Cognitive Flashcards

Question

what is the capacity of the STM in MSM?

Answer 1

- Miller 1956 showed that the STM is limited to around 7 items of information - we can view that the STM as a series of between 5 and 9 slots in which information can be stored

Answer 2

- Glanzer & Cunitz 1966 found support for the MSM in their study. - Using word lists they found that the first word in the list were recalled well, as were the last words, but the middle words were not remembered well. - they said that the information learned first (primacy effect) is well remembered as it has gone into the LTM through the rehearsal loop -n the information that is learned in the end (recency effect) is well remembered as it is still in the rehearsal loop - information in the middle is not well recalled because it did not go through the rehearsal loop into the LTM as it was displaced by new material coming into the loop (therefore the information was lost-forgotten)

Answer 3

- Atkinson & Shiffrin believed that a memory trace in the STM was held in an auditory or verbal form because of the phonological similarity effect - letters and words of a similar sound presented to p's are more difficult to recall than dissimilar sounding letters and words - the similarity of sounds leads to confusion in the STM suggesting that encoding in this store is primarily acoustic (Auditory or Verbal)

Answer 4

- retrieval from the STM is based on rapid scanning of the stored information - rehearsal is important in maintaining information in the STM, increasing the strength of the memory trace and ultimately building up the memory trace in the LTM - Digit span experiments suggest we are able to maintain between 5 and 9 items using rehearsal - As more information is input into the store, other information is knocked out (displaced) and quickly decays

Answer 5

- in order to transfer information received by our sensory register to the STM, we must use our LTM to make sense of the information and assign it to a verbal label e.g we may register the image of a horse, but this cannot be stored as an auditory verbal STM until we have identified it as such using our LTM of what the object represents

Answer 6

Atkinson & Shiffrin believed that long term memories exist for all sensory modalities, - we have memories for taste, sound, smells etc

Answer 7

- encoding into the LTM can depend on the rehearsal process or some form of association between the new and pre-existing knowledge - if information is linked to pre-existing knowledge it makes a search for the information far easier - this makes sense as a random search of such a large store would be exhaustive - encoding in LTM is semantic - we encode the meaning

Answer 8

- duration of LTM is potentially lifetime - Bahrick 1975 found that identification of names and faces in participants high school yearbook was between 70%-80% accurate 48 years after leaving school

Answer 9

- the capacity of LTM is potentially infinite Brady 2008 showed participants 2500 objects over the course of 5.5 hours - later, when participants were shown the original object paired up with a very different object, identification was 92% and if different object was similar identification was 88%- demonstrating that thousands of images can be maintained successfully in the LTM

Answer 10

- there is evidence for case studies that offer physiological support for the msm - HM suffered amnesia following brain surgery for epilepsy resulting in severe impairment to his LTM but his STM was still intact

Answer 11

-MSM is too simplistic - Clive Wearing could not recall past events of his life but could recall how to play the piano - suggests that LTM is not a single store but that perhaps we have different LTM stores of procedural memory of practised skills and abilities and other long term stores for factual information and autobiographical events

Answer 12

- Glanzer & Cunitz 1966 investigated whether position of a word list in a list affected recall - found that p's recalled more words from beginning and end - in support of the msm as they are reliable , they have been repeated often, well controlled and replicable

Answer 13

WMM - Baddeley and Hitch 1974 - proposed that STM has 3 components

Answer 14

Baddeley & Hitch in 1974

Answer 15

short term memory

Answer 16

- the central executive - the phonological loop - visuo-spatial sketchpad

Answer 17

- the slave driver - it is limited, processes information from any sensory system responsibilities: - monitors information coming in from different sources - decides what to pay attention to - allocates tasks to the slave systems

Answer 18

- a slave system and holds speech based information for 2 seconds before it decays -deals with the temporary storage of verbal information - it has 2 components: - the articulatory loop - the primary acoustic store - capacity of phonological loop is determined by the length of time it takes to say the words

Answer 19

(inner voice) - where information is repeated to maintain the trace - was used to explain the word length effect, where short monosyllabic words were recalled more successfully than longer polysyllabic words - longer words filled up the limited capacity of the articulatory loop resulting in the decay of words positioned earlier in the list - the longer the word, the more capacity was used up and forgetting was more likely - capacity= 2 seconds worth of what you can say

Answer 20

(inner ear) - can explain the phonological similarity effect, where it is more difficult to remember similar sounding words and letters compared to words and letters that sound different - however, this effect is not true of remembering words that had semantic (meaning) similarity or words that were semantically unrelated - this shows that the primary acoustic store relies on acoustic encoding for storage

Answer 21

can temporarily hold and manipulate visual and spatial information e.g. shapes, colours, position of objects - vssp can deal with visuospatial information either directly through observing images or retrieving visuospatial information from long term memory -role of vssp is to maintain and integrate visual and spatial information from these different channels using a visual code - it also rehearses information and transfers it to the central executive - visual cache= stores visual data (things that you can see) - the inner scribe= records the arrangement of objects in the visual field (where they are)

Answer 22

- to find out if LTM encodes acoustically (based on sound) or semantically (based on meaning) - he thought that if participants struggle to recall the word order, it suggests that LTM is confused by the similarity which means that this is how LTM tends to encode (by meaning rather than sound)

Answer 23

acoustic= sound acoustic similarity= words that sound alike

Answer 24

semantic= meaning semantic similarity= words that have similar meaning

Answer 25

- laboratory experiment - designed to test order recall of acoustically (sound alike) and semantically (similar meaning) word lists - mix of men and women volunteers from the Applied psychology research unit subject panel, Cambridge were in each group - each group contained 20 participants - participants were assigned to one of four conditions as an independent groups design

Answer 26

iv= acoustic similarity/semantic similarity dv= score on a recall test of 10 words, words must be recalled in the correct ORDER

Answer 27

list A had 10 acoustically similar words - ,man,cab,can,cad,mad list B had 10 acoustically dissimilar words- pit,few,cow,pen,sup list c had had 10m semantically similar words- great,large,big,huge,broad list d had 10 semantically dissimilar words- good,huge,hot,safe,thin

Answer 28

- each list of 10 words was presented by a slide projector - words were presented in the correct order one at a time for 3 seconds

Answer 29

- after the presentation, participants were given an interference task - this was to try and keep the working memory busy, making sure that they are not actively rehearsing the words as they are testing LTM not STM - in the interference task, six eight - digit (numbers) sequences were read out (e.g. 64239173) at one per second - p's had 8 seconds to write down the numbers - p's were allowed one minute to write down the 10 word in the ORDER they had been presented to them - this was repeated 4 times - after these four learning trials, p's were given a 15 minute interference task which involved copying eight digit number sequences at their own pace - after the interference task, participants were given a surprise retest on the word list order

Answer 30

- recall of the acoustically similar sounding words (list A) and the acoustically dissimilar sounding words (list B) were very similar - this shows that acoustic encoding did not affect long term memory recall - however, participants found the semantically similar words (list C) was much worse than the semantically dissimilar words (list D) and recalled significantly fewer semantically similar words in the retest

Answer 31

- the results showed that in LTM learning was affected by the meaning of words - this is evidence that LTM uses semantic coding- coding by meaning - therefore, Baddeley showed that coding in LTM is different from encoding in STM STM=acoustic coding (sound) and LTM=semantic coding (meaning)

Answer 32

- it was a laboratory experiment, it used careful controls such as controlling the time each word was displayed and same amount of time for the recall test, these tight controls means the study can show cause-and-effect conclusions because of controls over extraneous variables - standardised procedure, e.g. each participant underwent four trails, the interference task and the re-test, therefore the study can be replicated to test for reliability

Answer 33

- this study reduces memory to how well the order of 10 lists is recalled when lists have certain conditions e.g the lists of words being semantically similar/dissimilar, so this is reductionist (reductionism = the study of something by breaking it down into parts). Reductionism can be a strength in that findings can be reliable and a scientific body of knowledge can be build, however it can also be a weakness if it means that findings do not represent everyday life

Answer 34

- this study took place in an artificial environment (laboratory setting), laboratory research, such as this, use experimental techniques that are not typical of the way in which we use memory in an everyday context, we do not often learn lists of words then have to recall them in the correct order. this lack of ecological validity means the ability to generalise these findings to everyday (real life) contexts is questioned

Answer 35

- this study has useful application to real life - it showed STM and LTM differences. Knowing how memory works and differences between STM and LTM is useful for e.g to students - e.g. creating mind maps is a good revision tool because students are deliberately putting the information into different semantic categories in LTM

Answer 36

- all participants were volunteers from the applied psychology research unit subject panel , Cambridge. This means that they had given their consent (but not informed consent) to take part in the experiment, and were able to withdraw from the study at any time

Answer 37

- Results were measured in a scientific, objective way. Quantitative data was collected- being the number of words recalled in the right order out of 10

Answer 38

a specific testable prediction

Answer 39

- this is a statement of what is expected, the experimental hypothesis is the alternative hypothesis (alternative to the null hypothesis)

Answer 40

- the null hypothesis states that any difference or relationship expected is DUE TO CHANCE - there is no relationship or difference as predicted - it is the NULL hypothesis that is tested when using statistical testing

Answer 41

study 1= to see whether an interference task on short term memory, such as counting backwards for 15 seconds after seeing a list of letters, affects recall of those letters EXPERMIMENTAL HYPOTHESIS= there will be a difference in recall of a list of letters, counting backwards for 15 seconds after seeing the letters will lead to poorer recall than if there were no counting backwards NULL HYPOTHESIS= there will be no difference in recall of a list of letters, counting backwards for 15 seconds after seeing the letters will not lead to poorer recall than if there was no counting backwards

Answer 42

directional (one tailed) = predicts the specific direction of a relationship between variables, stating whether one variable will be greater or lesser than another non directional (two tailed)= states that a relationship exists between variables without specifying the direction of that relationship essentially, a directional hypothesis predicts "which way" the effect will go, while a non-directional hypothesis only predicts that there will be an effect.

Answer 43

The independent variable is changed or manipulated by the researcher - this is to see the effect on the dependent variable

Answer 44

The dependent variable is measured by the researcher - it changes as a result of the manipulation of the IV

Answer 45

they do this by being OPERATIONALISED

Answer 46

defining precisely how you intend to measure the DV and alter the conditions of the IV

Answer 47

extraneous variable= a variable that may have affected the dependent variable but that was not the independent variable confounding variable= a variable that affects the findings of a study directly, so much that you are no longer measuring what you intended

Answer 48

- situational variables - participant variables

Answer 49

- an extraneous variable that might affect the results of a study could be found in the ENVIRONMENT in which the study is conducted -e.g. noise, time of day, temperature, disturbances etc may affect the results of a study so it should be controlled or eliminated - controlling extraneous variables means that they are held constant ( i.e. all the same ) for all participants so the variable affects everybody equally - eliminating extraneous variables involves removing the possibility of them occurring in the first place

Answer 50

- participants themselves may affect the results of a study as they have different characteristics, e.g. intelligence, level of motivation, age, personality, skills - it is very difficult to control for all situational and participants - it is only necessary to control for variables that might have an unwanted impact on the dependent variable e.g. controlling the temperature of a room is not vital unless you are testing something where the temperature might affect performance

Answer 51

Participant design describes how the Ps are distributed between the experiment conditions -The researcher can ask Ps to partake in all conditions of the study or only in one

Answer 52

The same participants are used in all the conditions

Answer 53

Only one of the experimental conditions is tested on a group of participants - different participants in conditions

Answer 54

Essentially the same as independent groups, but all Ps are matched on a quality or characteristic important to the study, making it also a repeated measures design - different Ps but matched

Answer 55

Order effects occur when repeated measures design is used

Answer 56

practice effect- participants may become practised at the test and so improve their performance fatigue effect- participants may become tired or bored, so their performance deteriorates

Answer 57

Counterbalancing ensures that each condition is tested first or second in equal amounts - this means that the participants need to be divided equally between the conditions and to experiment them in a different order from other groups e.g. if there are only two conditions half of the P's are tested in condition A before condition B and the other half do condition B first then condition A - this technique controls order effects as the first and second condition is not the same for every participant so they are not always fresh for condition A and tired for condition B

Answer 58

Each participant is assigned to either condition A or B first by tossing a coin or picking names from a hat

Answer 59

STRENGTHS= - good control of participant variables (using the same participants) - need fewer P's because the study is being repeated with the same participants WEAKNESSES= -order effects are produced - participants may guess the purpose of the experiment

Answer 60

STRENGTHS= - avoids order effects because each participant are only being tested once - avoids the P's guessing the aims of the experiment WEAKNESSES= - no control of participant variables - needs more P's than with a repeated measures design

Answer 61

STRENGTHS= - controls for participant variables - avoids order effects because it is like an independent groups design WEAKNESSES= - very time consuming to match P's on key variables - may not control all P's variables (everyone is unique)

Answer 62

- refers to the way an experimenter (i.e. the researcher) may influence the outcome of an experiment by their actions or presence - this means that the behaviour of an experimenter may affect the participant and thus affect the DV - for e.g. a female researcher asking a male participant about his attitudes towards gender equality ( the male is going to share a lot less, isn't going to be very truthful, and this might be because it is a women and not a man, he might start to say things he thinks she will like and say exactly what she wants to hear rather than being truthful (affecting the DV)

Answer 63

demand characteristics occur when the effect of the experimenter causes the participant to alter their behaviour to meet the expectations (whether real or imagined) of the experimenter

Answer 64

1. DOUBLE-BLIND TECHNIQUE - the Ps are aware of which group they are in and what the study is about - the study is also carried out by someone other than the person who knows who is doing what - neither of the P's nor person running the study knows precisely what is expected 2. SINGLE-BLIND TECHNIQUE - the P's are not aware of what is expected but the person carrying out the study is - this stops P's expectations from affecting the results bud does not stop experimenter effects

Answer 65

in experiments using human participants, a great many variables can influence outcomes - it is important to identify these variables and ten put into place controls to help prevent them having any effect on the experiment - various control techniques have been established to deal with these control issues : standardisation

Answer 66

- making an experiment the same experience for ALL participants - standardised instructions are a set of instructions given to all participants that can be used to eliminate experimenter effects because it removed the potential for the experimenter to give verbal or non-verbal cues to Ps - Standardised procedures (stages of the experiment, timings, apparatus etc.) ensure all participants are treated in the same way (other than change in conditions due to IV) so there is no variation in the way they experience the research that may affect they way they behave - standardisation is important as it improved the replicability of the experiment

Answer 67

- takes place in a lab or controlled setting - seen as the most scientific and objective method - iv is manipulated, other variables are kept constant + controlled so the effects can be seen on what is being measured (DV)

Answer 68

- carried out in the FIELD, a natural setting e.g a school for teachers or pupils, a hospital for Dr's, nurses or patients or a prison for prisoners and guards - apart from a natural setting, field experiments have the same features as lab experiments including manipulated IV and measured DV, controls (e.g.) standardised procedure/instructions aiming for cause and effect conclusions

Answer 69

STRENGTH= - high degree of control - easy to replicate (standardised procedure and control) WEAKNESS= - low ecological validity - likely to get demand characteristics

Answer 70

STRENGTH= - less likely to get demand characteristics - has greater ecological validity then lab WEAKNESS= - low control over variables - high chance of extraneous variables

Answer 71

1. It should be possible to GENERALISE from the study, there is little point in studying particular people or animals if we cannot find out more about people or animals in general from it 2. The study should be REPLICABLE, this is it should be possible to copy exactly what the researcher did and get the same results 3. The measures used in the study must be VALID, this means we should be measuring what we say we are measuring

Answer 72

- refers to the consistency of findings from research, it is an important criterion for being scientific

Answer 73

- If findings are consistent, and can be considered reliable, we can trust that the findings will happen again and again - in order to achieve reliability, research must be replicable

Answer 74

- refers to the need to be impartial and judgement free - important that the DV is measured objectively , so that opinions or judgements of the researcher does not affect how the DV is recorded

Answer 75

- refers to whether the study is measuring the behaviour or construct it intends to measure -internal, predictive, ecological

Answer 76

refers to how well the procedure of a study establishes a casual relationship between the manipulated IV and the measured DV, or whether it has been confounded by uncontrolled extraneous variables - internal validity can be ensured by using standardised procedures, controlling for order effects and individual differences and avoiding demand characteristics

Answer 77

- a way to assess internal validity - the extent to which the performance on the measure can predict future performance on a similar criterion eg. if a test of intelligence can accurately predict future academic success, then it has predictive validity

Answer 78

- refers to the extent to which the research can be generalised to other situations, e.g. real life and everyday situations - memory experiments conducted in artificial environments with artificial tasks may not be generalised to everyday use of memory - we might say therefore that these experiments lack ecological validity - so we need to question whether the results of an experiment can be generalised from the environmental conditions created by the researcher to other environmental conditions i.e. to real life

Answer 79

STRENGTH - the working memory model is high in validity, meaning that the model seems credible - in this case, it seems credible because it fits with everyday experience of manipulating information when solving problems, with short term memory as a dynamic process rather than a static store, e.g. if you have to encode something in one particular way (like listening to a radio broadcast) STRENGTH: evidence to support the model e.g Neurophysiological evidence- case study of KF (Shallice and Warrington 1974) = - KF suffered stm impairment following a motorbike accident - his problem was with immediate recall of words being presented verbally ( e.g. he had a digit span of one) but not with visual information - suggests KF had an impaired articulatory loop but an intact visuo-spatial sketchpad, therefore providing evidence for the working memory model's (WMM) view of STM

Answer 80

WEAKNESS - much of the research which has supported the WMM has been laboratory experiments using artificial tasks e.g. learning word lists - this reduces the ecological validity of the evidence, as highly controlled studies might not be representative of what happens in the real world WEAKNESS - there are different theories of memory, e.g. Bartlett's reconstructive theory explains that memory is a reconstruction of events based on our past experience and stereotypes - therefore rec theory better explains differences in people's recall of the same event than WMM

Answer 81

- mental representation of information about a specific event or object - ideas and scripts about the world which give expectations and rules about what we do

Answer 82

- when information is added to fill in the gaps to make a story make sense

Answer 83

- process in which all individuals thoughts and perceptions of a situation influence the emotion they experience

Answer 84

- when we interact with the environment , we take information through our senses

Answer 85

- processing information, storing it in the memory to be assessed again - in stimulus

Answer 86

- recording participants responses - what information we can recall

Answer 87

a North American folk tale called "the war of the ghosts"

Answer 88

- it is culturally unfamiliar to the participants - lacked any rational story order - encouraged visual imaging - conclusion was somewhat supernatural - Bartlett wanted to see how participants would perceive and image this

Answer 89

- each participant read the story twice - repeat production was used to test the effect of time lapse on recall - Bartlett was interested in the form that the reproduced story would take, particularly after repeat reproductions - 20 participants recalled the story after several minutes, weeks, months and years (longest time lapse was six and a half years

Answer 90

information was left out or excluded

Answer 91

making it more clear, logical and consistent

Answer 92

- canoe was changed to boat - hunting seals were changed to fishing - many p's did not grasp the role of the ghost in the story, so simply omitted to mentioning them or rationalised their presence in some way

Answer 93

- memory is a reconstruction each time it is recalled - it is rarely accurate and prone to rationalisation (shortening a story to make it make sense) and confabulation (making up bits and filling in gaps when retelling an event so that it makes more sense - even recall after a couple of minutes contain erros and these erros tend to be repeated - process of remembering is constructive in nature and influenced by influences made by an individual

Answer 94

- schemas are parcels of stored knowledge or mental representations of information about a specific object or event - Bartlett argued that we do not remember all that we perceive - we draw on our existing schema when we recall an event to fill in the gaps - this means that recall is an active reconstruction of an event strongly influenced by pervious knowledge, expectations and beliefs - schemas are also used in recognition and interpretation of unfamiliar objects and events e.g. using your existing schema to interpret the ink blots or using your cinema schema when going to the theatre for the first time

Answer 95

- how we perceive an object or event is based on individual interpretation - this interpretation is strongly influenced by our past experiences , knowledge we have learned and the attitudes and beliefs we possess - therefore, perception is an individual characteristic that is unique to every person

Answer 96

- focuses on the role of experience in forming schemas which in turn influence memory encoding and retrieval - this puts nurture at the centre of our understanding of how memory works - this is in sharp contrast with theories of memory that emphasise underlying brain functions and dysfunctions - therefore, schema theory provides a welcome balance to nature-linked theories, providing a more rounded picture

Answer 97

- lab experiment - independent groups design - Loftus and Palmer showed leading questions - such as using a particular verb, can manipulate memory - if people are asked about 2 cars smashing into each other they "remember" the cars going at a faster speed than if they were asked about 2 cars hitting each other (41mph "smashed" 34mph "hit" - the verbs "smash" and "hit" lead to different memories of the same event - therefore the memory has been reconstructed in light of the verbs used

Answer 98

- may lack validity as seeing a traffic accident on video does not have the same emotional effect as seeing a traffic accident in real life - all participants were students, so results cannot be generalised as they may give different speed estimates to older people who have been driving for longer - as p's all watched the same videos, the results were not affected by seeing different traffic accidents, increasing the reliability of the study - the study collected quantitative data in the form of estimated mph, therefore, increasing objectivity when analysing results as there was no interpretation of what the p's said

Answer 99

- showed p's a drawing of an argument on a subway train - were asked to describe it to another participant (like Chinese whispers) - black character was better dressed and more middle class than the white character but after serial reproductions, white p's tended to reverse the appearance of the characters - some even described the black character as holding a knife

Answer 100

- high reliability, all p's saw the same drawing, results were not affected by seeing a different picture, standardised - application, shows how schemas distort memory especially prejudices meaning we remember things the way we think they ought to be - study may lack ecological validity because it is a drawing and not real life

Answer 101

- supporting studies=(loftus+palmer), (allport+postman) - other things= scientifically tested as it can be reduced down to an IV and a DV - different theories= links to Tulving's theories about semantic memory, if reconstructive memory is true, Tulving's ideas are more plausible, semantic memory may have more influence over episodic memory as schemas dictate how we reconstruct our memories - application= it is useful for our understanding how our memory can be manipulated by post-event information ,, can be used to form police when working with witnesses (leading questions)

Answer 102

- supporting studies= Bartlett- the story did not make sense to p's and they may have known that they would be asked to retell it, therefore they would have been influenced by demand characteristics - loftus + palmer lack of ecological validity, it was a lab experiment (artificial setting),, used students and not all could drive so relied on the word/verb to help guess the speed - other things= however, the theory simply describes that memory is reconstructive rather than explaining how

Answer 103

memory for events (remembered experiences)

Answer 104

memory for facts

Answer 105

- EPISODIC MEMORY Tulving suggested that episodic memory is a kind of mental diary - episodic memory receives and stores information about experiences or events that occur at a time in our life - these memories are linked to time and context (where they happened) - episodic memory is a record of events personal to you SEMANTIC MEMORY - Tulving suggested that semantic memory represented a mental encyclopedia, storing words, facts, rules, meanings and concepts as an organised body of knowledge - these memories are associated with other facts that link the concepts together e.g. "school is learning" or "bird and nest" - e.g. " I know that June follows may in the calendar" or "south Africa is a hot country" are memories of facts that have been learned at some earlier time

Answer 106

- Tulving believed that episodic memory was dependent on time referencing; memories about events that happen to you are linked to the time in which they occurred e.g. recalling your first day at BHS to the date this event occurred - however, semantic memory is detached from time when it occurred; as factual information can be recalled without reference to when it was learned e.g. you can recall that Paris is the capital of France without remembering when and where you learned that fact

Answer 107

- input into episodic memory is continuous, as we experience a whole episode in relation to when and where it happened, such as experiencing a birthday party however, semantic memories can be input in a fragmentary (pieces of information) way - we can then piece factual information together that has been learned at different points in time

Answer 108

- retrieval from an episodic memory is only possible if it has been encoded and stored - semantic memories, can help people to work out things they don't know before doing the working out -there can be retrieval in semantic memory that does not rely on stored information, just stored rules - retrieval from semantic memory does not change the actual memory - however, retrieval from episodic memory changes the memory that is stored, as a new episode that links to it is now encoded and stored

Answer 109

- semantic memory can work independently of episodic memory e.g we do not need to remember a classroom lesson about equations to be able to use the equations we learned - however, episodic memory is unlikely to operate without semantic memory as we need to be able to draw on previous knowledge of objects, people and events that occur in order to understand them - Tulving argued that, despite this and although the two systems may overlap, they can be treated as separate independent stores

Answer 110

- episodic and semantic memory systems are disrupted in Alzheimer's disease, a form of dementia - both research and personal experiences of people living with Alzheimer's suggest that episodic memory is affected first. This may be because of the hippocampus- which plays a central role in episodic memory- is damaged early in the disease -later, patients lose the ability to use knowledge stored in the semantic memory, again, this is probably because the disease now affects the brain areas closely involved in the semantic memory- frontal lobes

Answer 111

- LTM- episodic and semantic memory (Tulving 1972) the use of case studies of brain damaged patients gives us an important insight into the nature of human memory, and the relative independence or links between the various memory stores and functions

Answer 112

- case study of brain damaged patient KC (1951-2014) who suffered specific LTM impairment to his episodic memory, resulting in the inability to form or recall many personal events in his life; however, his recollection of information was intact - Sir Collin Blakemore (1988) carried out a case study on Clive Wearing -Blakemore discovered that damage to Clive Wearing's brain had been to the hippocampus, which seems to be the part of the brain where the stm rehearses information to encode it into the ltm - Schmolk et al. (2002) looks at other patients with amnesia because of the damage to the hippocampus; it includes patients like Clive Wearing who suffered herpes encephalitis infection - these patients also struggled with semantic memory because of damage to the wider temporal cortex.

Answer 113

supporting studies - case study of cw, suffered ltm impairment to his episodic memory, recollection of info still intact-shows episodic & semantic memory are seperate other things - there is neurophysiological evidence for the model- episodic memory seems to be affected by frontal brain damage rather than semantic memories application - Belleville et al. (2006) worked with older people who had mild memory impairment - p's undertook a training programme to improve their episodic memories - compared with a control group, there's p's performed better on a test of episodic memory after the training - the fact that it is possible to improve one type of LTM rather than another argues in favour of there being different types

Answer 114

other things - examining case studies of brain-damaged patients also points out a weakness in the model of LTM proposed by Tulving - e.g. cw suffered memory impairments that affected his ability to retain and recall LTM from episodic storage , but he was still able to remember how to perform procedural tasks e.g. playing the piano - this points to further long-term store for remembering practised skills (procedural memory) - this model is problematic as it is difficult to know whether the two stores are separate and independent as it appears that they rely on each other when used inn everyday life different theories - there are other theories which help us understand memory - the msm - focused on ltm reconstructive memories - Bartlett did not mention semantic memory

Answer 115

working at the university of Madrid, sebastian and hernandez gil wanted to examine the developmental pattern of digit span in the SPANISH population to test the phonological loop component (part that deals with auditory information) of working memory (Baddeley & hitch 1974) - wanted to investigate the capacity of the phonological loop and to understand whether it would differ in a Spanish population across different ages - Sebastian and Hernandez Gil knew that Anglo Saxon concluded digit span increased with age (aged 5 to 17 years) and wanted to investigate whether the same developmental trend occurred in a different culture

Answer 116

- to investigate the development of the phonological loop in children between the ages 5-17 years using digit (numbers) span as a measure of phonological capacity (part one) - to look at the decline of digit span in older people (normal healthy older people and dementia patients (part two) - to compare digit span in the Spanish population with Anglo-Saxon population

Answer 117

age group mean digit span pre school (5 years)= 3.76 (6-8 years)= 4.34 9-11 years = 5.13 12-14 years= 5.46 15-17 years= 5.83 The results show clearly that digit span increased with age - pre school children had a very low digit span that rises steadily until around 11 years old where it slows - digit span between 15 and 17 years remains stable

Answer 118

- now that they had the results from the study on children, they wanted to compare the findings with research they had carried out on adults in 2010. - in 2010, they had gathered data about the digit spans of healthy older people (25 pts), those with alzheimer's (25 pts) and those with dementia (9 pts) - they found that the healthy older people had a mean digit span of 4,44, the alzheimer patients 4.20 and the dementia patients 4.20 - results showed two things of interest= firstly that the healthy older p's had a higher digit span compared to 5 year olds in this study and the healthy older people digit span was similar to that of a 7 year old - older p's results were not significantly different from other age groups - secondly, co paring the healthy older p's to the alzheimer and dementia patients showed no significant difference, suggesting that impoverished digit span was a consequence of ageing rather than dementias

Answer 119

- digit span increases with age from 5-17 years, however the study did not find that Spanish population digit span continues to increase up to age 17 whereas Anglo Saxon results suggest digit span of 7 (mean average for adult) has been reached by aged 15 years - comparing the findings of research into patients with degenerative neurological disease and the healthy older population it is possible to speculate from this research that poor digit span is a result of ageing rather than dementias - digit span in the Spanish population is significantly shorter (about 1 digit less) then Anglo-Saxon culture- probably due to the word length effect associated with digits

Cognitive Flashcards

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