Paper 1: 2. Memory (COMPLETE)

Question 1

What three components are in the multi store model?

Answer 1

Sensory Register
Short Term Memory Store (STM)
Long Term Memory Store (LTM)

Question 2

What is the coding, capacity AND duration of the SENSORY REGISTER? (3 marks)

Answer 2

Coding: Through the five senses

Capacity: High (eg an eye has 100,000,000 data storage cells)

Duration: Half a second

Question 3

What is the coding, capacity and duration of the STM?

Answer 3

Coding: Encodes information acoustically.

Capacity: Limited capacity of 5-9 items (1 mark) because new information displaces / pushes out the original information (1 mark)

Duration: Limited duration of 30 seconds.

Question 4

What is the coding, capacity and duration of the LTM? (4 marks, hint duration)

Answer 4

Coding: Semantically

Capacity: Unlimited capacity

Duration: Indefinite duration but the LTM cannot always be accessed as there’s no appropriate cues.

Question 5

How does information reach the LTM?

Answer 5

Information from the STM is rehearsed over and over again and is transferred to the LTM.

Question 6

Define maintenance rehearsal.

Answer 6

When material is rehearsed over and over again for a long period of time in order for information to be passed from the STM to the LTM.

Question 7

Define retrieval.

Answer 7

When information from our LTM is transferred back to our STM for instant use. You cannot recall information directly from the LTM.

Question 8

Define capacity

Answer 8

How much information the STM or LTM can hold at any given time.

Question 9

State JACOB’S study for the CAPACITY of STM? (method and findings)

Answer 9

METHOD - Jacob came up with the digit span technique.

• The researcher states a 4 digit number aloud.
• The participant must repeat the digits in the correct order.
• A new number is added each row until the participant messed up the order.

4736
47362
473625
4736251 etc…

FINDINGS - Jacob found most people can recall between 5-9 items correctly in their STM.

Question 10

What are the two studies of the CAPACITY of the STM?

Answer 10

Jacob’s Digit Span Study

Miller’s Chunking Study

Question 11

State MILLER’S study for the CAPACITY of STM? (JUST findings)

Answer 11

FINDINGS - Miller found that you can increase the number of digits recalled by grouping digits or letters. This is known as chunking.

An example is it’s easier to recall 271 893 482 than recalling 271893482 as the chunked set only takes up 3 spaces in the digit span.

Question 12

What is the study into the CAPACITY for the LTM?

Answer 12

TRICK QUESTION - The capacity of the LTM is unlimited so there’s NO STUDY

Question 13

1❌- Evaluate capacity research.

Answer 13

❌Confounding variables - Jacob carried out his digit span study in 1887. Researchers back then didn’t have much control and knowledge of confounding variables. This means that some of Jacob’s participants may have been distracted when taking part in this study which could have affected the results.

Question 14

Evaluate the MSM (1✅ 3❌)

Answer 14

✅Supporting research
The Multi-store model is supported by research studies that show STM and LTM are different stores.
Beardsley found that the prefrontal cortex is active during STM tasks; and Squire found that the hippocampus was active during LTM tasks.
This supports the MSM’s view that these two stores are separate and independent. Further support is given by all the studies of coding; capacity and duration.

❌There is more than one type of LTM
There is a lot of research evidence that LTM is also not a unitary system.
For example we have one long term store for our memories of facts about the world (semantic) and we have a different one for memories of how to ride a bicycle (procedural).
This is something that the MSM cannot account for.

❌Artificial materials
In everyday life, we form memories related to all sorts of useful things, people’s faces, their names, facts, places and so on.
But a lot of the research studies that provide support for the MSM used none of these materials instead; they used digits, letters, consonant syllables (nonsense trigrams).
This is because trigrams, digits and letters are not the type of information we use in normal life. These studies do not GENERALISE to how we use our memory each day. They LACK ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY

❌More than one STM -
The MSM states that STM is a unitary store which means that there is only one type of STM.
However Shallice studied a patient known as KF. This patient had been in a motorcycle accident and damaged his STM.
They found that KF had poor recall of digits when it when it was read out loud to him. But he had a better recall of digits when he was able to read the digits to himself (i.e. he was shown the list of digits).
This suggests that there must be more to STM than one part e.g. one part for visual material and one for auditory information.

Question 15

State BADDLEY’S study for the CODING of STM? (method and findings)

Answer 15

METHOD: Baddeley gave different lists of words to four different groups. Their tasks was to remember the words.

Group 1 - Given ACOUSTICALLY SIMILAR words (ie cat, can, cab)

Group 2 - Given ACOUSTICALLY DISSIMILAR words (ie pit, cow, mid)

Group 3 - Given SEMANTICALLY SIMILAR words (ie small, tiny, petite)

Group 4 - Given semantically dissimilar words (ie good, fridge, dream)

Participants were shown the original words and asked to recall the words in the correct order.

RESULTS: GROUP 1 & GROUP 3 struggled as the information was SIMILAR!

Question 16

Additionally, what does Baddley’s study say about how the STM encodes and the LTM encodes from the research in his study?

Answer 16

STM - When the participants had to recall words immediately after hearing them, they tended to do better with acoustically similar words. This suggests that participants were encoding the word according to sound in their STM.

LTM - When participants were asked to recall the words after a 20 minute interval, they did worse with words that were semantically similar. This suggests that we code information according to meaning in our LTM

Question 17

Evaluate coding research (1❌)

Answer 17

❌Artificial stimuli - A limitation of Baddley’s study was that it used artifical stimuli. The word list had no personal meaning to participants, which is why we should be careful about generalising the finding to different kinds of memory tasks.

An example is when processing more meaningful information, people may use semantic coding even for STM tasks. This suggests that the finding from this study has limited application

Question 18

Who carried out research for coding?

Answer 18

Baddeley

Question 19

Define duration

Answer 19

Duration refers to how long a memory can be held for, before it is forgotten

Question 20

Peterson and Peterson’s duration study of the STM

Answer 20

Method:
Tested 24 undergraduate students, they took part in 8 trials (a trial is one test).
On each trial the participants were given a nonsense trigram (e.g. VTG) to remember.
Participants were also given a 3-digit number and were asked to count backwards from this number until they were told to stop.
This counting was done to prevent mental rehearsal because if they rehearsed the nonsense trigram it would go to LTM and we would no longer be testing the duration of STM.
The interval task (counting backwards) varied in duration; initially participants were expected to count backwards for 3 seconds, then 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18.
After the interval task participants were expected to restate the nonsense trigram they were given.

Findings:
Peterson found that recall of the trigrams decreased in accuracy as the length of interval time increased. STM duration lasted approximately 30 sec.

Question 21

Evaluate Peterson & Peterson’s STM study on duration 1✅2❌

Answer 21

❌Meaningless stimuli
Trying to remember trigrams does not reflect real life memory activities where what we are trying to remember is meaningful. Therefore, this study lacks ecological validity.

✅Reliable
A strength was that it was highly controlled and took place in a laboratory setting. This reduced the chance of extraneous variables, making it easy to replicate for reliability.

❌Demand characteristics
As the participants were psychology students, they may already know the aim of the study and use please u / screw u effects in the experiment. This means we cannot generalise the experiment to non psychology students.

Question 22

Bahrick’s duration study of the LTM

Answer 22

Method
Bahrick studied 392 participants aged between 17 and 74. High school yearbooks were obtained from the participants or directly from the schools. Recall was tested in various ways.

Photo-recognition test - consisting of 50 photos of participants’ old highschool friends.
Free-recall test - where participants had to recall student names from their memory.

Findings
Photo recognition
It was found that participant recall via the photo recognition was 90% accurate after 15 years.
This declined to 70% accurate after 48 years.

Free recall
For free recall after 15 years 60% were accurate in recall, by 48 years this had decreased to 30% accuracy. This shows that LTM can last a long time.

Question 23

Evaluate duration research 1✅2❌

Answer 23

❌Lacks population validity
It was all American uni students, so it cannot be applied to anyone in other cultures.

✅High levels of ecological validity -
As the study used real life memories, participants recalled real life information by matching pictures of classmates with their names. reflects our memory for real life events and can be applied to everyday human memory.

❌Unclear
The study is unable to explain whether the LTM becomes less accurate overtime because of a limited duration, or whether LTM gets worse with age.
Psychologists are unable to determine whether our LTM has an unlimited duration which is affected by other factors (such as memory loss over age) or our LTM is just limited.

Question 24

What four components are in the working memory model? What model is it?

Answer 24

• Central executive
• Phonological Loop
• Visuo spatial sketchpad
• Episodic buffer

IT IS AN STM MODEL

Question 25

What’s the function of the central executive?

Answer 25

The function of the central executive is to direct attention to particular tasks, it determines which of the 3 slave systems is most appropriate to allocate for a set task.
It deals with demanding tasks e.g. Problem solving.
It also has a limited capacity and it has no capacity for storing data.
Limited duration.

Question 26

What’s the function of the phonological loop?

Answer 26

The Phonological Loop deals with auditory information and preserves the order of information.

There are 2 sub-sections to the phonological loop:
The Phonological Store which holds the words you hear, like an inner ear.
An Articulatory process which is used for words that are heard/seen. These words are silently repeated (looped), like an inner voice. This is a form of maintenance rehearsal.

Question 27

What’s the function of the visuo-spatial sketchpad?

Answer 27

The Visuo-spatial sketchpad is used when you have to plan a spatial task(e.g. getting from one room to another, or counting the number of windows in your house).

The VSSP is referred to as the inner eye.
It gives visual info e.g. what things look like and spatial information which considers the physical relationship between things.

Logie suggested that the visuo-spatial sketchpad can be divided into:

• A visual cache which stores information about visual items, e.g. form and colour.
• An inner scribe, which records the arrangement of objects in the visual field.

Question 28

What’s the function of the episodic buffer?

Answer 28

This is a temporary store for information; it integrates material from the other sub-systems (visual, spatial and verbal information) into a single memory.

It also maintains a sense of time sequencing (records events as they happen).

The episodic buffer also acts as a storage component for the central executive as that has no capacity to store.

Finally the episodic buffer also links working memory to the LTM. (the closest link to the ltm)

Question 29

Evaluation of the Working Memory Model ✅❌

Answer 29

✅Dual task performance
Baddeley found that participants performed better when they were given a visual (follow a spot of light with a pointer) and a verbal task (recite a string of digits) simultaneously.

In comparison to completing two visual tasks simultaneously (pointer task as well as answering question about the angles of letters e.g. ‘does the Capital letter A have a right angle?’).
This is because completing a visual and verbal task makes use of different parts of the STM (visuo-spatial sketchpad and phonological loop).

Whereas completing two visual tasks makes use of only one part of the STM the visuo-spatial sketchpad which has a limited capacity.

This supports the idea that STM has more than one component.

✅Clinical support
Support for the WMM comes from the case of KF. This patient had suffered brain damage due to a motorcycle accident. The accident had damaged his STM and he had difficulty recalling verbal information but he could process visual information normally.
This suggests that his Phonological loop had been damaged but the other sections remained intact e.g. visuo-spatial sketchpad.
This supports the existence of a separate visual and acoustic store.
❌However, evidence from brain-damaged patients may not be reliable because it concerns unique cases with patients who have had traumatic experiences which may in itself change a person’s behaviour.

❌Lack of clarity over the central executive
The component of the WMM is unsatisfsctory and doesn’t really explain much.
baddley said the central executive is the moost important but least understood component needs to be more clearly speicified than just being attention. some psychologsts believe it has several components. this means the wmm hasnt been uflly explained

✅brain scanning support wmm
Braver gave their participants tasks that involved the central executive whilst having a brain scan. The researchers found greater activity in an area known as the prefrontal cortex. What was espcially interesting was the activtiy in this area increased as the task became harder. This makes a lot of sense in terms of the wmm, as demands on the central executive increase, it has to work harder to fulfil its functions.

Question 30

What are the two factors that affect the accuracy of eyewitnesses testimony?

Answer 30

Leading questions

Anxiety

Question 31

Loftus’ 1st study on leading questions

Answer 31

Procedure:
Loftus arranged for 45 students to watch 7 film clips of car accidents. After each clip participants were given a questionnaire which asked them a series of questions about the accident.
There was one critical question (a leading question) participants were asked, ‘About how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?’
This is a leading question because the verb (action word) ‘hit’ suggests the speed the car was going.
The other 4 groups were given the verbs smashed, bumped, collided, or contacted in place of the word hit.

Findings:
The mean estimated speed was calculated for each participant group.
The mean estimate for the verb for smashed was 40.5mph.
Whereas the verb ‘contacted’ resulted in a mean estimated speed of 31.8 mph.

Question 32

Study 2: Loftus Leading questions can alter ones memory of an event

Answer 32

Procedure: To test this Loftus had 3 groups of participants and they were also shown a film of a car accident and asked them about the speed of the car.
The participants were then asked to return one week later when they were asked a series of 10 questions about the accident, including another critical question. ‘Did you see any broken glass?’
There was no broken glass in the film.

Loftus found that those in the smashed condition were more likely to say they had seen broken glass which suggests that the leading question did change the actual memory of the event.

Question 33

Gabbert’s study on post event discussions

Answer 33

When co witnesses discuss crimes tgether, their eyewitness tesitmonies may become contaminated. This is because they combine information from other witnesses with their own memories.

PROCEDURE
Gabbert studied participants in peers. Each participant watched a video of the same crime, but filmed from different points of view. This meant that each participant could see elements in the event that the other couldn’t. For example, one participant could see the title of the book being carried by a woman.
Both participants then discussed what they had seen before individually completing a test of recall.

FINDINGS
The researchers found that 71% of the participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event that they did not see in the video but had picked up in the discussion. The corressponding figure in a control group, where there was no discussion was 0%.
Gabbert concluded that witnesses often go along with each other, either to win social approval or because they believe the other witnesses are right and they are wrong. They called this phenonmenon memory conformity.

Question 34

Evaluation for Gabbert’s study on post event discussions

Answer 34

✅Supporting evidence
Braun asked college students (who had been to Disneyland when they were aged 10) to evaluate advertising material about Disneyland.

Embedded in this material was misleading information about either bugs bunny or Ariel (neither character could have been seen at Disneyland because bugs bunny is part of Warner brothers and Ariel was not produced at the time they were at Disneyland) or a control group.
Participants in the Bugs bunny or Ariel group were more likely to report that they shook hands with these characters than the control group.

This shows that misleading information can create an inaccurate (false) memory.

❌Artifical tasks
A real limitation of Loftus and Palmers study is that their participants watched film clips of car accidents.
This is a very different experience from witnessing a real accident, mainly because such clips lack the stress of a real accident. Thus such studies are artificial and there is some evidence that emotions can have an influence on memory.

For instance Cutshall interviewed 13 people who had witnessed an armed robbery in Canada. He interviewed them four months after the crime and including 2 misleading questions.

Despite these Q’s the witnesses provided accurate recall that matched their initial reports. This suggests that misleading information may have less influence on real-life EWT.

✅Useful real-life applications
A great strength of all research into misleading information is that it has hugely important practical uses in the real world, where the consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious indeed.

For example Loftus believes that leading questions can have a distorting effect on memory and that police officers need to be very careful about how they phrase their questions when interviewing eyewitnesses.

Research into EWT is an area in which psychologists believe they can make an important difference to the lives of real people, for instance by improving the way the legal system works.

❌Demand characteristics
Zaragosa argued that many answers participants give in lab studies of EWT are the result of demand characteristics.
Participants usually do not want to let the researcher down, and want to appear helpful and attentive. So when they are asked a question they don’t know the answer to, they guess.

For instance imagine if a participant was shown a clip of a car accident and then asked ‘Did you see the blue car?’ They might be inclined to say ‘yes’ because they think that seems like a helpful answer.

This will have a negative effect on the results and the validity of the findings.

❌Consequences of ewt
There is also another key difference between lab based research studies in leading questions and real life cases.
In real life an eyewitnesses recall may lead to someone being sentenced to prison which is not true of studies like Loftus’.

Question 35

What is anxiety and how does it affect ewt?

Answer 35

Anxiety is a state of emotional and physical arousal – (emotions such as being worried)
(physiological changes such as an increased heart rate)

Research is inconclusive – some suggests that anxiety can aid recall whereas others suggest that it can impair recall.

Question 36

Why does anxiety has a negative effect on recall? state the study by SCOTT

Answer 36

Scott asked participants to sit in a waiting room.
While seated in the waiting room participants heard an argument in the next room (these were staged arguments).
In the ‘low anxiety’ condition a man then walked out of the room and through the waiting area, carrying a pen with grease on his hands.
In the ‘high anxiety’ condition participants overheard the same argument, but this time accompanied by the sound of breaking glass. A man then walked out of the room, holding a knife that was covered in blood.
Participants were then shown 50 photos and asked if they could identify the man that walked out of the room.

Findings:
49% of the participants who had seen the man carrying the pen were able to identify him.
Only 33% of participants could identify the man who carried a knife.
This is known as the weapons effect which suggests that the weapon in a criminals hand distracts attention from other features (e.g. their face) and therefore reduces the accuracy of identification.
Research which monitored eyewitness’s eye movements supports this effect.

Question 37

Why does anxiety has a negative effect on recall? State the study by CHRISTIANSON.

Answer 37

Christianson questioned 58 real witnesses to bank robberies in Sweden. T
he witnesses were either victims (bank employee) who were face to face with the robber (High anxiety) or bystanders (employees that were far or customers and experienced Low anxiety).
The interviews were carried out 4-15 months after the robberies.

Finding: The researchers found that all witnesses showed generally good memories for details of the robbery itself (better than 75% accurate recall). However those who were most anxious had the best recall of all. This suggests that anxiety aids recall.

Question 38

RESOLVING THE CONTRADICTION IDEA BY DEFFENBACHER (ANXIETY)

Answer 38

Deffenbacher suggested the Yerkes-Dodson effect .
This suggests that when anxiety levels are at a moderate level then an eyewitnesses recall will be enhanced.
However when anxiety levels are too low or too extreme then accuracy will be reduced (known as the inverted-U shape).

Question 39

EVALUATION on Scott & Christianson’s anxiety studies

Answer 39

❌Extraneous variables
Researchers usually interview real-life eyewitnesses sometime after the actual event (e.g. Christianson).
All sorts of things could have happened to the participants during that time period that the researchers have no control over – e.g. discussions with other people about the event, accounts they may have read or seen in the media, the effects of being interviewed by the police (post event information).

This is a limitation of such research because it is possible that these extraneous variables may be responsible for the accuracy/inaccuracy of recall.

❌ Ethical issues
Creating anxiety in participants is potentially unethical as it could cause them psychological harm purely for the purpose of research. This is why real-life studies are beneficial as witnesses can be interviewed for a crime they have already seen.

❌Individual differences
One key extraneous variable in many studies of anxiety is emotional sensitivity.
Bothwell assessed participants for neuroticism (a personality characteristic where individuals tend to become anxious quite quickly).
Participants were tested and labelled as ‘neurotic’ or ‘stable’ (less emotionally sensitive).
In this study it was found that the ‘stable’ participants showed rising levels of accuracy as stress levels increased whereas the opposite was true of ‘neurotics’.
This shows that effects of anxiety depend on the individual.

An alternative model to the Yerkes-Dodson model
Fazey proposed the catastrophe theory
This suggests that a decline in recall of an event is not only due to a rise in physiological arousal – But in addition it could also be due to mental anxiety (e.g. worrying about the event).

Question 40

What are 3 issues with standard police interviews?

Answer 40

Fisher identified the following issues with police interviewing techniques:

• Witness are often asked closed questions
• Witnesses are often bombarded with questions
• The interviewer tends to interrupt witnesses when they are recalling information

Question 41

What is the cognitive interview? List the 4 key principles.

Answer 41

Cognitive interview (proposed by Geiselman) applies psychological research to help improve police interviewing techniques.
The cognitive interview aims to help eyewitnesses retrieve more accurate memories and consists of 4 key principles.
1. report everything
2. mental reinstatemnt of orignal context
3. reverse the orfer
4. changed persepective

Question 42

Discuss (1. Report everything) in the cognitive interview. Provide an example of a question the interviewer may provide.

Answer 42

Witnesses are encouraged to report every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant. Trivial details may be important and they may trigger other important memories.

For example the interviewer may say:
‘Some people hold back information because they are not quite sure if it is important, but please do not leave anything out even if you think it is insignificant. I am interested in everything that you remember’.

Question 43

Discuss (2. Mental reinstatement of the original context) in the cognitive interview. Provide an example of a question the interviewer may provide.

Answer 43

This principle encourages the witness to mentally recreate both the physical (e.g. the weather, where they were) and psychological environment (e.g. how they felt) of the original incident.
This aims to make the memory accessible by providing appropriate contextual and emotional cues (based on the context dependent retrieval theory).

The interviewer may ask:
I would like you to think back to the day the event happened, what had you been doing, what was the weather like, try and get that picture in your mind. Think about the objects and colours around you. How did you feel at the time?’

Question 44

Discuss (3. Reverse the order) in the cognitive interview. Provide an example of a question the interviewer may provide.

Answer 44

Events should be recalled in a different chronological order to the original sequence, for example from the final point back to the beginning, or from the middle to the beginning.
This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened rather than the actual events.
It also prevents dishonesty (this is because it is harder for people to produce an untruthful account if they have to reverse it).

The interviewer may say:
‘I would like you to tell me what happened backwards. To start what is the last thing you remember… just before that what happened?’

Question 45

Discuss (4. Changed persepctive) in the cognitive interview. Provide an example of a question the interviewer may provide.

Answer 45

Witnesses should recall the incident from other peoples perspective.
This is done to disrupt the possible negative effects our expectations and schemas (mental concepts we use to help us interpret information) may have on our recall.

For example the interviewer may say:
‘Try to recall the incident from the perspective of another person, for example by imagining how it would have appeared to other witnesses present at the time, just focus on that person what would he/she have seen?’

Question 46

Evaluation of the cognitive interview ✅❌

Answer 46

✅Supporting evidence - Geiselman’s study
He found that participants recalled more information about a video of a simulated (fake) crime when the cognitive interview was used; in comparison to recall from the standard interview and hypnosis.
This suggest that the cognitive interview is the most effective method.

✅❌Supporting evidence - Kohnken
Kohnken Carried out a meta-analysis of 53 studies and found that there was an increase of 34% in the amount of correct information generated in the cognitive interview compared with standard interviewing techniques.
However most of these studies involved volunteer witnesses (usually college students) tested in a lab (such studies may not reflect real-life practises).

❌Time consuming
Police may be reluctant to use the cognitive interview because it takes much more time than the standard police interview.
For example, more time is needed to establish a rapport with the witness. The cognitive interview requires special training and many forces are unable to provide more than a few hours to question a witness.

❌Inaccurate
Kohnken found that although the cognitive interview increases the amount of correct information, it also led to a lot of incorrect information being recalled (61% incorrect information).

This means that police need to treat all information collected from the cognitive interview with caution as it does not guarantee accuracy.

❌
One of the problems with evaluating the effectiveness of the cognitive interview when it is used in the real world is that different establishments use the cog. Interview in different ways.

For example, Thames Valley Police use a version of the cognitive interview which does not include ‘change perspective’. Other police forces that claim to use the standard interview have tended to only use the mental reinstatement and report everything principles.

✅SOME ELEMENTS MAY BE MIRE VALUABLE THAN OTHERS
Bull found that each principle was valuable and each principle used by itself produced more information that than standard interview.
However, Bull found that using a combination of report everything and context reinstatement produced better recall than any of the other principles.
This shows that some aspects of the cognitive interview are more useful than others.
This is useful information because if police are limited in time, just using those two principles could help improve a police interview of an eyewitness.

❌Individual differences
Research suggests that the cognitive interview may be more useful for older witnesses as it stresses the importance of reporting any detail even if it seems insignificant to a person who may be questioning their recall (due to age).

Fisher compared older (mean age 72) and younger (mean age 22) adults’ memory of a filmed simulated crime using either a cognitive interview or a standard interview.

The results showed that the cognitive interview produced more information than the standard interview but this effect was more significant in the older group of participants.