Cognitive Psychology: Memory

Question 1

ways of testing memory

Answer 1

• Free recall - reproducing a material from memory in an unconstrained way (e.g. ‘recall 7 digits from memory’ 7 is where it gets difficult to recall)
• Cued recall - reproducing a specific item from memory when provided with a specific cue (e.g. word associated with number) It takes longer to re-learn a new association with the same word than the original association
• Recognition - deciding whether you have seen something previously when it was presented to you again (e.g. recognise what you’ve seen previously etc) 2/4 alternative forced choice

Question 2

Explicit vs Implicit ways of testing memory

Answer 2

Explicit: Free recall, Cued recall, Recognition

Implicit: (pp don’t know their memory is being tested) Relearning: you learn something faster the second time even if you have no memory of the previous learning

Question 3

Atkinson-Shiffrin Model (1968) Modal Multistore Model of Memory

Answer 3

1. Sensory register - brief sensory stores (iconic, echoic, gustatory, olfactory, haptic)
2. Short term store - (primary memory) held for seconds, maintained by rehearsal. Has limited capacity (7+-2) and duration (18-30 seconds)
3. Long term store - (secondary memory) Unlimited capacity (unlimited) and duration (lifetime)

Question 4

Visual sensory memory: Jensons (1871)

Answer 4

threw a handful on beans onto a black tray and said immediately how many landed in the white box. Results = accurate up to about 8/9 beans

Question 5

Visual sensory memory: Averbach (1963)

Answer 5

used a Tachistoscope to display patterns of dots for brief intervals masked by a subsequent erasing pattern. Results = the number of dots recalled increased with extra viewing time up to 150ms. However, extra viewing time made no difference when more than 8 dots were presented. (limiting factor = size of visual memory)

Question 6

Sperling’s Partial Report Procedure (1960)

Answer 6

• When pp’s were asked to recall 12 items, their maximum recall was 4/5
• If they had immediate cue to recall one row, the accurate recall was nearly 100%
• But if the recall cue was delayed by 1 second, the accurate performance went back down to 30% (approx. 4 items)
• As if almost the 12 items were once available in visual memory, but delays very rapidly
• Issues: output interference, capacity could increase to 12 items it cued item by item, duration may be longer than Sperling’s estimates (1.6 seconds), does the memory trace need a separate store or is it the same thing as traditional short-term memory

Question 7

Types of memory: William James (1890)

Answer 7

Primary Memory: “Sensations outlast for some little time the objective stimulus which has occasioned them.”

Secondary Memory: “The knowledge of a former state of mind after it has already once dropped from consciousness.”

Question 8

Short term memory: Serial Position Curve

Answer 8

• Primacy effect = is traditionally interpreted as down to rehearsal (you have term to practice those words)
• Recency effect = is traditionally interpreted as the capacity of the STM (you can remember the last few words you heard as they are still in your primary memory)
• Flat mid-art of curve us interpreted as transfer to the LTM

Question 9

Multi-Store model (Atkinson & Shriffrin 1968)

Answer 9

• Rehearsal can improve memory as it allows you to hold onto items in the short-term memory
• Not sufficient since it doesn’t always work (Glenberg et al 1977) Maintenance vs elaborate rehearsal
• Clinical evidence shows patients with only STM and only LTM but STM deficits aren’t as devasting to LTM as we might expect (goes against MSM as memory doesn’t have to go through STM to go to LTM)

Question 10

Working Memory Model (Baddeley & Hitch 1968)

Answer 10

• Central executive - acts as a general attentional controller governing the flow of information to two slave systems:
• 1. Visuo-spatial sketchpad
• 2. Phonological loop
• STM performance is often better for visuospatial materials

Question 11

Brooks (1967) - evidence for two slave systems

Answer 11

• found interference between two tasks that both require visuospatial resources compared to when one was visuospatial and the other is verbal (evidence for two stores in STM)

Question 12

Evidence for phonological loop: Conrad & Hull (1964)

Answer 12

Phonological similarity effect: Poor recall of word lists where items sound similar even when items are presented visually

Question 13

Evidence for phonological loop: Salame & Baddeley (1987)

Answer 13

Irrelevant speech effect: Recall impaired by simultaneous speech

Question 14

Evidence for phonological loop: Baddeley et al (1975)

Answer 14

Word length effect: Serial recall is approx. as many words as you can read out aloud in 2 seconds

• Span is lower for longer words than for shorter ones even presented visually
• Spans are loner for faster speakers

Question 15

The Central Executive

Answer 15

• Control of behaviour based on action schemas
• Low level ‘contention scheduling’ chooses next schema
• Supervisory Attention System (SAS) can override the general process of contention scheduling by directly activating or inhibiting schemas
• Everyday examples of SAS failure (accidentally driving to a familiar place route when trying to drive somewhere else)
• Random interval generation as a cure for insomnia

Question 16

Additions to the Working Memory Model

Answer 16

• Baddeley (2000) revised the basic model to allow interaction with LTM e.g. chunking via Episodic Buffer
• Later additions include a Hedonic Detector (Baddeley 2007) to deal with emotional information

Question 17

Alternatives to Working Memory: The Embedded Processes Model

Answer 17

Other researchers have claimed that it is not necessary to distinguish between the STS and LTS at all - STS is just the currently activated component of the LTS (e.g. Cowan et al., 2005; Oberauer, 2002 - also Feature model, Nairne, 2002). Working Memory as Attention?

Question 18

Alternatives to Working Memory: The SIMPLE Model

Answer 18

Scale Invariant Memory, Perception, and Learning - Brown et al., (2007)
Creates mathematical models based on temporal discriminability that apply to both STS and LTS.

Question 19

Alternatives to Working Memory: The Individual Differences Approach

Answer 19

A different approach is to focus on individual differences in working memory capacity - recently researchers have separated this out into influences on primary and secondary memory (Unsworth & Engle, 2007

Question 20

Ebbinghaus (1885)

Answer 20

• Translated (1913) as “Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology”
• The book describes the results of 2 years of solid memory testing done on himself
• He used the ‘method of saving’, having learned a lost once, how much faster can he learn it a second time after a period has passed- lists of ‘nonsense syllables’ (has no meaning)
• This is an example of implicit memory task
• The results found that even a month later, a big chunk of the list was still remembered during the second time learning it (the graph is always going to be above zero)

Question 21

Duration of Long Term Memories: Wixted (1990,1997)

Answer 21

has analysed a wide range of forgetting functions from Ebbinghaus onwards and concludes that they are well described as a power function: e.g. f(t) = at(-b)

The finding that memory performance reduces as a power function over time suggests that although initial forgetting is quite fast, memory is almost never completely degraded.

Question 22

Duration of Long Term Memories: Bahrick (1984)

Answer 22

tested 773 people’s memory for Spanish taught in a school for up to 50 years ago. Performance was closely related to initial learning level even 50 yrs. ago. Found memory decayed rapidly over the first few years, but then levelled off and was still way above chance 50 yrs. Ago

Question 23

Duration of Long Term Memory: Standing (1973)

Answer 23

• tested the capacity of LTM. Participants watched slides for 5 secs each and then have a recognition test 2 days later. Even with 10,000 items learned performance was at 83% on a subsequent recognition test. Results even better with ‘vivid’ pictures, though slightly worse with words
• But very hard to detect changes in pictures

Question 24

Horowitz & Wolfe (1998)

Answer 24

‘Visual search has no memory’ - try to spot the jumbled T hidden amongst jumbled L shapes. The more L shapes, the longer it takes. But the results showed that the search slope is unchanged even when the stimuli are randomly interchanged every 83.33ms. As if we don’t even remember where we have just looked.

Question 25

Konkle, Brady, Alvarez & Aude (2010)

Answer 25

showed pp slides of objects and then presented then with two items (one new and one old) and the pp needs to guess which one they have seen before. Results depend more on conceptual similarity among items than on perceptual similarity (e.g. better when two different fruits, worse when same fruit just slightly different version is presented)

Question 26

Forgetting faces: Bahrick (1984)

Answer 26

• tests the ability of college teachers to recognise and identify previous students from photos. Eight years on, still evidence for recognition, but no identification

Question 27

Forgetting faces: Young, Hay & Ellis (1995)

Answer 27

errors in everyday face processing. 22 pp’s keep a diary for 8 weeks noting down all the errors they make in face recognition and identification. 1008 errors = 6 each per day (114 failures to recognize a person, 314 mistakenly identifying a stranger as someone, 233 recognizing, but failing to identify a person,190 failing to recall a person’s name but knowing details about them)

Question 28

Verbal Overshadowing of Memory: Schooler & Engstler-Scholler (1990)

Answer 28

• Can you improve face memory by carefully describing faces you see?
• No, giving a verbal description of a face seems to impair subsequent memory for the face in a recognition test
• Important implications for eye-witness testimony