Memory Part 2

Question 1

What are the parts made up of the interference theory (Explanations for forgetting: Interference )

Answer 1

Proactive interference (PI)
Retroactive interference (RI)

Question 2

Describe Retroactive interference (Explanations for forgetting: Interference )

Answer 2

• 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

Question 3

Describe Proactive interference (Explanations for forgetting: Interference )

Answer 3

• 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%

Question 4

what are the similarity of test materials (Explanations for forgetting: Interference )

Answer 4

• McGeoch and McDonald 1931 – experimented with the effect of similarity of materials
• Gave participants a list of 10 adjectives once these were learned then there was a resting interval of 10 minutes in which they learned list B followed by recall
• If list B was a list of synonyms of list A recall was poor (12%) if list B was nonsense syllabus this had less effect (26%), if list B was numbers than this had the least effect of (37%) recall
• This showed that interference is strongest the more similar the items are, only interference can explain these differences rather than decay

Question 5

What was Baddeley and Hitches real world study (Explanations for forgetting: Interference )

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

What were the findings of Baddeley and Hitches real world study (Explanations for forgetting: Interference )

Answer 6

• 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 7

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: interference: Research is quite artificial

Answer 7

• Evidence that supports PI and RI, but most of the experiments are lab based and often use artificial and contrived equipment therefore does not relate to everyday memory
• Low ecological validity – participants may lack motivation to remember the lists which allows interference to have more of an effect
• On the other hand interference has been observed in everyday situations

Question 8

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: interference: Interference only explains some situations of forgetting

Answer 8

• Interference effects do not occur often
• Special conditions are required for interference to lead to forgetting so therefore it is relatively unimportant
• Anderson 2000 concluded that interference plays a role in forgetting but how much is plays a role is unclear

Question 9

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: interference: Accessibility versus availability

Answer 9

• Researchers question whether interference effects actually cause a memory to disappear or are just temporary
• Ceraso 1967 – found that if memory was tested after 24 hours there was spontaneous recovery whereas recall was the same, so interference occurs because memories are temporarily not accessible rather than lost

Question 10

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: interference: Real-World application to advertising

Answer 10

• Danaher et al 2008 – found that both recall and recognition of an advertisers message were impaired when participants were exposed to two advertisements for competing brands within a week – serious problem considering the amount of money advertisers spend only to have the effect dulled by interference
• Suggest that one strategy might be to enhance the memory trace by running multiple exposures to advert in one day rather than spread out over a week which reduces interference

Question 11

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: interference: Individual differences

Answer 11

• Evidence that some people are less affected by PI than others
• Kane and Engle 2000 – demonstrated that individuals with a greater working memory span were less susceptible to PI than those with a low span
• Having a greater working memory span meant having greater resources to consciously control processing and counteract the effects of PI

Question 12

What is forgetting in the LTM mainly due to?

Answer 12

• forgetting LTM is mainly due to retrieval failure, this is the failure to find an item of information as you have insufficient cues

Question 13

Describe the encoding specificity principle

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

Describe the Tulving and Pearlstone 1966 study which proved encoding specificity principle

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

What is another type of cue that is not related to the learning material in any type of way

Answer 15

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

Question 16

What is context dependant forgetting

Answer 16

this is when familiar things act as cues and allow us to retrieve memories from out LTM

Question 17

Describe Ethel Abernethy 1940s study to prove context-dependent forgetting

Answer 17

– 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

Question 18

Describe the Godden and Baddeley 1975 study to prove context dependent forgetting

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What is state-dependent forgetting

Answer 19

The mental state you are in at the time of learning can act as a cue

Question 20

Describe state dependent forgetting Godwin et al 1969 study

Answer 20

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 21

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: Retrieval failure: Real world application

Answer 21

• use it to improve recall
• Abernethy’s research suggests that you should revise in the room where you take the exam, may be unrealistic but you can use your imagination
• Smith 1979 - showed that just thinking of the room where you did the original learning was just as effective as doing the test in the same room

Question 22

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: Retrieval failure: Retrieval cues do not always work

Answer 22

• really not that effective to improve exam performance
• the information that you are learning is related to a lot more than just cues therefore it does not work
• learning complex associations which are less easily triggered by cues - outshining hypothesis - a cues effectiveness if reduced by the presence of better cues
• Smith and Vela 2001 - context effects are largely eliminated when learning meaningful material

Question 23

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: Retrieval failure: The danger of circularity

Answer 23

James Nairne 2002 - criticised what he calls the myth of encoding-retrieval match
- claims that the relationship between encoding cues and later retrieval is a correlation rather than a cause - cues do not cause retrieval but are just associated with retrieval
Baddeley made a similar criticism
- pointing out that the encoding specificity principle is impossible to test because it is circular - if a stimulus leads to the retrieval of a memory that it must have been encoded in memory if it does not lead to a retrieval of a memory then according to the encoding specificity principle it cannot have been encoding but it is impossible to test for an item which has not been encoded

Question 24

Evaluation of explanations for forgetting: Retrieval failure: Retrieval failure and explains interference effects

Answer 24

Tulving and Psotka 1971 - demonstrated that interference effects are due to the absence of cues
- participants were given 6 different word lists to learn each consisting of 24 words divided into 6 different categories
- after each word list was presented they were asked to write down how many they could remember
after all the lists were presented they were given the category names and asked to recall all the words from the lists, the categories acted as cues
- some participants only learned one list, then other learned 2 and so on
- according to interference theory the more lists a participant had to learn the worse their performance would become
- However when participants were given cued recall effects of interference disappeared - participants remembered 70%of the words regardless of how many lists that they have been given - shows that information is there but cannot be retrieved and shows that retrieval failure is more important explanation of forgetting that interference

Question 25

What effect does anxiety have on accuracy

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

Answer 25

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

Question 26

Describe the procedure of Johnson and Scott (1976)

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

Answer 26

• 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

Question 27

Describe the aim of Johnson and Scott (1976)

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

Answer 27

• 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

Question 28

Describe the findings of Johnson and Scott (1976)

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

Answer 28

• 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

Question 29

Can anxiety have a positive effect on accuracy

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

Answer 29

• 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

Question 30

How did Kenneth Deeffecnbacher resolve the contradiction between anxiety has a positive or negative effect on accuracy
(Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety)

Answer 30

• 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 31

Evaluation of Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

Weapon focus may not be caused by anxiety

Answer 31

• Pickel 1998 proposed that the reduced anxiety of identification due to the weapon focus effect could be due to surprise rather than anxiety,
• Arranged a thief to enter a hairdressing salon carrying scissors – high threat, low surprise- handgun – high threat high surprise , wallet – low threat low surprise, whole raw chicken – low threat, high surprise
• Identification was least accurate to high surprise conditions than high threat conditions 0 supports the idea that weapon focus effect is related to surprise rather than anxiety

Question 32

Evaluation of Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

Real life versus lab studies

Answer 32

• Anxiety done in context of real crime – Christianson and Hubinette – lab studies to do not create real levels of anxiety experienced by a real eyewitness during a real crime
• Deggenbacher et al – agreed with this, but found from a review of 34 studies that lab studies demonstrated that anxiety led to reduce anxiety, and real studies are associated with an even greater loss in accuracy which contrasts with Christianson and Hubinette

Question 33

Evaluation of Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

No simple conclusion

Answer 33

• Study of Christianson and Hubinette – concerned a violent real life crime – many other studies of anxiety and accuracy of identification, even the real-life ones did not involve violence
• Halford and Milne found victims of violent crimes were more accurate in their recall of crime scene information that victims of non-violent crimes – shows no simple rule about effect of anxiety on accuracy of eyewitness testimony

Question 34

Evaluation of Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

Individual differences

Answer 34

• Emotional sensitivity is an individual difference
• Bothwell et al – participants were assessed for neuroticism, a personality characteristic where individuals tend to become anxious quite quickly – they were labelled neurotic and stable, the participants that were stable showed rising levels of accuracy as stress increased whereas the opposite for neurotics
• Deffenbacher et al – pointed out that modest effect sizes may be the result of averaging out low accuracy and high accuracy scores of sensitive and non-sensitive participants respectively

Question 35

Evaluation of Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Anxiety

An alternative model

Answer 35

• Fazey and Hardy suggested a more complex relationship between anxiety and performance than the Yerkes-Dodson model
• Catastrophe theory predicts that when physiological arousal increases beyond the optimum level, the inverted-U hypothesis predicts a gradual decrease in performance Fazey and Hardy observed that in fact there is sometimes a catastrophic decline which they suggest is due to increased mental anxiety
• The inverted U describes increased physiological anxiety – fits real life eyewitnesses

Question 36

Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
Description of the cognitive interview, Mental reinstatement of original context

Answer 36

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

Question 37

Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
Description of the cognitive interview, Report everything

Answer 37

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

Question 38

Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
Description of the cognitive interview, Change order

Answer 38

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

Question 39

Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
Description of the cognitive interview, Change perspective

Answer 39

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”

Question 40

what are the features of the cognitive interview

Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview

Answer 40

1. Mental reinstatement of original context
2. Report everything
3. Change order
4. Change perspective

Question 41

Evaluation of improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
Research into the effectiveness of the cognitive interview

Answer 41

• Meta-analysis of 53 studies found on average a 34% increase in the amount of correct information generated in the CI compared with standard interviewing techniques although they involved volunteer witnesses tested in a lab
• The effectiveness of the CI may be due more to some individual elements rather than the whole thing
• Milne and bull 2002 – interviewed undergraduate students and children using one individual component of the CI and compared responses to a controlled condition where they were instructed to “try again” recall across the four individual components was broadly similar and no different to the control group – when did a combination of the report everything and mental reinstatement components of the CI there recall was higher than all other conditions

Question 42

Evaluation of improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
Quantity versus quality

Answer 42

• Procedure is designed to enhance the quantity of correct recall without compromising the quality of that information however the effectiveness has largely been in terms of quantity
• Kohnken et al found an 81% increase in correct information but a 61% increase of incorrect information when enhanced CI was compared to incorrect information therefore police need to treat all information collected from CI carefully

Question 43

Evaluation of improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
problems with using the CI in practise

Answer 43

• Kebbel and Wagstaff report a problem with CI in practise, police offers suggest that is requires more time which they do not have so use deliberate strategies aimed to limit an eyewitness report to the minimum amount of information that the officers feel is necessary
• CI requires special training and many forces cannot provide it in a few hours therefore it is not widespread

Question 44

Evaluation of improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
Difficulties in establishing effectiveness

Answer 44

• Used in the real world but is not one procedure but a collection of related techniques for example thames valley police use a version that does not require changing perspective and other police forces that use the CI technique have only tended to use the reinstate context and report everything

Question 45

Evaluation of improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony: the cognitive interview
Individual differences

Answer 45

• CI important when interviewing older witnesses
• Negative stereotypes can make interviews overly cautious about reporting information however CI stresses the importance for reporting everything
• Mello and Fisher 1996 – compared older and younger men’s memories of a filmed stimulated crime using either CI or standard police interview, the CI produced more information than the SI but it was significantly greater for the older than younger participants

Question 46

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information

Describe the procedure of experiment 1 from the Loftus and Palmer study

Answer 46

• 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

Question 47

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information

Describe the findings of experiment 1 from the Loftus and Palmer study

Answer 47

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

Question 48

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information

Describe the procedure of experiment 2 from Loftus and Palmer study

Answer 48

• 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

Question 49

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information

Describe the findings of experiment 2 from the Loftus and Palmer study

Answer 49

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

Question 50

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information

Conformity effect

Answer 50

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

Question 51

Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information

Repeat interviewing

Answer 51

• 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 52

Evaluation Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information
Supporting evidence

Answer 52

• Research supports this
• Loftus conducted a memorable study involving cut outs of bugs bunny, and college students were asked to evaluate advertising material about Disneyland, and embedded in this material was misleading information about bugs bunny or Ariel and these could not have been seen in Disney
• participants were assigned to the Bugs, Ariel or control condition and all had visited Disneyland
• participants in the Bugs or Ariel condition were more likely to report that they had shaken hands with the characters than the control group

Question 53

Evaluation Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information
EWT in real life

Answer 53

Loftus research suggeted that EWT was unreliable but not all researchers agree

• Loftus may not represent real life because it was carried out in lab conditions
• Foster et al - found that if participants thought they were watching a real life robbery and also thought that their responses would influence the trial their identification of a robber was more accurate
• Yuille and Cutshall found evidence of a greater accuracy in real life, witnesses to an armed robbery in Canada gave accurate reports to the crime four months after it had taken place even though they had initially been given two misleading questions suggesting that misleading information may have less influence on real life EWT

Question 54

Evaluation Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information
real world applications

Answer 54

• Criminal justice system relies of EWT and identification in prosecuting crimes
• psychological research has been used to warn teh justice system of problems with EWT
• DNA exoneration cases confirm this showing that eyewitness identification was the largest single factor contributing to the conviction of innocent people

Question 55

Evaluation Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information
individual differences

Answer 55

• Age differences could be consequence of source monitoring
• eyewitness acquires information from two sources from observing the event itself and from subsequent suggestions
• number of studies have found that compared to younger subjects elderly people have difficulty remembering the source and become prone to the misleading information

Question 56

Evaluation Accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Misleading information
It may be response bias

Answer 56

• Bekerian and Bowers suggested it might be a response bias after all and they compared participant performance in two conditions
• in one condition participants were given a set of questions which matched with data that was consistent or inconsistent, they were later asked the same questions but in a different order
• participants were less accurate when the data was inconsistent
• in condition 2 participants were given the same task but this time the set of questions were presented in the same order and there was now a difference between having been giving consistent or inconsistent data this suggests that the order of questions had a significant effect and therefore memory change was due to response bias not storage