Memory

Question 1

Define STM vs LTM

Answer 1

Short-term memory (STM): The limited-capacity memory store. In STM coding is mainly acoustic (sounds), capacity is between 5 and 9 items on average, duration is about 18 seconds.

Long-term memory (LTM): The permanent memory store. In LTM coding is mainly semantic (meaning), it has unlimited capacity and can store memories for up to a lifetime.

Question 2

Define coding, capacity and duration

Answer 2

Coding: The format in which information is stored in the various memory stores.
Capacity: The amount of information that can be held in a memory store.
Duration: The length of time information can be held in memory.

Question 3

What were Alan Baddeley’s different lists of words to four groups to remember

Research on coding

Answer 3

Group 1: (acoustically similar) - words sounded similar (eg. cat, cab, can)

Group 2: (acoustically dissimilar) - words sounded different (eg. pit, few, cow)

Group 3: (semantically similar) - words with similar meanings (eg. great, large, big)

Group 4: (semantically dissimilar) - words with different meanings (eg. good, huge, hot)

Question 4

What is digit span and who did this

Research on capacity

Answer 4

Joseph Jacobs (1887)

Found out how much information the STM can hold by using digit span - The amount of numbers correctly recalled out loud by a participant.

Question 5

What research was done on duration of the STM and what were the findings, what does this show?

Answer 5

Margaret and Lloyd Peterson (1959) tested 24 students in eight trials each.

Students were given a consonant syllable (E.g YCG) and a 3-digit number to remember and told to count back from this number. They were then told to stop at varying times and found that after 3 seconds recall was 80% and after 18 it was 3%.

Suggesting that STM duration may be about 18s unless information is repeated.

Question 6

What research was done on the duration of LTM and what were the findings, what does this show?

Answer 6

Bahrick (1975) studied 392 American participants aged between 17 and 74. High school year books were obtained and recall was tested in various ways such as (1) photo-recognition test consisting of 50 photos, some from participants year books. (2) free recall test where participants recalled all the names of their graduating class.

Participants tested within 15 years of graduation were about 90% accurate in photo recognition VS 70% after 48 years. Free recall was less accurate than recognition with about 60% accuracy after 15 years and 30% after 48 years.

Showing that LTM may last up to a lifetime for some material.

Question 7

Evaluate research on coding

Answer 7

+ Baddeley Identifies a clear difference in memory stores which was an important step in understanding the memory system.

— Artificial stimuli was used rather than meaningful material (no personal meaning there is limited application such as in everyday life.

Question 8

Evaluate research on capacity

Answer 8

+ Jacob’s study has been replicated so high in reliability. Suggesting that Jacob’s study is a valid test of digit span in STM.

— It is outdated as it was old and lacking adequate controls. When testing, confounding / extraneous variables can impact on the test.

Question 9

Evaluate research on duration

Answer 9

+ High external validity because the researchers investigated meaningful memories (i.e. of people’s names and faces). When studies on LTM were conducted with meaningless pictures to be remembered, recall rates were lower.

— Meaningless stimuli in STM study because recalling consonant syllables does not reflect most everyday memory activities where what we are trying to remember is meaningful.

Question 10

Define Multi-store model

and

Sensory register

Answer 10

MSM: A representation of how memory works in terms of three stores called the sensory register, STM & LTM. It also describes how information is transferred from one store to another, what makes some memories last what makes some disappear

Sensory register: The memory stores for each of our five senses such as vision (iconic store) and hearing (echoic store). Coding in the iconic sensory register is visual and in the echoic it is acoustic. The capacity of sensory registers is huge (millions of receptors) and information (duration) lasts for a very short time (less than half a second)

Question 11

What is primary effect VS recency effect

Answer 11

Primary: Better recall for items at the beginning of a list (attributed to LTM because those items receive more rehearsal) - unaffected by a distractor

Recency: Better recall for items at the end of a list (attributed to STM because they are still present in STM when recall begins)
- Eliminated by a distractor- supports separate STM and LTM stores

Question 12

What is the capacity and duration of the sensory store an how does information pass into the STM

Answer 12

Duration: Material is very brief - less than half a second

Capacity: Very high, for example over one hundred million cells in one eye, each storing data

Information is only able to pass further into the memory system if you pay attention to it. So attention is the key process.

Question 13

What is the duration and capacity of STM

Answer 13

Duration: 18s unless it is rehearsed

Capacity: Is a limited capacity store

Question 14

Define what hippocampus and maintenance rehearsal do

Answer 14

Hippocampus: There is a hippocampus on both sides (hemispheres) of the brain. The hippocampus has been show to play a major role in memory.

MR: Occurs when we repeat (rehearse) material to ourselves over and over again. We can keep the information in our STMs as long as we rehearse it. If we rehearse it long enough, it passes into long-term memory (LTM).

Question 15

What is the capacity and duration of the LTM

Answer 15

Duration: May be up to a lifetime as is mostly coded semantically

Capacity: Thought to be practically unlimited

Question 16

Evaluations of MSM (+) with a counterpoint

Answer 16

Research support:

Studies show differences between STM and LTM. Example: Baddeley’s work reveals that similar-sounding words are mixed up in STM, while similar-meaning words are confused in LTM. Capacity and duration research further supports separate memory stores

Counterpoint:

Experiments often use simple, meaningless stimuli (digits, letters, syllables), which may not reflect everyday memory tasks involving meaningful information.

Question 17

Evaluate MSM (-)

Answer 17

Elaborative rehearsal:

The MSM claims that longer (prolonged) rehearsal is necessary for transferring information to LTM.

However, research by Craik and Watkins shows that linking new information to existing knowledge (elaborative rehearsal) is more crucial than mere repetition.

Question 18

List and define the 3 types of long-term memory

Answer 18

Episodic: LTM store for personal events including memories of when the events occurred and of the people, objects, places and behaviours involved. Memories have to be retrieved consciously and with effort.

Semantic: LTM store for our knowledge of the world including facts and our knowledge of the what words and concepts mean. Memories usually need to be recalled deliberately.

Procedural: LTM store for our knowledge of how to do things. This includes our memories of learned skills. We usually recall these memories without making a conscious or deliberate effort.

Question 19

Who is Endel Turving and what did he propose

Answer 19

He was one of the first cognitive psychologists to realise that the the multi-store model’s view of long-term memory (LTM) was too simplistic and inflexible. Tulving proposed that there are in fact three LTM stores, containing quite different types of information. He called them episodic memory, semantic memory and procedural memory.

Question 20

What are the 3 complex features about episodic memories

Answer 20

1. They are all ‘time-stamped’ meaning you remember when they happened as well as what happened.
2. Your memory of a single episode will include several elements such as people, places, objects and behaviours. All of these memories are interwoven into one to produce a single memory.
3. Your have to make a conscious effort to recall episodic memories. You do this quickly, but you are still aware that you are searching for your memory of what happened.

Question 21

What features are in Semantic memory

Answer 21

These memories are not ‘time-stamped’, we don’t usually remember when we first heard about them. Semantic knowledge is less personal and more about facts we all share.

It contains an immense collection of material which, given its nature, is constantly being added to. According to Tulving, it is less vulnerable to distortion and forgetting than episodic memory.

Question 22

Define the working memory model

Answer 22

A representation of short-term memory. It suggests that STM is a dynamic processor of different types of information using subunits co-ordinated by a central decision-making system.

Question 23

Define the central executive and the phonological loop

Answer 23

CE: The component of the WMM that co-ordinates the activities of the three subsystems in memory. It also allocates processing resources to those activities.

PL: The component of the WMM that processes information in terms of sound. This includes both written and spoken material. It’s divided into the phonological store and articulately process.

Question 24

Define the visuo-spatial sketchpad (VSS) and the episodic buffer (EB)

Answer 24

VSS: The component of the WMM that processes visual and spatial information in a mental space often called our ‘inner eye’

EB: The component of the WMM that brings together material from the other subsystems into a single memory rather than separate strands. It also provides a bridge between working memory and long-term memory.

Question 25

Define interference and the 2 types

Answer 25

Forgetting because one memory blacks another causing one or both memories to be distorted or forgotten. - Proactive interference: Forgetting occurs when older memories, already stored, disrupt the recall of newer memories. he degree of forgetting is greater when the memories are similar. - Retroactive interference: Forgetting occurs when newer memories disrupt the recall of older memories already stored. The degree of forgetting is agin greater when the memories are similar.

Question 26

Define retrieval failure and a cue

Answer 26

RF: A form of forgetting. It occurs when we don’t have the necessary cues to access memory. The memory is available but not accessible unless a suitable cue is provided. Cue: A ‘trigger’ of information that allows us to access a memory. Such cues may be meaningful or may be indirectly linked by being encoded at the time of learning. Indirect cues may be external (environmental context) or internal (mood or degree of drunkenness)

Question 27

What were the 6 groups in research on effects of similarity and the findings

Answer 27

• Group 1: Synonyms – Words with the same meanings as the original • Group 2: Antonyms – Words with the opposite meanings to the originals • Group 3: Words unrelated to the original ones. • Group 4: Consonant syllables • Group 5: Three-digit numbers • Group 6: No new list – these participants just rested When the participants were asked to recall the original list of words, the most similar material (synonyms) produced the worst recall. Showing that interference is strongest when the memories are similar.

Question 28

What are 2 examples of non-meaningful cues:

Answer 28

- Context-dependant forgetting: recall depends on external cue - State-dependant forgetting: recall depends on internal cue

Question 29

What are the four conditions of research on context-dependant forgetting and the findings

Answer 29

- Learn on land / recall on land - Learn on land / recall underwater - Learn underwater / recall on land - Learn underwater / recall underwater In two of these conditions the environmental contexts of learning and recall matched, in the other 2 they did not. Accurate recall was 40% lower in the non-matching conditions. Concluding that the external cues available at learning were different from the ones available at recall and this led to retrieval failure.

Question 30

What are the four conditions of research on state-dependant forgetting and the findings

Answer 30

- Learn on drug / recall when on drug - Learn on drug / recall when not on drug - Learn not on drug / recall when on drug - Learn not on drug / recall when not on drug In the conditions where there was a mismatch between internal state at learning and recall, performance on the memory test was significantly worse. So when the cues are absent then there is more forgetting.

Question 31

What is the procedure and findings of loftus and palmer

Answer 31

Procedure: Arranged for 45 participants to watch film clips of car accidents and then asked them questions about the accident. In the critical question (a leading question) (E.g. how fast the cars were travelling). There were five groups of participants and each group was given a different verb in the critical question (Hit, contacted, bumped, collided and smashed) Findings: The mean estimated speed was calculated for each participant group. The verb contacted resulted in a mean estimated speed of 31.8 mph. For the verb smashed, the mean was 40.5 mph. The leading question biased the eyewitness’s recall of an event.

Question 32

What are the 2 explanations for leading questions affecting EWT

Answer 32

Response-bias explanation: Suggests that the wording of the question doesn’t affect their memory it only influences how they decide to answer. Substitution explanation: Suggests that the wording of the question actually alters memory. Loftus and Palmer conducted a second experiment supporting this as participants who originally heard smashed were later more likely to report seeing broken glass than those who heard hit.

Question 33

What are the 4 main techniques for improving EWT

Answer 33

1. Report everything Witnesses are encouraged to include every single detail of the event, even though it may seem irrelevant or the witness doesn’t feel confident about it. Seemingly trivial details may be important and may trigger other important memories 2. Reinstate the context Witness should return to the original crime scene “in their mind” and imagine the environment and their emotions. This is related to context-dependent forgetting. 3. Reverse the order Events should be recalled in a different order from the original sequence. This is done to prevent people reporting their expectations of how the event must have happened. Also preventing dishonesty. 4. Change perspective Witnesses should recall the incident from other people’s perspectives. This is done to disrupt the effect of expectations and also the effect of schema on recall.