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Memory, Types of LTM, Forgetting, Eyewitness Testimony, The Working Memory…
Memory
Long and Short Term Memory Duration:
- STM - less than 18seconds unless rehearsed.
- LTM - potentially forever.
Peterson and Peterson STM duration:
- 3 syllable test, asked participants to recall 3,6,9,12,15,18seconds without rehearsal, given a task to stop rehearsal (counting down from 100 in threes)
- 90% could recall after 3 seconds, 2% after 18 seconds
Bahrick LTM duration study
- classmate photo recognition - 70% accuracy even after 48yrs
Evaluation, Capacity
Size DOES matter.
- Research has found that chunk size affects number of chunks that can be remembered.
- Simon et al found that people have a smaller memory span for large chunks.
- This supports the view that the STM has a limited capacity, despite the benefits of chunking
Millers findings have not been replicated
- Cowan reviewed studies and found that it is more likely that we are limited to four, not seven, chunks.
- This suggests STM is not as extensive as Miller initially suggested.
Duration Evaluation
Testing STM is artificial
- A criticism of STM tests is that they tend to take place in artificial settings.
- This presents a lack of ecological validity, questioning the accuracy of the results in a real life setting.
STM results may be due to displacement
- Peterson and Peterson's study was criticised because it did not measure what it set out to measure.
- The counting back displacement technique may have caused the lack of recall rather than decay.
Coding evaluation.
LTM may not be exclusively semantic, either.
- Frost found that long-term recall was related to visual as well as semantic categories.
- This suggests that LTM is encoded using all types of
STM may not be exclusively acoustic
- Brandimote found that visual coding is used in STM when given pictures to remember and stopped from rehearsing.
- This suggests that there may be multiple types of coding involved in STM.
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Coding:
- LTM is coded semantically and STM is coded acoustically.
- Baddeley found this is his study.
Capacity:
- STM - Millers magic number, seven plus or minus two
- LTM - potentially unlimited
Types of LTM
Evaluation
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Research may not be generalisable
- brain damaged patients may not reflect general community
There is evidence of this from brain scans
- Different areas appear active when different kinds of LTM are being used.
Episodic
events that have happened in someones lifetime. for example, a memory from childhood, a night out or a concert.
Procedural
a skill, how to ride a bike, driving a car knowing HOW to do something
Semantic
memories related to knowledge, shared by everyone, for example, two plus two is four
Forgetting
Retrieval failure
State-dependent forgetting
- Goodwin et al - remembering things drunk or sober. Drunk remembered better when drunk and sober remembered better when sober.
Context-dependent forgetting
- Baddely and Godden - had divers remember things underwater and above water. Found things learned underwater were remembered better underwater, and vice versa.
The most effective way to remember something is through a cue - retrieval failure is forgetting through the absence of cues.
RF evaluation
Real word applications.
- Coveney tested whether changing the recall context from the learning context affected recall.
- Medical students were given audio lists in 2 learning environments: a tutorial room around a table and an operating theatre. There was no significant
Retrieval cues do not always work.
- More difficult thought processes are required to learn more challenging things, and cues do not always work in these cases.
- This suggests retrieval cues cannot explain all kinds of forgetting.
Students often struggle to recall in exams due to RF
- Gallagher tested weather including info from class lectures in test items as retrieval cues enhanced performance in tests. Found that it significantly improved test recall than control group with no cues.
- This supported RF
Interference
Proactive Interference
- old effects new - old people would say to young people: "BE PROACTIVE!!"
- Underwood found that people were more able to understand earlier words in a sequence.
Retroactive interference.
- new effects old - young people may say "WOW that's so retro!"
- Muller and Pilzecker identified RI in a study where participants were given an intervening task
Interference evaluation:
interference only explains some kinds of forgetting
- in real life, interference does not happen in most cases. it is unusual for interference to cause forgetting
research is artificial
- the results do not have much ecological validity
Eyewitness Testimony
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Effect of Anxiety
Anxiety has a positive effect on memory
- Christianson and Hubinette found that recall was more accurate the more anxious a person was. Yerkes-Dodson Law, high anxiety, high performance.
Johnson and Scott study
- Bloody knife vs Greasy pen. Asked to remember what the person looked like. Accuracy of situation was 49% in greasy pen situation and 33% in knife situation, supporting Loftus.
Anxiety has a negative effect on memory
- Loftus found that the presence of a weapon draws the persons attention to the weapon, so they are not able to remember much else.
Anxiety evaluation
Real life vs lab studies
- Lab studies may mot create the real levels of anxiety experienced when witnessing an actual crime.
- Deffenbacher reviewed 34 studies and concluded that generally, lab studies demonstrate that anxiety reduces accuracy,
Research does not always support weapon focus effect
- there is no simple rule about anxiety in eyewitness testimony.
Weapon focus may not be caused by anxiety.
- Pickel argues that the weapon focus effect could be a consequence of surprise rather than anxiety.
- Participants watched someone enter a hair salon with scissors (high threat, low surprise), a whole raw chicken (low threat, high surprise), and a wallet (low threat, low surprise). Accuracy was lowest in the high surprise category.
The Working Memory Model
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Evaluation:
Evidence from brain-damaged patients.
- Shallice and Warrington studied KF. His brain damaged only affected the phonological loop through the forgetting of auditory information.
- This supports the idea that they are separate areas of the brain.
Problems using case studies
- There are issues in using brain damaged participants in studies as they may under-perform in tasks indirectly, not as a result of damage to particular areas. They may, for example, have difficulty paying attention to tasks.
- This is important, because it means that it is difficult to generalise findings to the wider population.
The problem with dual task performance:
- a key strength in the WMM is that it explains why we can perform an auditory task and a visual task at the same time (dual task performance)
- Baddeley and Hitch found that participants were slower completing tasks which involved CE and PL
- This suggests central exec is separate to phonological loop.
Cognitive Interview
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Evaluation
Quantity rather than quality of recall
- A criticism of the CI is that effectiveness is often measured in terms of quantity rather than the quality of information
Kohnken found that there was also an increase of false information.
A lot of funding and training is necessary for the CI to be used in practice correctly, so may not be the most practical
The cognitive interview is effective
- There is a large amount of supporting research.
- Kohnken did a meta-analysis and found a 34% increase in accurate information.
- Milne and Bull found an increase in accurate report with just the 'report everything' and 'mental reinstatement' element.
The cognitive interview (CI) was developed to increase the accessibility of stored information through the use of multiple retrieval strategies.