cognitive psychology

• sensory store

  • duration - very short
  • capacity-rather large
  • forgetting - occur by decay
• short term store

  • recieves info from sensory store
  • transfers info to long term store via rehearsal
  • duration-18-30 seconds
  • encoding- acoustic
  • capacity- 7 +/- items
  • forgetting- by displacemement if info entered into the sts faster than can be transferred to ltm otherwise by decay
• long term store

  • capcity + duration- limitless
  • encoding- semantic
  • forgetting occur by decay
  • rehearsal maintains info in stm
  • retrieval- may use several mechanisms
• strength of MSM

  • Glanzer and cunitz supports notion of n ltm and stm store as well as the importance of reheasral via how primacy effect occurs due to rehearsal of the first words that are then transferred into the ltm
  • and how recency effect occurs because those are the last words to be presented
• weakness of MSM

  • soem case study evidence challenges single ltm store `
  • clive wearing had different types of ltm for different things e.g. proceudural for skills and stores for remembering biographical info
  • Aswell as this KF could still add memories to ltm even though his stm was damaged.
  • MSM doesnt explain this but his condition supports wmm
• strength of case studies

  • can give insight into how something works when it is functioning correclty such as brain damage on memory
  • case study on KF whos stm was impaired following a accident but his ltm was still intact suggesting seperate physicial stores in the brain
  • the detail collected on a case study may lead to findings that conflict with current theories and stimulate new paths for research
• weakness of case studies

  • unusual by nature so have poor reliability as replicating them exactly will be unlikely
  • due to sample size its unlikely findings from a case study alone can be generalised to a whole pop
• working memory model

  • baddeley and hitch developed the idea of wmm to replace the idea of a unitary stm
  • this model says stm is more active and complex
  • wmm suggests stm can comlete 2 different tasks at the same time
• central executive

  • controls the other slave components
  • has a limited capacity
  • decides what the wmm pays attention to and it can ahndle more than one task at once
• visuo spatial sketchpad

  • holds visual memories
  • limited capacity
  • used for spatial tasks
• phonological loop

  • limited capacity
  • deals with acoustic info
  • two parts:
  • phonological store-sound based info and duraion of 2 seconds
  • articulatory loop- linked to speech production. rehearse and stoe speech collected. repeated in a loop
• episodic buffer

  • links info across different slave systems to bring together type of info from other components
  • temporary storage with limited capacity
• strength of wmm

  • baddeley and hitch dual task experiment
  • we can do 2 diff tasks that take up space in diff stores
  • when asked to complete a task using the articulatory loop and seperate task in ce recall isnt effected
  • however 2 similar tasks bith in the AL recall is affected
• Weakness of the wmm

  • The Ce doesnt explain very much
  • baddeley suspects the ce consists of seperate sub components
  • this means that working memory has not been fully explained beacyse the ce still needs to be more specified
• Episodic and semantic memory

  • tulving suggested that the msms view of long term memory was too simplisti
  • he argued there are at least 2 ltm systems containing different types of information
• episodic memory

  • ability to recall events/episodes from our lives
  • timestamped- you remember when they happened
  • multiple elements- one episode includes several elements interwoven to produce a single memory
• semantic memory

  • stores our knowledge of the world
  • language- relies on semantic memory because it stores organised knowledge of words as well as the underlying concepts
  • mental representation of things that are not present
  • less vulnerable to forgetting
  • not time stamped
  • shared facts
• strength for episodic and semantic memory

  • HMs episodic memory was impaired but his semantic memory was relatively unaffected
  • this supports tulvings view that there are different memory stores in LtM
• weakness of episodic and semantic memory

  • a major weakness is lack of control over variables in case studies
  • studies involve people who have experienced unexpected brain damage so the researcher has no knowledge of the patients memory before the damage `
  • lack of control reduces validity and limits what such studies can tell us about types of LTM
• reonctructive memory

  • bartlett argued that memories are reconstrucions because memory is an active process in which we sstore fragments of information
  • we store framgments and when we try to recall something we build (reconstruct) fragments into a meaningful whole
• bartlett war of the ghosts

  • pps read a american folk tale ware of the ghoosts and reproduced it 15 mins later
  • bartlett showed the new version to another person who reproduced it a short time later
  • he repeated this chain with further participants
  • the story changed became shorter through leaving out unfamiliar details
  • reconstructions were not random but made the story mmore conventional coherent and meaningul to the pps
• schema theory

  • a mental package of knowledge
  • for example think of words associated with a bank robbery these reoresent your bank robbery schema
  • during everyday experiences the relevant xhema is activated
  • the schema allows us to process information about the situation more efficiently
  • schemas can be changed by new knowledge and experiences
• schemas and memory

  • encoding- new knowledhe that conflicts with an existing schema might not be encoded in the first place because it doesnt fit with what you expect
  • retrieval later on you might recall only these elements of the mempry that fit the relevent schema
  • this is what happened in bartletts study because the foreign nature of the story meant large parts of it didnt match the british pps schemas
• Strength of recontructive memory

  • Bartletts findings and the theory based on them are more relevent to real life processes
• weakness of reconstructive memory

  • bartletts research did nt use rigorously controlled methods and lacked objectivity
  • for example instructions were not standardised so the pps experiences of the procedure were inconsistent making it ard to compare reproductions
  • this means the evidence underlying reconstructive memory lacks credibility
• The multi-store model describes memory as consisting of 3 basic stores: a sensory register, short-term store and long term store.
• The SR is where information from the senses is stored, but only for a duration of approximately half a second before it is forgotten.
• If attended to, sensory information moves into the STM for temporary storage, which will be encoded visually (as an image) or acoustically (as a sound).
• STM is thought to have a capacity of 5-9 items and duration of approximately 30 seconds.
• This capacity can be increased through 'chunking' which means grouping items together.
• Maintenance rehearsal of information helps to retain information in the STM, and consolidate it to LTM, which is predominantly encoded semantically.
• Information can be stored and retrieved for up to any duration, and equally has a seemingly unlimited capacity.
• Research to support the MSM comes from Glazer and Cunitz. They came up with the serial position effect. The primacy effect showed the tendency to recall the first few items in a list) and the recency effect

  showed the tendency to remember the first few items in a list. People tend not to remember the items in the middle of the list. This demonstrates the difference between STM and LTM because people

  remembered words from 2 separate memory stores and often forgot the words in the middle of the list as the MSM suggested.
• The main criticism of the MSM is that it oversimplifies something as complex as human memory in to a basic model. This model cannot possibly account for all aspects of human memory, such as our

  performance on dual task performances. Later models such as the working memory model may therefore be more appropriate in explaining human memory.
• The MSM was a useful model of the memory system in its day. It encapsulated many research findings describing the nature of memory and the processes that connect them. However, further research established that the model is over-simplified- e.g. there is more than one type of STM and LTM and more than one type of rehearsal. However, the MSM finally gave way to the WMM which was able to accommodate these findings more successfully.
• Baddeley and Hitches' working memory model explains how short term memory is organised and how it functions.
• The central executive is an attentional process that has a supervisory role.
• The central executive focuses, divides and switches our limited attention.
• The central executive monitors incoming data, makes decisions and allocates slave systems to tasks.
• One of the slave systems in Baddeley and Hitches' working memory model is the phonological loop.