Memory AO1 Flashcards
Describe research on coding
Baddeley gave different lists of words to four groups of participants
1. Acoustically similar words
2. Acoustically dissimilar
3. semantically similar
4. semantically dissimilar
P’s asked to recall
Immediately (STM)= worse with acoustic
After 20 minutes (LTM)= worse with semantically similar
Suggests how information is coded in STM and LTM
Describe Jacobs’ study on capacity
- Digit span
- Researcher reads out 4 digits, if they get them in right order the length increases to 5 and so on
- mean span for digits was 9-3 items
- mean span for letters was 7-3
Describe Miller’s research on capacity
- Span of memory and cunking
- Made observations of everyday practice
- E.g making note of things that come in 7’s
- Capacity was 7 items give or take 2
- noted that people can recall 5 words as easily as they can recall 5 letters
- done by chunking
What is chunking?
The process of grouping sets of digits or letters into units or chunks
Explain peterson’s research on duration of STM
- Tested 24 students in 8 trials each
- Students were given a consonant syllable to remember as well as a 3-digit number they were told to count back from to prevent mental rehearsal
- After 3 seconds= recall was 80%
- After 18 seconds= 3%
STM duration may be about 18 seconds unless we repeat information over
Describe Bahrick’s study on the duration of LTM
- 392 Americans aged between 17 and 74
- Highschool yearbooks obtained
- There was a photo recognition test of 50 photos and a free recall test where p’s recalled all the names of their graduating class
- Within 15 years= 90% accurate photo
- After 48 years= 70%
- Free recall= 60% after 15, 30% after 48
LTM may last up to a lifetime
What is the purpose of the sensory register?
MSM
- All stimuli from the environment passes into
- Has 5 registers, one for each sense
- Coding is modality specific (depends on sense)
- Iconic= visual Echoic= acoustic
Describe the duration and capacity of the sensory register
MSM
Duration= very brief, less than half a second
Capacity= very high, 100 million cells in one eye each storing data
How does information pass further into the memory system?
- If you pay attention to it
Describe the capacity and duration of STM
- Coded acoustically
- limited capacity because it can only contain a certain number of things before forgetting occurs
- Capacity is 5-9 items
What is maintenance rehearsal?
Occurs when we repeat material to ourselves over and over again. We can keep the information in STM as long as we rehearse it.
Describe the coding and capacity of LTM
- Semantic, possibly permanent store for information
- Duration up to a lifetime
- Capacity is potentially unlimited
What are the three types of long term memory?
Episodic, semantic and procedural
Describe Episodic memory
- Refers to our ability to recall events from our lives, like a diary
- They are time stamped so we can remember which order things happened, it is complex
- Need to make conscious effort to recall
Describe Semantic memory
- Our shared knowledge of the world, likened to a combination of an encyclopaedia and a dictionary
- Knowledge of concepts
- Less personal and more about facts we all share
Describe Procedural memory
- Our memory for actions or skills, how we do things
- Recall all of these memories without conscious awareness
What are the 4 features of the working memory model?
- Central executive
- Phonological loop
- Visuo-spatial sketchpad
- Episodic buffer
What is the role of the central executive?
- Has a supervisory role
- It monitors incoming data and focuses and divides our limited attention
- Allocates slave systems to tasks
- Limited processing capacity, doesn’t store info
What does the phonological loop do?
- It deals with auditory information and preserves the order in which the information arrives
- Subdivided into phonological stores (words heard) and Articulatory process (allows maintenence rehearsal)
What does the Visuo-spatial sketchpad do?
- Stores visual and spatial information when required.
- Limited capacity of around 3/4 objects according to Baddeley
- Logie divided the VSS into= Visual cache, inner scribe (arrangement of objects)
What is the role of the episodic buffer?
- Added to the model by Baddeley in 2000
- Temporary store for information, integrating visual, spatial and verbal info
- maintains a sense of time sequencing
- limited capacity of 4 chunks
What is proactive interference
When older memories interfere with newer ones
prOactive (O=old)
What is retroactive interference
Newer memory interferes with an older one
retroactIve (I= infant, new)
What did Mcgeoh and Mcdonald research?
- Studied retroactive interference by changing the amount of similarity between two sets of materials.
- Participants learned a list of words to 100% accuracy
- They learned a new list after
- There were 6 groups who had to learn different types of new lifts
What were the 6 groups in Mcondald’s research?
- Synonyms
- Antonyms
- Words unrelated
- Consonant syllables
- Three digit numbers
- No new list (control condition)
What are the findings of Mcdonald’s research?
- Asked to recall original list, most similar produced the worst recall (synonyms)
- Shows that interference is strongest when the memories are similar
Explain what Tulvig researched
- Retrieval failure and discovered a consistent pattern to the findings
- Summarised the pattern in what he called the encoding specificity principle
What is the encoding specificity principle?
- States that a cue has to be present at encoding and present at retrieval.
- If cue is different at encoding and retrieval there will be some forgetting
What is context dependent forgetting and state dependent forgetting?
CD= Recall depends on external cue
SD= recall depends on internal cue (being drunk)
Describe the procedure of Godden and Baddeley for CD forgetting
- Studied deep sea divers to see if training on land or in water helped or hindered their work
- Learned a list of words underwater or on land and were asked to recall
- 4 conditions
What are the findings and conclusions for Godden and Baddeley’s research?
- In 2 conditions the envirnmental contexts of learing and recall matched, the other two didn’t
- Recall was 40% lower in non-matching conditions
- External cues available at learning were different from the oes available at recall
Describe the procedure of Carter and Cassaday’s research
- State dependent
- Gave antihistamine drugs to their participants
- Drugs had a mild sedative effect, making the p’s slightly drowsy
- This created an internal psychological state different from normal
- Learned list of words and passages of prose and told to recall
- 4 conditions, matched and non-matched
What are the findings and conclusions of Carter and Cassaday’s research?
- Where there was a mismatch between internal state at learning and recall, performance on memory test was worse
- when cues are absent there is more forgetting
Describe research on leading questions.
- Loftus and Palmer arranged for 45 participants to watch film clips of car accidents and asked them about the accident
- Critical question= asked to describe how fast the car was going when it (verb) the other car
- The verb changed (collided, bumped, smashed) for each of the 5 groups
What are the findings of the research on leading questions?
- Mean estimated speed was calculated
- The verb contacted resulted in an estimated speed of 31.8mph
- smashed= 40.5mph
Why do leading questions affect EWT?
- The response bias explanation suggests that the wording of the question has no real effect on the memories, but it influences how they decide to answer
What was Loftus and Palmer’s second experiment?
- Supported substitution explanation which proposes the wording of a leading question changed the p’s memory of the film clip.
- ‘smashed’= they report seeing broken class
What was Gabbert’s procedure for researching post event discussion?
- studied p’s in pairs
- each p watched a video of the same crime but from a different POV
- each p could see elements that the other could not
- Both p’s discussed what they had seen before individually completing a recall tests
What were Gabbert’s findings?
- 71% of the particiapnts mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video
- Control group had 0%, evidence of memory conformity
Describe memory contamination
When co-witnesses to a crime discuss it with each other the EWT’s may become altered or distorted because they combine information
Describe memory conformity
Witnesses go along with each other to win social approval or they believe others are right and they are wrong
What does anxiety create?
A physiological arousal in the body which prevents us paying attention to important cues so recall is worse
How did Johnson and Scott investigate the effect of anxiety on recall?
- Their participants believed they were taking part in a lab study
- While seated in a waiting room p’s in the low-anxiety condition heard a casual conversation in the next room and then saw a man walk past with a pen and grease on his hands
- Other p’s heard a heated arguemtn and a man walked past with a knife covered in blood, along with the sound of breaking glass (high-anxiety)
What were the findings and conclusions of Johnson and Scott’s research?
- The p’s later picked out the man from a set of 50 photos
- 49% who saw the pen were able to recall
- 33% who saw the knife could recall
What does the tunnel theory of memory argue?
- It argues that people have enhanced memory for central events. Weapon focus as a result of anxiety can have this effect.
How can anxiety have a positive effect on recall?
- The flight or fight response is triggered, increasing alertness.
- This may improve memory for the event as we become more aware of cues in the situation
How did Yuille and Cutshall carry out the research on the positive effect of anxiety?
- Conducted a study of an actual shooting in a gun shop in Vancouver, Canada
- the shop owner shot a thief dead
- 21 witnesses, 13 took part in the study
- they were interviewed for 4-5 months after the incident and these interviews were compared with original police interviews at the time of the shooting
- Accuracy was determined by the number of details recalled
‘ p’s asked to scale stress and emotional problems
What are the findings of research on the positive effect of anxiety?
- Witnesses were very accurate in their accounts and there was little change in the amount recalled after 5 months
- Those who reported the highest levels of stress had most accurate recall (88% compared to 75% for less stressed)
- Suggests that anxiety doesn’t have a detrimental effect on memory
According to who, what does the relationship between emotional arousal and performance look like?
- Yerkes and Dodson
- An inverted U
Who explained contradictory findings?
Anxiety EWT
- Deffenbacher
- reviewed 21 studies of EWT and noted contradictory findings on the effects of anxiety
- He used the Yerkes-Dodson law to explain the findings
- When we witness an event we become emotionally and physiologically aroused
- Lower levels of arousal= lower recall accuracy
- There is an optimal level of anxiety which is the point of maximum accuracy
What is the cognitive interview?
- A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories. It uses 4 main techniques based on evidence based psychological knowledge of the human memory
What are the 4 main parts of the cognitive interview?
- Report everything
- Reinsate the context
- Reverse the order
- Change perspective
Describe ‘report everything’
CI
- Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event even if it seems irrelevant or the witness doesn’t feel confident
Describe ‘reinstate the context’
- Witnesses should return to the original crime scene in their mind and imagine the environment and their emotions
- Related to context dependent cues
Describe ‘reverse the order’
- Events should be recalled in a different order from the original sequence
- Done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened
Describe ‘change perspective’
- Witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s perspectives
- Done to disrupt the effect of expectations and the effect of schema on recall
- Schema may generate expectations of what would have happened
What did Fischer create?
- The enhanced cognitive interview
- Fisher developed additional elements to the CI to focus on the social dynamics of interaction
- E.g the interviewer needs to know when to establish eye contact
- It also includes ideas such as reducing anxiety, minimising distractions and getting the witness to speak slowly.
