Memory Flashcards

Question

Research into Duration - Meaningless Stimuli in Peterson and Peterson's Study - 4 Points

Answer 1

- Stimulus material was artificial - Study is not completely irrelevant because we do sometimes try to remember family meaningless material, such as phone numbers - Recalling constant syllables doesn't reflect most everyday memory activities where what we are trying to remember is more meaningful - Means the study lacked external validity

Answer 2

-> 2 A C 1-> 3 -> 5 - > 6 -> 4 D V ^ < - l B E l_ _ l 1 - Sensory Registers 2 - Iconic Store 3 - Echoic Store 4 - Other memory stores 5 - STM 6 - LTM A - Attention B - Prolonged Rehearsal C - Retrieval D - Response (remembering) E - Maintenance Rehearsal (maintenance rehearsal)

Answer 3

- Sense specific coding (modality free) - High capacity because it contains all sensory experience - Lasts 0.25 - 0.5 seconds

Answer 4

- Limited capacity - Coded acoustically - Lasts 30 seconds

Answer 5

- Potentially permanent memory store - Unlimited capacity - Coded semantically

Answer 6

- Had severely impaired episodic memory but his semantic memory was relatively unaffected - Could not remember stroking a dog half an hour ago or if he had a dog in the past (episodic) but could understand the concept of a dog (semantic) - Both sides of hippocampus removed

Answer 7

- Participants were given a word list of 24 words, and each word was shown for 2 seconds, and then asked to free recall - Words recalled best were at start of list (primacy effect) and the end of the list (recency effect) - Primacy effect occurs because words rehearsed most make it to LTM - Recency effect occurs because words are still fresh in STM

Answer 8

- Lost of amnesia cases show that STM and LTM cannot be unitary stores - Shallice and Warrington - studied patient 'KF' - Found that KF's STM for digits was very poor when they were read aloud to him, but his recall was much better when he was able to read the digits himself - Shows that there must be at least one STM store to process visual information and one to process auditory information

Answer 9

- MSM says that rehearsal in terms of quantity not quality - Craik and Watkins - found maintenance rehearsal does not transfer information into the LTM but just keeps it in the STM - Say elaborative rehearsal is needed to transfer information into LTM (occurs when you link the information to your existing knowledge)

Answer 10

- Baddley - found that we tend to mix up words that sound similar when we are using our STM, and words that have similar meanings when using our LTM - Further support comes from the studies of capacity and duration - Includes Murdock's research - Clearly show that STM and LTM are separate independent memory stores

Answer 11

- Atkinson and Shiffrin based the MSM on the research evidence at the time that showed STM and LTM to be single memory stores that are separate and independent from each other - Lots of research evidence that the LTM is not a single memory store, such as semantic, episodic, and procedural LTM - Combined with research showing there is more than one the of STM and rehearsal, the MSM is an oversimplified model of memory

Answer 12

Episodic Semantic Procedural

Answer 13

LTM store for personal events

Answer 14

- Last holiday you went on - What you had for breakfast this morning

Answer 15

- Time stamped - Memory of single episode includes several elements (i.e. people, places, objects, behaviours) - Have to make conscious effort to recall

Answer 16

LTM store for knowledge of the world

Answer 17

- Meaning of words - Taste of an orange

Answer 18

- Likened to a combination of an encyclopaedia and a dictionary - Knowledge of concepts - Not time stamped - Less personal - more about facts we all share

Answer 19

LTM store for knowledge of how to do things

Answer 20

- Driving a car - Tying shoelaces - Swimming - Walking

Answer 21

- Can recall without conscious effort/awareness - Skills we find hard to explain to someone else

Answer 22

- Damaged hippocampus - Can remember some aspects of his past, but not others - Can remember he has children from an earlier marriage but not their names

Answer 23

- HM and Clive Wearing - Supports Tulving's view of separate stores - one can be damaged but the other stores can be unaffected - Evidence that the types of memory are different and stored in different parts of the brain

Answer 24

- Brain scanning studies show different types of LTM are stored in different parts of the brain - Tulving et al - PET scanned participants whilst doing different memory tools - Found that episodic memories recalled from right pre-frontal cortex and semantic memories recalled from left pre-frontal cortex - This finding has been confirmed in many other research studies which suggests high internal validity

Answer 25

- Belleville et al - demonstrated that episodic memories could be improved in older people with mild cognitive impairment - trained group on a test of memory - Being able to distinguish between types of LTM enables the development of specific treatments

Answer 26

- Cohen and Squire - disagree with Tulving and suggest there are only 2 types of LTM: declarative and non-declarative - Declarative memories - memories that can be subconsciously recalled (episodic and semantic) - Non-declarative memories - memories that cannot be consciously recalled (procedure)

Answer 27

Baddley and Hitch

Answer 28

Representation of STM which suggests STM is a dynamic processor of different types of information, using sub-units coordinated by a central decision-making system

Answer 29

- - - - - - - - > Central Executive < - - - - - - - - - - l ^ l v v v Visuo-spatial sketchpad Episodic Buffer Phonological loop ^ ^ (Articulatory control l l system and phonological l l store) l v ^ - - - - - - - - - - - > Long Term Memory < ---------- l

Answer 30

- Attentional processes - Monitors incoming data, makes decisions and allocates tasks to slave systems - Very limited processing capacity

Answer 31

- The slave system that deals with auditory information and preserves the order in which information arrives - Coding is acoustic - Divided into two parts - phonological store and articulatory control system

Answer 32

Part of the PL that stores the words you hear

Answer 33

- Part of the PL that allows for maintenance rehearsal - Capacity is believed to be 2 seconds with of what you can say

Answer 34

- Slave system which stores visual and/or spatial information - Limited capacity of 3 - 4 objects - Logie subdivided VSS into 2 parts - visual cache and inner scribe

Answer 35

Part of the VSS that stores visual data

Answer 36

Part of the VSS that records the arrangement of objects in the visual field

Answer 37

- Slave system that was added to the model by Baddley later - Temporary store for information which integrates visual, spatial and verbal information processed by other stores - Maintains a sense of time sequencing - Storage component of the central executive - Limited capacity of 4 chunks -

Answer 38

- KF suffered brain damage, leaving him with poor STM ability for verbal information by his STM for visual information was in tact - Suggests his phonological loop was damaged

Answer 39

- Baddley et al - participants had more difficulty doing two visual tasks at once, then doing both a verbal and visual task at the same time - The two visual tasks were competing for the same slave system - Supports existence of the VSS

Answer 40

- Baddley - "the central executive is the most important but least understood component of working memory" - It needs to be more clearly specified than simply being attention

Answer 41

- Baddley et al - showed people find it harder to remember a list of long words than a list of short words (word length effect) because of finite space in the articulatory control system - Word Length Effect disappears when a person does an articulatory suppression task

Answer 42

- Braver et al - gave participants tasks that involved the central executive whilst having their brain scanned - They found greater activity in the left pre-frontal cortex which increased with task difficulty - Makes sense that as demands on the central executive increase, it has to work harder to fulfil its function

Answer 43

When two pieces of information conflict with each other, which results in forgetting one or both pieces of information or some distortion of memory

Answer 44

Proactive and reactive interference

Answer 45

Older memories interfere with newer ones

Answer 46

Newer memories interfere with older ones

Answer 47

To investigate the effects of similarity on interference

Answer 48

- Participants learnt a list of 10 words until they could recall them with 100% accuracy, then learned one of six new words list before being retested with the original list - 6 lists were: synonyms, antonyms, unrelated words to original list, nonsense syllables, three digit numbers, or no new list (retest) -

Answer 49

- When recalling original list, performance depended on the nature of the second list - Group who had learnt the most similar material (synonyms) recalled the least

Answer 50

Interference effects are strongest when the memories are similar

Answer 51

- Thousands of lab experiments have been carried out - Most of these studies show both types of interference are likely to be common ways we forget information from LTM - High levels of internal validity due to high level of control

Answer 52

- Much greater chance of interference will be demonstrated in the lab rather than in real life situations because the stimulus materials used in most studies are word lists - Learning word lists is more realistic than learning lists of consonant syllables, but it is still quite different to the information we learn and try to remember in everyday life - May not be as likely an explanation for forgetting in everyday life, and has low external validity

Answer 53

- Much greater chance of interference will be demonstrated in the lab rather than in real life situations because the stimulus materials used in most studies are word lists - Learning word lists is more realistic than learning lists of consonant syllables, but it is still quite different to the information we learn and try to remember in everyday life - May not be as likely an explanation for forgetting in everyday life, and has low external validity

Answer 54

- E.g. time period between learning word lists and recalling them in experiment is usually very short - Uncommon for the whole experience of learning something and recalling it to be over within an hour - Very different to everyday life, and interference is more likely in a lab setting

Answer 55

- Tulving and Psotka -gave participants 5 lists of 24 words - each list organised into 6 categories - Categories were not explicit but it was presumed they would be obvious to the participant - Recall was 70% for the first word list, but this fell as participants learnt each additional word list - At the end, they were given a cued recall test where they were told the names of the categories - recall rose to 70% - Shows recall interference effects exist but also shows that the memories do not disappear - they are still available and we just need a cue to access it

Answer 56

- Baddley and Hitch - asked rugby players to try remember the names of the teams they had played so far that season, week by week - Results showed accurate recall did not depend on how long ago the matches had taken place, but the number of matches played since then - Shows interference explanations apply to at least some everyday situations - Burke and Skull - presented a series of magazine adverts to participants and asked them to recall the details of what they had seen - Interference effect was greater when the adverts were similar

Answer 57

When the information is in LTM but cannot be accessed, because the cues are not present

Answer 58

A trigger of information that allows us to access a memory - these cues may be meaningful or indirectly linked by being encoded at the time of learning

Answer 59

- If cues available at encoding and retrieval are different or entirely absent, there will be some forgetting - Some cues are linked to the material in a meaningful way - Other cues are also encoded when learning but not in a meaningful way

Answer 60

- Gave antihistamines to their participants and they had to learn list of words and passages of prose and then recall the information - Condition 1 - learn on drug, recall on drug - Condition 2 - learn on drug, recall not on drug - Condition 3 - learn not on drug, recall on drug - Condition 4 - lean not on drug, recall not on drug

Answer 61

- Mismatched conditions had worse performance on memory - Matching conditions had better performance on memory

Answer 62

When the internal cues are absent, there is more forgetting

Answer 63

- Divers learned a list of words either underwater or on land and were then asked to recall either underwater or on land - Condition 1 - learn on land, recall on land - Condition 2 - learn on land, recall underwater - Condition 3 - learn underwater, recall on land - Condition 4 - learn underwater, recall underwater

Answer 64

Non-matching conditions had 40% lower recall than matching conditions

Answer 65

When the external cues available at learning are different than the ones at recall, it led to retrieval failure

Answer 66

- Godden and Badley, and Carter and Cassidy - Eysenck - suggests retrieval failure is the main reason for forgetting in LTM - Evidence also shows retrieval failure occurs in real life situations as well as in controlled lab conditions

Answer 67

- Baddley - argues contact effects aren't as strong in real life - two contexts would have to be extremely different before we could see an effect - Godden and Baddley compared land to being underwater - we are unlikely to see such a large effect when switching between two similar cues

Answer 68

- Context effect may be related to the kind of memory being tested - When Godden and Baddley's experiment was replicated using a word recognition test rather than having to retrieve the words themselves, there was no context-dependent effect - Presence or absence of cues only affects emory when you test it in a certain way

Answer 69

- The ESP cannot be tested - when a cue leads to successful recall, we assume that cue must have been encoded at the time of learning - And the a cues does not result in successful recall, we assume the cue was not encoded at the time of learning - These are just assumptions - there is no way to test whether the cues has really been encoded

Answer 70

- Although context-related cues appear not to have a very strong effect on forgetting - Baddley still thinks they're worth paying attention to - When we are struggling to remember something, it is worth making the effort to try and recall the environment you first learned it in - Basic principle of cognitive interview

Answer 71

An account providing details of an event which the person has observed.

Answer 72

A question which is phrased in a way that suggests a certain answer

Answer 73

- Students watched films of car accidents and then answered questions about them - Asked to estimate how fast the cars were going but the verb was changed between questions - Verbs - hit, contacted, bumped, collided or smashed

Answer 74

- Estimated mean speed for 'contacted' was 31.8 mph - Estimated mean speed for 'smashed' was 40.5 mph

Answer 75

- Response bias explanation - Substitution explanation

Answer 76

Wording of the question has no real effect on participants memories, but influences how they choose to answer the question, e.g. when the participants heard 'smashed' it encourages them to estimate a higher speed

Answer 77

Wording of question alters participants memory e.g. in a second study, participants were more likely to report seeing seeing broken glass even thought there was none

Answer 78

When co-witnesses of a crime discuss the crime with one another which means their memories may be contaminated because they combine information from other witness with their own memories

Answer 79

- Studied participants in pairs - Each watched the same crime but different viewpoints - Discussed what they had seen before completing a recall test

Answer 80

71% of participants mistakenly recalled something they had not seen in the video

Answer 81

Witnesses often go along with one another, either to win social approval or because they believe other witnesses are right and they are wrong (memory conformity)

Answer 82

- Consequences of inaccurate EWT can be very serious in real life - Loftus believes that leading questions can have such distorting effects on memory that police officers need to be careful with how they phrase questions when interviewing eyewitnesses

Answer 83

- Decreased external validity - In Loftus and Palmer's research, participants watched film clips of car accidents, which is very different to witnessing one in real life - Artificial stimuli and tasks may tell us very little about how leading questions could affect EWT for real accidents/crimes

Answer 84

- Anastasi and Rhodes - found that people in the 18-25 and 35-45 age groups were more accurate in their eyewitness reports than people in the 55-78 age group - But all groups were more accurate when identifying people of their own age group (own age bias) - Research studies often use younger people as the target to identify, which could falsely make some age groups look less accurate -

Answer 85

Bodner et al - found that recall was more accurate when participants were warned that anything they hear from co-witness is secondhand information and may not be true, so they should forget it and recall only their memory of the event

Answer 86

- Zaragossa and McCloskey - argue many answers participants give in lab studies of EWT are due to demand characteristics - Participants want to be useful and not let the researcher down - When they are asked a question they don't know the answer to, they are more likely to guess

Answer 87

Foster et al - point out that memory of an eyewitness in real life can have important consequences, but this is not the same in research studies

Answer 88

Johnson and Scott

Answer 89

Yuille and Cutshall

Answer 90

- Participants were seated in a waiting room and heard an argument in the next room - In low anxiety condition, a man walked from the room carrying a pen and covered in grease - In high anxiety condition, they also heard the sound of breaking glass, and the man was covered in blood and carrying a knife

Answer 91

- 49% of participants in the low anxiety condition were able to identify him - 33% of participants in the high anxiety condition were able to identify him

Answer 92

The tunnel theory of memory argues that an eyewitness' attention narrows to focus on a weapon as they are a source of anxiety, meaning they cannot attend to other important cues

Answer 93

- Real event with 21 witnesses, with 13 agreeing to take part in the study - Interviewed 4 - 5 months after the incident and were compared with official police interviews made at the time of the shooting - Accuracy was determined by the number of details reported

Answer 94

Witnesses gave very accurate accounts and there was little change in accuracy after 5 months

Answer 95

The participants who rated their stress the highest were the most accurate in their recall

Answer 96

Performance l /\ B l / \ l / \ l / \ l / \ l A C l________________ Arousal A = comfort zone B = high performance zone C = panic zone

Answer 97

- Low levels of anxiety/arousal produce lower levels of recall accuracy - Memory becomes more accurate as anxiety increases - Reaches an optimal level which is the point of maximum accuracy - If the eyewitness experiences more stress than this, their recall accuracy drastically declines

Answer 98

- Valentine and Meson - carried out study of the Horror Labyrinth at London Dungeon, which is designed to be frightening - Visitors were offered a reduced fee if they agreed to take part in questionnaires at the end to assess their level of self-reported anxiety and wore wireless heart monitors to confirm they were experiencing anxiety - Participants had to describe a person encountered in the Labyrinth - Researchers found that the high anxiety participants recalled the fewest correct details about the actor and made more mistakes - Also found 17% of the high anxiety group correctly identified the actor in a line-up compared to 75% of low anxiety group

Answer 99

- Researchers usually interview real-life eyewitnesses sometime after the event - Plenty of things will happen between this time - Extraneous variables may not lead to accurate recall - Could be reports or post-event discussion

Answer 100

- Pickel - conducted an experiment using scissors, a handgun, a wallet or a raw chicken as handheld items in a hairdressing salon video - Eyewitness accuracy was significantly poorer in the high anxiety conditions (raw chicken and handgun) - Weapon focus effect may actually be due to unusualness rather than anxiety/threat

Answer 101

- Pickel - conducted an experiment using scissors, a handgun, a wallet or a raw chicken as handheld items in a hairdressing salon video - Eyewitness accuracy was significantly poorer in the high anxiety conditions (raw chicken and handgun) - Weapon focus effect may actually be due to unusualness rather than anxiety/threat

Answer 102

- Yuille and Cutshall asked participants to rate their stress at the time of the incident on a 7-point scale - Very subjective and a lot of time has passed between the event and the research - May not answer honestly (social desirability bias)

Answer 103

- Anxiety is very hard to define and measure because there are many aspects involved including, cognitive, emotional, behavioural, and physical - Inverted U explanation only assumes that one of these is linked with poor performance - psychological arousal (physical) - Means that the explanation is incomplete

Answer 104

- Anxiety is very hard to define and measure because there are many aspects involved including, cognitive, emotional, behavioural, and physical - Inverted U explanation only assumes that one of these is linked with poor performance - psychological arousal (physical) - Means that the explanation is incomplete

Answer 105

A method of interviewing eyewitnesses to help them retrieve more accurate memories

Answer 106

- Report Everything - Reinstate the Context - Reverse the Order - Change perspective

Answer 107

Witnesses are encouraged to include every detail of the event, even if it seems irrelevant or they don't feel confident about it

Answer 108

Witnesses should return to the original crime scene in their mind and imagine the environment as well as their emotions

Answer 109

Events should be recalled in a different chronological order to the original sequence

Answer 110

Witnesses should recall the incident from another person's point of view

Answer 111

Trivial details may be important to, and may trigger other important memories

Answer 112

This is related to retrieval failure - by having cues available at recall that were encoded during the event, more information can be accessed from the memory (ESP)

Answer 113

This prevents people reporting their expectation of how the event 'must' have happened and it prevents dishonesty as it is harder to produce an untruthful account of the eyewitness to reverse it

Answer 114

THis stops the effects of expectations and schema on recall - the schema you have a particular setting/incident generates expectations of what would have happened, so the schema may be recalled rather than what actually happened

Answer 115

- Fisher et al - developed some additional elements of the CI to focus on the social dynamics of the interaction - For example, the interviewer needs to know when to establish eye contact and when to relinquish it - Also includes ideas such as reducing eyewitness anxiety, minimising distractions, getting the witness to speak slowly, and asking open-ended questions

Answer 116

- Takes much more time than a standard police interview - More time is needed to establish rapport with the witness and allow them to relax - Special training is also needed, but many forces can only offer a few hours - Unlikely that the proper version is being used, which may explain why police have not been impressed by it

Answer 117

- May offer special benefits - Kohnken et al - meta-analysis of more than 50 studies found that ECI provided more correct information than the standard interview used by the police - There are practical benefits for the police using ECI, which also benefit society as a whole

Answer 118

- Milne and Bull - initially found each individual element was equally valuable and when each technique was used alone, it led to more information than the standard police interview - They then found a combination of report everything and reinstate the context produced better real than an other conditions - Suggests some aspects are more useful than others and at least two features should be used together or even the full CI

Answer 119

- Studies assessing the effectiveness of the CI often use slightly different techniques or use the ECI - Means we may be forming conclusions about the CI despite the research not being in the original CI - Also, police forces evolve their own methods, which may not be supported by evidence

Answer 120

- Techniques in the CI aim to increase the amount of correct information recalled but may also increase the recall of incorrect information - Kohnken et al - ECI produced 81% increase in correct information, but also a 61% increase in correct information compared to a standard interview