Memory : Multi Memory Model , STM And LTM

Question 1

What is the Multi-Store model?

Answer 1

Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968) proposed one of the earliest models of memory – the Multi‐Store Model (MSM). They suggested that memory is made up of three components: sensory register (SR), short‐term memory (STM) and long‐term memory (LTM).

Question 2

According to the model how are memories formed?

Answer 2

the model, memories are formed sequentially and information passes from one component to the next, in a linear fashion.

Question 3

What is coding?

Answer 3

Coding refers to the way in which information is changed and stored in memory.

Question 4

What is duration?

Answer 4

Duration refers to the length of time that information is held in the memory store

Question 5

What is capacity?

Answer 5

capacity refers to the amount of information that can be stored

Question 6

What is the pathway of the Multi- Store Memory Model?

Answer 6

1. Environmental Stimuli
   ->
2. sensory memory
   -> (attention)
3. short term memory
   - information could decay if information is not elaborative rehearsed
   - information could go under maintenance rehearsal staying in short term memory
4. Long term memory
   - Information goes under elaborative rehearsal from STM to LTM
   - Retival is when information goes from LTM to STM

Question 7

What is the capacity of the sensory register?

Answer 7

Very large

Question 8

What is the duration of sensory register?

Answer 8

0.5 Seconds

Question 9

What is the coding of sensory register?

Answer 9

5 senses ( touch , smell , sound , sight and taste )

Question 10

What is the capacity of Short term memory?

Answer 10

5-9 items

Question 11

What is the duration of Short term memory?

Answer 11

Up to 30 seconds

Question 12

What is the coding of Short term memory?

Answer 12

Acoustic ( sound)

Question 13

What is the capacity of long term memory?

Answer 13

Unlimited

Question 14

What is the duration of long term memory?

Answer 14

Potentially forever

Question 15

What is the coding of long term memory?

Answer 15

Semantic (by meaning )

Question 16

What is maintenance rehearsal?

Answer 16

• Keeps information in the short term memory by repeating the same word or phrase you are on maintaining the information. However, a disadvantage would be that when retrieving the information because you only learnt information one way you can retrieve it through the same way which can be difficult in exam situation

Question 17

What is elaborative rehearsal?

Answer 17

Keeps information in the long-term memory. This is done through deeper processing. By putting information in your own words, it allows you to understand the word or phrase better, giving your brain many more different ways of retrieving the information.

Question 18

what was jacobs study on STM?

Answer 18

Jacobs (1887)

Aim : the capacity of short-term memory for numbers and letters.

Method: Jacobs used a sample of 443 female students (aged from 8-19) from the North London Collegiate School. Participants had to repeat back a string of numbers or letters in the same order and the number of digits/letters was gradually increased, until the participants could no longer recall the sequence.

Results: Jacobs found that the student had an average span of 7.3 letters and 9.3 words, which supports Miller’s notion of 7+/-2.

Question 19

What is Millers Magic seven? ( aim and method)

Answer 19

Aim: To investigate the capacity of STM.
Method: Literature review of published investigations into perception and STM, from the 1930s to 1950s.

Question 20

What is Millers Magic seven? ( results and conclusions)

Answer 20

Results: This existing research suggested that organising stimulus input into a series of chunks enabled STM to cope with about seven ‘chunks’, and this was why more than seven digits, words or even musical notes could be remembered successfully. When we try to remember a phone number, which has 11 digits, we chunk the information into groups, for example: 0767…819…45…34, so we only need to remember four chunks of information and not 11 individual digits.

Conclusion: Organisation (or ‘encoding’) can extend the capacity of STM and enable more information to be stored there, albeit briefly.

Question 21

Evaluation of Millers study?

Answer 21

• Although Miller’s (1956) theory is support by psychological research, he did not specify how large each ‘chunk’ of information could be and therefore we are unable to conclude the exact capacity of STM. Consequently, further research is required to determine the size of information ‘chunks’ to understand the exact capacity of STM.
• Finally, Miller’s (1956) research into STM did not take into account other factors that affect capacity. For example, age could also affect STM and Jacobs’ (1887) research acknowledged that STM gradually improved with age.

Question 22

Who studied duration of STM?

Answer 22

Peterson & Peterson (1959)

Question 23

What was the Peterson and Peterson study ? ( Aim and method)

Answer 23

Aim: To investigate the duration of Short term memory

Method: - Investigated the duration of short-term memory, using a sample of 24 male and female psychology students.
- The students had to recall three letter trigrams at different intervals, 3, 6, 9 , 12 , 15 and 18 seconds).
- To prevent rehearsal they had to count backwards in three or four is from a specific number until they were asked to recall the letters

Question 24

What was the Peterson and Peterson study ? ( results and conclusions )

Answer 24

Results : Peterson & Peterson found that the longer the interval the less accurate the recall. At 3 seconds, around 80% of the trigrams were correctly recalled, whereas at 18 seconds only 10% were correctly recalled.

Conclusion: STM has a limited duration of approximately 18 seconds. Furthermore, if we are unable to rehearse information it will not be passed to LTM, providing further support for the MSM and the idea of discrete components.

Question 25

Evaluating Peterson & Peterson (1959)

Answer 25

• Firstly, the psychology students may have encountered the MSM of memory previously and therefore may have demonstrated demand characteristics by changing their behaviour to assist the experimenter.
• the memory of psychology students may be different from that of other people, especially if they had previously studied strategies for memory improvement. As a result we are unable to generalise the results of this study to non‐psychology students.
• could be argued that Peterson & Peterson’s study has low levels of ecological validity. In this study participants were asked to recall three‐letter trigrams, which is unlike anything people would want to memorise in their everyday lives. As a result we are unable to apply these results to everyday examples of memory and are unable to conclude if the duration of STM may be longer for more important information

Question 26

Who studied Duration of LTM?

Answer 26

Bahrick ( 1975]

Question 27

How did Bahrick (1975) study duration of LTM ? ( Aim and method)

Answer 27

Aim: To investigate the duration of LTM.

Method: 392 American university graduates were shown photographs from their high school yearbook and for each photograph participants were given a group of names and asked to select the name that matched the photographs.

Question 28

How did Bahrick (1975) study duration of LTM ? ( results and conclusions )

Answer 28

Results: 90% of the participants were able to correctly match the names and faces 14 years after graduating and 60% of the participants were able to correctly match the names and faces 47 years after graduation.

Conclusion: Bahrick concluded that people could remember certain types of information, such as names and faces, for almost a lifetime. These results support the MSM and the idea that our LTM has a lifetime duration (at least 47 years), and is semantically encoded.

Question 29

Evaluating Bahrick (1975)?

Answer 29

• Bahrick’s research used a sample of 392 American university graduates and therefore lacks population validity. Psychologists are unable to generalise the results of Bahrick’s research to other populations, for example students from the UK or Europe.
• it could be argued that Bahrick’s study has high levels of ecological validity as the study used real‐life memories. In this study participants recalled real‐life information by matching pictures of classmates with their names. Therefore, these results reflect our memory for real‐life events and can be applied to everyday human memory.

Question 30

Overall Evaluation of the MSM?

Answer 30

• Support for the MSM comes from the case study of Clive Wearing, who contracted a virus that caused severe amnesia (memory loss).
• Following the virus, Wearing could only remember information for 20‐ 30 seconds; however, he was able to recall information from his past, for example his wife’s name.
• Wearing was unable to transfer information from his STM to his LTM, but was able to retrieve information successfully.
• Wearing’s case supports the idea that memories are formed by passing information from one store to the next in a linear fashion and that damage to any part of the MSM can cause memory impairment.
• Baddeley and Hitch (1974) developed the working memory model (WMM) as an explanation of the complexity of STM and a way of explaining some of the research findings that could not be accounted for by the MSM, for example parallel processing (multi‐tasking).

Question 31

What is long term memory?

Answer 31

It stores information over long periods of time.

Question 32

how does the brain store information through coding?

Answer 32

• Visual - remembering places , faces
• Acoustic - remembering songs , voices
• Semantic - the main way information is remembered in LTM is through its meaning

Question 33

What did Tulving realise?

Answer 33

• Tulving (1985) was one of the first cognitive psychologists to realise that the Multi-store model’s view of LTM was too simplistic and inflexible.
  -Tulving proposed that there was in fact three LTM stores, containing different types of information in each.

Question 34

What is an episodic memory?

Answer 34

An episodic memory is a personal memory, which has three specific elements: details of the event , the context , and the emotions experienced. Episodic memories are associated with a part of the brain called the hippopotamus

Question 35

What is semantic memory?.

Answer 35

This comprises our knowledge of facts , concepts and meaning. For example , knowing that London is the capital of England is a semantic memory. Semantic memories are associated with a part of the brain known as the temporal lobe.

Question 36

What is procedural memory

Answer 36

Procedural memory is our memory of performed motor tasks / skills e.g swimming and writing. Procedural memories are acquired through repetition and practice and are associated with the cerebellum and motor cortex

Question 37

What type of memory is Explicit? ( conscious recall)

Answer 37

• Episodic memory
• semantic memory

Question 38

What type of memory is implicit ? ( unconscious recall)

Answer 38

Procedural memory

Question 39

What is the motor cortex

Answer 39

The motor cortex is involved in storing procedural memories

Question 40

What is a frontal lobe?

Answer 40

The frontal lobe store, semantic and episodic memory

Question 41

What is a prefrontal cortex?

Answer 41

The pre-frontal cortex is involved in the storage of short-term memories

Question 42

What is temporal lobe?

Answer 42

The temporal lobe is involved in the formation and storage of long-term semantic and episodic memories, and contributes to the processing of new material in short-term memory.

Question 43

What is amygdala

Answer 43

The Amygdala It’s vital to the formation of new emotional memories

Question 44

What is a hippocampus

Answer 44

The hippocampus plays a pivotal role information of new long-term semantic and episodic memories.

Question 45

What is cerebellum?

Answer 45

The cerebellum plays an important role in the storage of procedural memories

Question 46

What did Baddely do? Aim and Method (coding for STM and LTM)

Answer 46

Aim : coding for STM and LTM
Procedure :
- Baddeley (1966) gave participants one of four word lists to learn.
-The lists contained words that were either :
- acoustically similar (sounded the same, e.g. hat, cat, bat);
- acoustically dissimilar (sounded different, e.g. hat, stage, ball);
- semantically similar (had the same meaning, e.g. big, large); or
- semantically dissimilar (had different meanings, e.g. gate, big).

Participants either recalled the list immediately, testing the coding of short-term memory (STM) or after 20 minutes, testing the coding of long-term memory (LTM).

Question 47

What did Baddely do? Findings

Answer 47

• Participants did worse with acoustically similar words in STM, suggesting that information in STM is coded according to sound, as similar-sounding information conflicted with each other.
• For LTM, they did worse with semantically similar words, suggesting that information in LTM is coded according to meaning, as information with similar meanings conflicted with each other.

Question 48

Clinical evidence for LTM?

Answer 48

• HM and Clive Wearing both had brain damage which severely affected their episodic memory but their semantic and procedural memories were relatively intact.
- Clive Wearing could read and play very complex pieces of music on a piano. They show that procedural memory is distinct from both semantic and episodic memory.

Semantic - Clive wearing and HM
Procedural - Clive wearing ( piano ) , HM ( drawing)
Episodic - HM remembered everything up to operation.

Question 49

Neruoimaging evidence for memory?

Answer 49

• There is also evidence from brain scan studies that different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. For example, Tulving (1994) got their participants to perform various tasks while their brains were scanned using a PET scanner. They found that episodic and semantic were both recalled from an area of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex.

• This area is divided into two areas, one on each side (or hemisphere) of the brain. The left prefrontal cortex was involved in recalling semantic memories. Episodic memories were recalled from the right prefrontal cortex. Procedural memories, however, were recalled from the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.