short term memory

Question 1

define short term memory.

Answer 1

information stored that occurs daily and without repetition it is likely to disappear/be forgotten in you sleep or over a few weeks.

Question 2

what are the key differences between short term and long term memory?

Answer 2

duration - how long the information is stored.
capacity - how much information can be stored.
encoding - how the information is retained or learnt e.g acoustically.

Question 3

how can the capacity of your STM be assessed?

Answer 3

using the digit span technique:
reviewed research (miller) stated that the capacity of STM is 7+/-2 items
- most people can recall between 5-9 bits of info from their STM.

Question 4

what is chunking?

Answer 4

a technique that can be used to ‘increase’ the capacity of the STM.

Question 5

evaluating research of capacity of STM.

Answer 5

• more recent research (Cowan) suggests capacity is smaller.
• (Simon) the size of the chunks impacts how much you remember.
• there are individual differences, Jacobs found age has a difference - the mean was 6.6 for 8 yr old, and 8.6 for a 19 yr old.

Question 6

how does the STM encode?

Answer 6

acoustically

Question 7

explain the procedure of the duration of the STM.

Answer 7

Peterson and Peterson:
- stated 3 letters ‘nonsense trigram’ followed by 3 digit number.
- participants counted back in 3s until told to stop and then had to recall the trigram.
- repeated at 3,6,9,12,15 and 18 second intervals.

Question 8

state the findings of this experiment.

Answer 8

90 percent recall at 3 second interval.
2 percent recall at 18 second interval.

Question 9

explain the results of this experiment.

Answer 9

• without rehearsal, the duration of STM is between 20-30 seconds.
• the purpose of counting backwards was to distract STM from rehearsing and recalling easier.
• the longer the duration, the harder it was to recall.

Question 10

evaluation of duration.

Answer 10

• nonsense trigrams do not reflect every day realistic memory activities, however it does reflect some e.g postcodes, so it has some relevance.
• in Peterson’s study, you cant establish that participants are actually counting.

Question 11

evaluation of encoding.

Answer 11

STM doesn’t exclusively rely on acoustic code - some research shows it relies on visual codes too.