Memory

Question 1

What is capacity?

Answer 1

A measure of how much information can be held in memory

Question 2

What is duration?

Answer 2

A measure of how long a memory lasts before it is no longer available

Question 3

What is coding (encoding) and who did an experiment to find out if LTM was acoustic or semantic and the same for STM?

Answer 3

The way information is changed so that it can be stored in memory. It can be acoustic (mostly STM) or semantic (mostly LTM)
Alan Baddeley found that participants had difficulty remembering acoustically similar words in STM but not in LTM, whereas semantically similar words posed little problem for STM’s but led to muddled LTM’s.

Question 4

What is the capacity of STM and who found the average span?

Answer 4

Jacobs digit span, magic number seven plus or minus two, the larger the chunk the harder to remember, Jacobs - 19 year olds have longer digit span than 8 year olds

Question 5

What is the duration of STM and name a study?

Answer 5

Peterson and Peterson trigrams, participants were asked to recall trigrams after intervals of 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 seconds, whilst counting backwards from a three digit number. The longer the interval, the less information recalled due to rehearsal being prevented, because the information is lost from short term memory, which is because of trace decay.

Question 6

What is the multi store model of memory and who described it?

Answer 6

an explanation of memory based on three separate memory stores, and how information is transferred between these stores.
Atkinson and Shiffrin

Question 7

Name all the parts of the multi store model of memory and say what they do?

Answer 7

Environmental input
Sensory Memory - large capacity, very short duration information is held at each of the senses e.g. eyes, ears, nose, taste and touch
Attention - if information is focused on one of the sensory stores then the data will be transferred into short-term memory. Attention is the first step in remembering something
Short-term memory - limited capacity 7+/-2, information will decay if it isn’t rehearsed. Information has to be rehearsed to increase duration
Rehearsal loop - eventually creates LTM
LTM - unlimited capacity and duration, forgetting may happen but only due to the lack of accessibility
Retrieval - LTM goes through/to STM

Question 8

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the multi store model of memory?

Answer 8

Strengths - STM/LTM supported by studies done by Jacobs (Digit span), Miller (the magic number 7+/-2), Peterson and Peterson (trigrams) and Baddeley (acoustic and semantic encoding)
Brain scans - prefrontal cortex is active during STM, but not LTM tasks and the hippocampus is active when LTM is engaged.

Limitations/weaknesses - MSM is too simple, as STM and LTM are not unitary stores

Question 9

What are the four parts of the working memory model and what do they do?

Answer 9

Central executive - acts as ‘attention’, allocates tasks to the slave systems which are episodic buffer, visuo-spatial sketchpad and phonological loop, it has no storage

Phonological loop - deals with auditory information
phonological store - holds the words you hear (also known as an inner ear)
articulatory process - used for words that are heard or seen, these words are silently repeated like an inner voice

Visuo-spatial sketchpad - deals with planning and processing visual and spatial tasks

inner scribe - spatial relations/ positions of objects
visual cache - form and colour

Episodic buffer - records events in sequence as they happen, links to long term memory

Question 10

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the working memory model?

Answer 10

Strengths - Hitch and Baddeley, participants slower when doing dual tasks, therefore there must be different parts of the working memory model

Weaknesses - Central Executive doesn’t explain anything and the understanding of it is more complex than currently represented

Question 11

What are the three types of long term memory and how do we know the distinction?

Answer 11

Episodic memory - personal memories of events eg. what you did and ate yesterday (associated with the hippocampus and other parts of the temporal lobe where the hippocampus is located, also associated with activity in the frontal lobe)

Semantic memory - shared memories of facts and knowledge (relies on the temporal lobe)

Procedural memory - memory of how to do things eg. riding a bike (the activation of this is associated with the cerebellum, involved in the control of fine motor skills, as well as the motor cortex, basal ganglia and the limbic system are also involve in this kind of learning)

Question 12

What are the two types of interference and what is the difference?

Answer 12

Proactive interference is when past learning interferes with current attempts to learn something new, whereas retroactive interference is when current attempts to learn something new interfere with past learning.

Question 13

What are the evaluative points which can be used to expand on the strengths and weaknesses of interference?

Answer 13

+ there is evidence which supports both pro- and retroactive interference
- one issue with this is that most of this research has been lab based, and words which were used were quite artificial, as they weren’t something which relates to everyday uses of memory
+ counterargument is that interference effects have been observed n everyday situations

Question 14

What is retrieval failure?

Answer 14

an explanation of forgetting based on the idea that the issue relates to being able to retrieve a memory that is available but not accessible, this depends on using cues, which are things that serve as a reminder

Question 15

What is context-dependent and state-dependent forgetting?

Answer 15

context- dependent forgetting = Abernathy, recall best with same instructor in the same room

state-dependent forgetting =Goodwin et al. recall best when initial state (drunk or sober) matched state at recall

Question 16

Describe and Evaluate the eyewitness testimony study and state the names of the researchers

Answer 16

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

Experiment 1

• 45 students shown seven clips of car accidents, after each film participants were given a questionnaire, which mentioned a specific question “About how fast were the cars going when they ***** each other?” the verbs in place were smashed, collided, bumped, hit and contacted (from most severe to least severe). This question was a leading question because it suggested the answer that a participant might give.
  The findings of this study demonstrated that leading questions do affect the participants response, as the questions which included the word smashed, meant that the participants estimated the speed to be higher than the use of the word contacted in the question

Experiment 2:

Participants were shown a one minute clip of a car accident, and asked questions about the speed, the participants returned a week later and asked another 10 questions, including a critical question “Did you see any broken glass?” There was no broken glass in the video, but those participants who thought that the car was travelling faster would be more likely to think that there was broken glass, due to the verb used in the question. The findings were that the leading questions did change the memory of the participant that they had for the event.

Question 17

Evaluate the eyewitness testimony

Answer 17

+ shows that questioning technique for EWT is extremely important, as it stops innocent people form going to prison
- Loftus’ research suggested that EWT was inaccurate and unreliable, as it was a lab experiment, and not a real life study, because witnesses would have behaved differently as they would have been more emotionally aroused

Question 18

What is misleading information?

Answer 18

Supplying information that may lead a witness memory for a crime to be altered

Question 19

What is a post event discussion?

Answer 19

A conversation between co-witnesses or an interviewer and an eyewitness after a crime has taken place which may contaminate a witness’ memory for the event

Question 20

What is the study which supports the idea that anxiety has an effect on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony?

Answer 20

A study done by Johnson and Scott
They asked participants to sit in a waiting room, where they overheard an argument, and saw a man emerge with either a greasy pen (low anxiety) and a bloody knife (high anxiety. Participants were asked later to identify the man from photo’s. The findings were that people were more accurate with identifying the man who carried the greasy pen, rather than the one who carried the bloody knife, and his proved Loftus’ idea that anxiety does focus attention on central features
Lotus also monitored eyewitnesses eye movements and found that the presence of a weapon caused the eyes to physically draw to the weapon and away from other things like people’s face