Memory

• (A01) Coding is how information is stored in the memory stores
• (A01) Capacity is the amount of information that can be stored in the memory stores at any given time
• (A01) Duration is the amount of time that information can be stored for in a certain memory store
• (A01) Short-term memory (STM) is the low capacity memory store, also known as working memory. It has a capacity of 7±2 items, a duration of 18-30 seconds, and it encodes acoustically
• (A01) Long-term memory (LTM) is the permanent memory store. It has an infinite capacity, a duration of a lifetime, and it encodes semantically
• (A03) Baddeley did a study on coding in STM and LTM in 1966. Participants were split into 4 groups and had to learn sets of words of 4 different conditions:

  1. Acoustically similar
  2. Acoustically dissimilar
  3. Semantically similar
  4. Semantically dissimilar

  They had to recall them in the correct order.
• (A03 support) Findings of Baddeley’s 1966 Coding in STM and LTM study:

  When asked to recall the set of words immediately, participants in the acoustically similar condition had the worst recall results. This shows that STM is coded acoustically.

  When asked to recall the set of words 20 minutes later, participants in the semantically similar condition had the worst recall results. This shows that LTM is coded semantically.
• (A03) Jacobs did a study on the capacity of STM in 1887- the digit-span. The participants were read a 4 digit number and were asked to recall them immediately. If they recalled it back to them in the correct order, Jacobs would add another digit and ask to recall it again, and so on. (He also did the same with letters)
• (A03 Support) Findings of Jacobs’ 1887 digit span study:

  He found that the average digit-span was roughly 9. He found that the average letter-span was roughly 7.
• (A03) Miller did a study on the capacity of STM and ‘chunking’ in 1956. He noticed a pattern of things coming in 7s (e.g colours of the rainbow). He came to the conclusion that we can store 7 items in our STM, plus or minus 2. He also noted that we find it easy to recall small chunks of information, made of letters, words or digits. He called this ‘chunking’.
• (A03) Peterson and Peterson did a study on the duration of STM in 1959. Each participant was given a consonant trigram to remember (e.g YCG) and a 3 digit number to count backwards from, which would keep them from rehearsing it. They had to be recalled after 3 seconds, increasing by 3 seconds each trial, until 18 seconds.
• (A03 Support) Findings of Peterson and Peterson‘s 1959 study on the duration of STM:

  After 3 seconds, recall of the trigram was 80%.

  After 6 seconds, recall of the trigram was 50%.

  After 18 seconds, recall of the trigram was 3%.

  This shows that the average duration of STM is 18 seconds, without rehearsal.
• (A03) Bahrick carried out a study on the duration of LTM in 1975. He got participants of different ages to look at pictures of people they graduated with and were asked to recall the names of each person.
• (A03 Support) Findings of Bahrick’s 1975 study on duration of LTM:

  The recall percentage lowered very slightly over time, which suggests that information can last a lifetime in LTM.
• (A01) What are the stores mentioned in the Multi-Store Model of Memory?

  Sensory-register, STM, LTM
• (A01) What does the Multi-Store Model suggest moves information from the sensory-register to STM?

  Attention
• (A01) Who was the Multi-Store Model proposed by and when?

  Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968
• (A01) How does the Multi-Store Model suggest information is moved from STM to LTM?

  through prolonged rehearsal
• (A01) How does the Multi-Store Model suggest information is moved from LTM to STM?

  through retrieval
• (A01) How does the Multi-Store Model suggest information is kept in STM?

  through maintenance rehearsal
• (A01) What does the Multi-Store Model suggest are the explanations for forgetting in STM?

  Decay and displacement
• (A01) What does the Multi-Store Model suggest are the explanations for forgetting in LTM?

  Interference
• (A03 support) Why does Baddeley’s coding in STM and LTM study support the Multi-Store Model?

  because it shows that STM and LTM are coded differently, which shows they must be separate stores, like the Multi-Store Model suggests
• (A01) What are the three types of LTM?

  Episodic, Semantic and Procedural
• (A01) What is explicit/declarative memory?


  Memories that you do have to make a conscious effort to recall
• (A01) What is implicit/non-declarative memory?


  Memories that you don’t have to make a conscious effort to recall
• (A01) What types of LTM are explicit?

  Episodic and semantic
• (A01) What types of LTM are implict?

  Procedural
• (A01) Episodic memory is our ability to recall events that have happened in our life.
• (A01) Three key things about episodic memory?

  1. It is timestamped
  2. It consists of lots of details woven together to make a complex memory
  3. It is explicit
• (A01) Semantic memory is the memory of knowledge- kind of like an encyclopaedia or a dictionary. It is less vulnerable to distortion or forgetting.
• (A01) Procedural memory is the memory of how we do things. It is the only type of implicit LTM, and is commonly known as our muscle memories.
• (A01) What part of the brain is integral to explicit memory?

  Hippocampus
• (A01) What part of the brain is integral to implicit memory?

  Amygdala
• (A01) All the stimuli we receive from the environment passes through the sensory-register. The sensory-register is made of multiple stores- one for each sense, which is why it encodes modality-free. The duration of the sensory-register is <0.5 seconds, but the capacity is very high.
• (A01) The Working-Memory-Model (WMM) was created by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974 as an improvement on the Multi-Store-Model. It suggests that STM is an active system with 4 different components consisting of a central-executive and 3 slave systems.
• (A01) WMM- Central Executive:

  The Central Executive is considered the most important component of the WMM. Its purpose is to tell the slave-systems what to do. It has a limited capacity, and encodes modality-free.
• (A01) One of the slave systems in the WMM is the phonological-loop (PL). It is split into two subsystem: the phonological-store (the inner ear) and the articulatory-process (the inner voice). Its purpose is to store the words you hear, and allows for maintenance-rehearsal— to process what we hear, both when spoken and written down. It has a capacity of roughly 2 seconds worth of information, and it encodes acoustically.
• (A01) One of the slave systems in the WMM is the Visuo-spatial-sketchpad (VSS). Its purpose is to store visual/spatial information. It is split into the visual-cache, which stores visual data, and the inner-scribe, which records where objects are in relation to each other. It has a capacity of roughly 3-4 objects, and it encodes visually.
• (A01) One of the slave systems of the WMM is the episodic-buffer (EB). Its purpose is to link information from the other slave systems to form events in your mind, and acts like a storage-component. It has a capacity of roughly 4 chunks and encodes modality-free.