Memory

Question 1

Baddeley

Answer 1

He gave a different list of words to 72 people in 4 groups to remember;
Group 1- Acoustically Similar
Group 2- Acoustically Dissimilar
Group 3- Semantically Similar
Group 4- Semantically Dissimilar
Participants were shown the original words and were asked to recall them in the correct order. They did this immediately after hearing them. Participants tended to do worse with acoustically similar words.

Question 2

Jacobs

Answer 2

The researcher gave the participants (the 443 girls) a set of digits and they had to recall them in the right order. The mean digit span across all participants was 7.3 digits and 9.3 words. This supports Millers theory about 7+/-2

Question 3

Peterson and Peterson

Answer 3

24 undergraduate students took part in 8 trials (tests). During each trial, the student was given a trigram to remember and was also given a 3 digit number. The student was then asked to count backwards from their 3 digit number until told to stop. On each trial, they were told to stop after a different length of time. As the amount of time the participants had to count for increased, the % of correct remembrance of their trigram decreased.

Question 4

Bahrick

Answer 4

392 participants from Ohio aged between 17 and 74 were tested. Their high school yearbooks were obtained. Recall was tested in various ways including:

• photo recognition test of 50 photos, some from their yearbook
• free recall test where they recalled all the names of their graduating class. Participants who were tested within 15 years of graduation were about 90% accurate in photo recognition. After 48 years, this figure decline to 70%. After 15 years, free recall was about 60% accurate, dropping to 30% after 48 years.

Question 5

Coding

Answer 5

The format in which information is stored in the various memory stores.

Question 6

Capacity

Answer 6

The amount of information that can be held in a memory store.

Question 7

Duration

Answer 7

The length of time information can be held in memory.

Question 8

Sperling

Answer 8

In Sperling’s experiments, he showed a series of letters on a mirror tachistoscope to participants. These letters were visible for 15ms-500ms, participants would report 4-5/12 characters (33-40% accuracy).
However if tested on one particular row they would remember 3-4/4 on that row, an accuracy of 75-100%

Question 9

Triesman

Answer 9

Treisman demonstrated that participants were still able to identify the contents of an unattended message, indicating that they were able to process the meaning of both the attended and unattended messages.

Question 10

MSM

Answer 10

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968, 1971) (who created it) suggest memory is made up of three stores linked together by processing.
Environmental stimuli&raquo_space;> sensory register (iconic, echoic, other sensory stores)&raquo_space;> attention&raquo_space;> STM&raquo_space;> either response or prolonged rehearsal (which can go back to STM by maintenance rehearsal)&raquo_space;> LTM (can go back to STM by retrieval)

Question 11

MSM PEEL 1 (KF)

Answer 11

The MSM is supported by research showing STM and LTM are different. Baddeley (1966) found that we tend to mix up words that sound similar when using our STMs but we tend to mix up words with similar meanings when using LTM. This clearly shows that coding in STM is acoustic and LTM is semantic. This supports the MSM’s view that these two memory stores are separate and independent.
A limitation is that evidence suggests there is more than one type of STM. Shallice and Warrington (1970) studied KF, a patient with amnesia. KF’s STM for digits was poor when read out loud to him. His recall was much better when he read the digits himself. The MSM suggests there is only one type of STM but the KF study suggests there must be one short term store to process visual information and another to process auditory information. The working memory model is a better explanation for this finding because it includes separate stores.

Question 12

MSM PEEL 2 (Two Limitations)

Answer 12

Another limitation of the MSM is that it only explains one type of rehearsal. Craik and Watkins (1973) argued there are two types of rehearsal - maintenance and elaborative. Maintenance is the one described in the MSM. But elaborative rehearsal is needed for long-term storage (linking information to your existing knowledge). This is a very serious limitation of the MSM as it is another research finding that cannot be explained by the model.
Another limitation is that research studies supporting the MSM use artificial materials. Researchers often asked participants to recall digits, letters. e.g. Peterson and Peterson asked participants to record syllables. These have no meaning/usefulness. In everyday life we form memories related to useful things and meaning - people’s faces, facts, places, etc. This suggests that the MSM lacks external validity. Research findings with meaningless material may not reflect how memory works in real life.

Question 13

Episodic LTM store

Answer 13

Stores events (likened to a diary of daily happenings).
Episodic memories are complex.

Events are time-stamped (you remember when they happened).
They involve several elements (people, places, behaviours all in one memory).
You have to make a conscious effort to recall them.
(Declarative)

Question 14

Semantic LTM store.

Answer 14

Stores our knowledge of the world (the meaning of words, taste of an orange, make of a car).
The memories are not time stamped.

You do not normally remember when you gained the knowledge.
The knowledge is less personal - more to do with knowledge that everyone can share.
(Declarative)

Question 15

Procedural LTM store

Answer 15

Stores memories for actions and skills.
Memories of how we do things (riding a bike, playing a sport).

Recall occurs without awareness or effort.
It is hard to explain these actions or skills as they are recalled without conscious awareness.
(Non Declarative)

Question 16

Strengths of research into LTM

Answer 16

A strength of episodic memory is that it is supported by case study evidence. Clinical studies of amnesia (HM and Clive Wearing) showed both had difficulty recalling events that had happened to them in the past. However, their semantic memories were relatively unaffected (e.g. HM would not recall stroking a dog 30 mins previously but he knew the concept of a dog). This supports the view that there are different memory stores in the LTM as one store can be damaged but the others remain unaffected.
A strength is that brains scan studies show that there are different LTM stores. Tulving et al. (1994) had participants perform various memory tasks while their brains were scanned with a PET scanner. Episodic and semantic memories were in the prefrontal cortex; semantic in the left and episodic in the right hand side. This shows a physical reality in the brain to different types of LTM which has been confirmed in many research studies, supporting its validity.

A strength is that identifying different LTM stores has real-life applications. Psychologists can target certain kinds of memory in order to improve people’s lives. Belleville et al. (2006) found that episodic memories can be improved in older people with mild cognitive impairments. Training to improvements compared to the control group. This highlights the benefit of distinguishing between different types of LTM - it allows specific treatments to be developed.

Question 17

Working Memory Model

Answer 17

Working memory is short-term memory. However, instead of all information going into one single store, there are different systems for different types of information.

Question 18

WMM

Answer 18

Divided into the Central Executive, Visuospatial Sketchpad, and the Phonological Loop

Question 19

Phonological Loop

Answer 19

A component of working memory model that deals with spoken and written material. It is subdivided into the phonological store and the articulatory process.

Question 20

The Stores within the PL

Answer 20

Phonological Store (inner ear) processes speech perception and stores spoken words we hear for 1-2 seconds.

Articulatory control process (inner voice) processes speech production, and rehearses and stores verbal information from the phonological store.

Question 21

Robert H. Logie

Answer 21

Working Memory Experiment involved visual tests. 90 participants were used. E1 matched patterns and audio for words. E2 removed matching and used unattended patterns. E3 used simpler unattended material, E4 used line drawings and visual lists of words. The findings were that unattended pictures disrupt visual mnemonics while unattended speech disrupts rote rehearsal. In more depth, unattended visual material has access to the mechanisms involved in the visual-spatial processing.

Question 22

WMM strengths

Answer 22

Dual task performance studies support the VSS. Baddeley et al. (1975) found patients had more difficulty doing two visual tasks than doing a visual and verbal task at the same time. The greater difficulty is because both visual tasks compete for the same limited resources. When doing a verbal and visual task there is no competition. Therefore dual task performance activity provides evidence for the existence of the visuo-spatial sketchpad. This is something that the MSM cannot explain.

Question 23

WMM strengths

Answer 23

The case of KF supports separate STM stores. Shallice and Warrington (1970) carried out a case study on KF who had brain damage. He had poor STM ability for verbal information but could process visual information normally. This suggests his phonological loop had been damaged but other areas of STM were intact. This suggests there are separate visual and acoustic stores. This evidence may be unreliable though as the evidence is from a brain damaged patient and may be unique.

Question 24

WMM limitations

Answer 24

A limitation over the WMM is the lack of clarity over the central executive. Cognitive psychologists suggest that the CE is unsatisfactory and doesn’t really explain anything. The CE should be more clearly specified than just being simply ‘attention’. Some psychologists believe it may consist of separate components. This means that the WMM hasn’t been fully explained.

Question 25

WMM strengths

Answer 25

A strength is that the word length effect supports the phonological loop. Baddeley et al. (1975) found people have more difficulty remembering a list of long words (long word length) than a list of short words (short word length). This is the word length effect. This is because there is limited space for rehearsal in the articulatory process. Word length effect disappears if a person is given a repetitive task that ties up the articulatory process - this demonstrates the process at work. This provides strong evidence to support the phonological loop.

Question 26

Proactive Interference

Answer 26

Proactive interference is when older memories interfere with the retrieval of newer memories. Because older memories are often better rehearsed and more strongly cemented in long-term memory, it is often easier to recall previously learned information rather than more recent learning. For example, trying to remember your phone number but only being able to recall your old number.

Question 27

Retroactive Interference

Answer 27

Retroactive interference is when newer memories interfere with the retrieval of older memories. Essentially, this type of interference creates a backward effect, making it more difficult to recall things that have been previously learned. For example, trying to remember the name of a restaurant you went to years ago, but only remembering the most recent spots.

Question 28

Statistics on Forgetting

Answer 28

70% of information is forgotten with 24 hours of initial learning.

Question 29

Keppel and Underwood

Answer 29

Participants were presented with meaningless three-letter consonant trigrams (for example, THG) at different intervals (3, 6, 9 second, etc). To prevent rehearsal the participants had to count backwards in threes before recalling. Participants typically remembered the ones that were presented first, regardless of interval length. They concluded that proactive interference occurred as the earliest trigrams had moved to long term memory, therefore interfering with the memorisation of the newer ones (due to the similarity).

Question 30

Schmidt

Answer 30

According to the distinctiveness interpretation, generating words from word fragments leads to more distinctive memory traces than reading intact words. As a test of this hypothesis, the generation effect was experimentally compared to three phenomena previously attributed to distinctiveness. Experiments 1 and 2 proved that the generation effect was unlike conceptual and encoding task distinctiveness. In Experiment 3 the generation effect and the effects of orthographic distinctiveness were compared. These two manipulations had similar effects on memory, but the effects were additive—challenging the hypothesis that the generation effect is a result of the unusual appearance of to-be-generated items. Thus, the generation effect is inconsistent with current theories of distinctiveness. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that generated items receive more encoding resources than read items, and that increased attention to generated items may be at the expense of attention to intact items in the list.

Question 31

Retrieval Failure

Answer 31

information is in long term memory, but cannot be accessed. for example, being asked where you live, but naming an old address. Inversely it could be being asked for an old address and naming a more recent one