Key question Flashcards
What is the cognitive key question?
How can psychologists’ understanding of memory help patients with dementia?
What is dementia?
Dementia is a disease that causes progressive mental deterioration characterised by memory loss
What are 5 symptoms of dementia?
1) Struggling with names and faces
2) Getting lost in familiar places
3) Forgetfulness
4) Struggling with decision-making
5) Difficulty understanding time and place
Why is dementia an important issue?
- Over 944,00 people in the UK have dementia
- 1 in 11 people over 65 have dementia in the UK
- Dementia costs the NHS £42 billion per year (expected to increase)
- There is no cure
- Causes memory loss
- Distressing
Describe memory loss in dementia patients
Reduced activity or loss of brain tissue leads to:
- Short term memory loss
- Inability / difficulty retrieving information
What are 3 concepts in cognitive psychology that can expplain Alzheimer’s?
1) The working memory model
2)
How can the Working memory model explain Alzeimer’s?
The WMM suggests that alzheimer’s impairs the central executive
CE focuses and divides our attention, monitors incoming data, makes decisions and allocates slave subsystems to tasks
Those with Alzheimer’s struggle with dual tasks
How can the Working memory model help those with Alzheimer’s?
- Do things one at a time
- Limit distractions
What is a strength of the Working memory model as a way of understanding Alzheimer’s?
Baddeley dual task
P - Baddeley conducted separate and dual task experiments on alzheimer’s patients
E - Found that the performance of alzheimer’s patients did not differ from other groups when doing the tasks separate but did perform worse when doing the tasks at the same time
E - Dementia can affect the central executive which causes impairment to the ability to plan, organise and complete tasks which explains why alzheimer’s patients may struggle with dual tasks
A - With this knowledge, we can help dementia patients by doing tasks one at a time
What is a weakness of the Working memory model as a way of understanding Alzheimer’s?
P - Low task validity
E - Experiments involve artificial tasks such as recalling a sequence of digits in the correct order
E - Lacks mundane realism of how memory of alzheimer’s patients may be impaired so reduces credibility
How can the Multi-store model of memory explain Alzheimer’s?
Reduced brain activity or loss of brain tissue can lead to STM loss
Impairment to STM may lead to information decaying before there is a chance to encode so new LTM’s won’t be formed as a result
LTM’s may also experience decay if there is retrieval failure
How can the Multi-store model of memory be used to help those with Alzheimer’s?
Labelling things such as cupboards in unfamiliar environments so they don’t have to rehearse objects
What is a strength of the Multi-store model of memory as a way of understanding Alzheimer’s?
Clive Wearing
P - Research from Clive Wearing’s case study supports MSM
E - Suffered from retrograde amnesia due to his hippocampus being destroyed by viral encephalitis and therefore cannot form new long term memories but still had procedural memory
E - Supports the existence of separate stores and how it can potentially affect someone with alzheimer’s if brain tissue is destroyed
What is a weakness of the Multi-store model of memory as a way of understanding Alzheimer’s?
Simplistic
P - MSM is too simplistic
E - Reduces memory down to 3 components with little detail on the complex functions and doesn’t account for when rehearsal is not needed to form a new LTM
E - The explanation of the MSM’s idea of memory as a whole is not sufficient enough and so reduces credibility at helping us understand alzheimer’s
How can Tulving’s theory of LTM explain Alzheimer’s?
Alzheimer’s affects episodic memories more than semantic as they are more susceptible to change
More recent episodic memories are also more susceptible to cue retrieval failure than ones from years ago as they have been reinforced many more times
