Features of Memory Store Flashcards
What is the Sensory Register?
The memory stores for each of the five senses
What is Coding?
The format in which information is stored
What is Capacity?
The amount of information that can be held
What is Duration?
The length of time information can be held
What is Short term memory?
A limited capacity memory store. that can store between 5 to 9 items and lasts for about 18-30 seconds.
What is the main coding for short term memory?
Mainly acoustic (sound)
What is the Capacity of SR?
High
What is the duration of SR?
Less than half a second
What is the coding for SR?
Iconic, Echoic, Haptic, Gustatory, Olfactory
What is Long term memory?
A permanent memory store which has unlimited capacity and can store memories up to a lifetime.
How is LTM coded?
Semantically
Why is the capacity of the SR large?
The senses provide detailed information
Who studied Coding of SR and what did they find?
- Crowder
- He found that the SR only retains information for a few milliseconds in the iconic store but for two to three seconds for the echoic store. Which supports the idea of sensory information being coded into different sensory stores.
Who studied the Capacity of SR and what did they do/find?
- Sperling
- Flashed 3 by 4 grid of letters onto a screen for 1-twenteeithof a second and participants were asked to recall and sounded different pitched sounds and were asked to recall.
- Recall of letters in the indicated row were high, which suggests that all the information was originally there suggesting that the capacity is large
Who studied the duration of SR?
- Triesman
- Presented identical auditory messages to both ears of participants with a slight delay between them.
- Participants noticed that messages were identical if the delay was two seconds or less. This suggests the echoic store has a limited duration of two seconds.
Who studied the Coding of the STM?
- Baddeley
- 1 set of acoustically similar and dissimilar word lists which participants were asked to recall immediately after.
- Participants given the similar word list had the worst recall immediately as they confused words with similar sounds.
- Found that STM is coded acoustically as participants could recall other lists of words well
Who studied the Capacity of the STM?
- Jacob - Individuals were asked to recall digit spans and when they failed on 50% it was judged that they had reached their capacity. Found that the mean for digit spans were 9.3 items and for letters it was 7.3
- Miller - He found that things come in sevens - days of the week etc. He used the Jacob’s method but chunked items into groups - letters into words and digits into sets of numbers
Who studied the Capacity of the LTM?
- Wagenaar
- Created a diary of 2,400 events over 6 years and tested himself on recall of the events rather than the dates.
- He found that he could recall and describe most of the events in the diary
- Concluded that the capacity of the LTM is very large.
Who studied the Duration of the STM?
- Peterson and Peterson
- 24 students were given a trigram and a three digit number which they had to count backwards from. On each trial they were stopped after either 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 seconds, this is retention interval ( duration is short unless information is rehearsed).
Who studied the Coding of the LTM?
- Baddeley
- 1 set of semantically similar and dissimilar word lists which participants had to recall.
- Found that semantically similar word lists had the worst recall as they confused the words with similar meanings.
- Found that LTM is semantically coded because people were able to remember other word lists of words well.
Who studied the Duration of the LTM?
- Bahrick
- Studied 392 American participants aged 17 and 74 and were asked to recall the people who they went to school with which was tested with photo recognition and free recall.
- Found that 90% accuracy for phto recognition who had graduated within 15 years and 60% accuracy for free recall.
Evaluation points.
