Types of long-term memory & WMM Flashcards
What are the 3 types of long term memory?
Procedural memory
Episodic memory
Semantic memory
What is episodic memory?
Long term memory store for personal events
Includes memories of when events occured and of the people, objects & places involved
Have to make a conscious effort to recall episodic memories (try & remember what happened e.g. when you went to the dentist)
What is your semantic memory?
Long term memory store for our knowlege of the world & how to do things
e.g. what is the capital of france?
Includes facts & our knowlege of what words & concepts mean
less vunerable to distortion & forgetting than episodic memory (according to tulving)
What is your procedural memory?
Long term memory store for our knowlege on how to do things
e.g how to ride a bike
ability to do these th8ings becomes automatic with practice
What is one strength of the memory stores?
Evidence from case studies: Henry Molasion & Clive wearing
- Episodic memory was severley imparid for both men but semantic and procedural memories seemed to be intact
- Evidence supports Tulvings view that there are different memory stores in LTM- one can be damaged but other stores unaffected
What is one limitation of the LTM stores?
OL: There is conflicting neuroimaging evidence & research on where the stores are located
- Buckner & Petersen found that semantic memory is found on the left of the prefrontal cortex, whereas the episodic is on the right.
- Other studies have found the memory stores the other way around.
This does not help us as there is contrasting evidence
Challanges any neurophysiological evidence to supoort types of memory due to poor agreement to where which type is located
Give another strength of the memory stores
Allows psychologists to help people with memory problems e.g.
* Belvleville devised an intervention to improve episoidc memory in older poeple
* The trained ppts performed better on a episodic memory test than a control group
Shows that distinguishing between types of LTM enables specific treatments to be developed
Give some supporting research examples for the 3 memory stores.
Hodges and Patterson (2007)
Some Alzheimer’s patients were able to form new episodic memories but not semantic memories
Irish et al (2011)
Some Alzheimer’s patients had intact episodic memories but poor semantic memories
These findings suggest that these are two separate types of memories in LTM
What is the working memory model?
A representation of short term memory
Suggests that STM is a dynamic processor of different types of info using sub units co-ordinated by a central decision making system
What stores make up the WMM?
- Central executive
- Phonological loop
- Visuo-spatial sketchpad
- Episodic buffer
What is the role of the central executive?
Has a ‘supervisory’ role
Monitors incoming data, focuses & divides out limited attention & allocates subsystems to tasks
CE has very limited processing capacity & does not store info
What is the role of the phonological loop?
Deals with auditory information (i.e coding is acoustic)
Preserves order in which info arrives
What is the phonological loop sub-divided into and what do these do?
- Phonological store- which stores the words you hear
- Articulatory process- allows maintenance rehearsal
(repeating sounds/words in a ‘loop’ to keep them in WM while they are needed) - Capacity of this ‘loop’ is around 2 secs
What is the role of the visio-spatial sketchpad?
- Stores visual & or spatial info when required
- Limited capacity (around 3/4 objects)
e.g. if you are asked to work out how many windows are in your house you visualise it
What is the visio-spatial sketchpad subdivided into?
- The visual cache- Stores visual data
- The inner scribe- records the arrangement of objects in the visual field
What is the role of the episodic buffer?
- Component from WMM that brings together material from the other subsystems into a single memory rather than seperate strands
- Aslo provides a brige between working memory & LTM
What was the study conducted by Shallice & Warrington (1970)?
(Supporting evidence)
Conducted a case study and reported that brain-damaged patient KF could recall verbal but not visual information immediately after its presentation
This supports the WMM’s existence of separate visual & acoustic memory stores
This suggests that the MSM lacks validity
What was the dual task experiment conducted by Baddeley?
(supporting evidence)
Ppts given a visual tracing task (Task A) (they had to track a moving light with a pointer) – this used the VSSPad
At the same time they were given one of two other tasks:
Task 1 was to describe all the angles on the letter F,
Task 2 was to perform a verbal task
They found it hard to do the tracing task A alongside Task 1 but not Task 2
Task 1 was using the VSSP
Task 2 was using the PL
Suggests that components of WMM have limited capacity – people using VSSP for two tasks found it harder because tasks were competing for capacity
How does Baddeley’s study support the WMM?
It supports the idea of multiple components in STM, each with limited capacity.
What were Baddeley’s findings from this procedure?
Ppts found it hard to do the tracing task A alongside Task 1 but not Task 2
* Task 1 was using the VSSP
* Task 2 was using the PL
Suggests that components of WMM have limited capacity – people using VSSP for two tasks found it harder because tasks were competing for capacity
Give one strength of the WMM.
Studies of dual-task performance support the separate existence of the visuo-spatial sketchpad
Baddeley found that when both ppts tasks were visual or (both verbal) performance declined substantially as both visual tasks compete for the same subsystem
This shows there must be a seperate subsystem (the VSS) that processes visual input (& one for verbal processing the PL)
What is a limitation of the working memory model?
There is a lack of clarity over the nature of the central executive.
* The central executive is the most important but the least understood component
- The CE needs to be more clearly specified than just being simply ‘attention’
- This means that the CE in an unsatisfactory component & this challanges the integrity of the WMM
