memory Flashcards

Question

real world application counterpoint

Answer 1

- Participants watched film clips in a lab different from experiencing it in real life - Foster said what eyewitnesses remember has important consequences in the real world but participant responses in research don’t matter in the same way - Suggests that Loftus is too pessimistic about the effects of misleading information

Answer 2

- EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than others - Sutherland and Hayne - asked leading questions their recall was more accurate for central details - original memories for central details survived and were not distorted an outcome that is not predicted by the substitution explanation

Answer 3

- Evidence that post – event discussion actually alters EWT - Skagerberg and Wright (2008) showed participants 2 versions film clips. - Participants discussed the clips in pairs each having seen different - Often didn’t report what they had seen but what they had heard - Suggests that memory itself is distorted through misleading post-event discussion rather than result of memory conformity.

Answer 4

- EWT could improve if police used cognitive interviews

Answer 5

method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories - 4 main techinques used

Answer 6

- report everything - reinstate the context - reverse the order - change perspective

Answer 7

- Fisher - focus on dynamics of the interaction - includes ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, mimimising distractions

Answer 8

- Meta- analyse by kohnken, combined data from 55 studies comparing the CI with the standard police interview - CI gave an average 41% increase in accurate information - Shows CI is an effective technique in helping witnesses recall information that is stored in the memory but not immediately accessible

Answer 9

- not all elements are useful - Milne and Bull- found combining 'report everything' and 'reinstate the context' produced the best recall - some aspects of CI are more useful than others

Answer 10

- police may reluctant to use CI because it takes more time and training - better to focus on just a few elements

Answer 11

- representation of how memory works in terms of 3 stores - Describes how information is passed from 1 store to another

Answer 12

- All stimuli from the environment is passed into the sensory register - Memory store for each of our 5 senses - Coding in each store is specific - Duration less than half a second - high capacity - Information passes further into the memory system only if you pay attention to it

Answer 13

- Coded mainly acoustically and lasts around 18 seconds unless its rehearsed - Temporary memory store - Capacity is between 7 +/-2

Answer 14

- Potentially permanent memory store for information that has been rehearsed for a prolonged time - Coded mostly semantically - when we want to recall information from LTM it has to be transferred back into STM by retrieval - Bahrick el al found many participants were able to recognise the names and faces of old school classmates almost 50 years after graduating

Answer 15

- research support - more than 1 STM store -elaborative rehearsal

Answer 16

- MSM shows that STM and LTM are different - Baddeley found we tend to mix words that sound similar when using our STM - mix words that have similar meaning when we use our LTM - Shows LTM and STM are separate independent memory stores, claimed by the MSM

Answer 17

- In everyday life we form memories related to all sorts of useful things – names, faces - many studies that support MSM used none of these materials - Used digits, letters (Jacob) and sometimes words (Baddeley) - Used consonant syllables – have no meaning - Means that MSM may not be valid model of how memory works in our everyday life where we have to remember meaningful information

Answer 18

- Shallice and Warrington studied a client with amnesia - STM for digits was poor when read aloud to him but good when he read them himself - Shows MSM is wrong in claiming that there is just 1 STM store processing different types of information.

Answer 19

- Prolonged rehearsal isn’t needed to transfer to LTM - according to MSM what matters about rehearsal is the amount of it (the more you rehearse something the more likely it goes to your LTM) – prolonged rehearsal - Craik and Watkins found the type of rehearsal is more important than the amount - elaborative rehearsal is needed for long-term storage - occurs when you link information of existing knowledge - suggests MSM doesn’t fully explain how LT storage is achieved

Answer 20

- Tulving proposed the idea that there are 3 LTM stores

Answer 21

- Recall person events from life - Memories are time stamped - Memories of single episode will include several elements (people, places, objects) - Memories have to be retrieved consciously and with effort

Answer 22

- Shared knowledge of the world - These memories aren’t time stamped - Need to be recalled deliberately

Answer 23

- Knowledge of how to do things - Recall without consciousness - Eg riding a bike

Answer 24

- clinical evidence - conflicting neuroimaging evidence - real world application

Answer 25

- Study of Molaison and Wearing - Episodic memory in both men were severely impaired due to brain damage - But semantic memories were relatively unaffected- knew the concept of a dog but couldn’t remember stoking him 30 minutes before - Procedural memories were also intact – knew how to walk and speak - Shows that there are different memory stores in LTM – one can be damaged but others could be unaffected

Answer 26

- Clinical studies of brain are not always perfect - lack control of variables - Researcher has no control over what happened before or during the injury - No knowledge of individuals memory before incident, without its hard to see how much it has changed

Answer 27

- Buckner and Peterson (1996) reviewed evidence regarding the location of semantic and episodic memory. - semantic memory is the left side of the prefrontal cortex and episodic memory on the right - other research links the left prefrontal cortex with the episodic retrieval - Challenges any neurophysiological evidence to support types of memory as there is poor agreement on where each type might be located.

Answer 28

- Understanding types of LTM allows psychologist to help people with memory problems - As people age they experience memory loss but research shows it seems to be specific to episodic memory - Belleville devised an intervention to improve episodic memory in older people. - Trained participants performed better on a test of episodic memory after training than a control group - shows that distinguishing between types of LTM enables specific treatments to be developed

Answer 29

- Explanation of how STM is organised and how it functions - Consists of 4 main components

Answer 30

- Monitors the incoming data, focuses and divides our limited attention and allocates subsystems to tasks - Very limited processing capacity and doesn’t store information

Answer 31

- Deals with auditory information - Preserve the order the information arrives - Subdivided into o Phonological store – stores words you hear o Articulatory process – allows maintenance rehearsal, capacity is 2 seconds worth of what you can say

Answer 32

- Stores visual and/or spatial information when required - Limited capacity – Baddeley around 3-4 objects - Subdivided into o Visual cache o Inner scribe

Answer 33

- Added by Baddeley - Temporary store for information, visual, spatial and verbal information - limited capacity- about 4 chunks - Links working memory to long-term memory

Answer 34

- clinical evidence - dual task performance - nature of the central executive

Answer 35

- Shallice and Warrington case study of patient KF - After brain injury KF had poor STM ability for auditory information but could process visual information normally - Immediate recall of digits were better when he read them(visual) than being read out to him (acoustic) - phonological loop was damaged but his visuospatial sketchpad was intact - Findings support the existence of separate visual and acoustic memory stores

Answer 36

- Unclear whether KF had other cognitive impairments which might have effected performance on memory - Challenges evidence that comes from clinical studies of people with brain injuries that may have affected many different systems

Answer 37

- Baddeley – participants carried out a visual and verbal task at the same time, their performance on each was similar to when they did it separately - When both task were the same – performance declined - Because both visual tasks compete for the same subsystem whereas there is no competition when doing both - Shows there must be a separate subsystem that processes visual input

Answer 38

- Lack of clarity over nature of central executive - Baddeley – the central executive is most important but least understood - The CE needs to be more clearly specified than just for attention - Some psychologists believe the CE may consist of separate subcomponents - Means the CE is an unsatisfactory component and this challenges the integrity of the WMM

Answer 39

- interference - retrieval failure due to absence of cues

Answer 40

forgetting because one memory blocks another, causing one or both to be distorted or forgotten

Answer 41

- proactive - retroactive

Answer 42

- older memory interfers with a newer one - struggle learning new names

Answer 43

- happens when a newer memory interferes with an older one - learnt too many new names, cant remember old

Answer 44

- PI and RI are worse when memories are similar - Mcgeoch and Mcdonald changed the similarity between two sets of materials - Participants had to learn list of 10 words until they could remember with 100% accuracy, then learnt new list - Group 1 – synonyms - Group 2 – antonyms - Group 3- words unrelated to the original ones - Group 4- consonant syllables - Group 5- three-digit numbers - Group 6- no new list - When asked to recall synonyms had worst recall - Shows interference is strongest when memories are similar

Answer 45

- real world interference - interference and cues - support from drug studies

Answer 46

- Evidence of interference effects in more everyday situations - Baddeley and Hitch asked rugby player to recall names of teams they had played in the season - Players who played the most games had poorest recall - Shows interference happens in real world- increasing validity

Answer 47

- May cause forgetting but is unusual - Conditions needed for interference are rare - Unlike lab studies where there is a high degree of control, can create ideal conditions for interference - Suggests forgetting may be better explained by other theories such as retrieval failure due to lack of cues

Answer 48

- Interference is temporary and can be overdone by using cues - Tulving and Psotka gave participants lists of words organised into categories 1 list at a time - Recall was 70% for first list, but worse as list went on - End of procedure participants were given cued recall test – they were told names of categories recall rose to 70% - Shows interference causes a temporary loss of accessibility to material that is still in LTM – finding not predicted by theory

Answer 49

- Retrograde facilitation – gave participants lists of words later asked to recall, assuming the intervening experiences would act as interference - Found when list of words was learnt under influence of the drug diazepam recall 1 week later was worse than placebo group - But when learnt before drug was taken recall was better than placebo - Findings show that forgetting can be due to interference – reduce interference and you reduce forgetting

Answer 50

- not being able to access memories that are available - main reason people forget is because of insufficient cues - When information is stored in memory associated cues are stored at the same time - If cues aren’t available at time of recall retrieval failure occurs

Answer 51

- Tulving, ESP stating that a cue has to be both present at encoding and present at retrieval - Context dependent forgetting – recall depends on external cue (eg weather) - State dependent forgetting- recall depends on internal cue (eg feeling upset)

Answer 52

- Godden and Baddeley studied deep -sea divers to see if training on land helped or hindered their work underwater - Divers learnt lists of words either on land or underwater and then asked to recall on either land or water, creating 4 conditions

Answer 53

- recall was 40% lower in the non-matching conditions - The external cues available at learning were different from the ones available at recall and this led to retrieval failure

Answer 54

- Carter and Cassaday gave antihistamine drugs to their participants - Making participants slightly drowsy - Creates an internal physiological state different from the normal state of being awake and alert - Participants had to learn lists of words and passages of prose and then recall information again creating 4 conditions - learning on and off drug and recall when on and off drug

Answer 55

- Conditions where there was a mismatch between internal state of learning and recall was worse - When cues are absent there is more forgetting

Answer 56

- real-world application - research support - recall vs recognition

Answer 57

- Retrieval cue can help to overcome some forgetting in everyday situations - Although cues may not have very strong effect on forgetting – Baddeley thinks they are still worth paying attention to - Eg when you into another room to collect an item but when you get to said room you forgot what you wanted so go back to the original room to try to remember - If you have trouble remembering it is worth making effort to recall the environment in which you learnt it first - Shows us how research can remind us of strategies we use in the real world to improve our recall

Answer 58

- Godden and Baddeley - Show that lack of relevant cues at recall can lead to context dependent and state dependent forgetting in everyday life - Eysenck – argue retrieval failure is the main reason for forgetting from LTM - Evidence shows that retrieval failure occurs in real world situations as well as in highly controlled conditions of the lab

Answer 59

- Baddeley argues context effects aren’t very strong especially in everyday life - Different contexts have to be very different before an effect is seen - Would be hard to find environmental as land different from water - Means that retrieval failure due to lack of contextual cues may not actually explain much everyday forgetting

Answer 60

- Context effects may depend substantially on the type of memory being tested - Godden and Baddeley replicated their underwater experiment but used a recognition test instead of recall - there was no context-dependent effect, performance was same in all conditions - Suggests that retrieval failure is limited explanation for forgetting because it only applies when a person has to recall information rather than recognise it

Answer 61

- misleading information - anxiety

Answer 62

- wording of question may lead you to give certain answer

Answer 63

- 45 participants watch clips of car accidents then asked questions about them. - asked to describe how fast the cars were going, 5 groups given different verb - mean speed for ‘contacted’ was 31.8mph - Mean for ‘smashed’ was 40.5mph

Answer 64

- Response- bias - Wording of questions has no influence on memory but does influence how we answer - Loftus and Palmer, conducted a second experiment that supports the substitution explanation which shows that wording of a leading question changes the participants memory of the clip. - Participants who heard ‘smash’ were more likely to recall seeing broken glass (there was none)

Answer 65

- Eyewitnesses to crime discuss their experiences and memories with each other - Gabbert (2003) studied participants in pairs - Each participant watched a video of the same crime but filmed from different points of view - Both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall - 71% of participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they didn’t see in video but heard in the discussion - control group where there was no discussion was 0% - Evidence of memory

Answer 66

- memory contamination - memory conformity

Answer 67

- eyewitnesses testimonies may become altered or distorted - Because they combine information from other witnesses with their own memories

Answer 68

- Gabbert found witnesses often go along with each other either to win social approval or because they believe witnesses are correct

Answer 69

- real world app - evidence against the substitution - evidence challenging memory conformity

Answer 70

- practical uses in the criminal justice system - Loftus (1975) research on leading questions, police now careful with how they phrase their questions - Psychologists are sometimes asked to act as expert eyewitness in court trials to explain the limits of EWT to juries - Shows that psychologists can help to improve the way the legal system works

Answer 71

- Participants watched film clips in a lab, which is different from experiencing it in real life - Foster said what eyewitnesses remember has important consequences in the real world but participant responses in research don’t matter in the same way - Suggests that Loftus is too pessimistic about the effects of misleading information

Answer 72

- EWT is more accurate for some aspects of an event than others - Sutherland and Hayne (2001) showed participant video clip when they were asked leading questions their recall was more accurate for central details of the event than for peripheral ones - Suggests that the original memories for central details survived and were not distorted an outcome that is not predicted by the substitution explanation

Answer 73

- Evidence that post – event discussion actually alters EWT - Skagerberg and Wright (2008) showed participants film clips. There were 2 versions - Participants discussed the clips in pairs each having seen different - Often didn’t report what they had seen but what they had heard - Suggests that memory itself is distorted through misleading post-event discussion rather than result of memory conformity.

Answer 74

- Mental state of arousal that includes feeling concern and tension

Answer 75

- Prevents us paying attention to important cues so recall is worse - Johnson and Scott (weapon focus) participants seated in waiting room - Low anxiety condition – heard casual convo in next room then man with pen walking out – 49% able to identify him - High anxiety condition- heard heated argument and man walk out with knife - 33% able to identify him - Tunnel theory – enhanced memory for central events

Answer 76

- Fight or flight response – increased alertness - Yuille and Cutshall - real shooting in a gun shop - witnesses interviewed 5 months after shooting compared to police interview, also asked to rate how stressed they were 1-7 - witness more stressed had better recall - 88% high stress, 75% low stress (5 months after)

Answer 77

- Yerkes and Dodson – relationship between emotional arousal and performance looks like an inverted U - Deffenbacher – reviewed 21 studies of EWT and noted contradictory findings on the effects of anxiety - Used the Yerkes-Dodson law to explain findings - When we witness accident we become emotionally and physiologically aroused - Higher levels of anxiety = memory more accurate - optimal level of anxiety, if exceed recall drastic decline

Answer 78

- unusualness not anxiety - support for negative effect - support for positive effect

Answer 79

- Johnson and Scott may not have tested anxiety - Participant may have focused on object because its unusual not scared - Pickel – experiment with scissors, handgun, wallet or chicken as hand held items in salon - Eyewitness accuracy was poorer in high unusualness conditions - Suggests weapon focus effect is due to unusualness rather than anxiety and tells us nothing about effects of anxiety on EWT

Answer 80

- Valentine and Mesout supports research on weapon focus and negative effects on recall - Used objective measure (HR) to divide participants into high and low anxiety groups - Anxiety clearly disrupted the participants ability to recall details about actor - Suggest high level of anxiety does have negative effect on immediate eyewitness recall of a stressful event

Answer 81

- Christianson and Hubinette interviewed 58 witnesses to actual bank robberies in Sweden - Some directly and indirectly involved - Those directly involved had higher anxiety - Found recall more than 75% accurate across all witnesses - Direct witness more accurate - Findings from actual crimes confirm that anxiety doesn’t reduce accuracy or recall and may even enhance it

Answer 82

- They interviewed participants 4-15 months after the event - Researchers had no control over what happened during this time – post-event discussion - Effects of anxiety may have been overwhelmed by these factors - Lack of control over confounding variables may be responsible for these findings – invalidating their results

Answer 83

cognitive interview

Answer 84

- EWT could be improve if the police used better techniques when interviewing witnesses - Recommended that techniques should be based on psychological insights into how memory works and called these the cognitive interview

Answer 85

help them to retrieve more accurate memories.

Answer 86

- report everything - reinstate the context - reverse the order (prevent them reporting from their expectations of what happened and prevents dishonesty) - change perspective

Answer 87

- Fisher developed addition elements of cognitive interview to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction - The enhanced cognitive interview also includes ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly and asking open- ended questions

Answer 88

- support for the effectiveness - some elements may be more useful - time consuming

Answer 89

- Meta – analysis by Kohnken (1999) combined data from 55 studies comparing the CI and ECI with the standard police interview - CI gave an average 41% increase in accurate information compared with the standard interview - Shows CI is an effective technique in helping witnesses recall information that is stored in the memory but not immediately accessible

Answer 90

- Particular issue in the ECI which produced more incorrect details than the CI cognitive interviews may sacrifice quality if EWT in favour of quantity - This means that police officers should treat eyewitnesses evidence from CI/ECIs with caution

Answer 91

- Milne and Bull (2002) found that each of the four techniques used alone produced more information than the standard police interview - Found that using a combination of ‘report everything’ and ‘reinstate the context’ produced better recall than any of the other elements of combination of them - Confirmed that some aspects of CI are more useful than others

Answer 92

- Police officers may be reluctant to use CI because it takes more time and training than the standard interview - Suggests that the complete CI as it exists is not realistic method for officers to use and it might be better to focus on just a few elements

memory Flashcards

(117 cards)