Cognitive Psychology

Question 1

What are the memory theories and who came up with them?

Answer 1

1. Multi-store memory model by Atkinson and Schiffrin in 1968
2. Working memory model by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974
3. Reconstructive memory by Bartlett, 1932
4. LTM by Tulving 1972

Question 2

Describe the Multi-store model of memory. Components, encoding in each component, capacity for each, duration, how you can forget from each.

Answer 2

It contains 3 components:

1. Sensory register
2. Short-term memory
3. Long-term memory

Encoding:
SR- Information fromthe 5 senses
The STM stores acoustic
LTM stores semantic

Duration:
Less than a second
15-30 seconds
Very long- upto 46 years, shown by Bahrick et. al

Forgetting:
Lack of attention
Replaced/rewritten information
Lack of rehearsal

Capacity:
All sensory experience
7+/-2 items
Unlimited

Question 3

What are the types of memory and explain them

Answer 3

Acoustic memory- Memory that is heard

Semantic memory- Words, Facts, Rules, Meaning + Concepts are stored as Knowledge, similar to a Mental Encyclopaedia
e.g. Counting in French, Knowing Paris is the Capital of France

Episodic memory-Stored info about life Experiences + Events, sometimes called Autobiographical Memory; Similar to a Mental Diary
e.g. Receiving your GCSEs

Question 4

What Evidence supports the MSM?

Answer 4

Henry Molaison:
Brain Surgery damaged his LTM, but his STM is still intact - Proves they’re Separate
H.M. was left unable to make new memories. However, he still had a lot of memories from before his surgery, which suggests he still possessed LTM, but could no longer add to it.

Clive Wearing:
Unable to transfer STM to LTM
Proves they’re Separate
Clive Wearing could still use his STM to remember things for about 20 seconds but then he would forget everything – he could not “make new memories”. The Multi Store Model can be applied to his case, because it suggests an inability to rehearse information into LTM.

The Multi Store Model explains their disability as a failure to rehearse information, preventing them from encoding information in LTM.

Glanzer + Cunitz (Primary + Recency Effect):
First words are Remembered due to LTM, Last Words are Remembered due to STM (memories displaced when capacity exceeded) - Proves they’re Separate

Peterson and Peterson 1959:
Found that decay occurs in STM store over a period of 18 seconds, therefore there must be 2 distinct stores.

Miller 1957: suggests that the capacity of STM is 7+/-2 items

Bahrick et. al 1975:
Bahrick found that 60% of participants were able to correctly match the names and faces of students on their high school yearbook 47 years after graduation, and concluded that the LTM duration lasts almost a lifetime. This proves separate stores and supports Atkinson and Schiffrin’s claim about the duration of LTM.

Question 5

What Evidence challenges the MSM?

Answer 5

HM:
Couldn’t make long term memories, but could learn new skills -> challenges that STM is just 1 store

CW:
Couldn’t remember LT memories, but could play the piano + conduct an orchestra -> challenges that STM is just 1 store

Dual Tasks in eg. Darling et. al show diff capacity for diff types of information:
Better at remembering 2 of the same type than 2 different ->Challenges that STM has a fixed capacity.

WMM:
Proposes that there is more to the STM than the MSM explains. Explains the existence of dual tasks and

KF:
The case of KF shows that material in the STM is analysed for meaning, and not just for sound as proposed by the MSM.
He also could still add memories to LTM even though his STM was so damaged he couldn’t repeat back more than 2 digits. MSM cannot explain this.

Question 6

What are some Issues + Debates for the Multistore Model of Memory?

Answer 6

Brain damaged patients aren’t generalisable to all society.

Brain Damaged Patients are meant to be Anonymysed

Reductionist: The MSM underplays the connection between the Sensory Register, STM + LTM - too Simplistic

Question 7

How does retrieval occur during each part of MSM?

Answer 7

SR- Scanning
STM- retrieved sequentially. For example, if a group of participants are given a list of words to remember, and then asked to recall the fourth word on the list, participants go through the list in the order they heard it in order to retrieve the information.

LTM- retrieved by association. This is why you can remember what you went upstairs for if you go back to the room where you first thought about it. semantic/temporal search.

Question 8

Describe the working memory model fully

Answer 8

Comprises of 3 components:

Central executive
Phonological loop:
     -Articulatory store
     -Phonological store
Visuo-spatial sketchpad
Episodic buffer (addition by Baddeley in 2000)

CENTRAL EXECUTIVE
Supervises the system and oversees the 2 slave systems
Controls and/or Divides the amount of attention shared between the 2 systems
Modality free - can deal with any type of sensory info
Has a limited capacity

PHONOLOGICAL LOOP
Deals with the temporary store of verbal information.

It also involves rehearsing verbal information, allowing it to be held for a few seconds longer. It has evolved in to allow us to learn language.

ARTICULATORY REHEARSAL STORE
Known as the Inner Voice

Explains the Word Length Effect- shorter words w/ less syllables are recalled more successfully than longer words. The longer the word, the more capacity is used up, and forgetting is more likely.

PHONOLOGICAL STORE
Known as the Inner Ear

Holds a limited amount of verbal info for a few seconds, but can be extended if info is refreshed using the articulatory rehearsal system.

Explains the Phonological Similarity Effect- it’s more difficult to remember similar sounding words than different sounding words. However, this effect wasn’t true regarding words with semantic similarity. This shows the phonological store depends on acoustic encoding.

VISUO-SPATIAL SKETCHPAD
Deals with visual and spatial information

It deals with the info either directly through observing images or by retrieving visuospatial info from the LTM.

Uses a visual code to maintain + integrate the info

Spatial scan has been tested using the Corsi block tapping task, where participants have to recall a sequence of lit up block on a screen, with the number of lit up block increasing every time

EPISODIC BUFFER
Episodic Buffer is a limited capacity system, that could integrate information between subcomponents, as well as feeding/retrieving info to and from the LTM.

Question 9

What problem did the original WMM have that required the addition of the Episodic Buffer?

Answer 9

A problem with the original WMM was that it didn’t explain why the phonological loop had such a limited storage, but far longer sentences could be bound together by meaning/grammar.

It also failed to explain the interconnections between subcomponents, as well as the LTM

Question 10

What Evidence supports the Working Memory Model as a theory of memory?

Answer 10

William’s Syndrome:
•Normal language ability, Impaired visuospatial ability
•Significant problems comprehending sentences with spatial prepositions
•Shows Association with visuospatial memory and language acquisitions

KF:
•Damaged parietal lobe
•Impaired language memory, normal spatial ability
•Proves they’re separate

Neuroimaging:
•Broca’s Area was activated during a rehearsal task
•Supramarginal Gyrus was activated when the Phonological Store was used
•Difficult to locate the area of the central executive

Baddeley + Hitch
•Ppts found it hard to do 2 visual tasks simultaneously
•Tracking a moving light, and tracking the edges of a capital ‘F’

Question 11

What Evidence challenges the Working Memory Model as a theory of memory?

Answer 11

Ecological Validity:
•Tasks like what B + H used do not reflect normal behaviour
•Therefore it lacks ecological validity

Alternative Theory:
•The Working Memory Model only explains the STM
•Episodic + Semantic Memory explains the LTM
•Both can be used together to give a better overall understanding of memory

Brain Damaged Patients:
•Findings can’t be generalised
•Individual Differences affect findings

It doesn’t fully explain how the central executive works as it does not provide us with an understanding of how it supervises and coordinates the slave sub-systems.

WMM is simplistic as it does not explain processing in the LTM. Tulving 1972 proposed that the LTM is divided into different memory stores such as semantic and epsiodic memory which WMM does not consider.

Lieberman (1980) criticizes the working memory model as the visuospatial sketchpad (VSS) implies that all spatial information was first visual (they are linked).

However, Lieberman points out that blind people have excellent spatial awareness, although they have never had any visual information. Lieberman argues that the VSS should be separated into two different components: one for visual information and one for spatial.

Question 12

What are Other Problems with the Working Memory Model as a theory of memory?

Answer 12

Ecological Validity:
•Tasks like what B + H used do not reflect normal behaviour
•Therefore it lacks ecological validity

Alternative Theory:
•The Working Memory Model only explains the STM
•Episodic + Semantic Memory explains the LTM
•Both can be used together to give a better overall understanding of memory

Brain Damaged Patients:
•Findings can’t be generalised
•Individual Differences affect findings

It doesn’t fully explain how the central executive works as it does not provide us with an understanding of how it supervises and coordinates the slave sub-systems.

WMM is simplistic as it does not explain processing in the LTM. Tulving 1972 proposed that the LTM is divided into different memory stores such as semantic and epsiodic memory which WMM does not consider.

Lieberman (1980) criticizes the working memory model as the visuospatial sketchpad (VSS) implies that all spatial information was first visual (they are linked).

However, Lieberman points out that blind people have excellent spatial awareness, although they have never had any visual information. Lieberman argues that the VSS should be separated into two different components: one for visual information and one for spatial.

Question 13

Explain reconstructive memory

Answer 13

Memory is an imaginative reconstruction of past events influenced by how we encode, store and retrieve information
Memory is not like a blank tape but is changed when we recall it

Our attitudes and responses to events change our memory for those events

Retrieval of stored memories thus involves an active process of reconstruction using a range of information

AND not all information is encoded from an event, so we only have traces of it about the event

Question 14

What are schemas? And what do we use them for?

Answer 14

Schemas are parcels of store knowledge or a mental representation of information about a specific event or object. Every schema has fixed information, and variable information.

We use schemas that we already have to interpret information and incorporate these into our memory

This means recall is an active reconstruction of an event strongly influenced by previously stored knowledge, expectations + beliefs

SO memories are partly traces that we encoded at the time of the event and partly schemas of an event.

Question 15

What are confabulation and false memories?

Answer 15

Confabulation is when information is added to fill in the gaps to make a story/ make sense

Memories that not true, but made to seem true in order to deceive people

Question 16

Now go revise the

Answer 16

experiments

Question 17

What are the Strengths + Weaknesses of Bartlett’s theory?

How does it have application?

Answer 17

S: Bartlett’s theory is considered as strongly supported because he has repeated his reproduction experiments using 8 different stories on different participants and found the same familiarisation and transformations in line with schemas.

Reconstructive Memory has links to Tulving’s theories about Semantic Memory. Tulving argues our memory has semantic stores where we keep our understanding of relationships and rules – very similar to schemas. If Reconstructive Memory is true, this makes Tulving’s ideas more plausible. Moreover, semantic memory might have much more influence over episodic memory than Tulving imagined, because schemes dictate how we reconstruct our memories.

It is supported by Loftus and Palmers, who concluded that eyewitnesses are unreliable because they are influenced by leading questions. When we reconstruct memories, we change them by incorporating new information we learned after the incident. We also incorporate our schemas (expecting broken glass after a “smash” - this is sharpening the memory). We cannot tell which parts of a memory are original and which parts are later changed and there’s no way of going back to the original.

W: Bartlett’s experiments had a lack of control and standardisation in procedures so it is more difficult to re-conduct the war of the ghosts research to re-establish if memory is reconstructed.

A criticism of Reconstructive Memory compared to the other theories is that it doesn’t explain how memory is reconstructed. The other cognitive theories of memory describe the processes at work in rehearsing, retrieving and recalling. These processes have been linked to specific parts of the brain thanks to brain scanning and research on patients with lesions in specific parts of the brain. Reconstructive Memory is much more vague about how schemas work and where they are located.

Barlett’s theory has practical application as it could be useful in the real world because it emphasises to courts that eyewitnesses might reconstruct memories using schemas. So EWT alone should not be used to convict a criminal.

Question 18

What is an Alternative Theory to Reconstructive Memory?

Answer 18

Reconstructive memory fails to explain dual task experiment findings on how we can process/remember a visual and an auditory stimuli at the same time:

Working memory does explain this due to the phonological loop and VSSP, hence working memory has broader explanation of memory.

Question 19

Evaluate Bartlett GRAVE

Answer 19

G= The sample consisted of 20 british males and females. This is too small of a sample to represent a population any wider than these 20 participants.

Culture bias

R= It was a laboratory experiment, but the methodology was not rigorously controlled as participants were asked to recall the story a few mins later, some hours later, some years. So time may have been a key factor in changing the way participants responded. In addition, participants did not receive standardized instructions, so some of the distortions could be due to demand characteristics or guessing.

A= application to eye witnesses, supported by loftus and palmer

V= Lack of EV, however application in EW

E= Ethical: These male participants weren’t told that they had to recall the story (deception) but, this is a factor that affects the results.

Question 20

Evaluate Schmolck GRAVE

Answer 20

G= (-) Small sample of participants, only 6 therefore any anomolous result wouldn’t be averaged out.

(+) Schmolck identified HM as an anomoly, which is a positive.

(-) Participants are very rare and therefore if you try to generalise to the general population, the sample doesn’t have good population validity.

(-) Half of the participants had an illness such as herpes simplex encephalitis and therefore may not be generalisable to the

R= (+) 9 standardised tests, with 48 standardised items. This makes it very repeatable.

(+) As he recorded all of the conversations, it means that it has higher reliability because they can be checked by other people.

(+) Use of 14 raters means it has high inter-rater reliability.

(-) However, the participants are very rare and therefore it’s not as replicable.

A=(+) Informing future research about cognitive psychology, as it identified that the hippocampus is associated with episodic memory and the temporal lobe is associated with semantic memory.

(+) Brain surgery. This is because it can indicate what damage can cause and therefore can be used to inform whether brain surgery is needed. For example, HM wouldn’t have had his surgery had he known it would have led to his memory deficits.

V= (+) MRI scans showed that temporal lobe showed activity when using semantic memory.

(-) Ecological validity –> Lab experiment. Artificial environment and artificial tests.

E= (-) As the participants has memory loss, they couldn’t give informed consent as they would forget the purpose of the experiment. Therefore they received presumptive consent.

(+) However, it could be argued that the experiment was worth it because of the greater good as it has informed research and should help future patients with memory loss.

Question 21

Evaluate Sacchi et. al GRAVE

Answer 21

G= All Italian Students

R= Realism was good as people face images regularly and pilot studies were carried out to ensure venality of photographs wasn’t questionable

easily replicated, various replications have been made eg. slate magazine

A= Shows the powerful and significant effect of doctored photographs in the media

V=Standardised Instructions,good internal validity

E= deceived may cause questionable consent but informed during debriefing
right to withdraw and informed consent

Question 22

Describe your cognitive practical fully

Answer 22

Aim: To see how visual and auditory presented information can affect memory.
Hypothesis: Information presented in an auditory format will have higher levels of recall than information presented in a visual format.

Participants: students at ASCS. From age 14-18.
Repeated measures design (participants take part in all conditions) and volunteer sampling.
Laboratory experiment.

Procedure: P’s were given an initial assessment to test their auditory and visual skills. Based upon this assessment, the researchers then analysed the results and picked 10 P’s to take part in the actual experiment.

The setting was a classroom. P’s were read a list of 10 words by the researchers. They were then asked to complete a filler task (lasting 10 minutes). Once they had done this, they were asked to recall as many of the words from the original list that they could remember.

One week later, P’s were recalled and were this time shown a different list of 10 words. The words were presented to them on a large screen for 0.5 seconds (improvement could be to display the words for 1 second, in case any of the P’s could not read the words).

Results: Measures of central tendency used (i.e. mean, median, mode and range). Findings presented in histogram.

Wilcoxon test used. T value = 9 for a one tailed test at p<0.05 significance. N = 10.

Therefore, results are significant, and a one-tailed hypothesis can be accepted.

Question 23

Evaluate your cognitive studies practical

Don’t have application for this

Answer 23

G= 10 participants is too small and is unrepresentative of the population.
Age range is too small and participants are all localised. However, this could be a result of the screening done in the beginning of the experiment in order to have participants that share the same level of auditory and visual skills. This would increase the reliability of the results as well as the internal validity.

R= Laboratory experiment

V= the controls and screening as a standardized procedure give good internal validity. Moreover, the use of repeated measures design without counterbalancing creates order effects such as fatigue and/or change in performance, which can affect the results of the experiment and lead to anomalies (?), therefore decreasing the face (?) validity of the experiment.

ECO validity may be low due to the lack of mundane realism of the task leading to difficulty in applying the results to real-life situations, however it was carried out in a classroom which is a more natural environment for the students, so more natural behaviour is produced leading to valid results.

E= Participants were unaware they would be called back a week later which means there is a lack of informed consent, however this could be deemed necessary as if the participants were told, they might have put in extra effort to rehearse the information in order to be able to recall it when they are called back. This is a result of social desirability bias, which is the tendency of participants to respond in a way that would make them seem more socially acceptable.