Memory Flashcards

Question

What is state dependent forgetting?

Answer 1

Being in a different emotional of physiological state at the time of retrieval may result in retrieval failure

Answer 2

Limitations - cued recall works better for some than others. - does it haver mundane realism? the research often relies on artificial tests of memory - recall of meaningful content is not necessarily aided by context dependent cues as the info is more deeply processed so retrieval failure due to the absence of cues cannot account for all forgetting. Strengths - supporting evidence - Smith - basement room - participants were asked to learn 80 words in a basement room and the next day had to recall the words. They were split into 3 groups - group 1 stayed in the basement room for recall (average recall was 18 words) - group 2 recalled in an upstairs room with different furnishings (average recall was 12) - group 3 was in an upstairs room but told to imagine themselves in basement room (average recall was 17). - Goodwin et al asked male volunteers to recall a list of words when sober or drunk then participants were asked to recall these words a day later when they were wither sober or drunk again. Those who learnt in a drunken state were more likely to recall the words when once again in the drunken state.

Answer 3

Information which wrongly implies that something happened when it didn't and reconstructs their memory.

Answer 4

Leading questions and post-event discussion.

Answer 5

It either has a negative effect on recall or no effect at all. Negative effect - Loftus and Palmer - leading question (asked participants, after being shown videos of traffic accidents, how fast the car was going when it crashed, bumped, contacted, smashed) Those with a words like smashed recalled a greater average speed estimate than those who were asked another word. Gabbert et al - post event discussion - participants watched a short film of a girl stealing money either individually or in pairs and they each saw a different perspective, they then discussed the event and completed a questionnaire. 71% recalled info they hadn't witnessed. 60% in the co-witness condition who had not witnessed the crime claimed the girl was guilty. No effect - Loftus showed participants of a red purse. In immediate recall 98% remembered the colour of the purse correctly. They then read an account of the incident written by a professor (which would imply accuracy) and in a second recall test all but two resisted the blatantly wrong information and still correctly recalled the stolen purses colour.

Answer 6

- For info to be retained in STM need rehearsal. - structural, linear model - distinct characteristics between stores (encoding, capacity and duration) - unitary STM & LTM store - explains process of info transfer - explanations of forgetting differ between stores

Answer 7

Johnson and Scott - participants were in one of two situations, hearing an argument and saw a man run through carrying a pen covered in grease, or holding a paper knife covered in blood. Found that those who witnessed the man with a pen was accurately identified 49% of the time, where as the man holding the knife was correctly identified 33% of the time - started the 'weapon focus' phenomenon. Yuille and Cutshall - researched real life crime, witnesses of a shooting involving an owner of a store and an armed thief - thief was shot dead. Several months layer witnesses were interviewed by researchers who then introduced misleading info into the interview. However, witness accounts remained highly accurate - accuracy 86% for actions, 76% for people and 90% for objects.

Answer 8

Lab experiments (validity - real witnesses are exposed to the event unexpectedly and is likely to experience greater levels of emotion) vs natural experiments.

Answer 9

PROD (perspective, reinstate context, order, detail) Mental reinstatement - cues, makes memory accessible. Report everything - memories are connected, small details help piece together overall picture Change order - stops pre-existing schemas Change perspective - trying to stop pre-existing schemas

Answer 10

Individual differences - advantage of CI is greater in older people. There are problems with CI in practice - requires more time than is available - requires special training Difficulties in establishing effectiveness - difference police stations use different components.

Answer 11

There is evidence to support the existemce of seperate memory stores - PET scans and fMRIs take images of the brain and allow us to see which parts are active when using different types of memory. Research has shown our prefrontal cortex is active when working on a task in STM and the hippocampus is active when we are using our LTM. Can also use the primacy and regency effect to show support for the existence of seperate memory stores. Also indicates that rehearsal leads to the creation of lasting memories. The words in the middle are displaced by the items later in the list. Research by Glanzer and Cunitz demonstrated the primacy and regency effect, also showed that if the participants were given a distraction task before recall, primacy effect remained but the regency effect disappeared. This suggests the primacy effect reflects what is in long term memory and the regency effect would reflect the STM as the distraction task takes up the limited capacity which leads to the displacement and decay of the later items in the list. KF was a case study on a young man who had suffered brain damage after a motorcycle accidence. His LTM was unimpaired and he had no difficulty transferring info from his STM to his LTM however he only had a digit span in STM of 1/2 items, he was also more likely to forget auditory stimuli than visual stimuli. Researchers concluded that KF's problems centred on what they termed the 'auditory-verbal short term store'. This means that his STM is not a single store but consists of seperate components.

Answer 12

Codes speech sounds and has a limited storage capacity. Has two parts - the articulatory control process - inner voice and the phonological store aka the inner ear.

Answer 13

General store for visual and acoustic information and can extract info from the long term memory for present use.

Answer 14

Codes visual info and has a limited storage capacity. Has two parts - the visual cache - the properties of visual items and the inner scribe which is the spacial relations of the object.

Answer 15

Monitors and coordinates mental functions in the WM is involved in reasoning, problem solving, planning and decision making. It has a limited attentional capacity. it also monitors the other components (slave systems)

Answer 16

Iconic - Sperling - presented ps with a visual array of letters, ps were asked to give a full recall, but they could only remember 4/5 letters. Sperling then asked ps to recall a part of the info (e.g. one row), part recall was good and indicated that iconic memory could hold 9/10 items. Full recall bad as letters decayed in a fraction of a second. Echoic - Darwins research showed that echoic memories duration was slightly longer than iconic. Ps listened to recordings of lists of letters and numbers and wore headphones so one list came though the left and the other through the right. The delay between hearing the stimulus and recall varied from 0-4 seconds and as time between presentation and cue increased, recall decreased so while duration better than iconic memory, still very limited.

Answer 17

Conrad - encoding - visually presented ps with a series of 6 letters for 0.75secs each, letters either similar sounding or dissimilar in sound, then had to write down what they could recall in correct order. Ps found it more difficult to recall letters that were similar to eachother. Whilst the letters presented visually, ps transformed stimuli into an acoustic code, hence the acoustic errors - therefore STM relies on acoustic encoding. Jacobs - capacity - used digit span technique, shwed ps sequence of letters at half second intervals and asked for them to be recalled in the correct order. the average number of items ps could remember was their digit span. the average was between 5 and 9 items, however found that people could recall slightly more numbers. (Miller confirmed this in saying it was 7+/-2 items) Peterson/peterson - duration - ps presented with trigram consisting of 3 consonants and p recall was delayed by 3, 6, 9 etc seconds. Asked to recall in correct order . 3 sec delay - 80% correct recall, 6sec - 50%, 18sec - fewer than 10%.

Answer 18

Encoding - Baddeley - presented ps with sequences which were either, acoustically similar/not or semantically similar/not. Each list presented 4 times and recall tested after 20min delay. Ps had difficulty remembering semantically similar words, Baddeley thought this was because the words which were similar in meaning interfered with eachother - which means semantic encoding. Duration - Bahrick et all yearbook study, used American ex high school students aged 17-74, tested memory doing free recall of former classmates, cued recall (photo recognition), cued recall (name recognition) and cued recall (name and photo matching. findings 90% accuracy in name and face recognition tasks for ps who had left highschool up to 34yrs previously. 80% name recognition, 40% face recognition for up to 48yrs left. Free recall a lot less accurate 60% accuracy after 15yrs and 30% after 48yrs.

Answer 19

KF was a case study on a young man who had suffered brain damage after a motorcycle accidence. His LTM was unimpaired and he had no difficulty transferring info from his STM to his LTM however he only had a digit span in STM of 1/2 items, he was also more likely to forget auditory stimuli than visual stimuli. Researchers concluded that KF's problems centred on what they termed the 'auditory-verbal short term store'. This means that his STM is not a single store but consists of seperate components. PET scans have shown that different areas of the brain are active while doing visual and verbal tasks, which proves the existence of seperate components of STM which removes the idea of it being a unitary store. Dual task evidence - Baddeley - letter F task. Participants were given a visual tracking task at the same time they were asked to either describe all the angles on the letter F (a) or perform a verbal task (b) - Ps found it difficult to do task a - this was because they were both using the VSS competing for space in storage, evidence of different components in STM.

Answer 20

Barlett proposed the idea of reconstructive memory which refers to a memory distorted by the individuals prior knowledge and expectations. Argues that when we create memories we only store elements then when we need to recall something the stored elementsare combined with our knowledge (schema) reconstructing our memory. Suggests our memory is quite inaccurate. We may fill in the gaps during EWT and then our memory of the event will be reconstructed so consequently EWT might not be accurate.