Unit one memory

AQA A psychology

Memory

Multi-store model (slide 3 onwards) Working memory (Slide 9 onwards) Memory improvement (slide 16 onwards) Cognitive interview (slide 19 onwards) Effects of age on EWT (slide 23 onwards) Effects of anxiety on EWT (slide 25 onwards) Misleading information and EWT (slide 28

onwards)

Multi-store model

By Atkinson and Shiffrin

Consists of 3 main stores:

- the sensory memory

- the short term store

- The long term store

Sensory store

The Sensory Memory Store is what the information is first encoded in

Information can be held in this store for a maximum of 2 seconds before decay

If the information is attended to within these 2 seconds then it moves to the Short Term Store

Short term store

Information in the Short Term Store may be held for between 18 and 30 seconds before it’s forgotten

This store has a capacity of 7 (plus or minus 2) chunks so 7 +/- 2 chunks

If the information in this store is rehearsed within the 18-30 seconds then it will move to the Long Term Store

Information is encoded primarily in a Phonological format

Long term store

The long term store can store a potentially limitless amount of information

It can hold this information for up to a life time

The format the information is encoded in is Semantic (information stored by meaning)

A phrase to throw in your answer:The long term and short term stores are Unitary

Evaluation

Patients with brain damage and memory problems strengthen the model

Such as KF who suffered a brain injury in a motor cycle accident

His long term memory was fine But he couldn’t remember more than 2 chunks of

information at a time in the short term memory This flawed the model as the model states that a long term

memory is created through retrieval and rehearsal in the short term memory which he couldn’t do but still managed to create new long term memories

Evaluation

The case of Clive wearing strengthened the model

His episodic buffer was damaged leading to no new short term information to be stored

But he still had full recollections of old memories

This case proves the existence of separate stores (LTM and STM)

Evaluation

Baddeley and Hitch’s Working Memory proved that this model is too simplistic

They proved that the short term memory consists of other groups with in it

This is a weakness of the model

The working memory

By Baddeley and Hitch

They said that the multi-store model was too simplistic and that it didn’t go into enough detail when explaining the short term memory

A way to remember the names of who made which model (multi-store or working) think that:

‘Baddeley reacted Badly to the Multi-store’

The working memory

Consisted of three main subcomponents to the short term memory

- Central executive- Visuo-Spatial sketchpad- Phonological loop

Central executive

It basically the ‘boss’ of the other two (visuo and phono which are called the slave systems)

It’s responsible for allocating processing resources to the other two components as it is the most important part of the model

Visuo-spatial sketchpad

Processes visual images

Phonological loop

Consists of another 2 factors including:-The Phonological store -The Articulatory control

The Phonological loop processes speech based form of information (sounds)

The working memory

To test their memory model Baddeley put participants into two groups

One group were given two visual tasks to completeAnd the other group were given one visual and one

verbal taskHe found that those with the task of completing one of

each task instead of two visual tasks had no problem doing to correctly but the first group had difficulty.

This shows that when undertaking two visual tasks participants had to compete for the limited resources of the visuo-spatial sketch pad and provides strong evidence of its existence and the separated existence of the phonological loop or visuo…

Evaluation

The central executive cannot be measured directly, it must be done through the two slave systems (weakness)

There is also no evidence to suggest the existence of a central executive which is ironic as it is the most important factor of the whole model (weakness)

This model explains patients such as KF as it goes beyond the multi-store model’s idea of the short term memory involving only rehearsal to convert information into long term memories (strength)

Memory improvement

There are three easy ways of improvement to remember:

Verbal mnemonics

Visual mnemonics

Cues and context

Verbal mnemonics

Verbal mnemonics is the use of words to aid recall

This includes Acronym Acrostic and Rhyme

Visual mnemonics Visual mnemonics includes relating words with

numbers e.g. one:bun two:shoe three:tree

Cues and context

This involves the idea that information is best recalled in the same place as it was learned

Godden and Baddeley

They gave deep sea divers the task of learning a list of words

They told half of the divers to learn the list on land and half of the other divers to learn it under water

They then told the divers to recall the list in the opposite condition to where they learned the list (so if the memorised the it on land they tried to recall it under water)

They found that the list was most accurately recalled if the divers were in the same place as when they learned it

Cognitive interview

Gieselman came up with the cognitive interview as a way to improve the amount of information that was recalled in eye witness testimonies

The interview consisted mainly of 5 techniques…

Techniques The interviewee was told asked to make

themselves comfortable and relaxed

Now for the next four techniques that the person was asked in the interview, remember: R R C C

R eport absolutely everything you remember R einstate the context at the time of the event C hange the order in which you recall the event C hange your perspective

Gieselman

To test his interviewHe took 51 volunteers Made them watch a video of a violent crime48 hours later half of the pp’s were interviewed

standardly and the other half, cognitivelyBy using the cognitive interview he found that

more relevant details were recalled and the same amount of incorrect details were recalled

Proving that the interview worked

Evaluation The problem with the interview is that it took time and

money to train police officers to be able to conduct the interview

The experiment lacked ecological validity as it took place in a laboratory setting

There is also the risk of demand characteristics or personality biased with the pp’s being volunteers, effecting reliability and generalisability

But as a strength there was a study by Fisher et al who used a naturalistic observation technique to study the effectiveness of the interview, he saw that police had gained 47% more information from using the cognitive interview

Effects of age on EWT

Kent and Yuille

Asked children to identify from a set of photographs, a person that they had previously seen that day

They found that children of 9 years old were more likely to identify a person in the photographs, even if they had never seen that person before than 14 year olds were

They found that this was because they didn’t want to tell the adult in charge that they couldn’t complete the task that they were given

It didn’t actually have anything to do with a bad memory

Effects of age on EWT

As was proven in a later experiment showing that children as young as 5 could correctly point out a person that they had seen before in a set of photographs

Long term memories are stored in order of meaning, children may pay attention to different things than adults, effecting what they find to be important

Children are more susceptible to leading questions than adults are which will effect their memories even further

Effects of anxiety on EWT

Loftus’ Weapon Focus

Loftus took volunteers and put them in a waiting room, and told them that they were waiting for the experiment to start

The volunteers overhear an argument going on in the laboratory next door, they hear shouting and chairs breaking

When door opens, a man walks out holding a pen

Effects of anxiety on EWT

This is what only half of the volunteers witnesses, the other half did the same thing only when the man walked out of the room he was holding a bloody knife

The volunteers were later interviewed about what they had seen

He found that the pp’s that saw the bloody knife remembered little else about what they had witnessed, like the mans face for instance

Loftus said that this was because the weapon had caused anxiety and absorbed all of their attention

Evaluating Loftus He deceived his pp’s by not telling them what would be

in the experiment meaning that they couldn’t give their full informed consent, which raises ethical issues

The experimenter had good control over variables with is being a laboratory experiment

With it being an independent group design there wasn’t a risk of order effects

As pp’s didn’t know that they were being experimented on (because they were deceived by the experimenter) the ecological validity is higher then in most laboratory settings

Misleading information and EWTLoftus and Palmer

Leading verbs

They showed pp’s a video of a car crash Later the pp’s were split into 5 groupsSmashed group, bumped group, hit, collided,

and the contacted group

Loftus and Palmer

The interviewer asked each pp individually to estimate how fast the cars were going when they (and they either bumped, smashed, collided, contacted, hit)

They found that the smashed group estimated on average a speed of 10mph faster than all other groups

This proves that the verb used can mislead and effect peoples memories of an event

Loftus and Palmer

Later the same pp’s were asked about the glass at the scene of the car crash

Only the smashed group recalled seeing any glass

There was in fact no glass shown in the video

Evaluation

The fact that it was a laboratory experiment strengthens the control over the variables that the experimenter had, improving validity

But also laboratory experiments make for lower ecological validity

The experiment consisted of a video which isn’t realistic

The whole experiment lacks mundane realism