Lecture 6

Question 1

What is the evidence for separate short-term and long-term stores

Answer 1

Neurological impairment. Clive Wearing - recognizes his wife and can still play the piano, however he cannot lay down any new memories.
Serial position effects, learning words and recalling them.
Levels of processing - Craik & Lockhart (1972).
Self-reference effect - Rogers, Kuiper & Kirker (1977)
Context dependence - Godden & Baddeley (1975)

Question 2

How does information get into our long-term memory

Question 3

What is declarative/explicit memory

Answer 3

Memory you can say… facts/events/experience. Conscious recollection - impaired in amnesiacs

Question 4

What is non-declarative

Answer 4

Memory for behaviour, doesn’t involve conscious recollection. Preserved in amnesiacs

Question 5

What is hyperthymensia

Answer 5

When someone has super memory - their minds retain everything they process - this is wrong

Question 6

What is retrograde amnesia

Answer 6

Problems remembering events prior to the onset of amnesia, usually graded in nature

Question 7

What is anterograde amnesia

Answer 7

Marked impairment in ability to remember new information learned after the onset of amnesia

Question 8

What happens with amnesia

Answer 8

Slightly impaired short-term memory. Some preserved learning ability following amnesia’s onset

Question 9

Name 4 causes of amnesia

Answer 9

Bilateral stroke. Closed head injury. Chronic alcohol abuse leading to a thiamine deficiency and Korsakoff’s syndrome. Bilateral damage to the hippocampus and adjacent regions of the medial temporal lobes

Question 10

Name 2 types of amnesia

Answer 10

Retrograde amnesia and Anterograde amnesia

Question 11

What is the primacy effect in terms of serial positions effects

Answer 11

First words learned are remembered = entered the long-term memory

Question 12

What s the recency effect in terms of serial positions effects

Answer 12

Last words learned are remembered = in short-term memory still so easily recalled

Question 13

How do you improve your ability to remember things

Answer 13

Depends on how you encode and how you try to retrieve

Question 14

What did Ebbinghaus suggest about spacing your study

Answer 14

Spacing out your learning is more effective than cramming the night before

Question 15

Describe the levels of processing theory

Answer 15

Making things meaningful makes them more memorable. Suggested that deeper levels of processing encourage better recall.

Question 16

Describe the self-reference effect

Answer 16

Make sure material is meaningful to you.

Question 17

Describe context dependency

Answer 17

Godden & Baddeley (1975), found participants recalled words better when they were in the same context at study and test. Thus you should learn materials in surroundings which are similar to those you will be tested in.

Question 18

Describe Karpicke (2012) , retrieval-based learning

Answer 18

Suggests that the best way to learn something or recall something is to test yourself and retrieve it. There’s no point cramming revision in before an exam without practice getting it back out again.

Question 19

Describe the reliability of long term memory

Question 20

Describe Bartlett’s war of the ghost and the distortions that occured

Answer 20

He was interested in what happens when information is passed from one culture to another. Conventionalisation - canoes become boats. Transformation - changing detail that don’t make sense. Omission - missing out details. Commission - making up new details. Participants were not recalling the story verbatim, but reconstructing the details of the story according to their expectations and pre-existing schemata.

Question 21

What can Bartlett’s work conclude

Answer 21

Long-term memory is not stored accurately. Memory is reconstructive - we try to make sense of new information we already know, and make an effort after meaning. ‘How does this bit of information make sense in terms of what we already know’. New information can become assimilated with schemas.

Question 22

What are schemas

Answer 22

General knowledge structure used for understanding - frames or scripts that we can fit new information in.

Question 23

Why are schemas useful

Answer 23

To help people understand incoming information. Categorise new instances and infer additional attributes & guide interpretation and attention.

Question 24

Do schemas have to be accurate?

Answer 24

No. Everyone’s schemas are different, so we make inaccurate stereoptypes.

Question 25

How do schema effect recall?

Answer 25

Anderson & Pichert (1978).

Question 26

Discuss schemas and distorted memory

Answer 26

Bartlett (1932) - schemas structure our world knowledge and influence memory storage/retrieval.

Question 27

Discuss weapon focus effect

Answer 27

The presence of a weapon causes eyewitnesses to fail to recall other details - witnesses are less likely to accurately identify a target when a weapon was involved. Probably due to attention being naturally drawn to the weapon at the expense of other aspects of the situation - participants spend more time looking at weapons than a non-weapon substitute

Question 28

Discuss the influence of anxiety and stress on memory

Answer 28

deffenbacher et al.
McKinnon et al. (2014) study of passengers on a plane that nearly had to ditch into the sea with most details remembered fairly well

Question 29

Discuss post-event distortion

Answer 29

Expectations, schema and the nature of event can distort what is encoded from the event, how that information is organised. Post-event things can affect how memory is recalled and the accuracy of the recalled information. They can lead people to recall something about the event that never happened.

Question 30

Name an example of post-event distortion

Answer 30

Leading questions - Loftus

Question 31

Discuss how when eyewitnesses talk it effect recall

Answer 31

We now that witnesses to a crime often discuss what they have seen with other witnesses. This leads to memory conformity for details

Question 32

What is memory conformity

Answer 32

The extent to which a witness incorporates other witnesses statements

Question 33

Discuss the effects of memory conformity in police

Answer 33

Officers who were allowed to confer with each other before writing their statements were more confident in what they remembered than those who don’t.