Memory evaluation

Question 1

Evaluate MSM

Answer 1

1. Supporting evidence - controlled lab studies on capacity, duration and coding. Showed difference between STM and LTM.
   Beardsley (1997) prefrontal cortex active during stm not ltm . Squire et al. (1992) hippocampus active LTM.
2. Case studies - different brain areas involved in STM and LTM (brain damaged patients) HM removed hippocampus, couldn’t form new LTMs, remember stuff before the surgery.
3. MSM too simple STM divided into different stores (qualitatively) and LTM too.

Question 2

Evaluate WMM

Answer 2

1. Problems with case studies - A. brain injury traumatic may change behaviour.
   B. brain damaged individuals could’ve received damaged in areas affecting the performance on certain task.
   C. case studies are unique cannot be generalised to a population
2. Dual task performance - task 1 occupied Ce. Task 2 either involved the PL or both CE and PL. Task 1 was slower than task 2 when it had both CE and PL. shows dual task effect and CE is one of the components in working memory.
3. evidence from brain damaged patients - KF whose short-term forgetting of auditory information was much greater than that of visual stimuli. auditory problems were limited to verbal material such as letters and digits but not meaningful sounds.
   SC generally good learning abilities, but unable to learn word pairs presented out loud. LH who had been involved in a road accident performed better on spatial tasks than those involving visual imagery (Farah et al., 1988)

Question 3

Evaluate types of LTM

Answer 3

1. Evidence from brain scans - EM hippocampus + temp lobe + front lobe.
   SM temp lobe. PM - cerebellum, motor cortex plus basal ganglia.
2. brain damaged patients - difficult to find out which areas been affected.

Question 4

Give an evaluation of cog.interview

Answer 4

1. effectiveness - review of 53 studies found 34% more info from (kohnken et al) most due to report everything and mental reinstatement component (Milne and Bull)
2. Quality may suffer- 81% increase in correct recalls but 61% false positives
3. In practice - time consuming and inadequate training.

Question 5

evaluate research into duration and capacity of short term memory

Answer 5

1. duration: testing STM was artificial - memoristation of consonant syllables doesn’t truly reflect most everyday activities. sometimes we memrise meaningless stuff e.g phone numbers.
2. capacity: simon 1974 found that people had a shorter-memory span for larger chunks e.g eight-word phrases than smaller chunks one syllable word. - supports the view that STM has a limited span.
3. STM results may be due to displacement -in petersons study Ps were counting the numbers in their STM and this may displace or “overwrite” the syllables to be remembered. Reitman 1974 used auditory tones since they don’t interfere with verbal rehearsal found that duration of STM was longer.

Question 6

evaluate coding

Answer 6

1. STM may not be exclusively acoustic - brandimonte et al. (1992) found Ps used visual coding in STM if given a visual task and prevented from doing any verbal rehearsal in the retention interval.
2. LTM - may not be exclusively semantic - frost (1972) showed that LT recall was related to visual as well as semantic categories, and Nelson and Rothbart (1972) found evidence of acoustic in LTM.
3. Baddeley may not have tested LTM - in study STM tested by asking Ps to recall word list immediately after hearing it. LTM was tested by waiting 20 minutes.