Memory 2

Question 1

What is primary and recency?

Answer 1

-Primary is interpreted as down to rehearsal
-Recency is interpreted as capacity of the short term store
-Primary recency effect refers to remembering the start and end of a list and forgetting the middle part of the list

Question 2

What is a problem for a unitary short term store?

Answer 2

-Shallice and Warrington (1970)
-Clinical evidence shows that patients with only STM, and only LTM with STM deficits aren’t as devastating to the LTM as we’d expect

Question 3

What is the short term store for?

Answer 3

-Baddeley and Hitch (1974) simulate STM deficits by using tasks that should fill up the STM e..g remembering a string of digits
-Secondary tasks can be used; sentence verification, semantic judgements, list learning

Question 4

Describe the Working Memory Model (Baddeley and Hitch, 1986)

Answer 4

-Central executive acts as general attentional controller that controls info going to the 2 slave systems; phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad
-Controlling behaviour based on action schemas
-Supervisory Attentional System (SAS) can override the general process by direct activation
-SAS failure e.g. driving to normal destination by mistake
-Experimental task that can load central executive is random number generation

Question 5

What additions have been made to the working memory?

Answer 5

-Episodic buffer (2000) allows chunking to occur through interaction of LTM
-Hedonic detector (2007) that deals with emotional information

Question 6

Describe Brooks (1967) dual task interference

Answer 6

-STM memory performance is often better for visuo-spatial materials
-8 item spatial span v 6 item verbal span
-Spatial task - “Is the point an outside point?” (F task)
-Verbal task - “Is each word a concrete noun”
-Spatial output - “Point at answers in turn”
-Verbal output “Yes,Yes,Yes,No”

Question 7

3 pieces of evidence for phonological loop

Answer 7

-Phonological similarity effect (Conrad and Hull, 1964) - Poor recall of word lists where items sound similar when presented visually, shows they may be encoded by how they sound

-Irrelevant speech effect (Salame and Baddeley, 1987) - Recall impaired by simultaneous speech, completely involuntarily as it enters phonological loop naturally

-Word length effect (Baddeley et al. 1975) - Serial recall is the words you can read out in the span of 2 seconds, and this span is lower for longer words than shorter ones, even when shown visually