MEMORY Flashcards
Using case study’s, provide evidence for the multistore model
- Patients H.M and Clive Wearing both suffered damage to their hippocampus.
- H.M’s brain was damaged during a surgery to reduce epileptic-fits, Clive Wearing has a severe viral infection that caused brain damage.
- both lost the ability to form new long term memories, but they both had normal functioning short term memory
- so both patients would forget anything that had happened to them after a duration of 30secs
- they had memories from before their incidents
Provides evidence for: - STM & LTM being separate stores -> supports MSM
- supports theory that STM has a duration of 18-30secs
- Clive’s procedural memory was intact as he could play the piano, tie his shoe laces but his episodic memory was impaired showing there are different types of LTM
Describe a study on the investigation into the effect of eyewitness recall on leading questions
Loftus and Palmer (1974)
- 45 student participants split into 5 groups
- shown videos of car traffic accidents
- after video, each group given a questionnaire to answer
- questionnaire contained a critical question in which the verb was changed to describe the accident:
‘How fast was the car travelling when it — the other car?’
The verbs were hit, contacted, smashed, collided, bumped
Findings:
Lowest estimated speed was for contacted (32mph) and highest for smashed (41mph)
Therefore information after the event in the form of a leading question can results in unreliable EWT
-> provides evidence for leading questions distorting memory
Evaluate the Loftus and Palmer car accident Study (1974)
✅ RWA, findings can be applied to improve legal systems - so innocent people aren’t accused of committing a crime by leading questions distorting
✅ lab study - scientific so more control over extraneous variables -> high internal validity
❌ lacks ecological validity as it doesn’t represent a real life situation
❌lab experiment may inflict demand characteristics
❌ used university students so lacks population validity
Describe Loftus (1979) study looking into weapon focus in EWT
LOFTUS (1979)
METHOD:
- Independant groups design
- participants heard a discussion in a nearby room
- in condition A, a man came out of a room with a pen and grease on his hands
- in condition B, participants heart a loud argument, and breaking glass next door, then a man walked through the room holding a knife with bloody hands
FINDINGS:
- in condition A, 49% of the participants correctly identified the man
- in condition B, 33% of the participants identified the man
-> supports idea that anxiety can effect eyewitness recall
Describe the Yuille and Cutshall study (1986)
- contradicts Loftus weapon focus study (1979)
Investigated the effect of anxiety in a real life shooting
- one person was killed and another wounded
- 21 witnesses were originally interviewed by police
- Yuille and Cutshall carried out a follow-up research interview 4 - 5 months later, little change was found in their testimonies
- all of the same major details were reported, only minor details were different
FINDINGS:
- Misleading questions and anxiety don’t always effect EWT
- Researchers included 2 misleading questions but they were found to have no effect on the subjects answers
- study had high ecological validity as it was based on a real life event
-> opposes Loftus (1979) who said anxiety does effect EW recall
Explain and evaluate the Geiselman & Fisher study (1985)
- Geiselman invented the cognitive interview technique
Carried out a laboratory experiment to test the cognitive interview technique:
PROCEDURE: - 240 participants watched a video of a store robbery
- 120 were interviewed using the Standard police interview, 120 using the cognitive interview technique
RESULTS: - participants interviewed using the cognitive interview technique recalled 35% more facts
EVALUATION:
✅ provided evidence to support cognitive interview technique -> improves legal systems
✅ study was highly controlled so it’s easy to replicate
❌ lacks ecological validity - not real crime witnesses
❌ kohnken (1999)
Explain the Kohnken et al. (1999) meta analysis of Cognitive interview
Carried out a meta analysis of 55 studies comparing the cognitive interview to the Standard police interview
- found an increase in participant recall with CI
- however, there was an increase in incorrect information/recall
-> CI is unreliable
- contradicts Geiselman & Fisher (1984)
Describe and evaluate Peterson and Peterson (1959) study into the duration of the STM
METHOD:
- participants were shown nonsense trigrams (3 random consonants, e.g CVM) and asked to recall them after either 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, or 18 seconds
- During the pause, they were asked to count backwards in threes from a given number (this was an interference task to prevent them from rehearsing the letters internally)
FINDINGS:
- after 3 seconds, participants could recall about 80% of trigrams correctly
- after 18 seconds, only about 10% were recalled correctly
CONCLUSION:
- when rehearsal is prevented very little can stay in the STM for longer than 18 seconds
EVALUATION:
✅ laboratory experiment so highly controlled
❌ nonsense trigrams are artificial, so the study lacks ecological validity
Describe and evaluate Baddeley’s (1966) study investigating coding in STM and LTM
METHOD:
- Participants were given four sets of words that were either:
- acoustically similar (e.g man, mad, mat)
- acoustically dissimilar (e.g pit, cow, bar)
- semantically similar (e.g big, large, huge)
- semantically dissimilar (e.g good, pig, ruler)
— experiment used independent groups design
FINDINGS:
- when participants were asked to recall words straight away (using STM) they struggled with acoustically similar words (suggesting STM is coded acoustically)
- when given a 20 min interval (using LTM) they struggled with recalling semantically similar words (suggesting LTM is coded semantically)
-> supports idea that STM is acoustic coding, LTM is semantically coded
EVALUATION:
✅ standardised study and can easily be replicated so high reliability
✅ used interference tasks to ensure participants weren’t repeating words themselves
❌ lacks ecological validity as it is not an every day task
❌ didn’t consider visual learning
❌Independant groups design so no control over participant variables
Describe the Godden and Baddeley (1975) study on context dependent forgetting
PROCEDURE:
- 18 divers took part in a repeated measures designed to consisting of 4 conditions:
- learning words on lands and recalling on land
- learning words on land and recalling underwater
- learning words under water and recalling under water
- learning words under water and recalling on land
- they had to learn 38 unrelated words
FINDINGS:
- divers performed better when they were recalling in the same place and they learnt
- worse when they recalled different to where they learnt
-> supports theory of context dependant forgetting and cue retrieval
Explain Goodwin’s (1969) state dependent forgetting study
48 male participants learnt word lists whilst sober or drunk. They were then tested either when sober or drunk.
Recall was significantly worse if participants were in a different state at learning, supporting state-dependent forgetting.
Describe McGeoch and McDonald (1931) study into interference
- investigated whether interference affects forgetting in the LTM
- Participants learnt a list of adjectives until they could recall them perfectly.
- Some of the participants then spent 10 minutes resting while the others learned new material.
- The researchers varied the similarity to the original word list to investigate how similar the word list had to be to interfere with the original one.
-> Participants who spent 10 minutes resting without any new material to learn had the highest recall.
-> as similarity increased, recall decreased
-> evidence for retroactive interference affecting recall and
- the more similar the material, the greater the interference the higher level of forgetting.
