cognitive psychology

Question 1

Peterson and Peterson-supporting study to evidence MSM?

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

supporting study to evidence MSM- Glanzer and Cunitz?

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

CASE study to support MSM?

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

what is the working memory model comprised of?

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

CASE STUDY to support Baddeley and Hitch WMM?

Answer 5

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.

Question 6

Supporting evidence for reconstructive memory?

Answer 6

Bartletts study of reconstructive memory-
War of the Ghosts

Question 7

Supporting evidence for reconstructive memory

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Supporting evidence for reconstructive memory and EWT-Loftus and Palmer?

Answer 8

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)

Question 9

Case studies to support Tulvings theory of LTM?

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Applications of Tulvings theory?

Answer 10

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.

Question 11

Supporting evidence of Tulvings episodic and semantic memory?

Answer 11

Godden and Baddeley tested this and found that divers who learned words underwater recalled them better underwater than on land.

Question 12

evidence for MSM-Miller 1957

Answer 12

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).

Question 13

Sebastian and Hernandez Gill digit span 5 years old compared to 17 years old

Answer 13

5 years old= 3.76
17 years old= 5.91
Shows that digit span increases over time with age

Question 14

Sebastian and Hernandez Gill- why did Spanish children have lower digit span than British children?

Answer 14

Could be due to the world length effect as Spanish words have more syllables making it harder to remember.

Question 15

what was the aim of the cognitive practical?

Answer 15

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

Question 16

IV and DV of cognitive practical

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

cognitive practical alternate (HA) hypothesis

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

cognitive practical strength (PE)

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

One weakness of the cognitive practical

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

Evidence for VSSP in WMM- Robbins et al

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Evidence for the WMM- Baddeley and Hitch

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

Developmental psych- Alloway et al dyslexia

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

McDougall et al. (1994) - dyslexia and children

Answer 23

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.

Question 24

Baddeley 2001 Alzheimer’s

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

evidence against the MSM- Bekerian and Baddeley

Answer 25

Found that people did not know that the BBC radio wavelengths were changing despite them hearing the information over 1000 times on the radio. This suggests that the model may overemphasise rehearsal and there might be other processes involved in transferring information from STM to LTM.

Question 26

name the 3 individual differences in memory

Answer 26

1- processing speed- the speed at which we can process information differs between individuals

2- schemas (Bartlett)- Bartlett suggests that people will have similar information in different schemas

3- episodic memory- episodic memories/ naturalistic autobiographical memory are individual to the person as it is a collection of memories of their own life.

Question 27

Daniela Palombo et al (2012)- episodic/ autographical memory

Answer 27

Investigated individuals differences in naturalistic autobiographical memories in natural settings. They subdivided autobiographical memory into four domains: episodic, semantic memory , spatial memory and prospective memory. They then gave 598 volunteers a Survey of Autobiographical Memory (SAM). They found that:
-people who scored high or low on episodic memory also scored high or low on sematic memory which illustrates we have a good or poor memory overall.
-men scored higher on spatial memory which backs up previous research showing that men have strong spatial abilities than females.
-People who self reported having depression scored low on episodic and semantic memory.

Question 28

Characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease

Answer 28

It is characterised by memory loss, concentration loss, confusion and changes in mood. All of these things will get worse as the disorder develops. Alzheimers disease impairs certain cognitive systems rather than all of them. In particular, Alzheimer’s detoriates memory for new events/ information. It also affects working memory, central executive functioning and visuospatial processing. A major characteristic of alzheimers disease is the inability to recall autobiographical information from episodic memory which shows that it affects short term and long term memory recall.

Question 29

what is the function of the visuospatial sketchpad?

Answer 29

It stores and processes visual and spatial information. It also aids navigation by stopping us bumping into things. It also displays and manipulates visual and spatial information that is held in our long term memory.

Question 30

what is the function of the articulatory rehearsal system?

Answer 30

It is linked to speech production as it is used to rehearse and store verbal information such as remembering a phone number.

Question 31

what is the function of the phonological loop?

Answer 31

It is the inner ear. It is linked to speech perception and it holds information in speech based form for 1-2 secs.

Question 32

what is the role and function of the central executive?

Answer 32

It controls and delegates information to the slave systems and also deals with cognitive tasks such as problem solving

Question 33

psychological knowledge in society MSM- Butler and Roediger

Answer 33

found that the rehearsal of information presented in a lecture increased the recall of information one month later which evidences that students can learn more effectively through rehearsal

Question 34

The Innocence Project (key question)

Answer 34

The Innocence Project identified that 72% of wrongful convictions were partly or wholly due to eyewitness misidentification

Question 35

The Delvin Report 1976 (key question)

Answer 35

concluded that courts should be very cautious in the sole reliance of eyewitness testimony in the absence of other evidence

Question 36

State two findings of Baddeley and Hitch

Answer 36

-Baddeley (1966b) found a tendency for acoustically similar lists to be harder than the control list during early learning/from STM (1).

-Baddeley (1966b) found the semantically similar list had poorer recall than the control list on the surprise retest/from LTM (1)

Question 37

Bahrick- investigated very long term memory

Answer 37

Got participants to identify their previous high school classmates. Found that within 15 years, identification of names and faces was 90% correct and within 48 years identification of names and faces was 70-80% correct, illustrating long term memory does have a potentially limitless capacity.