Memory

Question 1

Abernethy (1940)

Answer 1

arranged for a group of students to be tested weekly prior to a certain course beginning. Some were tested in their classroom by their teacher, some in their classroom by a different teacher, some in a different classroom with their teacher and some in a different classroom with a different teacher. The group tested in their classroom by their teacher did best

Question 2

Accessibility

Answer 2

information that was once stored is difficult to retrieve

Question 3

Alkhalifa (2009)

Answer 3

described the case of a patient with severely impaired long-term memory who, nevertheless, demonstrated a short-term memory capacity of up to twenty-five prose items, exceeding the capacity of both the phonological loop and visuo-spatial sketchpad, supporting the idea of an episodic buffer that holds information in working memory until it is recalled

Question 4

Anterograde Amnesia

Answer 4

shown by Patient HM, who was unable to form new explicit memories (episodic and semantic)

Question 5

Articulatory Process

Answer 5

holds words that are heard or seen and silently loops them like an inner voice; a type of maintenance rehearsal

Question 6

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)

Answer 6

suggested there are three stages to get to long-term memory (sensory register, short term, then long term) who suggested we process memories in the same way that a computer processes information and that there are three variables that can be used to describe the stores that information passes through: coding, capacity and duration

Question 7

Availability Problem

Answer 7

where information is pushed out of STM due to limited duration and capacity

Question 8

Baddeley and Hinch (1970)

Answer 8

participants were asked to perform two tasks simultaneously, either two tasks involving the articulatory loop or one task involving the articulatory loop and one taks involving both the central executive and articulatory loop. They found that participants did better in tasks that required separate parts of the brain, which supports the working model of memory

Question 9

Baddeley and Hitch (1977)

Answer 9

involved asking rugby players to try and remember the names of teams they had played so far in the season, week by week. Most of the players had missed at least some games. The results clearly showed that accurate recall did not depend on how long ago the matches took place, more important was the number of games played in the meantime. However, Baddeley himself stated that the tasks given to participants were too close together and in real life, the events would be more spaced out, which might affect results

Question 10

Belleville et al (2006)

Answer 10

used memory training to improve episodic memory in people suffering from cognitive impairments, showing real-world applications of working model of memory

Question 11

Bransford and Johnson Experiment

Answer 11

a number of experiments which illustrated the role of schemata in our understanding and recall of information. I one experiment, participants were read a passage and asked to recall it as accurately as possible. Half were given a title and half were not. The half that were given a title remembered the passage better, as the title provides a schema so information can be appropriately stored and recalled more easily

Question 12

Bunge et al (2000)

Answer 12

used fMRI scans to see which parts of the brain were most active when participants were doing two tasks. He found that the same brain areas were active in either dual or single task conditions but there was significantly more activation in dual task conditions

Question 13

Capacity of LTM

Answer 13

potentially infinite

Question 14

Capacity of STM

Answer 14

five to nine digits, but digits are recalled better than letters, increases with age

Question 15

Capacity of STM Experiment

Answer 15

by George Miller in 1956, involves an experimenter listing random sequences of numbers, making the sequence longer each time until the participants can no longer accurately recall the sequence

Question 16

Carter and Cassaday (1998)

Answer 16

looked at the effect of anti-histamines, giving anti-histamines to their participants. They had a mild sedative effect and this created a psychological state different from the normal. The participants had to learn lists of words and then recall them. In conditions where there was a mismatch between internal state at learning and recall, there was more forgetting

Question 17

Centofanti and Reece (2006)

Answer 17

showed participants a video of a bank robbery and gave them misleading information or a neutral event summary; although everyone was susceptible to misleading questions, those questioned with a cognitive interview recalled more

Question 18

Central Executive

Answer 18

this decides how slave systems are allocated. It has limited capacity; data arrives from senses but can’t be held for long

Question 19

Ceraso (1967)

Answer 19

showed that if participants in the Baddeley and Hitch study were tested 24 hours later, there is significant recovery so interference may be temporary. This research does not investigate whether information has disappeared or can be recovered later

Question 20

Clifford and Scott (1978)

Answer 20

found that people who saw aviolent film attack remembered fewer items of information than a control group whosaw a less stressful version, showing that stress has a negative on recall

Question 21

Clive Wearing

Answer 21

a man whose hippocampus was destroyed by a virus leaving him unable to form new memories, studied by Blakemore (1988)

Question 22

Close Reading

Answer 22

according to studies on memory, if you want to memorise something, you should only close read after first having skim-read something

Question 23

Coding of Memory Experiment

Answer 23

done by Alan Baddeley in 1966, involved getting a group of participants to recall various lists of words in the correct order, either immediately or after being given a twenty-minute distraction task, lists of words were acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar and semantically dissimilar

Question 24

Coding of LTM

Answer 24

generally semantically

Question 25

Coding of STM

Answer 25

generally acoustically

Question 26

Cognitive Interview

Answer 26

developed by Fisher and Geiselman in 1992, involves four components

Question 27

Reporting Everything

Answer 27

a component of cognitive interview, ask the witness to record every detail of the event, without asking leading questions, allowing the witness to go off on tangents

Question 28

Mental Reinstatement/Original Context

Answer 28

a component of cognitive interview, mentally recreate the original context or go back to the scene of the crime

Question 29

Changing the Order

Answer 29

a component of cognitive interview, trying alternative timelines through the incident

Question 30

Changing the Perspectitve

Answer 30

a component of cognitive interview, imagining how it would appear to other witnesses

Question 31

Coker (2013)

Answer 31

found that an ECI that placed greater emphasis on the use of focused mental imagery produced more accurate details than standard CI

Question 32

Concept Formation

Answer 32

the process of forming concepts, for example, ‘animal’ is a concept that involves sub-concepts such as ‘birds’, ‘fish’ or ‘mammals’, which can then be further divided. It is easier to remember things if you can make links between concepts

Question 33

Consolidation

Answer 33

the rehearsal process to move information from the short-term memory to the long-term memory

Question 34

Daffenbacher (1983)

Answer 34

reviewed 21 studies and hypothesised that stress and performance follows a u-curve. Witnesses are either too stressed because something excited and dangerous is happening or are under-stressed because they didn’t realise that they witnessed a crime

Question 35

Darley et al (1973)

Answer 35

had participants hide money when high, found they were better at finding it if they were high

Question 36

Decay

Answer 36

forgetting in short-term memory because there isn’t enough time for maintenance rehearsal

Question 37

Declarative Memory

Answer 37

theorised by Cohen, memories that are consciously recalled, suggesting that episodic and semantic memories are the same

Question 38

D'Esposito (1995)

Answer 38

used fMRI scans and identified that the pre-frontal cortex is activated when verbal and spatial tasks are performed at the same time, suggesting the pre-frontal cortex is involved in the central executive

Question 39

Digit Span

Answer 39

the amount of numbers someone can fit into their short-term memory

Question 40

Digit Span Test

Answer 40

developed by Jacobs in 1887, this involves a researcher giving a number of a digits and the participant has to recall them all in order. The researcher then increases the amount by one and the participant has to recall again until they cannot recall the correct order

Question 41

Displacement

Answer 41

forgetting in short-term memory because there is not enough capacity

Question 42

Duration of LTM

Answer 42

potentially infinite

Question 43

Duration of LTM Experiment

Answer 43

an experiment by Harry Bahrick in 1975, involved testing people on their high school graduation class by asking them to list their names or match names to faces, proved that long-term memory can last forever, but deteriorates after a certain amount of time, especially after the age of 75

Question 44

Duration of STM

Answer 44

around 18 seconds

Question 45

Duration of STM Experiment

Answer 45

done by Peterson and Peterson in 1959, involves giving a person a consonant trigram to remember, then asking them to count back in threes from a three digit number before repeating the trigram. The time elapsed increases by three seconds each time until the participant can no longer remember the trigram

Question 46

Encoding Specificity Principle

Answer 46

in 1983, Tulving’s research into retrieval failure discovered a consistent pattern to the findings. He summarised this pattern in what he called the ESP. This states that if a cue is to help us to recall information then it has to be present at encoding and retrieval

Question 47

External Cues

Answer 47

context-dependent cue

Question 48

Internal Cue

Answer 48

state-dependent

Question 49

Endel Tulving

Answer 49

in 1885, realised that the multi-store model’s view of long term memory was too simplistic and inflexible, so proposed that there are three types of long-term memory containing different types of information

Question 50

Enhanced Cognitive Interview

Answer 50

Fisher et al (1987) developed additional elements of the cognitive interview. The enhanced cognitive interview focused on the social dynamics of the interaction, eye contact, minimising distractions, reducing anxiety, open-ended questions and slow speech

Question 51

Episodic Buffer

Answer 51

was added as Baddeley realised the model needed a more general store. This has a limited capacity of four chunks and integrates information from all other areas

Question 52

Episodic Memory

Answer 52

refers to the ability to recall episodes from your life, for example, your first day of school. These memories are complex, as they allow you to remember events exactly as they were and the memory will include several elements all interwoven into one memory. These require conscious effort to recall

Question 53

Eyewitness Testimony

Answer 53

evidence provided by those recalling an event who were present when the event took place

Question 54

Anxiety

Answer 54

a factor affecting eyewitness testimony, research suggests that frightening situations may affect recall because, as well as weapon focus, stress itself may have a negative effect on performance

Question 55

Misleading Information/Leading Questions

Answer 55

information that suggests a desired response

Question 56

Post-Event Discussion

Answer 56

information added to a memory after the event has occurred. For example, when more than one witness discuss a crime they have both seen, their testimonies become contaminated because they combine information from their own memory with other witnesses’ views. This can make them ore inaccurate

Question 57

Fisher and Geiselman (1992)

Answer 57

by reviewing memory literature, which showed that people remember things better if they are provided with retrieval cues, they devised an interview technique with four components, with the aim of improving effectiveness of questioning witnesses in police films

Question 58

Fisher et al (1987)

Answer 58

developed additional elements of the cognitive interview. The enhanced cognitive interview focused on the social dynamics of the interaction, eye contact, minimising distractions, reducing anxiety, open-ended questions and slow speech

Question 59

Fisher et al (1989)

Answer 59

found that the ECI produced superior results in comparison to the standard police interview

Question 60

Fuzzy Concept

Answer 60

where a concept can vary depending on context or conditions, instead of being fixed

Question 61

Gabbert et al (2003)

Answer 61

participants were set up in pairs. Each pair watched a video of the same crime but from different perspectives. They were then paired up and discussed the crime. 71% of participants mistakenly recalled aspects of the event they could only have picked up from the discussion

Question 62

Gathercole and Baddeley (1993)

Answer 62

found that participants encountered problems when simultaneously tracking a moving point of light and performing a spatial task, due to both tasks being involved using the VSS, but had little difficulty tracking the light and performing a verbal tasks simultaneously, due to these using different stores

Question 63

George Mandler Experiment 1967

Answer 63

Mandler suggested that by organising information, you learn it even though you are not making any effort to memorise it. Mandler carried out an experiment where two groups of participants were each given a pack of one hundred cards, each with a word printed on it. Both groups were told to organised the cards into groups, and were allowed to have several goes at organising them. The only difference was that participants of the first group were told to try memorising the words whilst organising them. When both groups were later tested on how many words they remembered, there was little difference between the groups

Question 64

Ginet and Verkampt (2007)

Answer 64

an example of anxiety affecting recall. Fake electrodes were placed on their bodies and participants were told if they misremembered the answers they would be shocked

Question 65

Glanzer and Cunitz (1966)

Answer 65

Glanzer and Cunitz showed participants a list of 20 words. They were presented one at a tie and then asked to recall them. They found that people have a tendency to remember words at the beginning and at the end of a list

Question 66

Gooden and Baddeley (1975)

Answer 66

carried out a study of deep sea divers working underwater. Divers learned a list of words either underwater or on land, and were then asked to recall the words either underwater or on land. Accurate recall was 40% lower in non-matching conditions. However, the groups who learned in different environments were disrupted so this could have influenced their recall

Question 67

Goodwin (1969)

Answer 67

repeated Carter and Cassaday’s experiment but instead of using anti-histamines used alcohol. Found that people who were sober when learning and sober when tested did best, then people who were drunk when learning and drunk when recalling

Question 68

Henry Molaison

Answer 68

the most studied man in the history of psychology, had his hippocampus removed in order to cure his epilepsy and ended up losing his short-term memory

Question 69

Holliday (2003)

Answer 69

compared the standard police interview with the MCI (designed for use with children) and found that the modified version produced more accurate results with groups of four to five and nine to ten year olds

Question 70

Inner Scribe

Answer 70

used for spatial relations

Question 71

Interference

Answer 71

where memory is inaccessible because of old or new information blocking retrieval

Question 72

Interference Theory

Answer 72

a theory for forgetting in long-term memory

Question 73

Jean Piaget

Answer 73

a Swiss psychologist who died in 1980 after spending over 50 years investigating how children develop thinking and cognitive skills. He proposed they did this by developing schemata, which are built up from the experience of the world, first came up with word schema

Question 74

Kebbel and Wagstaff (1996)

Answer 74

the police are reluctant to use CI because it takes more time than a standard interview. It also requires more training than the police have time to deliver, however CI techniques vary between police forces, so it is difficult to evaluate its effectiveness fully

Question 75

Keppel and Underwood (1962)

Answer 75

found that when presented with trigrams to recall and a task to prevent rehearsal, the first trigrams were recalled better, due to proactive interference

Question 76

Klauer and Zhao (2004)

Answer 76

found more interference between two visual tasks than between a visual and a spatial task, supporting the idea that visual cache and inner scribe are separate

Question 77

Kohnken et al (1999)

Answer 77

a meta-analysis of 53 studies found on average a 34% increase in the correct amount of information generated in the cognitive interview. However, most of these studies were done on university students. As well as correct information being increased, the CI also increases incorrect information. A 61% increase in the false positives were found when ECI was used compared to a standard interview

Question 78

Korsakoff Syndrome

Answer 78

a form of brain damage caused by chronic alcoholism, has little effect on STM, but severely impairs LTM

Question 79

Loci Method

Answer 79

a method of memorising a list where a person imagines each of the objects on the list somewhere in a known location, using mental images

Question 80

Loftus (1975)

Answer 80

concluded that it is mainly peripheral information that is unreliable and can be tampered with. Participants were shown a man stealing a large red wallet. Even after reading an account where the wallet was described as brown, only two percent of participants changed their testimony

Question 81

Loftus (1994)

Answer 81

each participant was given summaries of four events from their childhood, three true ones based on accounts from their parents and one fake account of getting lost in a shopping centre. After being interviewed a few weeks later, 25% now reported clear memories of being lost in a shopping centre as a child

Question 82

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

Answer 82

asked people to estimate the speed of cars using different forms of questions. They questions would be worded differently, using words such as “smashed”, “collided”, “bumped”, “hit” and “contacted”. On average those who heard the word “smashed” overestimated the speed the most and those who heard the word “contacted” underestimated the speed the most

Question 83

Loftus and Pickrell (2003)

Answer 83

participants were exposed to fake adverts of Bugs Bunny at Disneyland despite the fact Bugs Bunny is not a Disney creation. Afterwards, roughly a third remembered shaking hands with Bugs Bunny at Disneyland even though it never happened

Question 84

Loftus et al (1987)

Answer 84

participants heard a discussion in another room and then saw a man emerge either holding a pen or a knife. When asked to identify the man from 50 photos, 49% remembered the pen holder and 33% remembered the knife holder, suggesting that the weapon distracted attention and explaining why witnesses may have poor memory of violent crime

Question 85

Loftus and Zanni (1975)

Answer 85

participants were shown a video of a car crash and either asked if the saw ‘a’ broken headlight or ‘the’ broken headlight, but the video didn’t show a broken headlight. 7% of the a group said yes, 17% of the the group said yes

Question 86

Logie (1995)

Answer 86

suggested sub-dividing the visual sketchpad into the visual cache and inner scribe

Question 87

MCI Modified Cognitive Interview

Answer 87

for use with children

Question 88

Mello and Fisher (1996)

Answer 88

when CI and normal interview techniques were tested on both 72-year-olds’ and 22-year-olds’ memory, CI was found to be better for both, but was found to be a significant advantage for the elderly

Question 89

Memon and Yarmey (1999)

Answer 89

77 undergraduates were instructed to act as kidnap victims and heard taped instructions given by mock abductors. Two days later, witnesses recall was tested using either CI or a structured interview. Participants then rated the abductors’ voice for nine speech characteristics and attempt to identify his voice from an audiotaped lineup. It concluded that the success of CI is better explained through its influence on social components of interviewing rather than the free recall aspect

Question 90

Miles and Hardman (1998)

Answer 90

found that people who learnt a list of words whilst exercising on an exercise bike remembered better than those who learnt at rest

Question 91

Milne and Bull (2002)

Answer 91

this laboratory experiment found that a combination of ‘report everything’ and ‘mental reinstatement’ significantly increased participants’ recall, however, this study lacked ecological validity

Question 92

Mind Mapping

Answer 92

a method of memorising things that involves making links between concepts

Question 93

Non-Declarative Memory

Answer 93

memories that are consciously recalled; procedural memories

Question 94

Overgeneralising

Answer 94

young children often do this when forming concepts, for example, they may get dogs and cats muddled because their dog concept involves fur, four legs and a tail. They may not be able to identify a dog if it doesn’t fit their concept

Question 95

Overton (1972)

Answer 95

asked participants to learn material either drunk or sober, found it was easier to recall memory in the state they learned it

Question 96

Patient KF

Answer 96

suffered brain damage in a motorbike accident which damaged his phonological loop but his visuo-spatial sketchpad remained intact, studied by Shallice and Warrington (1974)

Question 97

Peters (1988)

Answer 97

participants attending a local health clinic for injections met with a researcher and nurse for equal lengths of time and were asked to identify them from photos a week later. They recalled the researcher better than the nurse, suggesting that the anxiety of having an injection had an impact on their memory.

Question 98

Primacy Effect

Answer 98

the tendency fore people to remember the first five or so words from the beginning of a list

Question 99

Proactive Interference

Answer 99

occurs when an older memory interferes with a newer memory

Question 100

Procedural Memory

Answer 100

memory store for actions or skills, such as touch-typing. These memories can be recalled without conscious awareness or much effort, and are often hard to explain to someone else

Question 101

Phonological Loop

Answer 101

deals with auditory information and preserves word order; it has a limited capacity

Question 102

Articulatory Process

Answer 102

inner voice, keeps information in the phonological loop through sub-vocalised repetition of information and is linked to speech production

Question 103

Primary Acoustic Store

Answer 103

stores work recently heard

Question 104

Phonological Store

Answer 104

holds words that are heard

Question 105

Prabhakaran et al

Answer 105

used fMRI scans and found greater right-frontal brain activation for combined verbal and spatial information, but greater posterior activation for non-combined information, providing support for an Episodic Buffer that allows the temporary storage of integrated information

Question 106

Recency Effect

Answer 106

the tendency for people to remember the last five or so words from the end of the list

Question 107

Retroactive Interference

Answer 107

occurs when a newer memory interferes with an older one

Question 108

Retrograde Amnesia

Answer 108

shown to some degree by Patient HM because he couldn’t consciously remember making procedural memories, but unconsciously did

Question 109

Rough and Atkinson 1975

Answer 109

a 1975 study by Michael Rough and Richard Atkinson on mental images and memory. Participants were asked to learn sixty Spanish words but only half were taught to use the key word technique, which can be used to learn foreign language vocabulary and involves mental images. On average, the participants who learnt to use the key word technique did sixty percent better than those who didn’t

Question 110

Schema (pl. schemata)

Answer 110

a word psychologists use to describe a mental framework in which you file all knowledge about certain situations. For example, if you apply concept formation to dentist, you might categorise it as occupation, but your dentist schema would include everything you associate with the dentist. Everyone’s schemata are different

Question 111

Role Schema

Answer 111

knowledge about how to act in a certain role e.g. expectations about how a waiter should act.

Question 112

Event Schema

Answer 112

also known as scripts. Our knowledge and expectation about what should happen in certain scenarios e.g. going to the movies.

Question 113

Self-Schema

Answer 113

all about us, what we are now, what we were in the past and what we hope to be in the future. Our sense of self.

Question 114

Semantic Memory

Answer 114

contains knowledge of the world, such as the capital of France. These are stored in concepts, are generally less personal and less vulnerable to distortion or forgetting and are not time-stamped, so we do not generally remember where we learnt them

Question 115

Serial Position Effect

Answer 115

when asking people to remember a list of words which is greater than the capacity of short term memory they have a tendency to remember words from the beginning of the list

Question 116

Skim Reading

Answer 116

psychologists have found it is easier to memorise things if you skim read before close reading something

Question 117

Stein and Memon (2006)

Answer 117

This Brazilian study found that CI increased the amount of correct information obtained and the detail of information when compared with normal interviewing techniques

Question 118

Trojani and Grossi (1995)

Answer 118

SC case study, who suffered brain damage affecting the functioning of the phonological loop but not the visuo-spatial sketchpad, suggesting that the phonological loop and visual spatial sketchpad are separate systems

Question 119

Tulving and Pearlstone (1966)

Answer 119

gave participants a list of 48 words to learn, organised into 12 categories of 4 words each. In one group, categories were given headings, in one they weren’t. The group with the headings remembered better

Question 120

Tulving and Psota (1971)

Answer 120

participants were given 6 different word lists to remember, each consisting of 24 words divided into 6 different categories. One group was asked to simply write down as many words as they could remember and one was given category names. The second group performed significantly better than the first

Question 121

Underwood (1957)

Answer 121

gave participants a list of nonsense syllables to remember and tested them 24 hours later. Memory was far worse than expected suggesting other irrelevant experiences were causing confusion and leading to proactive interference

Question 122

Underwood and Postman (1960)

Answer 122

involved asking people to remember lists of paired words. Participants later had their recall tested to see if they remembered the first or second list better. A control condition was used to see what recall will occur when there is no interference

Question 123

Valentine and Coxon (1997)

Answer 123

found both elderly and children are more likely to answer non-leading questions incorrectly, but children are more likely to be misled by leading questions

Question 124

Verbal Rehearsal

Answer 124

repeating something multiple times to improve memory

Question 125

Visuo-Cache

Answer 125

stores visual and spatial information

Question 126

Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad

Answer 126

stores visual and spatial information and has a limited capacity of 3-4 items; it was subdivided by Logie

Question 127

Weston Bousfield Experiment 1953

Answer 127

Bousfield asked participants to learn a list of 60 words that could be divided into four categories. Though the words were presented in a random order, the participants tended to remember them in groups, and remember them better if they were given category headings as cues

Question 128

Working Memory Model

Answer 128

states that memory is not just one store but a number of different stores, states that we can simultaneously process different things provided different parts of the brain are used

Question 129

Wright and Holliday (2007)

Answer 129

earlier studies have shown that recall decreases significantly between the ages of 75-95, however this study showed that the CI technique leads to older participants recalling significantly greater detail without giving any false information

Question 130

Yerkes-Dodson Law (1908)

Answer 130

says that performance in memory or recall is best in conditions that arouse medium anxiety levels, such as an experiment

Question 131

Yuille and Custhall (1986)

Answer 131

a thief stole guns and money in broad daylight, shot the shop owner who then shot and killed him. The witnesses recalled all of the important information accurately in detail, even after police used leading questions to try and throw them. This shows that real life cases involving recall contradict laboratory studies