supporting studies

Question 1

msm

Answer 1

Peterson and Peterson (1959).
- used nonsense trigrams to represent recall of memory (e.g. BNV)
- tested recall of the trigrams at 3 seconds and 18 seconds
- found that recall after 3 seconds was more than 80%, suggesting that rehearsal/STM aiding memory at 3 seconds, and information decaying or being displaced after an extended period of 18 seconds

Question 2

msm case study

Answer 2

Clive Wearing
- suffered from retrograde amnesia and could no longer form any long term memories
- this supports the existence of separate stores of stm and ltm

Question 3

wmm case study

Answer 3

KF’s case study supports
- after suffering a motorcycle accident, it was found that KF had an unimpaired STM but a damaged STM. - he had an impaired digit span of 1 (compared to seven normally) and could form stm better when they were presented visually than audially.
- this suggests that he suffered damage to his phonological loop
- therefore supports the idea that stm is not one single, unitary store, but has multiple different components which deal with visual and auditory information separately.

Question 4

semantic and episodic

Answer 4

Verfaellie, Koseff and Alexander (2000) studied a 40 year old female suffered brain damage to the hippocampus, but not the underlying cortices. It was found that she had greatly impaired episodic memory, but was able to acquire new semantic memories. For exmaple, she could recognise the faces of people that became famous after the onset of her amnesia. Therefore, this supports the idea that there are separate stores of long term memory as opposed to one unitary store, which process different forms of memory such as memory of events and memory of facts.

Question 5

reconstructive

Answer 5

Bartlett (1932)
- Bartlett conducted a longitudinal study of recall of an unfamiliar, native american folk story called ‘the war of the ghosts’.
- he tested recall of a number of occassions up to a year later and would compare recall over the period of time.
- Bartlett observed that in all ppts, the the story changed in a number of way- rationalisation occurred, where ppts changed details to make them make sense to their schemas- such as the character dying at sunset instead of sunrise, and taking a boat instead of a canoe, as this was a culturally unfamiliar term for the british participants
- this supports the idea that there are separate stores of LTM which can be distorted over time.