Memory Flashcards

Question

What did Peterson find about duration of STM?

Answer 1

After three seconds, average recall was about 80%, after 18 seconds it was about 3%. Duration may be about 18 seconds, unless we repeat info over and over

Answer 2

Bahrick et al

Answer 3

392 American ppts ages 17-74 High school yearbooks were obtained from the ppts or directly from some schools Recall was tested in various ways, 1)photo recognition test, 2) free recall test where participants recalled all the names of their graduating class

Answer 4

Ppts tested within 15 years of graduation were about 90% accurate in photo recognition. After 49 years, recall declined to about 70% for photo recognition. Free recall was less accurate than recognition - about 60% after 15 years, dropping to 30% after 48 years. This shows that LTM may last up to a lifetime for some maternal

Answer 5

Identified a clear difference between two memory stores Later research showed that there are some exceptions to Baddeley's findings. But the idea that STM uses mostly acoustic coding and LTM mostly semantic has lasted. This was an important step in our understanding of the memory system, which led to the multi-store model

Answer 6

Uses artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material. e.g. the word lists had no personal meaning to the ppts. So, Baddeley's findings may not tell us much about coding in different kinds of memory tasks, especially in every day life. When processing more meaningful info, people may use semantic coding even for STM tasks. This suggests that the findings from this study have limited application

Answer 7

Has been replicated Study is very old and early research on psychology often lacked adequate controls e.g. some ppts' digit spans might have been underestimated because they were distracted during testing (confounding variable) Despite this, Jacobs' findings have been confirmed by other, better controlled studies since (e.g. Bopp) This suggests that Jacobs' study is a valid test of digit span in STM

Answer 8

May have overestimated STM capacity Cowan reviewed other research and concluded that the capacity of STM is only about 4 (plus or minus 1) chunks This suggests that the lower end of Miller's estimate (five items) is more appropriate than seven items

Answer 9

Stimulus material was artificial Study was not completely irrelevant as we do sometimes try to remember fairly meaningless material (e.g. phone numbers). Even so, recalling consonant syllables does not reflect most everyday memory activities where what we are trying to remember is meaningful. This means the study lacked external validity

Answer 10

High external validity Due to researchers investigated meaningful memories (i.e. of people's names and faces). When studies on LTM were conducted with meaningless pictures to be remembered, recall rates were lower (e.g. Shepard et al). This suggests that Bahrick's findings reflect more 'real' estimate of the duration of LTM

Answer 11

Episodic Semantic Procedural

Answer 12

A long-term memory store for personal events It includes memories of when the events occurred and of the people, objects, places and behaviours involved Memories from this store have to be retrieved consciously and with effort Memories are time-stamped: have to remember when they happen as well as what happened Store information about how events relate to each other in time

Answer 13

A long-term memory store for our knowledge of the world Includes facts and our knowledge of what words and concepts mean These memories usually also need to be recorded deliberately According to Tulving, it is less vulnerable to distortion and forgetting than episodic memory

Answer 14

Our long-term memory store for our knowledge of how to do things. This includes our memories of learned skills We usually recall these memories without making a conscious or deliberate effort

Answer 15

HM and Clive Wearing Episodic memory in both men was severely impaired due to brain damage But their semantic memories were relatively unaffected They still understood the meaning of words. For example, HM could not recall stroking a dog half an hour earlier but he did not need to have the concept of 'dog' explained to him Their procedural memories were also intact They both still knew how to walk and speak, and Clive Wearing knew how to read music, sing and play the piano This evidence supports Tulving's view that there are different memory stores in LTM - one store can be damaged but the other unaffected

Answer 16

Studying people with brain injuries can help researchers understand how memory is supposed to work normally But clinical studies are not perfect A major limitation is that they lack control of variables The brain injuries experienced by participants were usually unexpected The researcher had no way of controlling what happened to the participants before or during the injury The researcher had no knowledge of the individual's memory before the damage Without this, it is difficult to judge exactly how much worse it is afterwards This lack of control limits what clinical studies can tell us about different types of LTM

Answer 17

Conflicting research findings linking types of LTM to the areas of the brain For example, Buckner and Petersen reviewed evidence regarding the location of semantic and episodic memory They concluded that semantic memory is located in the left side of the prefrontal cortex and episodic memory on the right However, other research links the left prefrontal cortex with encoding of episodic memories and the right prefrontal cortex with episodic retrieval (Tulving) This challenges any neurophysiological evidence to support types of memory as there is poor agreement on where each type might be located

Answer 18

Baddeley and Hitch

Answer 19

Another strength is that understanding types of LTM allows psychologists to help people with memory problems For example, as people age, they experience memory loss But research has shown this seems to be specific to episodic memory - it becomes harder to recall memories of personal events/experiences that occurred relatively recently though past semantic memories stay intact Belleville et al devised an intervention to improve episodic memories in older people The trained participants performed better on a test of episodic memory after training than a control group This shows that distinguishing between types of LTM enables specific treatments to be developed