cognitive psychology Flashcards
Peterson and Peterson-supporting study to evidence MSM?
Peterson and Peterson- aimed to investigate duration of STM and provide empirical evidence for MSM. A lab experiment was conducted in which 24 participants had to recall trigrams. To prevent rehearsal participants had to count back from a certain number in 3s or 4s until a red light appeared. They then had to recall the trigram.
They found that Ps were able to recall 80% of the trigram after 3 second delay, however after an 18 second delay and interference only 10% of trigrams were recalled correctly.
Concluded that STM had a limited duration when rehearsal was prevented. Also shows STM is different from LTM in terms of duration therefore supporting MSM.
supporting study to evidence MSM- Glanzer and Cunitz?
Glanzer and Cunitz 1966- certain words were read aloud by a teacher, slowly and clearly. Found that first words read allowed were remembered clearly due to primacy effect and last words were remembered clearly due to recency effect but middle words were often forgotten. This supports the idea of two separate stores.
CASE study to support MSM?
HM- had a bilateral mesial temporal lobe reduction and lost 2/3 of his hippocampus due to suffering from seizures. Due to this, he had memory lost, could not remember daily events and struggled to form new memories. Case study evidences MSM as shows that there is a clear distinction between STM and LTM as he could form STM but not long term memories.
what is the working memory model comprised of?
Central executive
Phonological loop- phonological store and articulatory control system.
Visuospatial Sketchpad- specialised for visual and spatial coding.
Added in 2000- the episodic buffer which acts as a general store.
CASE STUDY to support Baddeley and Hitch WMM?
Case of KF- in the 1970s experienced a motorcycle accident, resulting in damage to his parietal lobe. He had a digit span of 1 suggesting impairment to the phonological store but an intact visual store.
Supporting evidence for reconstructive memory?
Bartletts study of reconstructive memory-
War of the Ghosts
Supporting evidence for reconstructive memory
Brewer and Treyens 1981- had participants wait in an office and asked them to recall items they had seen in the office. They recalled items like desk, stapler but did not recall unexpected items like a pair of plyers.
Supporting evidence for reconstructive memory and EWT-Loftus and Palmer?
Loftus and Palmer- found that particpants memories could be altered through leading questions which indicates memory is reconstructive. (Smashed condition 40.8 compared to hit verb 34mph)
Case studies to support Tulvings theory of LTM?
Clive Wearing- contracted a viral infection which caused him to have total amnesia. Lost episodic memory but still had semantic memory.
KC- couldnt recall episodic events but could recall semantic facts
HM- episodic memory was impaired but his semantic memory was intact which suggests that there were two separate spheres.
Applications of Tulvings theory?
Belleville 2006 carried out a cognitive training programme on people with memory impairment using semantic memory to help retrieve episodic memories. Found that episodic memory improved.
Supporting evidence of Tulvings episodic and semantic memory?
Godden and Baddeley tested this and found that divers who learned words underwater recalled them better underwater than on land.
evidence for MSM-Miller 1957
Miller (1957) did an earlier study into “the Magic Number 7, plus or minus 2”. He found that STM has a capacity of 7 items (or “bits”) of information comfortably, but struggles to hold more than 9. Miller found that “bits” of information can be grouped together into “chunks”. STM can hold more information in chunks, but loses accuracy (eg recalling a whole face instead of remembering eye colour).
Sebastian and Hernandez Gill digit span 5 years old compared to 17 years old
5 years old= 3.76
17 years old= 5.91
Shows that digit span increases over time with age
Sebastian and Hernandez Gill- why did Spanish children have lower digit span than British children?
Could be due to the world length effect as Spanish words have more syllables making it harder to remember.
what was the aim of the cognitive practical?
To investigate the effect of reconstructive memory and memory decay on an eyewitnesses memory recall when Ps had a time delay in between reporting an incident
IV and DV of cognitive practical
IV- amount of time between witnessing the stabbing incident on a video and recall
condition A- immediate recall after seeing the video of the stabbing
condition B- recall after a time delay (2 weeks) after seeing the video of the stabbing
DV- memory recall of the stabbing (immediately after and two week time delay) amount of correctly answered questions out of 10 on a fixed response questionnaire memory test based around the event.
cognitive practical alternate (HA) hypothesis
There will be a significant difference between amount of correctly answered questions out of 10 on a fixed response questionnaire about the video of a stabbing when recall is immediate compared to 2 weeks after.
cognitive practical strength (PE)
One strength of the cognitive practical was that it was a lab experiment where standardised procedures were used to make it reliable. This is a strength as it can be repeated to gain consistent results. For example, the stimulated stabbing incident was shown on video so all of the participants would see exactly the same scenario from the same point of view and all participants answered the same 10 fixed response questions to ensure reliability.
One weakness of the cognitive practical
One weakness of the cognitive practical is that it lacked ecological validity so the results cannot be generalised to real life. For example, the participants were asked to watch a video of a stimulated stabbing which was artificial. Normally, eyewitnesses witness an event in real life which could be traumatic and therefore may affect their memory more.
Evidence for VSSP in WMM- Robbins et al
Robbins et al. (1996) tested participants’ ability to remember and replicate chess positions (using the VSSP) and found that when completing a task simultaneously that also used to VSSP, performance was worse.
Evidence for the WMM- Baddeley and Hitch
Baddeley & Hitch (1976) asked participants to track the location of a moving light on a screen whilst imagining the capital letter F. They had to mentally follow the edges of the letter and say out loud whether the angles they imagined were at the top or bottom of the image. Participants struggled to do both at the same time because they were using the VSSP for both tasks.
Developmental psych- Alloway et al dyslexia
Alloway et al. (2009) suggest that children with dyslexia have difficulty in processing and remembering speech sounds because of poor working memory. They cannot hold all of the speech sounds for long enough in working memory to be able to bind them together to form a word. Investigating 46 children, aged 6–11 years with a reading disability, she found that they showed short-term working memory deficits that could be the cause of their reading problems.
McDougall et al. (1994) - dyslexia and children
McDougall et al. (1994) Found that a basic inefficiency in phonological processing and storage may explain dyslexia. divided 90 children into three different reading ability groups and found that poor readers had significantly lower memory spans for words and a slow reading rate.
Baddeley 2001 Alzheimer’s
Baddeley et al. (2001) conducted some experiments to investigate attentional control in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Participants had to look for the letter ‘Z’ among both easy and difficult distractor letters (either they looked like Z or didn’t) and a dual task procedure*. They found that those with Alzheimer’s disease performed worse on the difficult version and were more impaired on the dual task than a control group of people without Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting tasks where attention is needed on more than one thing are specifically impaired by the disease.
