Memory Studies

Question 0

SCOVILLE AND MILNER (1957)

METHOD: ?

Answer 0

This was a case study, not an experiment. Patient ‘HM’, a severe epileptic, had portions of his hippocampus removed in 1953 in an attempt to control his frequent and unusually violent seizures. (The hippocampus helps regulate emotion and memory). Scoville and Milner kept track of changes in his mental performance.

Question 1

SCOVILLE AND MILNER (1957)

AIM: ?

Answer 1

To study the effect of brain damage on mental performance

Question 2

SCOVILLE AND MILNER (1957)

RESULTS: ?

Answer 2

Much of HM’s memory for the previous 10 years vanished. He also lost the ability to store new information. His short-term memory was not affected

Question 3

SCOVILLE AND MILNER (1957)

CONCLUSION: ?

Answer 3

There appears to be a physical location for LTM, or at least LTM-transfer, that is not the same as that of STM.

Question 4

SCOVILLE AND MILNER (1957)

EVALUATION: ?

Answer 4

His memory deficit may have been caused by the general trauma of the operation, or perhaps even by his epilepsy.

Question 5

PETERSON AND PETERSON (1959)

AIM: ?

Answer 5

To study duration in STM when rehersal is prevented.

Question 6

PETERSON AND PETERSON (1959)

METHOD: ?

Answer 6

24 students heard 3-letter nonsense words, or ‘trigrams’, and were asked to repeat them after counting backward from random 3-digit numbers for varying lengths of time. THese lengths of time, termed the ‘retention interval’, ran for 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18 seconds.

Question 7

PETERSON AND PETERSON (1959)

RESULTS: ?

Answer 7

Recall was near 90% at 3 seconds, dropped steeply to around 20% at 9 seconds, and then gradually moved to 2% by 18 seconds.

Question 8

PETERSON AND PETERSON (1959)

CONCLUSION: ?

Answer 8

Without rehersal, most information leaves STM in 9 seconds, and the rest is gone by around 20 seconds.

Question 9

PETERSON AND PETERSON (1959)

EVALUATION: ?

Answer 9

Nonsense trigrams and backward-counting are not real-life tasks. (Studies that are not true-life are said not to be ‘ecologically valid’.) Nor are 24 students a fair cross-section of the population of human beings.

Question 10

WAUGH AND NORMAN (1965)

AIM: ?

Answer 10

To investigate decay vs displacement

Question 11

WAUGH AND NORMAN (1965)

METHOD: ?

Answer 11

Four students were asked to remember particular digits buried at various points in 90 strings of numbers that were read to them at varying speeds. (This is called the ‘serial probe’ technique.) If we lose our short-term memories because of displacement, the speed at which the numbers come should not matter; if the decay theory is correct, slower lists should yield comparitively poor recall.

Question 12

WAUGH AND NORMAN (1965)

RESULTS: ?

Answer 12

The probe numbers were remembered correctly 80% of the time if they came later in the string, and only 20% of the time if they came early. Displacement and decay could both account for this. The rate of presentation mattered little in early numbers, but it did begin to matter in the late numbers. The later the probe, notice, the more interfering items there were.

Question 13

WAUGH AND NORMAN (1965)

CONCLUSION: ?

Answer 13

Most forgetting in STM is a matter of displacement; a small amount is from decay.

Question 14

WAUGH AND NORMAN (1965)

EVALUATION: ?

Answer 14

This is a laboratory setting, where results may not be apllicable to the way we function in the wider world. Other research, though, noticeably Shallice (1967), does seem to support these results.

Question 15

BADDELEY (1966)

AIM: ?

Answer 15

To investigate encoding in STM and LTM.

Question 16

BADDELEY (1966)

METHOD: ?

Answer 16

Participants were presented with one of four word lists. Two of the lists were experimental ones; one was acoustically similar (meet/feet/sweet) and the other list was semantically similar (neat/tidy/clean). The other two lists acted as control lists and were acoustically and semantically dissimilar.

Question 17

BADDELEY (1966)

RESULTS: ?

Answer 17

Immediate recall showed that the most confusion was between the acoustically similar words compared with the words that were acoustically dissimilar. THere was no difference in recall for the semantically similar and dissimilar lists.

In the test delayed recall, the most confusion was between semantically dissimilar. There was no difference in recall for the acoustically similar and dissimilar lists.

Overall, in the STM the words that sounded similar were remembered least well. In the LTM the words that were remembered least well were the ones with similar meanings.

Question 18

BADDELEY (1966)

CONCLUSION: ?

Answer 18

STM encodes information on how it sounds (acoustically), whereas the LTM encodes information based upon its meaning (semantically)

Question 19

BADDELEY (1966)

EVALUATION: ?

Answer 19

In real life people rarely lean word lists, so the experiment’s results cannot be generalised to real-life situations.

Question 20

BADDELEY AND HITCH (1974)

AIM: ?

Answer 20

To determine whether STM functions as a working memory.

Question 21

BADDELEY AND HITCH (1974)

METHOD: ?

Answer 21

Participants were asked to perform reasoning, comprehension or learning tasks at the same time as they were holidng in STM between 0 and 8 digits for immediate recall. If STM does function as a working memory, then loading it to capacity should lead to maddive disruption of cognitive processing.

Question 22

BADDELEY AND HITCH (1974)

RESULTS: ?

Answer 22

It did indeed cause some disruption with time to perfomr a reasoning task increasing with load, but the effect was not huge, and there was no influence on error rate.

Question 23

BADDELEY AND HITCH (1974)

CONCLUSION: ?

Answer 23

STM is larger and more dynamic than the Multi-store Model suggests.

Question 24

LOFTUS AND PALMER (1974)

AIM: ?

Answer 24

To investigate the influence of the wording of questions on eyewitnesses’ estimates of speed.

Question 25

LOFTUS AND PALMER (1974)

METHOD: ?

Answer 25

Students were divided into groups, watched fimled traffic accidents then answered questions about the accidents. Different groups heard different verbs relating to the moment of collision, ranging through *contacted, hit, bumped, collided *and *smashed. *Their memories of the speed and of the presence of broken glass were recorded.

Question 26

LOFTUS AND PALMER (1974)

RESULTS: ?

Answer 26

Mean speed estimates were spread exactly as expected: 31.8 mph, 34 mph, 38.1 mph, 39.3 mph, and 40.8 mph. Those who heard the word ‘smashed’ estimated higher speeds than those who heard the word ‘contacted’ and also tended to remember broken glass (of which there had been none).

Question 27

LOFTUS AND PALMER (1974)

CONCLUSION: ?

Answer 27

The form of a question can affect a witness’s memory of a situation.

Question 28

LOFTUS AND PALMER (1974)

EVALUATION: ?

Answer 28

Participants’ memory traces may not have been altered at all. They may simply have used the vocabulary they were given as information about what happened in the accidents. This being a study, too, and not real life, participants may not have bothered to think very hard about the true speed of the cars. They may even have been trying to offer answers they sensed were desired by the investigators. Nor was the choice of participants a true cross-section of the population.

Question 29

HITCH AND BADDELEY (1976)

AIM: ?

Answer 29

To test the dual-tasking predictions of the Working Memory Model.

Question 30

HITCH AND BADDELEY (1976)

METHOD: ?

Answer 30

12 students were given a verbal reasoning task to occupy their central executives. Simultaneously, some were asked to repeat a single word continuously; others were asked to count in sequence; others were asked to hear and repeat strings of digits - all of these tasks should occupy theor phonological loops. One control group was not asked to perform any of these tasks.

Question 31

HITCH AND BADDELEY (1976)

RESULTS: ?

Answer 31

The control group could solve the verbal reasoning task in about 2.79 seconds. The repitition group needed, on average, 3.13 seconds. The counters required 3.22 seconds. The random number memorisers took 4.27 seconds.

Question 32

HITCH AND BADDELEY (1976)

CONCLUSION: ?

Answer 32

The general premise of the Working Memory Model does appear to be supported.

Question 33

HITCH AND BADDELEY (1976)

EVALUATION: ?

Answer 33

There is nothing in the Multi-store Model that can explain these findings, so the Working Memory Model is a useful complement to it. 12 students, of course, is a tiny sample of the human population. It is also hugely biased. Their memories may be better than average, if they are successful students, used to memorising things, and are generally young.