L1 (week 7) - Memory

Question 1

What is declarative and non-declarative memory?

Answer 1

Declarative memory, also known as explicit memory, involves the conscious recall of facts and events.
Non-declarative or implicit memory involves unconscious recall and influences our behavior without awareness.

Question 2

What is episodic memory?

Answer 2

A type of long-term declarative memory that involves conscious recollection of events.

Question 3

What is semantic memory?

Answer 3

A type of long-term declarative factual memory involving the capacity to recall facts.

Question 4

What is procedural memory?

Answer 4

Long-term non-declarative memory of information necessary to perform learned skills e.g. riding a bike

Question 5

What are the stages of remembering?

Answer 5

Encoding > storage > retrieval

Question 6

What did Murdock’s 1962 study on free recall identify?

Answer 6

The serial position effect.

Question 7

What are the main concepts of the serial position effect?

Answer 7

Primacy effect: recalling the first few items in a list better than those in the middle.

Recency effect: recalling the last items in a list better than those at the start and the middle.

Question 8

How did Glanzer & Cunitz 1966 study differ from Murdock’s and what did they find?

Answer 8

They introduced a delay when participants were asked to recall items in a list, this removed recency effect supporting evidence of a temporary mental store.

Question 9

What is amnesia?

Answer 9

A severe loss of explicit memory (semantic and episodic) but a relatively intact short term memory recall.

Question 10

What are the 2 main types of amnesia?

Answer 10

Retrograde amnesia: Being unable to recall memories from your past.

Anterograde amnesia: Being unable to make new memories but being able to recall most things from before the amnesia began.

Question 11

What are the key features of the Modal model coined by Atkinson & Shiffrin in 1968?

Answer 11

Sensory store, short-term store, long-term store.

Question 12

What is the capacity, coding and retention for each of the key features of the modal model?

Answer 12

Sensory store:
Capacity = small
Coding = Copy of input
Retention = up to 2 seconds

Short-term store (STS):
Capacity = small
Coding = Phonological, visual & semantic
Retention = up to 30 seconds

Long-term store (LTS):
Capacity = unknown limit
Coding = Semantic, auditory and visual
Retention = minutes to years.

Question 13

What was the key feature about short term memory identified in Baddeley & Hitch’s 1974 study?

Answer 13

That short term memory could be separated into 3 interacting systems known as working memory;
Visuospatial sketchpad
Central executive
Phonological loop

Question 14

What does the Visuospatial sketchpad do?

Answer 14

Stores a small amount of information based on visual and spatial characteristics.

Question 15

What does the Central Executive do?

Answer 15

A system that helps to control and co-ordinate
mental activities.

Question 16

What does the Phonological loop do?

Answer 16

Stores a small amount of
information in a speech-based
form.

Question 17

Which study provided evidence for ‘Phonological Loop’ and what were it’s findings?

Answer 17

Conrad, 1964 found that people most confused similar sounding letters (e.g. B, P and M, N) when asked to recall them. This supports the idea that short-term storage for visually presented words uses a temporary acoustic code.

Question 18

What did Della Sala et al’s 1999 study of the Visuospatial sketchpad reveal?

Answer 18

That spatial and visual information is (at least partially) stored separately.

Question 19

What 3 functions did Miyake et al’s 2000 study provide strong supporting evidence for regarding the Central executive?

Answer 19

Shifting: Shifting back and forth between multiple tasks.
Updating: Updating and monitoring of working memory.
Inhibition: inhibit dominant, automatic or prepotent.

Question 20

What did Craik & Tulving test and find in their 1975 study on Levels of processing?

Answer 20

They tested participants recall ability in regards to structural (capital letters), Phonemic (rhyme) and sentence (asking if the word would fit in a given sentence) processing.

They found that the participants were able to recall words when a deeper level of semantic memory was activated (sentence processing), and recalled less of the words at a shallow level of semantic requirement (Capital letters).

Question 21

What is the Encoding specificity principle coined by Thomson & Tulving in 1970?

Answer 21

The principle that our memories are heavily associated to their encoding context/environment e.g. when detectives have victims retrace their steps to see if it ‘jogs their memory’.

Question 22

Define the 3 types of recall tasks

Answer 22

Serial recall: Recalling items in the exact order you were shown them.

Free recall: Recalling items in any order.

Cued or paired associates recall: When you are shown items in pairs and are given one half of the pair and asked to recall the other.

Question 23

What is Hypermnesia?

Answer 23

A Process of retrieving memories that initially appear to have been forgotten.

Question 24

What is the PDP model?

Answer 24

Parallel distributed-processing puts forward that the key to knowledge representation lies in connections between nodes.

Question 25

What are nodes in PDP context?

Answer 25

Neuron-like computational unit.

Question 26

What is priming effect?

Answer 26

When a node is activated by a connection with another node (a prime).

Question 27

What is metacognition?

Answer 27

Our ability to think about how we think (analyse our own mental processes).