Memory (Short and Long term memory) Flashcards
Short and Long term memory
What is the capacity of STM?
Miller’s magic number 5-9 items
What is the capacity of LTM?
The capacity is infinite
What is the duration of STM and whos the researcher?
3-18 seconds. Peterson and Peterson.
What is the duration of LTM and whos the researcher?
Potentially forever, Bahrick.
How is STM encoded and whos the researcher?
Acoustically, Baddeley.
How is LTM encoded and whos the researcher?
Semantically, Baddeley.
A03(capacity-SLT): Individual differences
Jacobs found that recall increased with age, 8 year old’s could remember 6.6 digits but 19 year old’s could remember 8.6, this age increase might be due to changes in the brain.
AO3(capacity-SLT): The size of the chunk matters
Simon found that people had sorter memory spans for larger chunks like 8 word phrases than smaller chunks like one- syllable words. This supports the view than SLT has limited capacity.
AO3(duration-STM): Testing STM was artificial
Trying to remember syllable doesn’t truly reflect everyday activities, however learning groups of numbers or letter like phone number or postcodes are fairly meaningless, so even though it is artificial it still does have some relevance to everyday life.
AO3(coding-LTM): Baddeley might not have tested LTM
For STM he asked the ppts to recall the word lists immediately. For LTM he asked them to recall them after 20 mins, this casts doubt on the validity of his research as he wasn’t testing LTM memory after all