Nature of Memory AO3

Question 1

What are the limitations of Jacob’s theory on capacity?

Answer 1

There are individual differences. After further research Jacobs found that recall increases with age (8 year old could recall 6.6 digit and 19 year olds could remember 8.6)

Question 2

What are the limitations of Miller’s theory on capacity?

Answer 2

He may have over estimated the capacity of STM. This is shown by Cowan who suggest that the capacity was only 4 chunks.

Question 3

what is the strength of Jacobs’ and Miller’s experiment

Answer 3

they had standardised procedure as all the participants received the same instructions, material and experiences during the experiment

Question 4

What is a limitation of Peterson and Peterson’s study of the duration of memory?

Answer 4

The stimuli in the experiment was artificial which means that the results may not reflect real life memory activities where we are trying to remember something more meaningful

Question 5

what is a strength of Bahrick et al’s experiment?

Answer 5

It has a high external validity as it uses meaningful experiences which would increase recall to a more realistic level (according to Shepard)

Question 6

what is the weakness of Bahrick et al’s experiment?

Answer 6

because real life experiences were used, confounding variables are not controlled. For example some participants may have looked at their year book more recently than others (rehearsal)

Question 7

What is a strength of Baddely’s theory?

encoding

Answer 7

he clearly identifies memory stores, which is supported by later research (the multistore model)

Question 8

What are the weaknesses of Baddely’s theory

encoding

Answer 8

LTM might not be exclusively sematic:
* Frost showed that LTM was related tpo visual and sematic caragories
* Nelson and Rothbart found acoustic coding in LTM

Artificial stimuli was also used in the experiment so it may not be applicable to real life memory tasks