Memory 3 Flashcards
Ebbinghaus (1885) memory studies
Tested on himself
Remembered a random combination of vowels and consonants by repeating them
Ebbinghaus forgetting function
Sudden decreases in what you remember in the first ~50hours
Never forget everything which shows learning once improves future memory
Duration of long term memories
Wixted (1990, 1997) shows that forgetting function can be modelled by a power function eg. f(t)=at⁽⁻ᵇ⁾
Shows initial forgetting is fast but almost never completely degraded
Duration of memories test
Done by Bahrick (1984)
Tested on people who studies Spanish at school up to 50 years ago
Showed memory decayed rapidly over first few years then levelled off and still remembered some things 50 years later
Better at remembering Spanish->English than English->Spanish
Capacity of LTS
Standing (1973)
Participants watch slides for 5 seconds then have a recognition test 2 days layer
Even with 10000 items, performance was 83%
Shows long-term memory is effectively limitless
Visual memory is stored if information is …..
Encoded
Just looking at something isn’t enough for it to be short in out LTM/’
Visual memory- we seem to remember the … of pictures but not the ….
Gist
Finer detail
This shows that our memory is affected by how many other similar things have been remembered
Forgetting faces Barrack (1984)
Study done on the ability of college teachers to recognise and identify students
Significant decrease within first year
After 8 years, can’t identify but better at recognising
Verbal overshadowing of memory-faces
Giving a verbal description of a face seems to impair memory in a face recognition test
Verbal overshadowing of memory-wine
Melcher & Schooler (1996)
The value of verbalisation depends on level of expertise
Novice wine drinkers have memories enhanced by verbalisation
Expert wine tasters memories are unaffected
Intermediate wine drinkers memories are almost completely removed by verbalisation
