Cognitive Psychology Flashcards
Reconstructive Memory
The theory that memories are not exact copies of what is encoded and stored, but are affected by prior experience and prior knowledge in the form of schemas
Schemas
Packages of stored knowledge about a specific object or situation. Every schema has fixed information and changeable information
The War of the Ghosts story
A North American folk tale that Bartlett used in his 1932 study
Effort after meaning
The effort we put into trying to find the correct schema that offers some meaning to an object
Repeated reproduction
When a participant recalls information at increasing time intervals
Describe the ‘War of the Ghosts’ experiment
Twenty participants read the story twice and repeated reproduction was used to test the effect of time lapse on recall. The participants recalled the story after several minutes, weeks, months and years.
Results of the ‘War of the Ghosts’ experiment
The story became considerably shortened because of details left out, the phrases used by participants reflected modern concepts and the story became more coherent. There were a number of transformations made to the story, including particular objects used were made more familiar (e.g. canoe was changed to boat)
What does the multi-store model of memory consist of?
A sensory register, short-term store and long-term store
Brief description of memory according to the multi-store model
A sensory experience first enters the sensory register where it is held for a brief moment before it decays. Attended information from the sensory register is then transferred to the short-term store-information is held for around 30 seconds before it decays, unless rehearsal is used to maintain this information for a longer period of time. From the short-term memory, information can be transferred to long-term permanent storage in the long-term store
Rehearsal
Consciously rehearsing and repeating items
How has the visual sensory register been researched?
Using a whole or partial report technique (Sperling) in which a visual array of letters is presented via a tachistoscope for a brief moment and then a direction is given to recall the whole or specific row of the array.
How has the short-term store been researched?
Peterson and Peterson (1959) investigated the duration of the short-term store using an interference task to prevent rehearsal. Participants were required to remember a trigram for intervals of 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18 seconds.The trigram was read out and participants were then given a number from which they had to count backwards in threes
