Memory

Question 1

Jacobs (1887)

Answer 1

Investigated digit span: a list of digits is read and the participant recalls them in order
Mean span for digits: 9.3
Mean span for letters: 7.3

Question 2

Baddeley (1966)

Answer 2

Different lists to 4 groups of participants
Group 1: Acoustically similar
Group 2: Acoustically dissimilar
Group 3: Semantically Similar
Group 4: Semantically dissimilar
Recalled immediately: participants did worse with acoustically similar words
Recalled after: participants did worse with semantically similar words
Information is coded acoustically in STM and coded semantically in LTM

Question 3

Miller (1956)

Answer 3

Investigated span and chunking
Observed everyday practices and noted that things typically come in 7’s
Miller thought the span of short term memory is about 7 items plus or minus 2
He noted that people can recall 5 words as easily as 5 letters as they use chunking

Question 4

Peterson and Peterson (1959)

Answer 4

24 students in 8 trials
Set of consonant syllables such as ‘YCL’ and a 3 digit number.
Counted back from the number until told to stop (prevents rehearsal)
Students were told to stop after varying periods of time: 3,6,9,12,15 or 18 seconds
After 3 seconds average recall was about 80%, whereas after 18 seconds it was about 3%
STM duration is around 18 seconds unless we repeat the information over and over ie verbal rehearsal

Question 5

Bharick et al (1975)

Answer 5

Studied 392 American participants between the ages of 17-74.
They tested Photo Recognition (50 photos) and Names using high school yearbooks
Those tested within 15 years were 90% accurate in photo recognition, after 48 years, only 70% were
Free recall (names) was less accurate than recognition – 60% after 15 years and 30% after 48 years

Question 6

Who created the multi-store model?

Answer 6

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)

Question 7

MSM Sensory Register

Answer 7

Coding: Five stores: iconic, echoic, haptic, gustatory and olfactory
Capacity and duration: Large amounts for a short time, sub-stores have different durations – Crowder

Question 8

Crowder (1993)

Answer 8

Visual information: a few milliseconds, auditory information: two to three seconds: sub-stores have different durations

Question 9

Sperling (1960)

Answer 9

Capacity of sensory registers: iconic
Participants saw a grid of digits, heard a tone and wrote down the grid/ row indicated
When asked to recall the whole grid their recall was poor, when asked to recall 1 row recall was 75%.

Question 10

MSM Short Term Memory

Answer 10

Limitedl store, holds information briefly, once it’s been paid attention to.
Coding: Primarily acoustically, but other codes do exist too.
Capacity: 7±2. You can stretch this capacity if you can chunk information together
Conflicting research: Daneman and Carpenter (1980): reading comprehension affected digit span
Duration: 18-30 seconds, this is extended with rehearsal.
Research: Peterson and Peterson (1959)

Question 11

MSM Long Term Memory

Answer 11

Permanent store for information; limitless information indefinitely.
Any information for longer than 30 seconds is in your long term memory.
Coding: mainly semantic, the more something means to you, the more likely it is to remain
Research: Baddeley (1966)
Capacity: Unlimited, potentially
Duration: Can last for a lifetime, more likely to if it’s encoded semantically and you revisit it
Research suggests that when you can’t remember something it is because you cannot reach it

Question 12

MSM Evaluation

Answer 12

Strengths:
Research Support showing STM and LTM are different
Weaknesses:
There may be more than 1 STM store: Shallice and Warrington (1970)
Prolonged rehearsal not needed for transfer to LTM: Watkins (1973)
Oversimplified

Question 13

Tulvings Long Term Memory study

Answer 13

Three types of memory: procedural, episodic and semantic
Scanned brains after injecting gold, to see different patterns for memories
Six individuals participated in the study, Tulving included. Only three volunteers’ data was included
When volunteers recalled episodic memories, there was higher activity in the frontal and temporal lobes. When volunteers recalled semantic memories, the parietal and occipital lobes showed greater activity.

Question 14

Explicit vs Implicit memories

Answer 14

Explicit: consciously recalled, explainable, episodic and semantic
Implicit: unconsciously recalled, not explainable, procedural

Question 15

Semantic Memory

Answer 15

Facts: explicit and declarative

Question 16

Episodic Memory

Answer 16

Events: explicit, declarative

Question 17

Procedural Memory

Answer 17

Skills: Implicit and non declarative

Question 18

Case study of HM

Answer 18

H.M. had a surgery to remove his hippocampus and amygdala: believed to be the source of his seizures
The surgery went wrong and he suffered from amnesia
He lacked the ability to form new episodic and semantic memories, and lost many of his past ones
He still had his past procedural memories, and could form new procedural memories

Question 19

Case study of HM

Answer 19

H.M. had a surgery to remove his hippocampus and amygdala: believed to be the source of his seizures
The surgery went wrong and he suffered from amnesia
He lacked the ability to form new episodic and semantic memories, and lost many of his past ones
He still had his past procedural memories, and could form new procedural memories

Question 20

Murdock et al

Answer 20

Murdock presented participants with lists of 10-40 words, one at a time, at one word per second
Participants were asked to recall as many words as they could in any order.
Probability of recalling any word depended on its position in the list (its serial position).
Words presented early (primacy effect) or at the end (recency effect) were best recalled
Concluded that they are recalling information from two separate stores (STM and LTM).

Question 21

Who created the Working Memory Model?

Answer 21

Baddeley and Hitch (1974)

Question 22

Central executive

Answer 22

Decides what is and isn’t attended to, delegates tasks to each of the
“slave systems” (VSS and PL) and helps us to switch our attention between
different inputs of information.

Question 23

Visuo-spatial sketchpad

Answer 23

Deals with spatial and visual information e.g. identifying
where items are located in our environment.
Later subdivided by Logie (1995) into:
Visual cache- stores visual data such as shape and colour
Inner scribe- records the arrangements of objects in our visual field.

Question 24

Phonological Loop

Answer 24

Temporary storage system for auditory information and helps us to order information.
Later subdivided by Baddeley (1986) into:
Phonological store: “inner ear” stores what you hear
Articulatory process: “inner voice” rehearses words to keep them in memory whilst needed.

Question 25

Episodic Buffer

Answer 25

Added later by Baddeley (2000).
Responsible for integrating ongoing experiences into one flow of information that can be transferred into the long term memory. Maintains a sense of time sequencing (episodes).

Question 26

Gathercole and Baddeley (1993)

Answer 26

Participants had more difficulty doing two visual tasks than doing both a visual and verbal task at the same time. This is because both visual tasks compete for the same slave system
This supports the idea that there are separate verbal and visual parts of the working memory

Question 27

Case study: KF

Answer 27

Shallice and Warrington (1970) conducted a case study on KF who had suffered brain damage.
KF had poor STM ability for verbal information but could process visual information normally.
This supports the existence of separate visual and acoustic stores suggested by the WMM.