Memory Flashcards
What is the coding, capacity and duration of short-term memory
- Coding = Acoustic
- Capacity = 7 items (+/- 2 items)
- Duration = 18-30 seconds
What is the coding, capacity and duration of long-term memory
- Coding = Semantic
- Capacity = Unlimited
- Duration = Up to a lifetime
Who did a study on the coding of STM and LTM and what happened during the study
- Baddeley
- Showed participants words that were: acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar and semantically dissimilar
- Asked to recall the words after a short time for stm and a longer time for ltm
- Found that stm is acoustic and ltm is semantic
Who conducted a study to find the capacity of STM and what happened
- Jacob’s
- Digit strings
- Participants asked to recall the digit strings adding a number each time
- Found that the average digit string was 9.3 and letter string was 7.3 therefore concluding that capacity was 5-9 items
List the 3 components of the multi-store model of memory
- Sensory register
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory
What is the coding, capacity and duration of sensory register
- Coding = Modality Specific
- Capacity = Unlimited
- Duration = very short, as long as 250 milliseconds
List the components of the working memory model
- Central executive
- Visuo-special sketchpad
- Phonological loop
- Episodic Buffer
What are the components in the visuo-spatial sketchpad
- Inner Scribe
- Visual Cashe
What are the components of the phonological loop
- Phonological store
- Articulatory Process
What is the capacity of the central executive
- 4 Items
Who is HM and what is the case study
- Hm = Henry Molaison
- Had his hippocampus removed to cure epilepsy
- Ltm was severely damaged as he could not remember what had happened earlier on in his day however he performed well in test of stm
- Demonstrated that stm and ltm are distinctly different components of memory and that they are stored in different parts of the brain
What are the three types of long-term memory
- Episodic
- Semantic
- Procedural
What is procedural memory
- Ltm store of how to do things (muscle memory)
- Memories of previously learned things
- Recall these things unconsciously
- E.g riding a bike
What is Semantic memory
- Our knowledge of the world and general facts and knowledge of what words and concepts mean
- Conscious recall
- E.g Paris is the capital of France
What is Episodic memory
- Ltm store for personal events
- Memories of when events occurred and people, objects, places and behaviours involved
- Conscious recall
- E.g What you had for breakfast
Who is Clive wearing and what does his case study show + Evaluation
- Clive wearing had severe viral encephalitis attacking his brain
- Clive could remember different things like how to play the piano (procedural) however he could not remember his wife’s name or who he had seen in the past hour
- Demonstrates that Ltm has different components
- Evaluation = Clive is a one off which causes this case study to have poor generalisability. It is also unethical as Clive is unable to give informed consent
What is atavistic form
- Our subconscious image of a criminal and how we perceive them
List some atavistic characteristics
- Narrow sloping brow
- Strong prominent jaw
- High cheekbones
- Facial Asymmetry
- existence of extra toes, nipples or fingers
- Murderers = Bloodshot eyes, curly hair and long ears
- Sexual deviants = Glinting eyes, swollen fleshy lips and projecting ears
- Tattoos
What is the interference theory and when does it occurs
- When we forget things as a result of interference of other information
- Occurs when two pieces of information conflict
What are the two types of interference
- Proactive
- Retroactive
What is proactive interference
- When Old information replaces new information
What is retroactive interference
- When new information replaces old information
Evaluate interference theory
- Has good validity as there have been a lot of experiments
- Studies of interference theory lack mundane realism
Which psychologists investigated interference theory and what did their study involve
- Mcgeoch and McDonald
- Word lists - Participants had to remember two sets of words either with little or a lot of similarity
- were shown one list of words, then the. Another and had to recall the first list
- Second list was either: Synonyms, Antonyms, Unrelated words, Nonsense syllables, Three digit numbers or No new list
- Findings: Similar lists provided worst recall, Unrelated lists provided best recall
Evaluate Mcgeoch and McDonald’s study
Positives:
- Proof for theories
- Lab based = Highly controlled = No confounding variables
Negatives:
- Lacks ecological validity
- Lacks mundane realism
What did baddeley and hitch do a study on
- Rugby players to investigate interference theory and if it was a better explanation for forgetting over time
- Asked rugby players to name the teams that they had played week by week
- Sone players had missed matches so the last team they played may have been 2 or 3 weeks ago
- Showed that accurate recall did not depend on time, it depended on the number of matches they had played in the meantime
- Shows that interference theory can apply to at least some everyday explanations
What is retrieval failure
- When a memory is available but not accessible
What are memory cues
- A trigger that enables access to memories
What is the encoding specificity principle
- Recall is Better when the cues that were present when we learnt something are also present when we recall it —> Tulving
What is a meaningful cue
- A cue linked to material to be accessed in a meaningful way
What is context-dependant forgetting
- When we try and recall something in a different environment from where the learning took place causing forgetting
- Godden and baddeley deep sea diver study
What is state-dependant forgetting
- When we try and recall something is a different physical or psychological state to when we learnt it causing forgetting
- Carter and Cassidy medication study
What happened in Godden and Baddeley’s study
- Context-Dependant forgetting
- Had divers learn word lists either on land or in water and then recall either in water or on land
- Found that recall was better when divers recalled the lists on the same context as when the learning took place
- Proved retrieval failure as the relevant cues for learning were not present to help when the environment was different
Evaluate Godden and Baddeley’s study
- Has high ecological validity
- Low mundane realism as a small percentage of people are actually divers
What happened in Carter and Cassiday’s study
- State-dependant forgetting
- gave anti-histamine drugs to participants to make them slightly drowsy
- Then participants to learn a word list either on the drugs or off the drugs and then recall either on drugs or off drugs
- Recall was better when recall state was the same as learning state
- When cues are absent recall is lower
Evaluate Carter and Cassiday’s study
- Low ecological validity s most people wouldn’t learn information whilst drugged
- Provides evidence for retrieval failure
Evaluate Retrieval failure theory
+ Lots of studies to provide evidence
- Context effects may not be so strong in real life as contexts have to be extremely different when recalling fro where learning took place (Baddeley)
- Presence or absence of cues only effects memory when you test it in a certain way
Evaluate the types of long term memory
+ Clive Wearing
+ Neuroimaging evidence = Tulving did PET scans on patients while asking them to perform memory tasks —> Found that episodic and semantic were stored in prefrontal cortex but different hemispheres –> Semantic = left and episodic = right
+ Real life applications allows psychologists to target certain types of memories to better peoples lives
