memory

Question 1

What are the 3 memory stores?

Answer 1

Sensory, short term and long term.

Question 2

What’s sensory memory?
(+duration, subsystems)

Answer 2

A very short-term memory store for information being processed by the sense organs. Sensory memory has a limited duration to store information, typically less than a second. Sensory memory can be divided into subsystems called the sensory registers: such as iconic, echoic, haptic, olfactory, and gustatory. Generally, iconic memory deals with visual sensing, echoic memory deals with auditory sensing, and haptic memory deals with tactile sensing.

Question 3

What was Sperling’s experiment involving visual sensory memory?

Answer 3

Sperling used a tachistoscope, which used a camera-like shutter to flash a picture onto a screen for a brief time measured in milliseconds. In Sperling’s experiment, subjects saw an array of letters like this flashed very briefly on a screen: slhi, vpoy, xzaw.
Subjects were asked to read as many letters as possible during the brief flash. Usually they could only read 3 or 4 letters.

Question 4

What did spelling decide to do after the first part of the experiment? (visual sensory memory).

Answer 4

Next Sperling tried a variation of his experiment called the partial report method. After he flashed the letters he sounded a high, medium, or low tone. Depending on which tone was sounded, the subject read the high, medium, or low row of letters. Sperling found that as long as the tone was sounded within 250 milliseconds (a quarter second) of the flash, subjects could report 3 out of 4 letters from any row.

Question 5

What does Sperling’s experiment suggest about the capacity, duration and coding of a sensory store?

Answer 5

Capacity- very large
Duration- half a second
Coding- raw form

Question 6

Whats short term memory?

Answer 6

Short-term memory (STM) is a temporary storage system that processes incoming sensory memory

Question 7

Testing encoding in STM: Baddeley 1966. What did he find?

Answer 7

Baddeley (1966) reported that the percentage of correctly recalled words for each list were approximately: 10% for List A (similar sounding words), 82% for List B (similar common English words however sound different), 65% for List C (adjectives with similar meanings) and 71% for List D (adjectives with distinct meanings).

Question 8

What did Baddeley conclude from these results?

Answer 8

Baddeley concluded that we code information acoustically in STM. This was evident as acoustic confusion occurred: words which have similar meaning were the hardest to recall, suggesting they had become mixed up.

Question 9

Testing duration of STM: Peterson & Peterson (1959).
What was the aim, method, procedure and findings of this experiment?

Answer 9

Aim: to investigate the duration of STM
Method: laboratory experiment
Procedure: 8 trials. on each trial, given a consonant trigram and a number trigram e.g GKL 684. asked to recall consonant trigram after 3,6,9,12,15 and 18 seconds. during the retention interval, had to count backwards from the number given.
Findings: 80% correct at 3 seconds, 20% correct at 9 seconds , 2% correct at 18 seconds

Question 10

Evaluation of Testing duration of STM study. (+ 1 strength and weakness).

Answer 10

STM duration is less than 18 seconds if verbal rehearsal is prevented.

strengths- can easily test reliability due to standardised procedure

weaknesses - low population validity- only 24 students. students may have a superior memory. different ages should be investigated
counting task could have displaced the consonant trigrams from STM, lowering the internal validity of the study.

Question 11

Encoding in LTM: Baddeley 1966
What was the method, procedure, findings and evaluation of this experiment?

Answer 11

Method: lab experiment
Procedure: participants split into 4 groups. had lists of words (10) for 3 seconds. they then had a test where they had to write 8 numbers 3 times. they then had to recall the 10 words in order after 20 mins. Acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar, semantically dissimilar.
Findings: He found that the participants struggled to remember acoustically similar words in STM but not LTM. semantically similar- similar problem for STM but muddled LTMs. this suggests that STM is largely encoded acoustically and LTM largely encoded semantically.
Evaluation: LTm encodes semantically
STM encodes acoustically
long term recall was related to visual as well as semantic categories.
20 mins- not long enough