Memory

Question 1

What is the multi-store model of memory ?

Answer 1

A representation of how memory works in terms of three stores called sensory register, STM, LTM.
It also represents how memory is stored, transferred between the different stores, remembered and forgotten.

Question 2

Multi-store model of memory diagram

Answer 2

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Question 3

Who developed the multi-store model of memory ?

Answer 3

Atkinson and Shiffrin

Question 4

The sensory register

Answer 4

A stimulus from the environment will pass into the sensory register.
The sensory register contains a store for each of the 5 senses.
The two main stores are iconic memory (visual information coded visually) and echoic memory (auditory information coded acoustically).
Since it receives information for our senses, the sensory register has a huge capacity, but a duration of less than 0.5 seconds.
Very little of what goes into the sensory register passes further into the memory system. But it will if you pay attention to it.

Question 5

The STM

Answer 5

Known as a limited capacity store because it can only contain a certain number of things before forgetting takes place.
Capacity of STM is around 7 +/-2 items of information.
Coded acoustically (sounds).
Duration of about 18-30 seconds unless it is rehearsed.
Maintenance rehearsal occurs when we repeat the new information to ourselves, allowing the information to be kept in the STM. Prolonged maintenance rehearsal allows the information to pass into the LTM, whilst a lack of such rehearsal causes forgetting.

Question 6

The LTM

Answer 6

Potentially permanent memory store for information that has been rehearsed for a prolonged time.
Believed to have an unlimited capacity.
Very long duration (almost 50 years, as shown by Bahrick et al).
LTM is described as being semantically (meaning) coded.
When we want to recall it, it has to be transferred back into STM by retrieval. No memories are recalled directly from the LTM.

Question 7

Study into LTM and STM being separate stores

Answer 7

Man called HM :
• Had brain surgery to relieve epilepsy. Procedure was new and not fully understood.
• His hippocampus was removed from both sides of his brain. The hippocampus is known to be central to memory function.
• When assessed, he would get his age and the current year incorrect. He had very little recall of the operation, could not remember speaking with someone just an hour earlier, couldn’t recall what he had eaten earlier. His LTM was tested repeatedly but never improved with practice.
• Despite this, he performed well on tests of immediate memory span (a measure of STM).
• This supports the MSM as it shows that the LTM and STM are different stores. This is shown when HM could recall tests on his STM, but he could not transfer to his LTM. Supporting they are different stores

Question 8

Baddeley - coding

Answer 8

• Gave different lists of words to four groups of participants to remember.
• Each group was assigned with either acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar, semantically dissimilar words to remember.
• When asked to recall words immediately after hearing them (STM recall), they tended to do worse with acoustically similar words. Suggesting information is coded acoustically in the STM.
• If participants were asked to recall the word list after a time interval of 20 minutes (LTM recall), they did worse with the semantically similar words. This suggests that information is coded semantically in the LTM.

Question 9

Bahrick - LTM

Answer 9

The duration of LTM is unlimited, as shown by Bahrick et al who found that photo recognition of graduating classmates of nearly 400 participants decreased from 90% to 70% between 15 years and nearly 50 years of graduating.

Question 10

Peterson and Peterson

Answer 10

Tested 24 undergraduates, each did 8 trials. On each trial they were given 3 letters to remember (a triagram e.g. ycg) and 3 numbers, they then had to count backwards from that 3 digit number until they were told to stop. This was to prevent rehearsal. On each trial they were told to stop after a different amount of time. They found that increasing these retention intervals decrease the accuracy of recall and suggests the STM duration is limited unless we rehearse.

Question 11

MSM evaluations

Answer 11

❌ There is more than one type of rehearsal : according to the MSM, what matters in rehearsal is the amount of it that you do ( the more you rehearse some information the more likely you are to transfer it to the LTM and remember it for a long time ). Craik and Watkins found it’s more about the rehearsal type. They discovered there are two types of rehearsal. Maintenance rehearsal is the type described in the MSM and does not transfer information into LTM instead remains in STM. Elaborate rehearsal is needed for long-term storage - it occurs when you link information to your existing knowledge , or think about what it means and this is not explained in the model.

✅ The MSM acknowledges the qualitative differences between STM and LTM by representing them as separate stores. For example, STM is encoded acoustically, whilst LTM is encoded semantically and has a much longer duration, as evidenced by Baddeley. Therefore, the MSM portrays an accurate view of the differences between the two types of memory, as supported by Baddeley and the case study of HM.

❌ The MSM incorrectly represents STM as a single, unitary store. For example, Shallice and Warrington found that their amnesiac patient ‘KF’ had poor STM recall for auditory stimuli, but increasingly accurate recall for visual stimuli. This, alongside KF being able to differentiate and recall both verbal and non-verbal sounds, suggests that there may be multiple types of STM.

❌ Artificial materials : in everyday life, we form memories related to lots of useful things (faces, names, places…). A lot of the research studies providing support for the MSM used none of these materials. Instead used digits, letters (Peterson and Peterson) and words (Baddeley).

❌ The case study of HM does not offer good support for the MSM as it is a unique case study of a brain-damaged individual.

Question 12

What is memory

Answer 12

The process in which we retain information about past events.
This could refer to our immediate past, or events that happened years ago.

Question 13

What is coding

Answer 13

Coding refers to the process of converting information from one form to another.
Coding is acoustic in STM, and semantic in LTM, as demonstrated by Baddeley.

Question 14

Research into coding

Answer 14

Baddeley gave different lists of words to four groups of participants to remember. Each group was assigned with either acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar, semantically dissimilar words to remember. When asked to recall words immediately after hearing them (STM recall), they tended to do worse with acoustically similar words. Suggesting information is coded acoustically in the STM.
If participants were asked to recall the word list after a time interval of 20 minutes (LTM recall), they did worse with the semantically similar words. This suggests that information is coded semantically in the LTM.
❌ Quite artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material. The words lists had no personal meaning to participants. This means we should be cautious about generalising the findings. When processing more meaningful information, people use semantic coding even for STM. This means the findings of this study have limited application.

Question 15

What is capacity?

Answer 15

Capacity refers to the volume of information/data which can be kept in any memory store at any one time.
For example, the capacity of STM is thought to be 7 +/- 2 items (Miller), whilst the capacity of LTM is unlimited. This is based on Miller’s idea that things come in groups of 7 (e.g. 7 days of the week, deadly sins), and that such a ‘chunking’ method can help us recall information.

Question 16

Research into capacity

Answer 16

Jacobs and Miller

Question 17

Jacobs research into capacity

Answer 17

• Jacobs developed a technique to measure digit span. This was the researcher reading out a number of digits and increasing until the participants cannot recall the order correctly. The results were that the mean span for digits (how many can be recalled) across all participants was 9.3 items. The mean span for letters was 7.3.
❌ was conducted a long time ago. Early research in psychology often lacked adequate control. For example, some participants may have been distracted while they were being tested so they didn’t perform as well as they might. This would mean that the results might not be valid because there were confounding variables that were not controlled. ✅ However, the results of this study have been confirmed in other research, supporting its validity.

Question 18

Miller research into capacity

Answer 18

• Miller made observations of everyday practice. E.g. things come in 7s (days of week). Suggesting the capacity of STM is about 7 +/- 2 items. Miller also noted that a ‘chunking’ method can help us recall information (grouping individual letters together into meaningful units). These things help us increase the capacity of the STM.
❌ More recent research has suggested that Miller may have over-exaggerated the capacity of STM, and that the capacity is more similar to 4 chunks as opposed to the original 7 +/- 2. This may reflect the outdated methodologies adopted by Miller.

Question 19

What is duration ?

Answer 19

Duration refers to the amount of time that information can be stored in each memory store.
The duration of STM is ~ 18 seconds unless rehearsed.

Question 20

Research into duration

Answer 20

Peterson and Peterson

Bahrick et al.

Question 21

Peterson and Peterson research into duration

Answer 21

• Peterson and Peterson – tested 24 undergraduates. They were given 3 letters to remember (a triagram e.g. ycg) and 3 numbers, they then had to count backwards from that 3 digit number until they were told to stop. This was to prevent rehearsal. On each trial they were told to stop after a different amount of time. They found that increasing these retention intervals decrease the accuracy of recall and suggests the STM duration is limited unless we rehearse. After 18 seconds, 3% could recall, this suggests STM duration without rehearsal is up to 18 seconds.
❌ features methodologies with low mundane realism, thus producing findings with little ecological validity. This is due to the use of artificial stimuli which has little personal meaning to the participants, and so does not accurately reflect everyday learning experiences. This therefore limits the generalisability of such findings.

Question 22

Bahrick et al. research into duration

Answer 22

• The duration of LTM is unlimited, as shown by Bahrick et al. who found that photo recognition of graduating classmates decreased from 90% to 70% between 15 years and 48 years of graduating.
✅ use of meaningful stimuli, and a methodology which is high in mundane realism. This suggests that the findings have high ecological validity because they can be easily generalised to real-life, due to the stimuli reflecting those which we would often try to learn and recall in our day to day lives: information with personal and meaningful value.
❌ In real-life based research like Bahrick et al.’s, confounding variables are not controlled. For example, the fact that Bahrick’s participants may have looked at their yearbook photos and rehearsed their memory over the years.

Question 23

What are the three types of long-term memory ?

Answer 23

Episodic, semantic and procedural.

Question 24

What are episodic memories ?

Answer 24

They store events from our lives (episodes).
An example would be the memory of a wedding or the first time meeting a partner.
They are time-stamped and involve several elements (people, places, objects, behaviours). You have to make a conscious effort to recall them.

Question 25

What are semantic memories ?

Answer 25

Stores our knowledge of the world (like a combination of an encyclopaedia and a dictionary).
E.g. meaning of words, how to apply to university.
Are not time-stamped, less personal than episodic (more about facts/knowledge).

Question 26

Procedural memories ?

Answer 26

Stores memories for actions and skills.
E.g. driving a car, playing table tennis.
Is recalled unconsciously (muscle-based memory/automatic action)

Question 27

Types of long-term memory evaluations

Answer 27

✅ there is neuroimaging evidence from brain scan studies that different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. E.g. Tulving et al. got participants to perform various memory tasks while their brains were scanned using a PET scanner. They found episodic and semantic memories are both recalled from the prefrontal cortex. They found the left side recalls semantic memories and the right side recalls episodic memories. This supports the view that there is a physical reality to different types of LTM within the brain. There has also been much research later supporting this, therefore increasing the validity of this finding.
❌ Peterson et al. concluded after that semantic and episodic memory is located in the opposite sides of the prefrontal cortex. This challenges these neurophysiological findings to support types of memory as there is disagreement between psychologists.

✅ real-life application. Memory loss in old age is specific to episodic memory. Belleville et al. demonstrated that episodic memories could be improved in older people who had a mild cognitive impairment. The trained participants performed better on a test of episodic memory after training than a control group. This highlights the benefit of being able to distinguish between different types of LTM — it enables specific treatments to be developed.

✅ clinical studies of amnesia evidenced different types of LTM. For example, HM had difficultly recalling events that happened to him (episodic) in the past but his semantic memories were to the most part unaffected and his procedural memories were intact. This supports the view that there are different memory stores in LTM because one store can be damaged but other stores are unaffected.
However, clinical case studies lack control and are of unique individuals (lacks population validity).

Question 28

What is the WMM ?

Answer 28

It is a model of STM designed by Baddeley and Hitch which sees STM as a non-unitary store and active processor.

Question 29

What does WMM suggest that STM is made up of ?

Answer 29

The WMM suggests that STM is made up of the central executive, the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad and the episodic buffer.

Question 30

WMM diagram

Answer 30

.

Question 31

Central executive

Answer 31

Allocates subsystems.
Monitors incoming data, directs attention and allocates subsystems to tasks.
Has a very limited storage capacity.

Question 32

Phonological loop (PL)

Answer 32

Deals with auditory information and preserves the order which information arrives. It is subdivided into :
• Phonological store : stores the words you hear.
• Articulacy process : allows maintenance rehearsal (repeating sounds to keep them in WM while they are needed).
Capacity = ~ 2 seconds of what you say.

Question 33

Visuo-spatial sketchpad (VSS)

Answer 33

Stores visual and/or spatial information when required (e.g. recalling how many windows your house has).
Logie subdivided the VSS into :
• Visual cache : store visual data.
• Inner scribe : records arrangement of objects in visual field.
Capacity = 3/4 objects.

Question 34

Episodic buffer

Answer 34

Added in 2000.
Is a temporary store for information.
Integrates visual, spatial, and verbal information from other stores.
Maintains sense of time sequencing.
Links to LTM.
Capacity : about four ‘chunks’.

Question 35

WMM evaluations

Answer 35

❌ Baddeley said the CE is the most important but least understood component of working memory. The central executive has not been precisely defined. For example, the central executive may be made up of several sub-components or even be part of a larger component itself in working memory. This lack of a comprehensive explanation for each component of WMM draws doubts about the accuracy of its depiction of working memory.

✅ Shallice and Warrington’s study of KF
provides support for the WMM because
their findings show that KF had very
poor STM recall for auditory stimuli (damaged PL), but
increased STM recall for visual stimuli (intact VSS).
This supports that the components of
memory which process auditory and
visual stimuli are separate (as described
in the WMM through the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad).

✅ Studies of dual-task performance (e.g. Baddeley et al.’s), where each participant must undertake a visual and verbal task simultaneously, shows decreased performance for such tasks and so supports the idea that the central executive has a very limited processing capacity (as predicted by the WMM) and that the slave systems are in competition with each other for these tasks and resources. Therefore, there must be separate subsystems that process visual and verbal processes.
❌ however, these studies are highly-controlled and use tasks that are unlike everyday working memory tasks (e.g. recalling random sequences of letters). This challenges the validity of the model because it is not certain that working memory operates this way in everyday situations.

Question 36

What is interference ?

Answer 36

When two pieces of information disrupt each other.

Question 37

What is proactive interference (PI) ?

Answer 37

When an older memory disrupts the recall of a newer memory (newer information is forgotten).
For example, a teacher learns many names in the past and can’t remember names of her current class.

Question 38

What is retroactive interference (RI) ?

Answer 38

When newer memory disrupts recall of an older one (older information is forgotten).
For example, a teacher learns many new names this year and can’t remember the names of her previous students.
• retroactive interference is less likely to occur when there is a gap between the instances of learning.

Question 39

What makes inference worse?

Answer 39

1. Interference is worse when memories are similar.
2. When there is a gap between the instances of learning.

Question 40

Research on effects of similarity:

Answer 40

Procedure : McGeoch and McDonald asked participants to learn a list of words to 100% accuracy.
Then they were given a new list to learn of which varied in the degree to which it was similar to the old: synonyms, antonyms, unrelated, consonant syllables, three-digit numbers, or no new list.
Findings : performance depended on the nature of the second list. The most similar material produced the worst recall. The mean number of items recalled increased in the same order as the lists above.
Conclusions : this shows that interference is strongest when the memories are similar.

Question 41

Interference evaluations

Answer 41

❌ The artificial stimuli used in these tasks, such as learning lists of random words with no personal meaning to the participants, meaning that the findings of interference studies are likely to have low mundane realism. This is because in real life, we are likely to learn lists of meaningful information, such as revision topics for psychology, which we draw links upon and also which have personal meaning to us. These factors may also influence the extent of forgetting.
✅ Interference has been consistently demonstrated in several studies, but particularly in lab experiments. This increases the validity of the theory, due to the use of highly-controlled conditions in lab experiments, standardised instructions alongside the removal of the biasing effects of extraneous and confounding variables (e.g. time).

✅ Baddeley and Hitch asked rugby players to recall the names of teams they had played against during a rugby season. Players did not play the same number of games (e.g. due to injuries). Those who played most (more interference) had poorest recall. This shows that interference operates in some everyday situations, increasing the external validity of the theory.

❌ A second methodological criticism of interference studies, further suggesting that they lack mundane realism and reliability, is that they are often conducted in very short spaces of time, with participants recalling their words 1 or 2 hours after they have learnt them. This does not reflect the normal passage of time in everyday life, where we often find that several days pass until we need to recall such information e.g. in the case of an exam. Therefore, this suggests that interference is unlikely to be a valid explanation for forgetting from the LTM.

Question 42

Retrieval failure

Answer 42

A form of forgetting. It occurs when we don’t have the necessary cues to access memory. When information is initially placed in memory, associated cues are stored at the same time.

Question 43

Encoding specificity principle (ESP)

Answer 43

By Tulving.
Cues help retrieval if the same ones are present both at encoding (learning of material) and at retrieval (recalling).
If the cues available at encoding and retrieval are different, there will be some forgetting.
Some cues are linked in a meaningful way (e.g. ‘STM’ may lead you to recall much information on short term memory). Some cues are encoded at time of learning but not in a meaningful way, these are :
• Context-dependent forgetting: recall depends on external cue (e.g. weather/place).
• State-dependent forgetting: recall depends on internal cue (e.g. feeling upset, being drunk).

Question 44

Context-dependent forgetting research

Answer 44

Godden and Baddeley carried out a study of deep-sea divers working underwater.
Procedure —> the divers learned a list of words underwater or on land and then were asked to recall the words either under water or on land. This therefore created four conditions.
Findings —> accurate recall was 40% lower in the non-matching conditions - the external/context cues available were different from the ones at recall and this led to retrieval failure.

Question 45

State-dependent forgetting research

Answer 45

Procedure —> Carter and Cassaday gave anti-histamine drugs (hay fever drugs) to their participants. It has a mild sedative effect. This creates an internal state different from the ‘normal’ state of being awake and alert. The participants had to learn a list of words/prose and then recall the information in another four different conditions consisting of leaning/not learning on drug, recalling/not recalling on drug.
Findings —> recall was significantly worse with the differing internal cues for learning and recalling.

Question 46

Retrieval failure evaluations

Answer 46

❌ Poor generalisability : Godden and Baddeley repeated their underwater diver experiment but tested for the recognition of learnt words, as opposed to recall, and found no significant difference in accuracy of recognition between the matched and non-matched conditions. This suggests that retrieval failure may only explain forgetting for some types of memory, tested in specific ways and under certain conditions, hence not being a universal

❌ The encoding specificity principle suffers from cyclical reasoning due to its over-reliance on assumptions. For example, if a cue produces the successful recall of a word, we assume that the cue must have been encoded at the time of learning. This is just an assumption and there is no way of independently establishing whether the cue has been coded.

✅ real life application : we have probably all had the following experience : going downstairs to get something then forgetting what you went downstairs for when you go down there, only to remember the moment you go back upstairs. When we are having trouble remembering something, it is probably worth making the effort to try to recall the environment you learned it, research on context-related cues can remind us of strategies we use in the real world to improve our recall.

✅ range of supporting evidence : Godden and Baddeley and Carter and Cassaday show that lack of cues at recall leads to everyday forgetting. There is even further evidence, for example, Aggleton and Waskett showed how smell can act as a context-related cue to memory. They based their study on a museum in York where you can walk round the 1000-year-old ruins, recreated to be like the Viking town of that time, including the smells.
They found that recreating these smells helped people to recall the details of their trip to the museum more accurately, even after several years. This increases the validity of the idea of retrieval failure being due to absence of cues.

Question 47

What is ‘misleading information’ ?

Answer 47

Incorrect information given to the eyewitness usually after the event. It can take many forms, such as leading questions and post-event discussion between co-witnesses and/or other people.

Question 48

What is a leading question ?

Answer 48

A question which, because of the way it is phrased, suggests a certain answer. For example, “was the knife in the left hand?”. This suggests the answer is ‘left hand’.

Question 49

Leading questions research

Answer 49

Procedure : Loftus and Palmer arranged participants to watch film clips of car accidents and then gave them questions about the accident. They were asked the leading question “about how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?”. It is a leading question because the verb “hit” suggests the speed the car was going. There were 5 groups of participants, each was given a different verb in the question.
Findings : the mean estimated speed was calculated for each participant group. The verb ‘contacted’ resulted in a mean estimated speed of 32 mph. The verb ‘smashed’ was a mean of 41 mph. The leading question biased the eyewitness recall of an event.

Question 50

Why do leading questions affect EWT ?

Answer 50

The response-bias explanation suggests that the wording of the question has no real-effect on the participants’ memory but instead influences how they decide to answer. When the participants got the leading question ‘smashed’, it encouraged them to choose a higher speed estimate.
Loftus and Palmer conducted a second experiment that supported the substitution explanation - the wording of a leading question actually changes the participant’s memory of the film clip. This was demonstrated because participants who originally heard ‘smashed’ later were more likely to report seeing broke glass (which there wasn’t) than those who heard ‘hit’. The verb altered their memory of the incident.

Question 51

What is a post-event discussion (PED) ?

Answer 51

When co-witnesses discuss the crime with each other.
It may influence the accuracy of each witness’ recall of the event as they combine misinformation from other witnesses with their own memories.

Question 52

PED research

Answer 52

Procedure : Gabbert et al. studied participants in pairs. Each participant watched a video of the same crime, but filmed from different points of view. This meant that each participant could see elements in the event that the other could not. Both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall.
Findings : the researchers found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video but had picked up in the discussion. This figure, in a control group was 0%. Gabbert et al. concluded that witnesses often go along with each other, either to win social approval (NSI) or because they believe the other witnesses are right (ISI) and they are wrong. This is called memory conformity.

Question 53

What is memory contamination?

Answer 53

When co-witnesses discuses a crime, they mix (mis)information from other witness with their own memories.

Question 54

What is memory conformity?

Answer 54

Witnesses go along with each other to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right.

Question 55

Leading questions evaluations

Answer 55

❌ A key methodological criticism for studies of EWT is that they often use the same, young target to identify. This, as argued by Anastasi and Rhodes, may be affected by own age bias, which describes the tendency to recall others from your own age group with a high degree of accuracy, with a lower accuracy rate for those from other age groups. This means that participants aged of elderly and middle-age may be inaccurately represented as having a lower accuracy of EWT, due to the frequent use of young targets.

❌ Demand characteristics may also reduce the reliability of the findings, in Loftus’ study, as it is suggested that participants often want to be as helpful and attentive as possible. This means that, through the mechanism of social desirability bias and the ‘Please-U’ effect, when in doubt over their answer to a question, they are likely to give an answer which seems most beneficial or expected of the researcher, thus biasing the results.

❌ The artificial tasks used by both Loftus and Palmer, alongside Gabbert, reduces the ecological validity of the findings and the mundane realism of the methodology. For example, the film clips of the car crashes do not expose participants to the anxiety of experiencing a real-life car crash. This anxiety may either have a negative or positive effect on the accuracy of EWT, thus biasing the findings.

❌ For Loftus, participants were all her university students all of a similar age. Therefore, it is not generalisable to whole population and lacks population validity.

✅ has hugely important practical uses in the real world, where the consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious. For example, Lotus believes that leading questions can have such a distorting effect on memory that police officers need to be very careful about how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses. Research into EWT is one area that psychologists believe they can make an important positive difference to the lives of real people, for example, by improving the way the legal system works and in court.

Question 56

Research of anxiety having a negative effect on recall

Answer 56

Anxiety can prevent us paying attention to important cues, so recall is worse.
Procedure —> Johnson and Scott led participants to believe they were taking part in a lab study. While seated in a waiting room participants heard an argument in the next room. In the ‘low-anxiety’ condition a man walked through the waiting area, carrying a pen. Other participants overheard the same heated argument, but accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. A man walked out of the room, holding a paper knife covered in blood (‘high-anxiety’) condition. The participants were later asked to pick out the man from a set of 50 photos.
Findings —> nearly half of the participants who saw the ‘low-anxiety’ condition were able to identify him. With the participants involved in the ‘high-anxiety’ condition, a third could identify the man. The tunnel theory of memory argues that a witness’s attention narrows to focus on a weapon, because it is a source of anxiety.

Question 57

Research of anxiety having an positive effect on recall

Answer 57

Procedure —> Yuille and Cutshall. In an actual crime, a gun-shop owner shot a thief dead. There were 21 witnesses, 13 agreed to participate in the study. They were interviewed 4-5 months after the incident. The information recalled was compared to the police interviews at the time of the shooting. Witnesses rated how stressed they felt at the time of the incident.
Findings —> witnesses were very accurate in what they recalled and there was little change after 5 months. Some details were less accurate, e.g. age/height/weight. Participants who reported the highest levels of stress were most accurate.
Conclusion —> In this, anxiety does not appear to reduce the accuracy of EWT for a real-world event and may even enhance it.

Question 58

Yerkes-Dodson Law

Answer 58

The inverted-U theory states that performance will increase with stress, but only to a certain point, where it decreases drastically.

(Refer to diagram)

Question 59

Effect of Anxiety evaluations

Answer 59

❌ Field studies (Yuille and Cutshell) sometimes lack control. Researchers usually interview real-life eyewitnesses sometime after the event. Many things can happen to the participants in this time that researchers have no control over (post-event discussion, things seen in media). This is a limitation because it is possible that these extraneous variables may be responsible for the accuracy levels of recall. This limits the reliability of EWT field studies.

❌ ethical issues : creating anxiety in participants may cause psychological harm. This breaches the BPS guideline of the right of the participant to be protected from psychological harm, thus meaning that a cost-benefit analysis would be needed to compare the associated ethical costs with the benefits of increased knowledge of the effects of anxiety on the accuracy of EWT. These real-life studies are beneficial because they have already witnessed a real-life event, however, witnesses are forced to remember a traumatic event.

❌ The Yerkes-Dodson Law is too simplistic. It suggests that there is an ‘inverted-U’ relationship between increasing arousal and increasing performance (in this case the accuracy of EWT), with moderate arousal yielding the highest levels of performance. However, this can be considered as an overly-simplified explanation of anxiety as anxiety is difficult to define and measure accurately. There are many elements to anxiety but this model assumes only one of these is linked to poor performance (physical).

❌ Johnson and Scott’s participants may have focused on the weapon be they were surprised, not anxious. For example, Pickel found that the highest levels of accuracy of EWT were experienced in the condition with high unusualness i.e. a raw chicken and a gun in a hairdressing salon. This suggests that the weapon’s effect is due to unusualness rather than anxiety and so tells us nothing about the specific effects of anxiety of recall.

✅ Supporting evidence for negative effects of anxiety (Johnson and Scott). Valentine and Mesout used heart rate (objective measure) to divide visitors to the London Dungeons into low and high anxiety groups. High anxiety participants were less accurate than low-anxiety in describing a target person. This supports the claim that anxiety has a negative effect on eyewitness recall of an anxiety-inducing event.

Question 60

Cognitive interview

Answer 60

It is based on psychological understanding of memory. Fisher and Geiselman claimed that EWT could be improved if the police use techniques based on psychological insights into how memory works. It is called cognitive interview to indicate its foundation in cognitive psychology. Rapport (understanding) is established with interviews using 4 main techniques :

• Context reinstatement : the witness returns to the original crime scene in their mind and imagines the environment (e.g. weather, what they could see) and their emotions. This is based on the concept of context-dependent forgetting. Cues from the context may trigger recall.
• Order reverse : events are recalled in a different order which prevents people basing their descriptions on their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events. It also prevents dishonesty as it is hard to produce an untruthful account if it has to be reversed.
• Perspective different : witnesses recall the incident from other people’s perspectives. This prevents the influence of expectations and schema on recall.
• Everything reported : witnesses are encouraged to include every detail of an event, even if it seems irrelevant or the witness is not confident about it.

Question 61

Enhanced cognitive interview (ECI)

Answer 61

Fisher et al. developed additional elements of the cognitive interview to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction. For example, knowing when to establish eye contact, reducing the eyewitness’ anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly, asking open questions.

Question 62

Cognitive interview evaluations

Answer 62

✅ police forces take a ‘pick and mix’ approach in practice which makes CI more flexible because police forces evolve their own approaches depending on what they think works best. They can adapt to different situations, increasing credibility for officers, though this isn’t good for research.

✅ a meta-analysis by Köhnken et al. combined data from many studies comparing CI (and ECI) with the standard police interview. The CI produced an average of 41% more correct information then the standard interview. This shows that the CI is effective in helping witnesses recall information that is available but not accessible. This research gives police a greater chance of catching and charging criminals, which is beneficial to society as a whole.
❌ techniques of the CI aim to increase the amount of correct information remembered but the recall of incorrect information may also increase. This is seen by Köhnken et al. who found an increase, especially in the ECI compared to standard interviews.

❌ police are reluctant to use the CI because it takes more time than the standard police interview. The CI also requires special training but many forces do not have the resources to provide more than a few hours training, especially for the enhanced social understanding required for the enhanced cognitive interview. This suggests that the complete CI is not realistic for police officers to use and it might be better to focus on just a few techniques. This lack of time for training may explain why some forces may be unimpressed with the CI.