Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
What is duration?
How long the memories are held in the store.
What is capacity?
How much the memory store can hold.
What is coding?
The form in which the memories are held in the store.
What is the capacity of sensory memory?
Attention
What is the capacity of short-term memory?
7+/-2 items
What is the capacity of long-term memory?
Unlimited
What is the duration of sensory memory?
Less than seconds
What is the duration of short-term memories?
Seconds
What is the duration of long-term memory?
Lifetime
How is sensory memory encoded?
The senses
How is short-term memory encoded?
Visual and acoustic
How is long-term memory encoded?
Semantic
How do memories move from one memory store to the next?
Through a process of rehearsal.
How do we rehearse information?
By repeating it to ourselves.
What happens when we pay attention to something?
It is rehearsal enough to ensure it passes from sensory to STM.
Why do we sometimes forget things?
Because the LTM struggles to retrieve all the information that it stores.
What did Glanzer and Cunitz’s 1966 study demonstrate?
The serial position effect
What was the method of Glanzer and Cunitz’s 1966 study?
Gave participants lists of words presented one at a time and then tested their free recall.
Condition 1: participants asked to recall words immediately.
Condition 2: participants given a distraction task before recall
What were the results of Glanzer and Cunitz’s 1966 study?
Serial position curve - the first and last words were recalled best. First word - had time to rehearse primary effect, last word - fresh in STM recency effect.
What is the advantage of using a laboratory experiment?
Replicable and reliable
What were some disadvantages of Glanzer and Cunitz’s 1966 study?
Lacks mundane realism
What happened to HM and what effect did it have on his brain?
Brain damage caused by hippocampus removal operation to reduce severe epilepsy.
Personality and intellect unharmed but can’t form new LTM. Can remember LTM from before.
What does the case of HM suggest about the Hippocampus?
Hippocampus functions as a memory gateway which new memories pass through before entering LTM.
What happened to Clive Wearing and what effect did it have on his brain?
Viral brain infection.
Dramatically reduced memory for personal events and general knowledge. Forgets things in a few seconds and regrets his wife whenever he sees her. Can still talk, walk etc
What does Clive Wearing’s case suggest about the brain?
His LTM is intact but STM impaired as he can’t form new memories.
What did Sperling (1960) find about sensory memory?
Times remain in sensory memory for less than a few seconds
Info in sensory memory unprocessed
Info is passively registered in sensory memory - cannot recall
Separate sensory stores for different senses
How can you lose information from the LTM?
Memory decay
Interfering other memories
Not capacity
Who did Luria (1968) study and what did he find?
Solomon Shereshevsky
Had best ever memory, could remember almost every detail in his life and had no limit to his memory capacity
What technique did Jacobs (1887) propose?
Digit span technique
What did Miller (1956) conclude about the STM?
Span of STM is 7+/-2 items
What did Simon (1974) find?
The size of the chunk affects how many chunks you can remember
What did Cowan find about the STM?
STM may be limited to just 4 rather than 5 chunks
What did MacLeod and Donnellan (1993) find about the STM?
Different people have different STM capacities - individual differences
E.g. Anxious people have shorter STM span.
What did Peterson and Peterson (1959) want to find out?
How long items stay in STM without rehearsal.
What was the method of Peterson and Peterson’s 1959 study?
Pps given consonant trigram.
Asked to count back in threes from specific number to stop rehearsal.
After intervals of time they were asked to recall the trigrams.
Repeated with different trigrams.
What did Peterson and Peterson find?
Pps could recall 80% of trigram after 3 sec interval.
Recall worsened as interval lengthened
After 18 secs they could recall less than 10%.
What is an advantage of the Peterson and Peterson study?
Lab experiment so good variable control and few extraneous variables.
Easily repeatable and reliable.
What is an advantage of the Peterson and Peterson study being a repeated measures design?
It avoids individual differences.
Give three disadvantages of the Peterson and Peterson study?
Lack of mundane realism.
Loss of info may be because of capacity limitations.
Proactive interference - earlier trigrams may cause confusion meaning later trigrams were incorrectly recalled.
What are two factors affecting the duration of STM?
If we repeat info it extends STM duration.
If we know we are going to need to remember info later, we can recall it for longer.
What did Bahrick et al (1975) do?
Used various memory tests including the recognition of classmates pictures, matching names to pictures etc.
Pps performed well up to 34 yrs
Performance better on recognition tasks (cued recall)
Dip in all types of memory performance after 47yrs - could be ageing effects on the brain rather than time.
What are four factors affecting the duration of LTM?
- Remember things from the past better of given cues
- remember things for longer if learnt well in the first place
- Certain topics recalled more accurately
- if vocabulary is learnt over a long period of time it is retained for longer
What did Conrad (1964) investigate?
STM encoding techniques
What was the method of Conrad’s (1965) study?
Showed pps random sequence of 6 consonants. Letters either acoustically similar or dissimilar. Pps told to write down letters immediately so they were accessed from STM.
What did Conrad (1964) find?
Pps often mistook similar sounding letters for one another e.g. v and d.
For this acoustic confusion to occur we must convert visually presented material to acoustic material in STM.
What are some evaluative points about Conrad’s (1964) study?
Lacks mundane realism and ecological validity.
Lacks population validity - used students.
What was Baddeley trying to find out in his 1966 study?
How LTM was encoded.
What was the method of Baddeley’s (1966) study?
Presented pps with lists of words that were acoustically and semantically similar and dissimilar.
Prevented them from rehearsing by interrupting after each presentation.
Recall tested after 20 mins.
What did Baddeley find in his 1966 study?
Acoustic similarity had no effect on recall.
words similar in meaning were poorly recalled (lack of rehearsal meant they did not transfer well to the LTM)
Concluded LTM codes mainly semantic
What are some evaluation points for Baddeley’s 1966 study?
+ high control and replicability
- lacks mundane realism
+ poor hearing could have got in the way of recall - extraneous variables
(+) What does the MSM provide strong evidence of?
3 qualitatively different stores suggesting basis of MSM is sound.
(+) The MSM provides an account if memory in terms of both ______ and _______.
Structure and Process
What does the MSM have clear predictions about?
Memory which means that psychologists can conduct studies to test it.
(-) What are the STM and LTM not?
Unitary stores
(-) What does memory research usually relate to and what does this mean?
Semantic memory meaning it is relevant to some everyday memory activities e.g. Phone numbers but not all aspects of memory.
What does Baddeley and Hitch’s (1974) Working Memory Model focus on?
Short term memory (the working part of memory)
How is the WMM different to the MSM?
The MSM suggests STM is one unitary store. The WMM suggests STM has different parts which have different functions.
What are the four parts if the WMM?
Central Executive
Visio-spatial Sketchpad
Episodic Buffer
Phonological Loop
What does the Central Executive do?
Directs attention to particular tasks.
Determines how the slave systems are allocated to tasks.
Has limited capacity
What does the Phonological Loop do?
Deals with auditory information and preserves order of information.
Subdivided into phonological store (inner ear) which holds words you hear and articulatory process (inner voice) which is used for words heard or seen.
Limited capacity.
