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Question 1

describe short term memory and long term memory

Answer 1

capacity

• Can be assessed using a digit span – cover all the numbers except the first and then say them all back
• Joseph Jacobs in 1897 used this techniques to assess STM capacity, found that the average span for digits were 9.3 items and 7.3 for letters – easier to recall digits as there are only 9 whereas there are 26 letters
• George Miller in 1956 wrote the article called The Magic Number seven plus or minus two, he reviewed psychological research about the span of memory and concluded that the span of immediate memory is about 7 sometimes a bit more or less
• He noted that people can count 7 dots flashing on screen but no more
• This same is if you are asked to recall musical notes, letters and words
• Miller also found that people can recall 5 words if they can recall 5 letters as we chunk things together and can remember more

duration
- LTM potential last forever but STM does not last very long
short term duration
- Lloyd and Margaret Peterson 1959 – studied the duration of STM using 24 students
- Each participant was tested over 8 trials
- On each trial the participant was given a consonant syllable and a three digit number they are wasked to recall the consonant syllable after an rentention interval of 3,6,9,12,15,18 seconds during the retention interval they had to count backwards from their three digit number
- Participants were 90% accurate over 3 seconds, 20% accurate after 9 seconds, and only 2% accurate after 18 seconds this suggests that STM has a short duration less than 18 seconds
long term duration
- Harry Bahrick et al 1975 tested 400 people of various ages (17-74) on their memory of their classmates
- A photo recognition test considered of 50 photos from the participants high-school year book in a free-recall test they were asked to list the names from their graduation class
- Participants who were tested within 15 years of graduation were 90% accurate, after 48 years this dropped to 70% accurate for photo recognition. For free recall after about 15 years it was about 60% accurate and after 48 years it was 30% accurate

coding

• Information that we store has to be written in memory in some form it is described as in the forms of sounds, images, or meaning
• Alan Baddeley 1966a and 1966b used lister words that were acoustically similar but semantically different or semantically similar but acoustically different
• Did this to test the effects of acoustic and semantic similarity of STM and LTM
• He found that participants had difficulty remembering the acoustically similar words in STM but not in LTM whereas semantically words were the opposite way round
• Suggested that the STM is largely encoded and acoustically whereas LTM is largely encoded semantically

Question 2

multistore model of memory

Answer 2

• The MSM was first described by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin in 1968, It is called the modal model because it was the most usually used model of memory
  parts :
  Sensory register - Attention
  Short term memory - Maintenance rehearsal
  Long term memory - Retrieval
  sensory register
• Is the place where the information is held at each of the senses – the eyes, ears, nose , fingers and tongue and the corresponding areas of the brain
• The capacity of the registers is very larger – they are constantly receiving information, but most receives no attention and remains in the sensory register for a brief period
  attention
• If a persons attention is focuses on sensory stores then data is transferred to STM, attention is the first step in remembering something

short term memory
- Information is held in STM so it can be sued for immediate tasks such as remembering directions to a friends house
- STM has a limited duration and will disappear quickly if it is not rehearsed
- Largely verbal and repeating things over and over again is called maintenance rehearsal
- Information disappear from STM if new information enters the STM pushing out original information as STM has limited capacity
Maintenance rehearsal
- Repetition keeps information in STM eventually repetition will create a long term memory LTM
- Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed a direction relationship between rehearsal in STM and the strength of LTM – the more information is rehearsed the better it is remembered

long term memory
- LTM is potentially unlimited in duration and capacity
- You may feel like there are things that you have forgotten but the evidence suggests that that either you actually never made it permanent or you just cannot find it
retrieval
- Process of getting information from LTM involves the information passing back through STM it is then available for use

Question 3

the working memory model

Answer 3

• Baddeley and Hitch 1974, though that the STM was not one store but many stores
• They thought this because: if you are doing two things at the same time and they are visual tasks then you perform less well than if you do them separately, if you do two things at the same time but one is visual and one is acoustic then there is no interference, you do them as well as you would separately
• This suggests that there is one store for visual processing and a separate store for sounds, forms the basis of the working memory model where systems are organised by a central executive

central executive

• The function of the CE is to direct attention to particular tasks and determine how the brains “resources” are allocated to tasks.
• Resources are the three slave systems
• Data arrives from the sense or long term memory
• The CE has a limited capacity

phonological loop
- This deals with auditory information and preserves the order of information, Baddeley subdivided the group loop into: the phonological store which holds words that your hear, an articulatory process which is used for words that are heard or seen, they are silently repeated like an inner voice and is a form of maintenance rehearsal

visuo-spatial sketchpad

• This is used when you have to plan a spatial task such as getting from one room to another or counting the number of windows in the house
• Visual or spatial information is held temporarily stored here
• Logie 1995 - suggested that the visuo – spatial sketchpad could be divided into, a visual cache which stores information about visual items e.g. from colour, an inner scribe which stores the arrangement of object in the visual field

episodic buffer

• Baddeley 2000 – added the episodic buffer as he realised the model needed a general store, this was because the phonological group and visuo-spatial sketchpad deal with processing and temporary storage of specific kinds of information, and the CE has no storage capacity therefore there is no place to hold information that relates to both visual and acoustic information – therefore it has a limited capacity
• The episodic buffer intergrates information from the central executive, the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad, also maintains time sequencing and send information to the LTM

Question 4

types of long term memory

Answer 4

• Divided into two main types this is explicit(declarative) memory and implicit(procedural) memory – this is the distinction between knowing that and knowing how
  That - Explicit - episodic and semantic
  How - Implicit - procedural

episodic

• They are about knowing that
• For example an event or group of events occurring as a larger sequence – this is concerned with personal experiences and recollection, such as first day of school, holiday, playing with friends
• May recall context surrounding the event such as what happened before and what happened after and the emotions that you felt at the time
• there are three parts of episodic memory these are
• details of the event
• the context
• the emotion of the event

semantic

• They are about knowing that
• But instead of knowing your first day of school was scary you known that people of a certain age go to school or the capital of England is London
• Knowledge that is shared with everyone not personal like episodic memories
• May relate to things such as how to function in social event and how to function an object or things such as maths and language
• Begin as episodic memories because that’s how we experience things and acquire knowledge
• Gradual transition from episodic to semantic as memory slowly loses association to a particular event and information is generalised
• Sometimes people have a strong recollection of when they learned a particular event

procedural

• Concerned with skills like tying a shoelace or to swim and read
• Remembering how to do something rather than knowing what the rules are to do
• Acquired through repetition and practise and this kind of memory is implicit unlike episodic and semantic, we are less aware of the memories because they are automatic
• Important that they are automatic so we can focus on other tasks

Question 5

explanations for forgetting: interference

Answer 5

parts that make up interference

• Proactive interference (PI)
• Retroactive interference (RI)

describe proactive

• Benton Underwood 1957 – he showed that proactive interference (PI) could be equally significant, analysed findings from a number of studies and concluded that when participants have to learn a series of word lists they do not learn the words on the lists later on in the sequence than the words encountered earlier on
• Overall Underwood found, if participants remembered 10 or more lists than after 24 hours they remembered about 20% of what they learned, if they learned one list recall was over 70%

describe retroactive

• Georg Muller and his student were the first to identify retroactive interference(RI) effects
• Gave participants a list of nonsense syllables to learn for 6 minutes, then after retention interval they asked participants to recall the lists
• Performance was less good if participants had been given intervening tasks between initial learning and recall – describing a landscape
• intervening task produced RI because the later task – describing pictures – interfered with what they had originally learned

describe similarity of test materials
- Baddeley and Hitch 1997 – investigated interference effects in rugby players recalling the names of the teams they had played over a rugby season – some were in all the games and others had missed games because of injury – time interval was the same for all players but the number of intervening games was different for each player because of missed games

a real world study: Baddeley and Hitches study

• If decay theory was correct then the players should recall a similar percentage of games played because time alone should be the cause of forgetting
• If interference theory is correct than those players who played the most games should forget proportionately, more because of interference – this is what Baddeley and Hitch found which demonstrated the effect of interference in everyday life

Question 6

explanations for forgetting retrieval failure

Answer 6

what is forgetting in LTM mainly due to

the encoding specificity principle
Endel Tulving and Donald Thomson 1973, proposed that memory is most effective if information present at time of the encoding is also available at time of retrieval
- Cue doesn’t have to be right but the closer to the original the more useful it is
- Tulving and Pearlstone 1966 – demonstrated the value of retrieval cues in a study where participants had to learn 48 words belonging to 12 categories, each word was presented as a category and word, there were two different recall conditions, participants had to either recall as many words as they could or they were given cues in the form of the category names
- In recall condition 40% of the words were recalled on average whereas in the cued recall condition participants recalled 60% of the words
- Evidence of cues that have been explicitly or implicitly encoded, at the time of learning and have a meaningful link to the learning material
- another type of cue not linked to learning material is remembering where we were, or how we felt, information encoded to varying degrees along with material learned – sometimes the reminder that a particular place or mood can act as a trigger or cue to help access a memory

context dependent forgetting
this is when familiar things act as cues and allow us to retrieve memories from out LTM
- ethel Abernethy 1940s study - – arranged for a group of students to be tested before a certain course began, they were then tested each week, some in there teaching room by their instructor whereas others were tested by a different instructor, others were tested in a different room by there usual instructor or by a different one
- Four different experimental conditions in this study those tested by the same instructor in the same room performed best – similar things acted as memory cues
Godden and Baddeley - researchers recruited scuba divers as participants and arranged for them to learn a set of words either on land or underwater, therefore they were tested on land or underwater for experimental conditions, showed the highest recall occurred when the initial context matched the recall of the environment

state-dependent forgetting
The mental state you are in at the time of learning can act as a cue
describe Goodwin et al - asked male volunteers to remember a list of words when either they were drunk or sober, Participants were asked to recall the lists after 24 hours when some were sober but others had to get drunk again, Recall suggested that the words learnt in the same state provided the highest recall

Question 7

accuracy of eyewitness testimony: misleading information

Answer 7

Leading questions
Key study:Loftus and palmer
experiment 1: procedure
- 45 students were shown 7 films of different traffic accidents and after each film they were given a questionnaire to describe the incident and answer a series of questions about it
- there was one critical question “About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other,”
- one group of participants were given this question the other four groups were given the verbs smashed, collided, bumped or contacted in place of the word hit
- this was a leading question as it suggested the answer that the participant may give

findings
The findings showed that the leading questions affected the results
- smashed was highest mean speed estimate at 40.8 whereas contacted was lowest at 31.8

experiment 2 procedure
- leading question may bias the participants response
- to test this a new set of participants was divided in three groups and shown a film of a car accident lasting one minute the participants were then asked the questions about speed and then asked to return one week later and asked a series of 10 questions including another critical question “ Did you see any broken glass,”
even though there was no broken glass their responses varied

findings
people who had smashed as their verb instead of hit had a higher percentage which showed that there was broken glass compared to those who had hit and the control group

post event discussion
the conformity effect
co-witnesses may reach a consensus view of what actually happened
- this was investigated by Fiona Gabbert and colleagues in 2003
- participants were in pairs and each partner watched a different video of the same event so they watched unique items
- pairs in the condition were encouraged to discuss the event before each partner individually recalled the event that they watched
- high number 71% mistook their partners event for their own

repeat interviewing
each time the eyewitness is interviewed there is the possibility that comments from the interviewer will be incorporated into their recollection of events
- case that interviewer may be leading questions therefore alter the individuals memory

Question 8

accuracy of eyewitness testimony: anxiety

Answer 8

what affect does anxiety have on accuracy
It has a negative effect on accuracy, as it has a negative effect on memory as well as performance therefore performance on difficult tasks are reduced

key study
procedure
- Asked participants to set in a waiting room where they heard an argument and then saw a man running through the room with a pen covered in grease or a knife covered in blood, participants were then asked to identify the man in pictures
- Different account on why anxiety might reduce the accuracy of EWT, this is the weapon focus effect – weapon distracts attention as it creates fear and anxiety therefore reduces the accuracy of identification
findings
- Supported the idea of weapons focus effects
- Mean accuracy was 49% in identifying the man in pen condition whereas it was 33% accuracy in knife condition
- Loftus et al 1987 – showed that anxiety does focus attention on central features of a crime
- Researchers monitored eyewitnesses eye movement and found that the presence of weapons caused the attention to be drawn to the weapon and not the persons face

anxiety has a positive effect on accuracy

• High anxiety and arousal creates more enduring and accurate memories
• Be adaptive to remember emotional events and recall how to act in the future in similar situations
• Christianson and Hubinette found evidence of enhanced recall when they questioned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies in Sweden, they were either bystanders or victims, and conducted 4-15 months after the robberies
• Researchers found that all witnesses showed generally good memories for details about the robbery itself, those who were most anxious had the best recall of all – negative emotional event is better than for neutral events

resolving the contradiction

• Kenneth Deffecnbacher 1983, reviewed 21 studies of the effects of anxiety on eyewitness memory, he found that 10 of these studies had results that linked higher arousal levels to increased eyewitness accuracy while 11 of them showed the opposite
• Suggested that the Yerkes-Dodson effect can account for this apparent inconsistency – according to this principle there would be occasions when anxiety is only moderate and then eyewitness accuracy is enhanced whereas with anxiety is extreme then accuracy is reduced

Question 9

description of the cognitive interview

Answer 9

1. mental reinstatement
   One of the principal techniques of the CI is when the interviewer encourages the interviewee to mentally recreate the physical and psychological environment of the original incident , they use words such as “ I would like you to think back to the day that the event happened,” this makes the memories accessible, and people often need contextual and emotional cues to retrieve there memories
2. report everything
   The interviewer encourages the reporting of every single detail of the event without editing anything out even though this may seem irrelevant they say something like “some people may hold information back because they are not sure that that is important or you may think I already know this but please do not leave anything out. I am interested in everything that you have to say” Memories are interconnected with each other therefore recollection with one item may cue a whole lot of other memories, or a small detail might piece together another witnesses to form a clearer picture
3. change order
   The interviewer may try alternative ways through the timeline of the incident by reversing the order in which the events occurred, this is because are recollection is influenced by schemas. Schemas influence what is likely to happen in certain situations and fill in gaps but if you start the event from back to front then the schema cannot influence the events
4. change presepctive
   Interviewee is asked to recall the incident from multiple perspectives by imagining what would happen to the witnesses at that time this also disrupts the effect of schemas for example the interviewer would ask “try to recall the incident from the perspective of another person involved in the incident”