory- try to limit questions- still try to follow the story.

Question 48

Cognitive practical: acoustically similar and dissimilar words

Answer 48

Hypothesis: Recall more acoustically dissimilar than similar
Null hypothesis: There will be no difference
Procedure: field experiment (classroom). Two groups evenly separated. Independent. Labelled condition A (similar) and condition B (dissimilar). List of 10 words presented through a projector, stayed up for 3 seconds. 1 minute recall
Findings: Similar mean = 5.3 and dissimilar = 5.7.
Conclusion: Greater recall with acoustically dissimilar words