Memory Flashcards

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1
Q

Capacity, duration and coding of the sensory register

A
  • Large capacity
  • Duration of 1-2 seconds
  • Sensory code
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2
Q

Capacity, duration and coding of the STM

A
  • Limited capacity (found to be around 7 items)
  • Limited duration
  • Mainly acoustically coded
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3
Q

Capacity, duration and coding of the LTM

A
  • Very large capacity
  • Very long duration
  • Semantic coding
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4
Q

Who came up with the multi-store model of memory?

A

Atkinson and Shiffrin

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5
Q

Who carried out research into the capacity of short term memory?

A

Jacobs, 1887

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6
Q

What was Jacobs’ experimental method?

A
  • Asked ppts to recall strings of letters or numbers of different lengths
  • Measured how many they could recall
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7
Q

Jacobs’ experiment: results

A

Participants could recall an average of 7 letters or numbers, concluding the STM has a limited capacity

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8
Q

Who investigated the sensory register?

A

Sperling, 1960

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9
Q

Sperling: method

A
  • Presented ppts with a grid of letters for just 50 milliseconds
  • Immediately tested their recall
  • Two conditions: recall everything, recall one row, specified after seeing grid
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10
Q

Sperling: results

A
  • First group (recall everything) managed to recall 5 letters (40%)
  • Second group (row specified after seeing) managed to recall 3/4 (75/100%) letters
  • He argued that in condition 2 they had to remember all the rows to answer for just one, indicating the capacity of the sensory register was large but duration very short
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11
Q

What research provided evidence for the presence of two seperate memory stores?

A

Glanzer and Cunitz (1966)

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12
Q

Glanzer and Cunitz - method

A
  • Serial position experiment
  • Ppts hear a list of words and are asked to recall them in any order (free recall)
  • Condition 1 was immediate free recall
  • Condition 2 was recall after an interference task
  • To obtain results he plotted the position of each of the words in the list against how many ppts recalled it
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13
Q

Glanzer and Cunitz: results

A
  • Ppts recalled more words at the beginning of the list (primacy effect, LTM storage) and at the end of the list (recency effect, STM storage)
  • The interference task (designed to prevent STM rehearsal) removed the recency but not the primacy effect
  • This indicates we have two seperate memory stores
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14
Q

Evidence for the duration of STM: Which research?

A

Peterson and Peterson

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15
Q

Peterson and peterson: method

A
  • 24 psychology students had to recall meaningless 3 letter trigrams at different time intervals
  • They had to count backwards in threes or fours from a specific number until they were asked to recall to prevent rehearsal
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16
Q

Peterson and Peterson: results

A
  • The longer the time between learning and recall, the lower the accuracy
  • At 3 seconds, 80% were correctly recalled
  • At 18 seconds only 10% were recalled
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17
Q

Peterson and Peterson: evaluation

A
  • Demand characteristics due to all ppts being psychology students
  • Lack of generalisability - psychology students at Indiana University may have above average memory function
  • Lab experiment - high control, low ecological validity
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18
Q

Quickfire study: duration of long term memory

A
  • Bahrick (1975)
  • Tested recall and recognition of the names of their high school classmates
  • 15 year recall 60% recognition 90%
  • 48 year recall 30% recongnition 80%
  • LTM has long duration but recognition is better than recall
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19
Q

Quickfire study: Evidence for coding

A
  • Baddeley (1966)
  • Recall 4 lists of words that either sounded similar, different, similar meaning or different meaning
  • Ppts recalling acoustically similar struggled more immediately after learning, but 20 mins after learning semantically similar words proved harder to recall
  • Concluded STM is coded acoustically and LTM semantically
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20
Q

Case study to support the MSM?

A
  • Henry Molaison, damage to his LTM store but still had a functional STM, indicating that the stores are separate
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21
Q

Brain imaging study support for MSM

A
  • Brain imaging studies have shown that different areas of the brain are active when we hold information over short and long time periods
  • Frontal cortex active for STM
  • Hippocampus active for LTM
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22
Q

Who proposed the model of long term memory and what is it?

A
  • Proposed by Endel Tulving
  • Says LTM can be broken down into three distinct portions - semantic, procedural and episodic
23
Q

Support for Tulving’s LTM model

A
  • Case studies such as Clive Wearing and Henry Molaison who had damage to their episodic memory but not their procedural memory
  • Clive Wearing was able to play the piano despite a severely damaged LTM and no STM
  • Brain imaging studies show different parts of the brain active with different types of memory (Hippocampus - episodic, temporal lobe - semantic, cerebellum+motor cortex - procedural)
24
Q

Limitations to Tulving’s LTM model

A
  • Squire and Zola found that people with a damaged temporal lobe had damage to both their episodic and semantic memories
  • Indicates the two stores are not distinct - particularly that semantic memories may begin as episodic memories
25
Q

What are the components of the working memory model?

A

The phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketchpad, central executive, episodic buffer

26
Q

Who developed the working memory model?

A

Baddeley and Hitch, 1974

27
Q

What does the working memory model say about STM?

A

It is an active memory store, holding information while it is being worked on and allowing for that information to be manipulated

28
Q

WMM: Phonological loop

A
  • Processes verbal and auditory information and remembers the order in which it was learnt
  • Sub-divided into primary acoustic store (1-2 seconds duration holds most recently learnt info) and the auditory process (rehearses info from primary acoustic store while it is required for a task through subvocal repetition)
29
Q

What is the word-length effect?

A

It is easier to recall a list of short words than long words as the primary acoustic store only has duration of 2 seconds

30
Q

WMM: Visuo-spatial sketchpad

A
  • Handles visual and spatial information as mental pictures
  • Visual cache stores visual information
  • Inner scribe stores spatial information
30
Q

WMM: Episodic buffer

A
  • Multimodal store combining information from all 5 senses to create an overall scene of an event
  • This can then be transferred to LTM to create episodic memories
31
Q

WMM: central executive

A
  • Responsible for managing other stores and directing information between them
  • No storage capacity and limited attention capacity
  • If you divide your attention between tasks involving multiple WMM stores the central executive can become overloaded
32
Q

Support for WMM:

A
  • Patient KF could only store verbal information but not visual, indicating the seperate stores of short term memory. He could also generate new long term memoriesm which couldn’t be explained by the MSM if his STM was damaged
  • Gathercole and Baddeley found patients perform better if doing one verbal and one visual task compared to two verbal or two visual, indicating that these are separate.
  • Brain imaging shows different areas are active with different types of information (temporal lobe for PL and occipital/parietal for VSS- more intense tasks use parietal)
33
Q

What are the two key theories for why we forget?

A
  • Decay theory - where the memory is no longer in the LTM
  • Retrieval failure - where the memory cannot be retrieved either due to interference or cue overloading
34
Q

Define cue overloading

A

Where a clue to a memory begins to have multiple memories attached to it, for example the smell of popcorn at the cinema. This makes it increasingly difficult to retrieve a single, distinct memory

35
Q

The two types of cue for cue-dependent forgetting theory

A
  • External cues are features of the environment such as the smell, weather or location at the time of encoding
  • Internal cues are features of our internal environment such as mood, and state of intoxication
36
Q

Explanations for forgetting based on cue-dependent forgetting theory

A
  • Context dependent forgettign is when the external environment in which the memory was encoded does not match that at the time of recall (different weather)
  • State- dependent forgetting is the same but with internal state (drunk etc.)
37
Q

Study support for interference theory

A
  • Underwood (1957)
  • Asked participants to learn either one word list or multiple
  • If they learnt only 1, recall was 80% accurate, if they had to learn multiple their recall of the last word list was only around 20% accurate, supporting proactive interference
38
Q

Criticisms of interference theory

A
  • Laboratory studies such as those conducted by Underwood are highly artificial and may lack ecological validity (word lists don’t resemble the type of info we remember in everyday life)
  • It can only explain forgetting that occurs when we have two or more memories that are very similar to eachother - we often forget things even if we don’t have a similar memory
39
Q

Support for cue-dependent forgetting theory

A
  • Godden and Baddeley (1975)
  • Learn a word list underwater or on a beach and recall it either underwater or on the beach.
  • Ppts were able to recall better when tested in the same contect as where they encoded the information
40
Q

Research support for interference in an everyday setting

A
  • Baddeley and Hitch asked rugby players to recall the names of opponent teams they had encountered
  • Some had been periodically injured and some were present at every game
  • Greater number of games played, less ability to recall names of teams, providing support for retroactive interference
41
Q

Support for effect of similarity of test materials on interference

A
  • McGeoch and McDonald (1931)
  • Gave participants 10 adjectives (A) to learn followed by a rest period of 10 mins to learn a second list (B)
  • If B was synonyms of A recall 12%
  • Nonsense syllables 26%
  • Numbers 37%
42
Q

Evidence support for state-dependent forgetting

A
  • Goodwin et al.
  • Four groups, Sober (S) Alcohol (A) (groups were SS, AA, AS,SA)
  • Carried out over two days
  • SA and AS made the most mistakes on day 2
  • The SS participants (obviously) did better overall
  • Supports state-dependent forgetting
43
Q

Limitations of cue-dependent forgetting

A
  • Lack of ecological validity in studies such as Godden and Baddeley (who learns words underwater??)
  • Cue-dependent forgetting is less relevant in explaining how we recall and forget procedural memories
44
Q

What are the four factors affecting memory accuracy?

A
  • Schemas lead us to incorrectly modify a memory to fit a schema
  • Leading questions that suggest a particular answer is correct
  • Post-event discussion as people have their own expectations/ interpretations/ perceptions of an event
  • Anxiety - moderate anxiety is the sweet spot
45
Q

Study into how leading questions affect EWT

A
  • Loftus and Palmer
  • Asked ppts to estimate the speed at which the car was travelling at when a crash occured in a video, using words such as “smashed” or “bumped”. When “smashed” was used they estimated it was travelling faster
  • A second experiment asked ppts if they saw any broken glass in a film of a car driving through the countryside and crashing
  • Participants who were asked if there was glass after being asked about the car’s speed when it “smashed” were much more likely to identify broken glass (even though there wasn’t any)
46
Q

Loftus and Palmer AO3

A
  • May have suffered from demand characteristics
  • Lack of ecological validity, especially as they knew they were in a lab watching a video as part of a psychology experiment so may not have tried very hard to provide accurate answers
47
Q

Study for effects of anxiety on EWT

A
  • Johnson and Scott (1976)
  • Ppts told to wait in the waiting area of a laboratory, one confederate ran through with a knife soaked in blood or a pen soaked in grease
  • When asked to identify the person who came in from photographs, 49% accuracy was recorded for the pen condition compared to 33% for the knife
48
Q

Johnson and Scott AO3

A
  • Ppts knew they were likely not going to come to any harm in a laboratory so may have focused on the weapon out of surprise or amusement, leading to the 33% accuracy recorded
  • Lack of following ethical guidlines as there was deception and the ppts were not protected from harm, particularly if they or someone they knew had been involved in knife crime
  • Not replicated by Yuille and Cutshall
49
Q

Real-life case study into anxiety and the weapon focus effect

A
  • Yuille and Cutshall investigated anxiety in a real life shooting in Canada
  • 13 of the 21 originally interviewed witnesses agreed to take part
  • They were aged between 15 and 32
  • Witnesses had extremely good memory of the details of the event even 5 months later
50
Q

Yuille and Cutshall AO3

A
  • High ecological validity
  • However participant variables may be problematic, especially as all participants were young (below 32) and the 13 out of 21 who may have volunteered to take part in the follow up are likely to have done so because of their good memory and potentially lower anxiety than others, who may have avoided it to not feel overwhelmed or as the feel they can’t offer any info/remember it
51
Q

Elements of the cognitive interview:

A
  • Recall everything
  • Reverse the order
  • Change the perspective
  • Reinstate the context
52
Q

AO3 of the cognitive interviee

A
  • Geiselman created a situation where an intruder to a lecture stole a projector
  • Ppts interviewed using the cognitive interview were less susceptible to the leading question “Was the guy with the green backpack nervous” (it WAS BLUE) than those interviewed with a standard interview
  • Limitations include that it is less effective when interviewing children, so the enhanced cognitive interview was developed to build a trusting relationship with the witness and work better with children
  • Expensive training of police which are underfunded, takes longer
53
Q

Hazan and shaver:

A
  • Love quiz in local American newspaper Rocky Mountain news assessed thoughts on love and the second part assessed their childhood attachment style
  • They found that there was a correlation between the two, supporting the idea of the internal working model
  • 56% secure, 25% insecure-avoidant, 19% insecure-resistant, the same in childhood and adulthood
  • strength both men and women ppt
  • weakness self report
  • strength alignment with ainsworth’s strange situation findings, indicating high concurrent validity