Unit one memory AQA A psychology Memory
Transcript of Unit one memory AQA A psychology Memory
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