Nature of Memory AO1 Flashcards
What is the capacity of STM?
9.3 items for digits, 7.3 for letters
How did Jacobs find the capacity of STM?
he used a digit span
What did Miller suggest the capacity of STM was?
he suggested the ‘magic number’ which means that the capacity of memory might be defines as 7+-2 units
How did Miller find the capacity of STM?
he analysed several studies into memory processing
What is the capacity of LTM?
it’s seemingly limitless
What is the duration of STM?
18-30s
How did Peterson and Peterson find the duration of STM?
They asked participants to recall the trigram after 3,6,9… seconds and then asked them to count backwards in sets of 3 from a given number. After 3 seconds 80% of the trigram was recalled and after 18 seconds 3%
Why did Peterson and Peterson ask them to count backwards in 3s?
to prevent rehearsal
What is the duration of LTM?
a very long time
How did Bahrick et al find the duration of LTM?
They asked 400 participants a series of questions about people they went to school with. Their level of accuracy after 15 years in photo recognitions was 90%, after 48 years it was 70%. Free recall was 60% at 15 years and 30% at 48 years.
What is encoding?
the ways in which memory is written in our brains?
what are the ways in which memory can be encoded?
- acoustically
- visually/ through images
- semantically
How did Baddley find how LTM and STM are coded?
He gave participants a list of words that were either acoustically similar but semantically different or acoustically different but semantically similar. Through this is found that participants struggled to recall the acoustically similar words immediately after reading them and the semantically similar words after an interval. This shows that STM is mainly encoded acoustically and LTM semantically
