Memory

Question 1

What are the 3 ways we forget?

Answer 1

1. Failure to encode.
2. Failure to retrieve.
3. Storage decay

Question 2

What are the 3 types of LTM?

Answer 2

Procedural memory
Episodic memory
Semantic memory

Question 3

What are the 3 stages of memory?

Answer 3

Encoding
Storage
Retrieval

Question 4

What are the ways you can encode?

Answer 4

Visually (By seeing)
Acoustically (by hearing)
Semantically (by meaning)

Question 5

What is the capacity and duration of STM?

Answer 5

duration - 15-30secs

capacity - 7+-2 items

Question 6

What is the capacity and duration of LTM?

Answer 6

Both are potentially unlimited.

Question 7

What is the capacity and duration of sensory memory?

Answer 7

duration - 250milliseconds

capacity - very large

Question 8

What are the 3 sensory registers?

Answer 8

Iconic - deals with visual information
Echoic - deals with auditory information
Haptic - concerned with touch

Question 9

How are STM, LTM and sensory memory encoded?

Answer 9

STM - primarily acoustic
LTM - visually, semantically
Sensory memory - modality specific, in a relatively unprocessed form.

Question 10

What is episodic memory?

Answer 10

Episodic memory is memory of past experiences which is stored in reference to time and place e.g. your first day at school.

Question 11

What is semantic memory?

Answer 11

Semantic memory is memory of general knowledge and facts and usually comes as a result of episodic memory e.g. knowing the capital of a country

Question 12

What is procedural memory?

Answer 12

Procedural memory is action-based memory which is subconsciously used and comes as a result of practice e.g. riding a bike

Question 13

What types of LTM are explicit and implicit?

Answer 13

Implicit - procedural memory

Explicit - semantic and episodic

Question 14

What is encoding?

Answer 14

Changing the information input into a way that can be easily stored, it creates a chemical trace in the brain so the information can later be retrieved.

Question 15

What did the primacy and regency effect show?

Answer 15

That the words in a list are best remembered if they are at the beginning and end. This supports the MSM as it shows the existence of seperate stores and indicates rehearsal leads to the creation of longer lasting memories.

Question 16

What was the HM case study?

Answer 16

The HM case study was done on HM who had a cracked skull which led to seizures and no control over bodily functions, this led to his hippocampus to be removed in order to solve the problem.

Question 17

What were the findings of the HM case study?

Answer 17

HM’s LTM and episodic memory were affected as he could not remember past experiences and was unable to move short term memories into the long term store.

Question 18

What are the different parts of the Working memory model?

Answer 18

The central executive, phonological loop, visuo-spacial sketchpad, and episodic buffer

Question 19

Who created the working memory model?

Answer 19

Baddeley and Hitch (1974)

Question 20

What type of memory is least vulnerable to interference?

Answer 20

Semantic memory

Question 21

What is forgetting?

Answer 21

The loss of ability to recall or recognize something you have previously learned

Question 22

What is retrieval failure?

Answer 22

Forgetting in LTM which occurs due to the absence of appropriate cues

Question 23

What are the types of cues?

Answer 23

External cues - Explicit cues (links to learning material e.g. category names), Environmental cues - (where you were when you learnt the new information).

Internal cues - psychological or physiological state (how you felt when you learnt the material)

Question 24

What is context dependent forgetting?

Answer 24

When individuals fail to recall something when they are not in the same context at retrieval as when they learnt the information

Question 25

What is state dependent forgetting?

Answer 25

Being in a different emotional of physiological state at the time of retrieval may result in retrieval failure

Question 26

Evaluate retrieval failure?

Answer 26

Limitations - cued recall works better for some than others.

• does it haver mundane realism? the research often relies on artificial tests of memory
• recall of meaningful content is not necessarily aided by context dependent cues as the info is more deeply processed so retrieval failure due to the absence of cues cannot account for all forgetting.

Strengths - supporting evidence - Smith - basement room - participants were asked to learn 80 words in a basement room and the next day had to recall the words. They were split into 3 groups - group 1 stayed in the basement room for recall (average recall was 18 words) - group 2 recalled in an upstairs room with different furnishings (average recall was 12) - group 3 was in an upstairs room but told to imagine themselves in basement room (average recall was 17).
- Goodwin et al asked male volunteers to recall a list of words when sober or drunk then participants were asked to recall these words a day later when they were wither sober or drunk again. Those who learnt in a drunken state were more likely to recall the words when once again in the drunken state.

Question 27

What is misleading information?

Answer 27

Information which wrongly implies that something happened when it didn’t and reconstructs their memory.

Question 28

What types of misleading information are there?

Answer 28

Leading questions and post-event discussion.

Question 29

Evaluate misleading information’s effects on recall of evidence.

Answer 29

It either has a negative effect on recall or no effect at all.

Negative effect - Loftus and Palmer - leading question (asked participants, after being shown videos of traffic accidents, how fast the car was going when it crashed, bumped, contacted, smashed) Those with a words like smashed recalled a greater average speed estimate than those who were asked another word.
Gabbert et al - post event discussion - participants watched a short film of a girl stealing money either individually or in pairs and they each saw a different perspective, they then discussed the event and completed a questionnaire. 71% recalled info they hadn’t witnessed. 60% in the co-witness condition who had not witnessed the crime claimed the girl was guilty.

No effect - Loftus showed participants of a red purse. In immediate recall 98% remembered the colour of the purse correctly. They then read an account of the incident written by a professor (which would imply accuracy) and in a second recall test all but two resisted the blatantly wrong information and still correctly recalled the stolen purses colour.

Question 30

What is the multi-store model?

Answer 30

• For info to be retained in STM need rehearsal.
• structural, linear model
• distinct characteristics between stores (encoding, capacity and duration)
• unitary STM & LTM store
• explains process of info transfer
• explanations of forgetting differ between stores

Question 31

Name 2 pieces of research into eyewitness testimony.

Answer 31

Johnson and Scott - participants were in one of two situations, hearing an argument and saw a man run through carrying a pen covered in grease, or holding a paper knife covered in blood. Found that those who witnessed the man with a pen was accurately identified 49% of the time, where as the man holding the knife was correctly identified 33% of the time - started the ‘weapon focus’ phenomenon.

Yuille and Cutshall - researched real life crime, witnesses of a shooting involving an owner of a store and an armed thief - thief was shot dead. Several months layer witnesses were interviewed by researchers who then introduced misleading info into the interview. However, witness accounts remained highly accurate - accuracy 86% for actions, 76% for people and 90% for objects.

Question 32

Evaluate the research into eyewitness testimony.

Answer 32

Lab experiments (validity - real witnesses are exposed to the event unexpectedly and is likely to experience greater levels of emotion) vs natural experiments.

Question 33

What is the cognitive interview?

Answer 33

PROD (perspective, reinstate context, order, detail)
Mental reinstatement - cues, makes memory accessible.
Report everything - memories are connected, small details help piece together overall picture
Change order - stops pre-existing schemas
Change perspective - trying to stop pre-existing schemas

Question 34

Evaluate the cognitive interview.

Answer 34

Individual differences - advantage of CI is greater in older people.
There are problems with CI in practice - requires more time than is available - requires special training
Difficulties in establishing effectiveness - difference police stations use different components.

Question 35

Evaluate the multistore model.

Answer 35

There is evidence to support the existemce of seperate memory stores - PET scans and fMRIs take images of the brain and allow us to see which parts are active when using different types of memory. Research has shown our prefrontal cortex is active when working on a task in STM and the hippocampus is active when we are using our LTM.

Can also use the primacy and regency effect to show support for the existence of seperate memory stores. Also indicates that rehearsal leads to the creation of lasting memories. The words in the middle are displaced by the items later in the list.

Research by Glanzer and Cunitz demonstrated the primacy and regency effect, also showed that if the participants were given a distraction task before recall, primacy effect remained but the regency effect disappeared. This suggests the primacy effect reflects what is in long term memory and the regency effect would reflect the STM as the distraction task takes up the limited capacity which leads to the displacement and decay of the later items in the list.

KF was a case study on a young man who had suffered brain damage after a motorcycle accidence. His LTM was unimpaired and he had no difficulty transferring info from his STM to his LTM however he only had a digit span in STM of 1/2 items, he was also more likely to forget auditory stimuli than visual stimuli. Researchers concluded that KF’s problems centred on what they termed the ‘auditory-verbal short term store’. This means that his STM is not a single store but consists of seperate components.

Question 36

What is the phonological loop?

Answer 36

Codes speech sounds and has a limited storage capacity.

Has two parts - the articulatory control process - inner voice and the phonological store aka the inner ear.

Question 37

What is the episodic buffer?

Answer 37

General store for visual and acoustic information and can extract info from the long term memory for present use.

Question 38

What is the visuo-spacial sketchpad?

Answer 38

Codes visual info and has a limited storage capacity.

Has two parts - the visual cache - the properties of visual items and the inner scribe which is the spacial relations of the object.

Question 39

What is the central executive?

Answer 39

Monitors and coordinates mental functions in the WM is involved in reasoning, problem solving, planning and decision making. It has a limited attentional capacity. it also monitors the other components (slave systems)

Question 40

What research is there into sensory memory?

Answer 40

Iconic - Sperling - presented ps with a visual array of letters, ps were asked to give a full recall, but they could only remember 4/5 letters. Sperling then asked ps to recall a part of the info (e.g. one row), part recall was good and indicated that iconic memory could hold 9/10 items. Full recall bad as letters decayed in a fraction of a second.

Echoic - Darwins research showed that echoic memories duration was slightly longer than iconic. Ps listened to recordings of lists of letters and numbers and wore headphones so one list came though the left and the other through the right. The delay between hearing the stimulus and recall varied from 0-4 seconds and as time between presentation and cue increased, recall decreased so while duration better than iconic memory, still very limited.

Question 41

What research is there into short term memory?

Answer 41

Conrad - encoding - visually presented ps with a series of 6 letters for 0.75secs each, letters either similar sounding or dissimilar in sound, then had to write down what they could recall in correct order. Ps found it more difficult to recall letters that were similar to eachother. Whilst the letters presented visually, ps transformed stimuli into an acoustic code, hence the acoustic errors - therefore STM relies on acoustic encoding.

Jacobs - capacity - used digit span technique, shwed ps sequence of letters at half second intervals and asked for them to be recalled in the correct order. the average number of items ps could remember was their digit span. the average was between 5 and 9 items, however found that people could recall slightly more numbers. (Miller confirmed this in saying it was 7+/-2 items)

Peterson/peterson - duration - ps presented with trigram consisting of 3 consonants and p recall was delayed by 3, 6, 9 etc seconds. Asked to recall in correct order . 3 sec delay - 80% correct recall, 6sec - 50%, 18sec - fewer than 10%.

Question 42

What research is there into LTM?

Answer 42

Encoding - Baddeley - presented ps with sequences which were either, acoustically similar/not or semantically similar/not. Each list presented 4 times and recall tested after 20min delay. Ps had difficulty remembering semantically similar words, Baddeley thought this was because the words which were similar in meaning interfered with eachother - which means semantic encoding.

Duration - Bahrick et all yearbook study, used American ex high school students aged 17-74, tested memory doing free recall of former classmates, cued recall (photo recognition), cued recall (name recognition) and cued recall (name and photo matching. findings 90% accuracy in name and face recognition tasks for ps who had left highschool up to 34yrs previously. 80% name recognition, 40% face recognition for up to 48yrs left. Free recall a lot less accurate 60% accuracy after 15yrs and 30% after 48yrs.

Question 43

Evaluate the working memory model.

Answer 43

KF was a case study on a young man who had suffered brain damage after a motorcycle accidence. His LTM was unimpaired and he had no difficulty transferring info from his STM to his LTM however he only had a digit span in STM of 1/2 items, he was also more likely to forget auditory stimuli than visual stimuli. Researchers concluded that KF’s problems centred on what they termed the ‘auditory-verbal short term store’. This means that his STM is not a single store but consists of seperate components.

PET scans have shown that different areas of the brain are active while doing visual and verbal tasks, which proves the existence of seperate components of STM which removes the idea of it being a unitary store.

Dual task evidence - Baddeley - letter F task. Participants were given a visual tracking task at the same time they were asked to either describe all the angles on the letter F (a) or perform a verbal task (b) - Ps found it difficult to do task a - this was because they were both using the VSS competing for space in storage, evidence of different components in STM.

Question 44

What is reconstructive memory and why might it make eyewitness testimony inaccurate?

Answer 44

Barlett proposed the idea of reconstructive memory which refers to a memory distorted by the individuals prior knowledge and expectations. Argues that when we create memories we only store elements then when we need to recall something the stored elementsare combined with our knowledge (schema) reconstructing our memory. Suggests our memory is quite inaccurate. We may fill in the gaps during EWT and then our memory of the event will be reconstructed so consequently EWT might not be accurate.