memory

Question 1

What are the three features of each store in the multi-store memory model?

Answer 1

• coding
• capacity
• duration

Question 2

For the coding in the sensory register, what are the different senses and their names?

Answer 2

iconic - vision
haptic -touch
echoic - sound
gustatory - taste
olfactory - smell

Question 3

What is the capacity in the sensory register?

Answer 3

Very large, however only what is paid attention to is passed to the short term memory

Question 4

What is the duration like in the sensory register?

Answer 4

Very short, as low as 250 milli seconds

Question 5

What is the coding in the short term memory?

Answer 5

Information in the short term memory is stored acoustically

Question 6

What is the capacity in the short term memory? How can it be improved?

Answer 6

Around 7 items plus or minus 2.
Can be improved by chunking

Question 7

What is the duration in the short term memory? How can it be extended?

Answer 7

Short, 18-30 seconds. However, duration can be extended by rehearsal

Question 8

When information is passed from STM to LTM what are the two types of rehearsal?

Answer 8

• maintenance rehearsal - repeating the info
• elaborative rehearsal - linking info that is already in the LTM

Question 9

In the short term memory, what are the two ways information can be lost?

Answer 9

• Displacement - new info replacing it
• Decay - lost over time

Question 10

What is the coding in the long term memory?

Answer 10

Stored semantically e.g we link waves to the ocean

Question 11

What is the capacity in the long term memory?

Answer 11

no limit. Info can be lost, not because it ‘ran out of room’, it may be in the long term memory its just not accessible

Question 12

What is the duration in the long term memory?

Answer 12

Potentially unlimited as recall from childhood is normal in old people

Question 13

What was the Glanzer and Cunitz study?

Answer 13

Asking participants to remember to recall a list of words in any order

Question 14

What was the results of the Glanzer and Cunitz study?
What does this show?

Answer 14

• most people remembered words from the start and then end of the list but the middle was usually forgotten
• this suggests that there are separate short term and long term memory stores. First ones go into the long term memory by rehearsal and the end are recalled by the STM
• words in the middle get displaced out of the STM by the end words

Question 15

What was the Sperling (1960) study?

Answer 15

• Participants were given a grid 4 by 4 filled with letters
• Shown for 1/20th of a second
• asked to recall what they could remember

Question 16

What was the results of the Sperling study and what does this tell us about the sensory register?

Answer 16

• It was found that the recall for one row was 75%
• This shows that all the rows were contained by the sensory register
• Therefore, the capacity is large

Question 17

How is the short term memory coded?

Answer 17

Acoustically

Question 18

How is the long term memory coded?

Answer 18

Semantically

Question 19

What is the role of the central executive in the WMM?

Answer 19

• ‘Head of the model’
• controls attention
• receives sense info and filters it before passing it on
• capacity is 4 items - only 1 type of info at a time

Question 20

What is the role of the phonological loop in the WMM?

Answer 20

Processes auditory coded info

Question 21

What is the role of the primary acoustic store in the WMM?

Answer 21

• inner ear, holds words recently heard

Question 22

What is the role of the articulatory control process in the WMM?

Answer 22

Inner voice, holds info via sub vocal repetition

Question 23

What is the role of the visuo - spatial sketchpad in the WMM?

Answer 23

• Processes visual and spatially coded info, thought of as ‘inner eye’

Question 24

What is the role of the visual cashe in the WMM?

Answer 24

• A passive store of form and colour

Question 25

What is the role of the inner scribe in the WMM?

Answer 25

• active store holding holding the relationship between objects in 3D space

Question 26

What is the role of the episodic buffer in the WMM?

Answer 26

Added to WMM in 2000, as the model needed a general store to hold and integrate info from VSS, PL, CE and long term memory

Question 27

What was the Baddeley (1975) 1 test?

Answer 27

Participants were asked to perform two visual tasks, tracking moving lights at the same time as describing the angles of the letter F. Or a visual and verbal task

Question 28

What was found in the Baddeley (1975) 1 test? What does this suggest?

Answer 28

• performance was much higher when the tasks were not using the same processes
• This suggests that there are two separate processes for visual and spatial

Question 29

What was the Shallice and Warrington (1970) test? What does this suggest?

Answer 29

• Investigated the clinical case of KF. It was found that KF had selective impairment to his verbal short - term memory, caused by a brain injury, however the visual functioning of his STM was not affected.
• this suggests that the PL and VSS are separate processes located in separate regions of the brain

Question 30

What is the Baddeley (1975) 2 test? What does it suggest?

Answer 30

• Participants were visually shown word lists and then asked to write them down in the same order. One condition had monosyllabic words e.g bond and the other had polysyllabic e.g opportunity. It was found they could recall more mono words than poly.
• This suggests that the capacity of PL is is not in number of words but in time it takes to say them - approx 2 seconds

Question 31

What are the criticisms of the working memory model?

Answer 31

• too simplistic and too vague (central executive), not open for testing and no full explanation of its function
• It is impossible to directly observe the process of memory, this means the assumptions made could be false
• issues with external validity