Types of memory Flashcards
What is the role of the SENSORY register?
To temporarily store the information from the senses. Unless attention is paid to this information it spontaneously decays because it has a limited capacity and duration. Stores visual, auditory, tactile info etc.
Sperling provided evidence for the sensory register by conducting a lab experiment. Briefly outline the procedure.
Sperling showed participants a grid of three rows of four letters for 50ms and asked them to recall the whole grid or a row.
What was found in the sensory register experiment?
Sperling found that participants were only able to recall four or five letters on average and three items when a row was indicated by a tone. This is because the whole grid was being held in the sensory register and they could not remember the whole grid due to decay.
Briefly evaluate the evidence for the sensory register.
Sperling’s lab experiment had high control and thus was reliable in its replications, however, there was low ecological validity due to this setting as people don’t have to carry out such tasks in real life.
Short term memory also has a limited capacity, however encoding is mainly acoustic. Who provided evidence of short term memory?
Peterson and Peterson carried out a lab experiment using trigrams to prove the existence of short term memory.
Briefly outline the procedure of Peterson and Peterson’s study into STM.
Peterson and Peterson showed nonsense trigrams to participants and asked them to recall them after 3,6,9 etc. seconds together with an interference task of counting backwards in threes from a given number.
What were the results of Peterson and Peterson’s investigation into STM?
After 3 seconds , 80% recalled the trigrams correctly, however after 18 seconds, only 10% did, thus concluding that when rehearsal is prevented, the STM cannot hold information for longer than 18s
Briefly evaluate Peterson and Petersons’s study into STM.
Lab experiments generally have high control and reliability, however the conditions are artificial and the results are not very meaningful in real life. The duration of the STM also may depend on the type of information received.
What is long term memory characterised by?
Unlimited capacity and theoretical permanence. Coding is usually semantic.
What are the types of long term memory? Which ones are declarative?
Declarative long term memory types are episodic (info about events) and semantic (factual info). Non-declarative type of LTM is procedural memory which is unconscious, e.g. motor skills
Where does the evidence for the declarative and procedural long term memory types come from?
Amnesia patients that have difficulty recalling episodic or semantic memories, however, have unaffected procedural memories.
