Memory

Question 1

difference between the duration of STM and LTM ?

Answer 1

• STM duration between 18-30 seconds
  -LTM has a life time duration

Question 2

Proactive interference

Answer 2

• when an older memory interferes with a newer one

Question 3

Retroactive interference

Answer 3

When a newer memory interferes with a older one

Question 4

Procedure of McGeoch and Mcdonalds study

Answer 4

• participants had to learn a list of 10 words until they could remember with 100% accuracy. They then learned a new list. The 6 groups learned a diiferent new list varying in similarity to the original

Question 5

Findings of McGeoch and McDonalds study (1931)

Answer 5

• recall of the original list words was worse on the similar list (synonyms) showing interference is strongest when the memories are similar.

Question 6

Procedure of Baddley and Hitch (1977) study

Answer 6

-comprised of rugby union players who played every match in the season and players and players who had missed some games due to injury. the length of time from the start to the end of the seqson was the same for all players. The players were asked to recall the names of the teams they had played against in the season.

Question 7

Findings of Baddley and Hitchs (1977) study

Answer 7

• players who played the most games forgot proportionetly more games than those who played fewer games due to injury. Shows retroactive interference.

Question 8

Evaluation of interference

Answer 8

• research support: McGeoth + McDonald’s. Lab study so have high levels of control= lack of extraneous varaibles so higher internal validity
• artificial task. Learing meaningless stimiuli such as simple list of words. Does not represent everyday examples of interference so lack ecological validity + limited in there application to everyday human memory
• real life studies support: Baddley + Hitch(1977) shows that interference explanations can apply to everyday situations

Question 9

The multi-store model of memory Atkinson and shiffrin(1968)

Answer 9

• memory’s are formed sequentially and information passes on from on component to the next, in a linear fashion. Each specific component has its own coding,duration and capacity
• information enters the sensory register via our senses. Sensory register has a duration on a millesecond. The sensory register has many stores one for our 5 senses. The two main stores are called iconic memory(visual information is coded visually) and echoic memory (sound-auditory-information coded acoustically) has a high capacity
• information passes through to the short term memory store through paying attention. Short term memory has a limited capacity of 5-9 chunks of information and duration of 30seconds. Information is coded acoustically. We can keep information in the STM through maintained rehearsal. Through prolonged rehearsals information can enter the long term memory store which has a lifetime duration and unlimited capacity. Coding is semantically. Information can be retrieved from the LTM to STM when required.

Forgetting can occur at any stage.
-sensory register= decay if not payed attention to
-STM=decay or displacement
-LTM=retrieval failure and interference

Question 10

Strengths of the multi-store memory model

Answer 10

• research support. In Baddeley (1966) study on coding he gave participants 1 to 4 lists of words to remember and he found that acoustically similar words were harder to recall immediately and semantically similar after 20 minutes. It was concluded that acoustic confusion was occurring in STM and semantic confusion in the LTM, suggest STM codes acoustically and LTM semantically . Showing the the two types of memory are different entities.

Question 11

Limitations of the multi-store memory store

Answer 11

• the MSM states that there only one type of STM. However evidence from people suffering from amnesia shows this cannot be true. E.g. shallice and Warrington (1970) studied a patient known as KF and found KF’s STM for digits was very poor when they read them out pound to him but his recall was much better when he was able to read the digits to himself. Further studies of KF and other people with amnesia showed that there could possibly be another STM store for non-verbal sounds(such as noises).
• according to the MSM, what matters in rehearsal is the amount of it that you do. The more likely u rehearse something the more likely you are to transfer it to the LTM. This is disproven by craik and Watkins, who found elaborating rehearsal, linking new knowledge to previously known things,is more effective in transfer. Suggesting the MSM does not fully explain long term memory.
  -artificial materials. In everyday life ,we form memories related to all sorts of useful things- peoples faces , their names, facts etc.. but a lot of research studies supporting the MSM used digits,letter,words,constant syllables with no meaning. Such as Peterson and Petersons. Studies lack external validity therefore the MSM cannot be generalised.

Question 12

The working memory model Baddley and Hitch,(1974)

Answer 12

• replaced the idea of STM being a unitary store (like MSM). Focuses on active processing and short term storage of information. LTM as a more passive store that holds previously learned materials for use by the STM when needed.
• central executive - attentional process that monitors incoming data, make decisions and allocates the slave system tasks. Has very little processing capacity.
• 1st slave system. Phonological loop. Deals with auditory information coding acoustically and preserves the order in which information arrives. Subdivide into two groups: phonological store- stores words u hear, the articulatory process- hold words:heard/seen and silently repeated like an inner voice. ( maintenance rehearsal) limitless capacity of about 2secs
  -visuo-spatial sketchpad.2nd slave system. Stores visual (what things look like) and/or spatial information( relationship between things). Has a limited capacity. Subdivided into the visual cache: a passive temporary visual store e.g. info about colour and form and the innerscribe which records the arrangement of objects in the visual field.
• third slave system. The episodic buffer. Added to the model by baddley in 2000. General store. Can be seen as the store for the central executive. Intergrates information from others stores maintaining a sense of time sequencing. Has a limited capacity.

Question 13

Strengths of the working memory model

Answer 13

• supporting evidence. Shallice and Warrington’s (1970) case study of patient KF who had suffered brain damage. After this damage happened KF has poor STM ability for verbal information but could process visual information normally Suggesting that just his phonological had been damaged leaving the other areas of his memory intact l. Supports evidence of the existence of separate visual and acoustic store.
• studies of dual- task performance supports the separate existence of the Visio-spatial sketchpad. Baddley et al. (1975) shower that participants had more difficulty doing two visual task( tracking a light and describing the letter F) than doing both a visual and verbal task at the same time. This can be explained by the WMM because both visual takes compete for the wave slave system whereas doing verbal and visual tasks there is no competition meaning there must be a separate slave system that process visual input.
  -brain scanning supports the WMM. Braver et al (1977), gave their participants tasks that involved the central executive while they were having a brain scan. The researcher found greater activity in the prefrontal cortex and the activity increased as the task become harder. This makes sense in terms of the WMM: as demands on the CE increase,it has to work harder to fulfil its function.

Question 14

Limitations of the WMM

Answer 14

-lack of clarity over the central executive. Cognitive psychologist argue that the central executive component is unsatisfactory and doesn’t really explain anything. Baddeley himself recognised this when he said ‘the central executive is the most important but least understood component of the WMM ‘(2003). Needs to be more specific that ‘attention’ r.g. Some some psychologist believe it may consist of separate components meaning it hasn’t been fully explained.
- evidence from brain- damaged patients and case studies may not be reliable because it concerns unique cases with patients who have had traumatic experiences.

Question 15

Types of long term-memory

Answer 15

• endel Tulving(1985) was a cognitive psychologist who realised that the multi-store models view of LTM was too simplistic and inflexible. Tulving proposed that there are 3 types of long-term memory
• episodic memory- refers to our ability to recall events(episodes) from our lives. E.g your recent dentist visit l. The memory are ‘time-stamped’ ( you remember when they happen), memory of a single episode will include several elements such as people and places interwoven to produce a single memory.you have to make a conscious to recall episodic memories.
  -semantic memory. Contains or knowledge of the world. Includes facts. Likened to a combination on encyclopaedia and a dictionary. Theses memories are no ‘time-stamped’. We don’t usually remember where we learned them from. Constantly being added too.
• procedural memory. Our memory of actions,or skills. Can recall without conscious awareness.e.g. Driving a car. Theses are the sorts of skills we might find hard explaining to someone elses.

Question 16

Strengths of tulvings different types of long term memory

Answer 16

• case studies such as HM and Clive wearing providing supporting evidence. Both men had a great difficulty recalling events that had happened in there pasts. But there semantic memories were relatively unaffected. E.g. they still understood the meaning of words. Their procedural memories was also intact. E.g. Clive wearing still knew how to play the piano. Supports Tulvings view that there are different memory stores in LTM. One store can be damaged but the other stores are unaffected. Evidence that the memory’s are different and stored in different parts of the brain.
  -evidence from brain-scan studies. E.g. Tulving et al (1994) got participants to perform various memory tasks while there brains were scanned using a PET scanner. They found episodic memory and semantic memories were both recalled from the prefrontal cortex. The left prefrontal Cortex was involved in semantic memories and right episodic. Supports the view that there is a physical reality to the different types of LTM, within the brain. It has also been confirmed many times in later research studies, further supporting the validity of this study.
• real-life application. Being able to identify different aspects of LTM have allows psychologist to target certain kinds of memory in order to better peoples lives. Belleville et al (2006) demonstrated that episodic memories could be improved in older people who had a mild cognitive impairment. The trained participants performed better on a test of episodic memory after training than a control group. The benefit of being able to distinguish between types of LTM enables specific treatments to be developed.

Question 17

Limitations of Tulvings et al(1994) types of long term memory

Answer 17

• clinical studies such as HM and Clive wearing lack serious control of different variables.

Question 18

Tulvings (1983) encoding specificity principle(ESP)

Answer 18

• from research Tulving summaried the consist pattern he found In what he called the ESP which states that if a cue is to help us to recall information it has to be present at encoding and at retrieval. If the cues are available at encoding and retrieval are different(or if the cues are entirely absent at retrieval) there will be some forgetting.
• some cues are linked to the material-to-be-remembered In a meaningful way. Others are encoded at the time of encoding but not in a meaningful way e.g. context-dependent forgetting (external cues) and state-dependent forgetting(internal cues)

Question 19

Retrieval failure theory

Answer 19

• a form of forgetting. It occurs when we don’t have the necessary cues to access memory. The memory is available but not accessible unless a suitable cue is provided.

Question 20

Content-repent forgetting Godden and Baddeley (1975)

Answer 20

• Godden and Baddeley carried out a study of deep-sea divers. In this study the divers learned a list of words either underwater or on land and then we’re asked to recall the words either underwater or in land therefore creating 4 conditions. In two of the conditions the environmental contexts of learning and recall matches, whereas the other two they did not.

Question 21

Findings of Godden and Baddley (1975) context-dependent forgetting

Answer 21

• accurate recall was 49% lower in the non-matching conditions. The external cues available at learning were different from the ones at recall and the lead to retrieval failure

Question 22

State- dependent forgetting. Carter and Cassaday(1998)

Answer 22

-Carter and Cassaday (1998) gave anti-histamine drugs to their participants. The anti-histamines had a mild sedative effect making the participants slight drowsy creating a internal physiological state different from the ‘normal’ state.the participants had to learn a list of words and passages of prose and then recall the informations creating 4 conditions.

Question 23

Findings of Carter and Cassaday(1998). State-dependent forgetting

Answer 23

• in the conditions where there was a mismatch between internal state at learning and recall, performance on the memory test was significantly worse. So when cues are absent then there is more forgetting.

Question 24

Strengths of retrieval failure

Answer 24

• supporting evidence. An impressive range of studies supports retrieval studies. E.g Godden and Baddeley and carter and Cassaday.The supporting evidence increases the validity of an explanation . Especially true when the evidence shows that retrieval failure occurs in real-life situations as well as in highly controlled conditions of the lab.
• real life application. Such as in cognitive interviews. So is useful

Question 25

Outline the cognitive interview

Answer 25

• fisher and Geiselman (1992) argued that eyewitness testimony’s could be improved if the police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses.They recommend that interviews should be based on psychological insights into how memory works, and called these techniques the cognitive interview.

1) report everything- witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant or the witness doesn’t feel comfortable about it. The details may be important or trigger other important memories.

2) reinstate the context- the witness should return to the original crime scene’ in there mind’ and imagine the environment and their emotions related to context-dependent forgetting.

3) reverse the order- events should be recalled in a different chronological order to the original sequence. Done to prevent people reporting their expeditions of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events. Also prevents dishonesty.

4) change in perspective- witness should recall the incident from others peoples perspectives.E.g. How it would have appeared to other witnesses. Done to disrupt the effects or expectations and schema on recall which generates an expectation of what would have happened and is the schema that is recalled rather than what actually is happened Ming

Question 26

Limitations of retrieval failure

Answer 26

• Baddley (1997) argues that context effects are not very strong in real life as the contexts face to be very different before an effect is seen. E.g. it would be hard to find an environment as different from land as underwater. In contrast, learning something one room and recalling in another is unlikely to result in much forgetting because these environments are generally not different enough. Limitation because it means that real- life applications of retrieval failure due to contextual cues don’t actually explain much forgetting.
• the context effect may be related to the type of memory being tested. Godden and Baddeley (1980) replicated their underwater experiment but used a recognition test. When recognition was tested there was no context-dependent effect; performance we the same for all 4 conditions. Limitations as it because that the presence or absence of cues only affect memory when you test it in a certain way.
• the encoding specificity principle(ESP) cannot be tested. Where a cue produced the successful recall of a word, we assume that the cue must have been encoded at the time of learning. If a cue down not then we assume that the cue was not encoded at the time of learning. That is on the basis of assumption as the is no way to independently establish whether or not the cue has been encoding meaning the ESP may lack validity.

Question 27

The enhanced cognitive interview (ECI)

Answer 27

• fisher et al (1987) developed some additional elements of the CI to focus on the social dynamics of the interactions. E.g. when the researcher needs to make eyes contact, reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions etc..

Question 28

Limitations of the cognitive interview

Answer 28

• time consuming. Takes much more time than the standard police interview. E.g. more time is needed time is needed to establish rapports with the wittiness and allow them to relax. The CI also requires special training and many focussed have not been able to provide more than a few hours meaning that the ‘proper version of the CI is actually used, hence why police are reluctant to us CI.

Question 29

Strengths of the cognitive interview

Answer 29

• increase credibility of the CI amongst those who use it. Milne and Bull(2002), found that each individual element was equally valuable. Each technique singularly produce more information that the standard police interview. However, Milne and Bull found that using a combination of report everything and context reinstatement produced better recall that any of the other conditions. Confirming that aspects of the CI are more useful than others. Suggesting at least two elements should be used to improve police interviewing of eyewitnesses even if the full CI isn’t used.
• support for the effectiveness of the ECI. Research suggests that the enhanced cognitive interview (ECI) may offer special benefits. E.g. a meta-analysis by kohnken et al (1999) combined data from 50 studies. The ECI consistently provided more correct information that the standard police interview. Strength as it indicates that there are real practical benefits to the police of using the ECI giving police a grater chance of catching and charging criminals beneficial to society as a whole.

Question 30

Procedure of Loftus and palmer (1974) leading questions experiment

Answer 30

• Loftus and Palmer (1974) arranged for students to watch film clips of car accidents and then have them questions about the accident. In the leading question participants were asked ‘about how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’ There were 5 groups each were given a different verb in the critical/leading question. One group had the Verb hit, the others had contacted,bumped,collided,smashed.

Question 31

Findings of Loftus and palmers (1974)

Answer 31

• the mean estimated speed for the Verb ‘contacted’ was 31.8mph and for the verb ‘smashed’ the mean was 40.5mph. The leading question biased the eyewitness recall on an event.

Question 32

Explanations of why leading question affect EWT?

Answer 32

the response-bias explanation- suggest the wording of the question has no real effect on the participants memories,but just influences how they decide to answer. When a participant gets a leading question using the word ‘smashed’ this encourages them to choose a higher speed estimate.

Substitution explanation- the wording of a leading question actually changes the participants memory of the film clip. Loftus and palmer (1974) conducted a second experiment supporting this. Demonstrated because participants who originally heard ‘smashed’ later were more likely to report seeing broken glass when there was none that those who heard ‘hit’. The critical Verb altered their memory of the incident.

Question 33

Procedure of Gabbert and her colleagues(2003) post-event discussion study

Answer 33

• anxiety creates physiological arousal in the body which prevent us from paying attention to important cues.
• Gabbert and her colleagues (2003) studied participants in pairs. Each participant watched a video of the same crime from different points of view. Meaning that participants could seen elements in the event that the other could not.E.g. One participant could see the title of the book being carried by a young women . Both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall.

Question 34

Findings of Gabbert and her colleagues (2003) post-event discussion

Answer 34

• the researcher found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the events they did not see in the video but had picked up in the discussing. The corresponding figures in a control group were there was no discussion 0%. Gabbert et al concluded that witnesses often go along with each, either to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong called memory conformity.
• post-event discussion contaminates the eyewitness testimony because it combines misinformation from other witness with their own memories.

Question 35

Strengths of research into misleading information affecting EWT

Answer 35

• useful real-life application.has hugely important practical uses in the real world, where the consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious. E.g. Loftus (1975) believes that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be very careful about how phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses.research into EWT can have a positive difference to the lives of people such as improving the way the legal system works.

Question 36

Limitations of research into misleading information

Answer 36

• lacks ecological validity as the tasks are artificial. Loftus and palmers study is that their participants watched dim clips of car accidents which is very difference for experiencing a real car accident, mainly because such clips lack the stress of the real accident. Limitation because studies of artificial task may tell us very little about how leading questions affect EWT in cases of real accidents or crimes. Cannot be generalised to real life situations.
• ignores individual differences .There is evidence that older. People are less accurate than younger people when giving eyewitness reports.e.g. Anastasi and Rhodes (2006) found that people in age groups 18-25 and 35-45 were more accurate than people in the group 55-78years. However, all ages group were more accurate when identifying people of their own age(gender bias). Cannot be generalised to all age groups:entire population.
• Contradictory real life research - Loftus’ research has led to more real-life research into EWT. Yuile and Cutshall studied a real life crime and suggested the important information in real-life crime is not easily distorted - additionally, there is a weapons focus effect where people to tend to focus on the weapon rather than the other details.

Question 37

Anxiety has a negative effect on recall. Johnson and Scot’s (1974)

Answer 37

Procedure: participants were led to believe they were going to take part in a lab study m. While seated in a waiting room participants heard arguments in the next room. In the ‘low anxiety’ condition a man then walked into a waiting area. Carrying a pen and with grease on his hands. Other participants in the ‘high anxiety’ condition heard the same heated arguments,but this time accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. Am man walked off of the room, holding a paper knife that was covered in blood.the participants later picked out the man from a set of 50 photos
- 49# of the participants who had seen the man carrying a pen were able to identify him. The corresponding was just 33%. The tunnel theory of memory argues the witnesses attention narrows to focus on a weapon, because it is the source of anxiety.

Question 38

Anxiety has a positive effect on recall. Yuille and cutshall (1986)

Answer 38

• the stress of witnessing a crime or accident triggers the flight-or-flight response which increases our alertness and improves memory for the event as we because more aware of cues in the situation.

Procedure: Yuille and Cutshall(1986) conducted a study of a real-life shooting in a fun shop in Vancouver, Canada. The shop owner shit a thief dead witnessed by 21 people. 13 which agreed to take part. The interviews were held 4-5 months after the incident and compared with the original police interviews made at the time of the shooting. The witness were also asked to take how stressed they had felt at the time of the incident using a 7-point scale.
Findings:the witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in the amount of accuracy after 5months- though some details such as age/height/weight estimates were less accurate. Those who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate about 88% compared to 75% of the less stress group

Question 39

Yerkes-Dodson law applied to EWT by Deffenbacher

Answer 39

• the relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an ‘inverted U’.
• lower levels of anxiety produce lower levels of recall accuracy. But memory becomes more accurate as the level of anxiety experienced increases. However there comes to a pony where optimal level of anxiety is reached which is the point of maximum accuracy. If the eyewitness experiences anymore stress than this, then their recall of the event suffers a drastic decline

Question 40

Limitations of anxiety affecting eyewitness testimoniesq

Answer 40

• weapon focus may surprise rather than anxiety argues by Johnson and Scott. The reason participants focus on the weapon may be because they are surprised at what they see rather than because they are scared.pickel (1998) conducted an experiment using scissors( low anxiety/low unusualness),an handgun, a wallet or a raw chicken as the hand-held items in a hairdressing salon video. Eyewitness accuracy we significantly poorer in the high unusualness conditions(chicken+ handgun) suggesting that the weapon focus effect is due to unusualness rather than anxiety/threat and therefore tell us nothing special about the effects of anxiety on EWT.
• field studies used sometimes lack control. Researchers, usually interview real-life eyewitnesses sometimes after the event. Lots of things will have happened to the participant in which the researcher have no control over E.g post-event discussion or read or seen something in the media. Limitation as it it is possible that these extraneous variables may be responsible for the accuracy of recall. The effect of anxiety may be overwhelmed by these other factors.
• demand characteristics. Most lab studies show participants a filmed (usually staged crime) most of these participants will be aware they are watching a filmed crime for a reason to do with the study most of them may have worked out they are going to be asked questions about what they have seen.
• ethical issues= creating anxiety for the purpose of the study = psychological harm = cost and benefit analysis

Question 41

Research on coding

Answer 41

• Baddeley (1966) gave different lists of words to four groups of participants to remember. Acoustically similar,acoustically dissimilar,semantically similar and semantically dissimilar. Participants were asked to recall the words in the correct order. When they had to recall immediately after hearing it ( STM recall ) they tended to do worse with acoustically similar words. If asked to recall word list after 20 minutes (LTM recall) they did worse with the semantically similar words suggestions that’s information is coded semantically in LTM and acoustically in STM.

Question 42

Evaluation of Baddeley study

Answer 42

• artificial stimuli used rather than meaningful material. The word list had no personal meaning to participants meaning we should be more cautious of generalising the findings to different kinds of memory tasks E.g. when processing more meaningful information, people may use semantic coding even for STM tasks. Suggests that the findings from this study have limited application.

Question 43

Research on capacity

Answer 43

• Jacob (1887) the researcher gives,for example 4 digits and then the participants is asked to recall theses in the correct order out loud. If this is correct by he researcher reads out 5 digit and so on until the participants cannot recall correctly determine an individual digits soak. Mean span for digits across all participants was 9.3-7.3items.
• miller (1956) made observations of everyday practice E.g. he noted that things come in 7: 7days of the week,7 deadly sins etc. He noted people can also recall 5 words as well as they can recall 5 letters. They do this by chunking. This suggests that the span of STM is about 5-9 items.

Question 44

Evaluation of research on capacity

Answer 44

• limitation of Jacobs study is that it lacks validity as it was conducted a long time ago. Early research in psychology often lacked adequate control E.g. some participants may have been distracted while they were being tested so they didn’t perform as well. This would mean the results may not be valid because there were confounding variables that were not controlled.
• limitation of Millers research (1956) is that he may have overestimated the capacity for STM. E.g. Cowan (2001)reviewed other research and concluded the capacity for STM was only about 4 chunks suggesting that the lower end of millers estimate(5 items) is more appropriate than 7 items

Question 45

Research on duration

Answer 45

• Peterson and Peterson (1959) tested /4 undergraduate students . Each student took part in 8 trials error they were given a trigram( constant syllable) on each trial to remember and was also give a 3 digit number. The students were then asked to count backwards from that 3 digit number until told to stop to prevent any mental rehearsal. On each trial they were told to stop after a different amount of time-3,6,9,12,15 or 18 seconds. Called retention interval. found that the longer the interval the less accurate the recall. Suggesting that short-term memory has a limited duration of approximately 18 seconds. Furthermore, the results show that if we are unable to rehearse information, it will not be passed to long-term memory.
• Bahrick and colleagues (1975) studies 392 participants from the Ohio between the age 17-74. High school yearbook were Obtained and recall was tested in various ways. One being photo recognition consisting of 50 photos some from the participants school yearbooks and Free recall where participants 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 48years, recall declined to about 70% for photo recognition. Free recall was 60% accurate after 15years dropping to 30% after 48years. This shows that LTM can last very long.

Question 46

Evaluation of research on duration

Answer 46

• limitation of Peterson and Petersons study is that the stimulus material is artificial. Trying to memories ‘nonsense trigrams’ does not reflect most real-life Memory activities where what we are trying to remember is meaningful. So the study lacked external validity.
• strength of Bahrick et al’s study is that it has higher external validity. Real-life meaning memories were studied. When studies on LTM have been conducted with meaningless pictures to be remembered, recall rates were lower E.g. Shepard 1967. However such real-life research means the confounding variables are not controlled, such as participants may have looked at their yearbook photos and rehearsed their memory over the years.