Types of long-term memory & WMM

Question 1

What are the 3 types of long term memory?

Answer 1

Procedural memory
Episodic memory
Semantic memory

Question 2

What is episodic memory?

Answer 2

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)

Question 3

What is your semantic memory?

Answer 3

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)

Question 4

What is your procedural memory?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

What is one strength of the memory stores?

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What is one limitation of the LTM stores?

Answer 6

There are conflicting research findings linking types of LTM to areas of the brain

Some researchers believe that semantic memory is located in the left side of the pre-frontal cortex & episodic memory on the right

However other research links the left prefrontal cortex with encoding of episodic memories & right prefortnal cortex with episodic retrieval

Challanges any neurophysiological evidence to supoort types of memory due to poor agreement to where which type is located

Question 7

Give another strength of the memory stores

Answer 7

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

Question 8

Give some supporting research examples for the 3 memory stores.

Answer 8

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

Question 9

What is the working memory model?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

What stores make up the WMM?

Answer 10

• Central executive
• Phonological loop
• Visuo-spatial sketchpad
• Episodic buffer

Question 11

What is the role of the central executive?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

What is the role of the phonological loop?

Answer 12

Deals with auditory information (i.e coding is acoustic)
Preserves order in which info arrives

Question 13

What is the phonological loop sub-divided into and what do these do?

Answer 13

• 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

Question 14

What is the role of the visio-spatial sketchpad?

Answer 14

• 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

Question 15

What is the visio-spatial sketchpad subdivided into?

Answer 15

• The visual cache- Stores visual data
• The inner scribe- records the arrangement of objects in the visual field

Question 16

What is the role of the episodic buffer?

Answer 16

• 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

Question 17

What was the study conducted by Shallice & Warrington (1970)?

(Supporting evidence)

Answer 17

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

Question 18

What was the dual task experiment conducted by Baddeley?

(supporting evidence)

Answer 18

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

Question 19

How does Baddeley’s study support the WMM?

Answer 19

It supports the idea of multiple components in STM, each with limited capacity.

Question 20

What were Baddeley’s findings from this procedure?

Answer 20

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

Question 21

Give one strength of the WMM.

Answer 21

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)

Question 22

What is a limitation of the working memory model?

Answer 22

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