Cognitive Approach Flashcards
(7 cards)
Multistore Memory Model
Peterson and Peterson (1959)
Aim: To investigate the duration of STM when rehearsal is prevented.
Procedure: Participants were presented with trigrams (e.g., “MPT”) and asked to count backward in threes from a random number for 0, 6, 12, or 18 seconds to prevent rehearsal.
Results: Recall accuracy decreased as the time delay increased, with nearly no recall after 18 seconds.
Conclusion: STM has a limited duration unless rehearsal occurs.
Working Memory Model
Robbins et al. 1996
Aim: To investigate the effects of interference on working memory tasks.
Procedure: Male chess players were asked to recreate a chess board configuration after a 10 second viewing, while simultaneously performing a distracting task, that interfered with either their visuospatial sketchpad (typing on a hidden keypad) or phonological loop (repeating “the”).
Results: The reduction of accuracy in recall of chess positions was much greater during the visuospatial interference task than during the verbal interference.
Conclusion: The fact that visuospatial interference significantly impaired the performance on a visuospatial task (remembering the chess board) much more than the auditory interference, supports the existence of separate slave systems that process different information during working memory tasks.
Schema theory
Bartlet (1932)
Aim: To investigate how the memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge, the effect of cultural schema on recalling a foreign story.
Procedure: Participants heard a Native American legend and were then asked to do either serial or repeated reproduction of the story. In serial reproduction they were asked to tell the story to another person and in the repeated reproduction participants recalled the story to the researcher multiple times over the course of one month.
Results: There was no significant difference between the way that groups recalled the story. The story became much shorter over time. The participants overall remembered the main themes in the story but changed the unfamiliar elements to match their own cultural expectations so that the story remained a coherent whole although changed.
Conclusion: Results indicate that remembering is not a passive but rather an active process, where information is retrieved and changed to fit into existing schemas.
Thinking and decision making
Dual Processing Model
Alter et al. (2007)
Aim: To investigate the effect of cognitive disfluency on the use of rational thinking over intuitive thinking. (System 1 and System 2)
Procedure: Participants were given identical Cognitive Reflections Tests (CRT) to answer. The CRT consisted of questions that were not inherently difficult but required some cognitive energy to solve. Participants got either a test where either fluent (easy to read) or disfluent (difficult to read) font was used. It was hypothesised that the disfluent font would require participants to focus more on what was written which would trigger S2 thinking which requires deeper processing than S1.
Results: Participants in the disfluent condition answered more questions correctly than participants in the fluent condition.
Conclusion: Results indicate that by having to concentrate on a disfluent font which required more cognitive energy participants’ S2 was activated and they were able to reach a more reasonable conclusion, i.e. answer questions correctly.
Reconstructive memory
Reliability of cognitive process
Loftus and Palmer (1974): effect of leading questions on eyewitness testimony.
Aim: To investigate whether memory could be influenced by misleading postevent information.
Procedure: Participants in two experiments watched video clips of car accidents and answered questions afterwards. The critical question in the first experiment varied the verb used to describe the collision (e.g., smashed, hit, contacted) to see if it influenced speed estimates. In the second experiment, participants were asked about seeing broken glass a week later, even though none was present in the video, after being asked about the speed using either “smashed” or “hit”.
Results: Mean speed estimates increased with more emotionally intense verbs in the first experiment. In the second experiment, participants who were asked the question with the more intense verb were more likely to falsely recall seeing broken glass.
Conclusion: Misleading information and leading questions can influence both memory and perception, suggesting that memory is reconstructive. The findings support the idea of genuine memory change rather than just a response bias.
Framing effect
Cognitive bias
Tversky and Kahneman (1981)
Aim: To test the influence of positive and negative frames on decision making (framing effect)
Procedure: Participants were asked to make a decision between two options in a hypothetical scenario about a disease outbreak, with the information being framed either positively (lives saved) or negatively (people dying).
Results: When the scenario was framed positively, a larger proportion of participants preferred the option with a certain positive outcome. Conversely, when the same scenario was framed negatively, a larger proportion of participants favoured the riskier option that offered a chance of avoiding any loss.
Conclusion: The way information is presented, or framed, significantly affects individuals’ decisions, even when the underlying outcomes of the choices are identical.
Flashbulb memories
Brown and Kulik (1977)
Aim: To investigate the factors influencing the formation and maintenance of flashbulb memories related to significant events.
Procedure: Participants completed a questionnaire about public and personal events. They wrote a free recall of the circumstances surrounding their learning of the events. Then rated each event’s personal consequentiality and frequency of overt rehearsal on a 5-point scale.
Results: Black participants showed more vivid memories of events involving civil rights leaders due to higher personal consequentiality. Across groups, vividness correlated with both personal consequentiality and overt rehearsal.
Conclusion: The findings support the roles of surprise and personal consequentiality in the formation of flashbulb memories and the role of rehearsal in maintaining their vividness.
