Memory

Question 1

Memory

Answer 1

Process of retaining learned information and accessing information when it is needed, it is an Importnsnt factor in how human beings process information

Question 2

Process in Memory

Answer 2

Coding = the way info is changed so that it can be stored
Storage= keeping info within memory system until it is needed
Retrieval = recovering info stored in the memory when it is required

Question 3

Memory stores

Answer 3

Sensory Register= contains unprocessed impressions of information received through the senses, separate sensory store for each sensory input. There is an ionic store for visual info and echoic store for auditory info

Question 4

Definition of Capacity and Duration

Answer 4

Capacity- the amount of info that can be he,d in memory before new incoming info displaces it
Duration- the amount of time info can be held in a memory store before it is lost to decay

Question 5

Baddeley (1966)- coding in STM

Answer 5

Gave participants four lists of words to recall, A contained words that sounded similar, B contained words that did not sound similar, C contained words with similar meanings and D contained words with dissimilar meanings. He found that STM is coded acoustically ( organises info according to how it sounds). Whilst LTM is coded semantically, tested participants after 20 mins (LTM organises info according to its meaning)

Question 6

Jacobs (1887)- tests for capacity of STM

Answer 6

Used a digital span test. Participants were read a sequence of letters/numbers and asked to repeat the same sequence immediately. An additional letter/number was added each subsequent trail to measure the capacity of STM. He found on average we can hold 9.3 digits and 7.3 letters. Miller concluded that the span of stm is 7 (+/) 2. If we try to recall more info that the capacity for new incoming info displaces old info. He also found that people can recall five words as easily as five letters so chunking can help us remember more

Question 7

Evaluation of Jacobs (1887)

Answer 7

-Early research lacks adequate control
-study was using repeated measures design so there may have been issues with order effects
- the results of this study were an overestimation of capacity. More recent study show that the capacity of stm is only four chunks of information not 7 (+/-2) items

Question 8

Peterson and Peterson (1959)

Answer 8

Gave participants a trigram and then asked them to count backwards from a certain number for a specified time (prevents maintaining rehearsal) they are then asked to recall the original trigram to test for STM duration. After 3 seconds recall was 90%, after 9 seconds the accuracy was 20%, and after 18 seconds it was 2%, it led to the conclusion that STM lasts for 18-30 seconds without rehearsal before it is lost to decay

Question 9

Bahrick (1979)

Answer 9

Tested 400 people of various age groups on their memory of classmates, so a photo recognition test was carried out showing 50 pics of pple and deciding if they belonged to their classmates or not, in a free recall test participants were asked to list the names they could remember from their graduating class. They found 90% accuracy at identifying faces within 15 years, after 48 years it declined to 70%, free recall was 60% and 30%. Bahrick concluded that the duration of LTM is potentially lifetime but sometimes we have retrieval failure and need retrieval cues to access this information

Question 10

Multi store model of memory (atkinson and shiffrin 1968)

Answer 10

Attempts to explain how info flows from one memory to another, there are three permanent structures. STM, LTM, SR , each differs in their capacity, coding and duration.

Question 11

MSM- SR

Answer 11

Environmental stimuli received through the senses enters the SR, which is a short duration store retaining unprocessed impressions of info received through the senses. It has a seperate sensory store for each sensory input- iconic and echoic store. The capacity is unlimited but the duration is 250ms. Only a small fraction of info recycled by SR is attended to and selected for further processing in STM, if not attended to it is lost by decay

Question 12

MSM- STM

Answer 12

If info in the SR is attended to, it is acoustically coded into STM, so similar sounding info can be confused, it is a temporary store before the info is transferred to LTM, info may be recalled at this point but then forgotten before it is transferred to LTM. Capacity of 7±2 piece of info before it is displaced. It has a short duration of 18-30s, without rehearsal info will be decayed very quickly.
Maintenance rehearsal (repeatedly verbalising or thinking about info)- rehearsal loop. Elaborative rehearsal (info organised in meaningful way)

Question 13

MSM- LTM

Answer 13

If info is sufficiently rehearsed in STM it is then semantically coded into LTM. permanent store holding vast amount of info for long periods of time, the duration and capacity is potentially infinite. When info in LTM is needed it is retrieved by STM and then recalled, sometimes we cannot access info from it because of retrieval failure so we need retrieval cues to help us access it

Question 14

Evaluation of MSM

Answer 14

+scoville (1957)- HM’s epilepsy by removing several brain areas including the hippocampus, then the patient was unable to code new LTM, even tho his STM was unaffected (seperate and distinct areas)
+shallice and Warrington (1970)- KF, motorbike accident leading to reduced STM capacity to one or two digits yet LTM was normal, however the STM for verbal tasks was worse than visual tasks suggesting there is more than one type, and also if the stm is damaged then it should be difficult to retrieve LTM however KF was able to access LTM without difficulties
+ Murdock- free recall experiment- serial position effect: words at the beginning and end of list were better recalled due to primacy and recency effect, supports the idea of seperate and distinct STM and LTM
-overly simplified
-doesn’t explain the ability of multi tasking: if there is one type of STM than we wouldn’t be able to multitask

Question 15

Working memory model

Answer 15

Baddeley and hitch, argued that people do not have only one type of STM, they argued that it is far more complex than simply being a temporary store for info before it is transferred to LTM, they instead suggested that it is an active store holding several pieces of info while they are being worked on, they argued that LTM is the passive store that holds previously learned info to be used by STM needed.

Question 16

Central executive (WMM)

Answer 16

it drives the whole working memory system and allocates data to the other components known as slave systems, it also deals with cognitive tasks like decision making, reasoning and problem solving.

Individuals have limited attentional capacity, tasks that are automated and require less attentional demands on CE and so lease use free to perform other tasks

Question 17

The phonological loop (WMM)

Answer 17

Component of the working memory that deals with spoken and written material, it has two sub components:
The phonological store- inner ear, speech perception and holds info in speech based form for 1-2 seconds
Articulatory loop- inner voice, linked to speech production and is used to rehearse and store verbal info from phonological store, allows for maintenance rehearsal.

Question 18

Visuo-spatial sketchpad

Answer 18

Stores and process info in visual or spatial form, used for navigation, referred to as the inner eye. It has two sub components: visual cache- stored visual info about form and colour
And inner scribe: handles spatial relationships

Question 19

Episodic buffer

Answer 19

Baddeley realised that the model needed a general storage component to operate properly, because the slave system only deals with processing and temporary storage of specific types of info and the CE has no storage capacity at all. It is a limited capacity store, integrating info from the CE, phonological loop and visual-spatial sketchpad aswell as LTM

Question 20

Evaluation of WMM

Answer 20

+ case of KF
+ Baddeley and hitch gave participants a dual task, they were asked to complete a reasoning take which uses CE, and at the same time read out a book, using phonological loop, participants managed to do both task simultaneously.
+it has improved understanding of how people learn to read and so helped psychologists to assist those with dyslexia
-criticism, the idea of CE is vague and untestable. Case of EVR who had cerebral tumour removed. He had good reasoning suggesting a good CE but he couldn’t make decisions, which suggested his CE was damaged.

Question 21

Types of LTM

Answer 21

Episodic- autobiographical events in your life e.g. recollection of first day of school, contextual knowledge of when and where info learned, likely to involve storage of emotional content in memory. Stored in the hippocampus
Semantic- memory for general factual knowledge, e.g. capital of England is London. Begin as episodic memory because we acquire knowledge on personal experiences, it is gradually changed to semantic memory when it loses its association to a particular event and is generalised. Stored in the temporal lobe
Procedural- muscle memory, concerned with motor skills and score e.g. tying shoelaces, acquired through practice and repetition and seem to be most resistant to forgetting. They are automatic and unavaibke for conscious inspection, if you think too much of riding a bike you won’t be able to ride it. Stored in the cerebellum

Question 22

Evaluation of LTM

Answer 22

+evidence for distinction. Typically patients with amnesia are unable to store new episodic or semantic memory but their procedural memory is unaffected
+brain scans support the idea of different types of LTM, in fMRI different areas of the brain are shown to be active when asking a participant to recall different types of info.
+clive wearing
-individual differences

Question 23

Forgetting: interference

Answer 23

Forgetting is used to refer to a persons loss of ability to recall or recognise something they have previously learned. The interference theory claims that forgetting occurs when two memorise conflict and become mixed up, more likely to occur when material is similar (creates competition), less likely to occur when there is a gap between instances of learning, retroactive- when newer memory disrupts older memory, proactive- when older memory disrupts new memory

Question 24

Evaluation of interference theory

Answer 24

+ proactive interference, trigrams at different intervals, to prevent rehearsal participants had to count backwards in threes before recall, the participants remembered the trigrams presented first, so it was concluded that the memory for earlier trigrams was interfering with the memory for later trigrams
-retrieval failure is a better theory
-it is only temporary so not a true explainstion for forgetting
+practical applications
+retroactive interference. Participants given a list of words to recall which they learned until they could recall with 100% accuracy, then learned new list, either synonym or antonyms. Participants with the list of synonyms had the worst recall

Question 25

Retrieval failure

Answer 25

Forgetting occurs in the absence of appropriate retrieval cues. When info is initially placed in memory, the data associated with this info is stored at the same time, if these retrieval cues are not available at the time of recall, it appears as you may have forgotten the info when in fact you just can’t access at the time. Context cues- environment in which the material is learned, meaning that if you. Recall info in the same environment as the one you learned it in, then your recall will be netter, if you are not in the same context at retrieval as you were at coding then forgetting can occur.
State cues- an individuals physical state can affect their recall

Question 26

Evaluation of retrieval failure

Answer 26

+tested patients recall using a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar room and teachers those with familiar condition performed better- context cues
+divers asked to learn and recall word lost on either dry land or underwater, results showed that the words learned at the same environment were better remembered
+ participants hid money in a large wet house while under influence of cannabis, more likelier to rem,beer if drunk again
+practical applications
- we recall info in unfamiliar places- we don’t take GCSEs exams in our classrooms

Question 27

Eyewitness testimony

Answer 27

Evidence supplied to the court by people who have seen a crime based on their memory of the incident, it can include identification of the perpetrator or the details of the crime, juries are often heavily influenced by eyewitnesses

Question 28

Leading questions

Answer 28

Questions that are phrased in a way to encourage a witness to give a certain answer, the response bias explanation argue that leading questions don’t affect memory, just the answer a person chooses to give, whilst substation bias argues that leading questions distort memory because they contain misleading information

Loftus and Palme(1974)- 45 American students shown a film of a car crash and asked to estimate the speed of the cars when crashed, different verbs were used in the question depending on the condition: contacted, hit, bumped, collided, smashed. 31mph in contact, and 41mph In smash. A week later when asked about any glass broken, 32% compared to 12%

Question 29

Post event discussion

Answer 29

Memory of an event can be contaminated through witnesses discussing what hey have seen with other witnesses, it can lead to info being added to a memory after the event has occurred, this info can be misleading and the accuracy can be reduced, also a desire for social approval can lead to a consensus view of what happened.

Gilbert et Al (2003)- participants paired up and watched different vid of the same event so that they each got differs details, in one condition encouraged to discuss and in the other not. 71% of witness who had discussed the event went onto mistakenly recalling details that they couldn’t have seen

Question 30

Anxiety

Answer 30

Is a state of apprehension, uncertainty and fear resulting from a threatening situation, hand high it can impair both physical and psychological functioning, several psychologists have suggested that the anxiety that occurs when witnessing a crime can prevent accurate recall of crime . Weapon focus effect- it increases anxiety and therefore can impair witnesses memory of the crime people observing a violent crime often pay attention to the aspect which is most threatening to them, so the witnesses can often describe the weapons in great detail but not much about the criminal themself,

Question 31

Loftus (1979)- weapon focus effect

Answer 31

Experimental condition- Loftus attended for participants to overhear a heated and hostile arguement between two people, heard sound of furniture being overturned and broken glass, man emerged carrying a letter opened covered in blood, whilst in the control condition participants overheard a convo between two people about lab equipment failure before a man with grease all over his hand emerged carrying a pen, then asked to identify the man in 50 photos- 33% in bloody letter and 49% in pen condition

Question 32

Evaluation of anxiety

Answer 32

+ Loftus and burns- violent film about boy shot in the head vs a non violent short film of a crime, a higher recall of non violent
-ecological validity
-ethical guidelines violated
-individual differences
-yuille and cutshall- real life shooting in which one person killed and the other seriously wounded. 21 witnesses originally interviewed and 13 took part in follow up interview after 5 months, the witnesses had little change to their memory over the 5 months and the ones most distressed remembered the best

Question 33

Cognitive interview

Answer 33

Fisher (1987)- police interviews over four months and found that questions were brief, direct and fact based and closed, witnesses were often interest-techniques and not allowed to explain (standard interview), he argued that the failure of eyewitness testimony might be contributed to. Cognitive interview. Context reinstatement, report everything, recall from changed perspective, recall in reverse order, in the enhanced cognitive interview the witness encouraged to relax and speak slowly, avoid distractions, open ended questions, offer comments to help clarify witness statements

Question 34

Evaluation of cognitive interview

Answer 34

-time consuming
-witness make recall of more inoccret info when interview with CI compared to SI, because more detailed recall increases chances of making mistakes
+ geiselman (1985)- partipanfs showed a video of simulated crime and tested recall using CI, SI and hypnosis the cognitive interview had the most info being recalled
+fisher (q990)- trained real police officers in Miami to use enhanced CI, an average of 46% increase in info being told and 90% being correct