Memory

• Peterson and Peterson's study on STM duration

  1. Participants were given a nonsense consonant triad and a three digit number

  2. Participants then had to count down in threes from their three digit number during a retention period of either 3,6,9,12,15 or 18 seconds

  3. After the retention period, participants had to recall the triad they were given
• Baddeley's study on coding in LTM and STM

  1. Baddeley gave participants word lists to learn- one semantically similar, acoustically different, and one semantically different, acoustically similar

  2. Participants struggled short-term with list 2, and long-term with list 1

  3. Baddeley concluded that LTM is encoded semantically and STM acoustically
• Proactive Interference


  Past learning interferes with attempts to learn something new
• Retroactive Interference


  Current attempts at learning interfere with the recollection of past learning
• Goodwin's study on state-dependent forgetting

  1. Participants had to learn a word list either drunk or sober

  2. Recall of the words was best when they were drunk during both encoding and recall or sober during both encoding and recall
• Abernathy's study on context dependent forgetting

  1. Students were tested in different conditions: by their regular instructor in their usual teaching room/different one, or by a different instructor in usual teaching room/different one

  2. Results were best when tested in their usual room by their usual instructor
• Components of the Cognitive Interview

  • Mental reinstatement of events
  • Report everything
  • Change the order
  • Change perspective
• Johnson and Scott's study on the effects of anxiety on the accuracy of EWT

  1. Participants heard an argument and then saw a man run past holding a grease covered pen (low anxiety) or knife covered in blood (high anxiety)

  2. In the low anxiety situation identification of the man was 49% accurate but only 33% in the high anxiety scenario
• Loftus and Palmer in 1974 conducted research on the effects of misleading information on EWT
• Retrieval failure


  Forgetting due to an absence of cues (context-dependent forgetting, state-dependent forgetting)
• Context-dependent forgetting


  Less accurate recall when in a different context to where the memory happened
• State-dependent forgetting


  Less accurate recall due to not being in the same state as when the memory happened (e.g. not being drunk)
• Multi-store model


  Developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)

  Inforation is picked up by the sense organs and enter into the sensory register

  If information is attended to, it enters the STM(all other info is lost due to decay and displacement)

  If information is sufficient rehearsed (maintenance rehearsal), it enters the LTM

  Information in the LTM is unlimited in duration and capacity but can only be accessed by retrieval from the STM
• Working memory model


  Created by Baddeley and Hitch (1974) to replace the STM store of MSM due to criticisms of the STM (STM must be more complex than just a single unitary store)

  • Central executive
  • Phonological loop
  • LTM
  • Visuo-spatial sketchpad
  • Episodic buffer
• Central executive


  “head of the model” - controls attention, receives sense info (or LTM info) and filters(monitors) this, before passing(allocating) on to the sub-systems - limited in capacity (4 items)
• Phonological loop


  Processes auditory coded information and has a limited capacity of what can be said in 2 seconds and contributes to our learning of language (accesses LTM to store and retrieve info about language sounds)

  • Primary acoustic store - inner ear holding words recently heard
  • Articulatory process - inner voice holding info via sub-vocal repetition
• Episodic buffer


  Added to WMM in 2000, as the model needed a general store to hold and integrate info from the VSS, PL, CE and LTM

  Maintains a sense of time-sequencing (recording events that are happening)

  Limited in capacity (4 chunks)

  Links working memory to LTM and wider cognitive processes, such as perception