Memory

• Misleading information:

  Leading question: Loftus and Palmer arranged for students to watch a film clip of car accident and then gave them a question on how fast the cars were travelling.

  This is leading question because there was 5 groups of participants and each was given a different verb in the question.

  Findings:

  • The verb contacted resulted in a mean estimated speed of 31.mph
  • for the verb smashed it was 40.5mph
  • The leading question biased the eyewitness recall of event
• Leading questions AO3

  Strength:

  • Useful real-life application: can make an important positive difference to the lives of real people, for instance by improving the way the legal system works

  Limitation:

  • The task are artificial: participants watched a film clip and it doesn’t replicate an actual accident
• Negative effect on recall

  Anxiety
• Johnson and Scott study


  1. Participants heard an argument in the next room

  2. In 'low-anxiety' condition, a man walked through carrying a pen and with grease on his hands

  3. In 'high-anxiety' condition, participants overheard the same heated argument, but accompanied by the sound of breaking glass, and a man walked out holding a paper knife covered in blood
• Participants later picked out the man from a set of 50 photos

  • 49% of participants who saw the man carrying the pen were able to identify him
  • 33% of participants who saw the man holding the blood-covered knife were able to identify him
• Tunnel theory


  A witness's attention narrows to focus on a weapon due to anxiety
• Weapon focus effect

  • May not be relevant
  • Tests surprise rather than anxiety
• Items used in Pickel (1998) experiment


  • Scissors
  • Handgun
  • Wallet
  • Raw chicken
• Scissors

  • Low anxiety
• Unusual items (chicken and handgun)

  Eyewitness accuracy was significantly poorer
• The weapon focus effect is due to unusualness rather than anxiety/threat
• The weapon focus effect tells us nothing specifically about the effects of anxiety on eyewitness testimony
• Who came up with the Multi-store model?

  Atkinson and Shiffrin
• Capacity meaning

  The quantity of information that can be stored
• Duration meaning

  The amount of time information can be stored for
• Coding meaning

  The format in which information is stored
• Baddely's research on coding

  • 4 groups of participants were given different lists of words to remember
  • Group 1 - Acoustically similar words (sounded the same)
  • Group 2 - Acoustically dissimilar words (sounded different)
  • Group 3 - Semantically similar words (similar meaning)
  • Group 4 - Semantically dissimilar words (all had different meanings)
• Recall task


  Participants were shown the original words and asked to recall them in the correct order
• Short-term memory (STM) recall


  Participants tended to do worse with acoustically similar words
• Long-term memory (LTM) recall after 20 minutes


  Participants did worse with semantically similar words
• This suggests that information is coded semantically in long-term memory
• Research on coding AO3:

  • Artificial stimuli:

  One limitation of Baddeley's study was that it used quite artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material. The word lists had no personal meaning to participants. This means we should be cautious about generalising the findings to different kinds of memory task.

  This suggests that the findings from this study have limited application.
• Research on capacity:

  Digital span:

  Jacobs developed a technique to measure digit span. The researcher gives, for example, 4 digits and then the participant is asked to recall these in the correct order out loud. If this is correct the researcher reads out 5 digits and so on until the participant cannot recall the order correctly. This determines the individual's digit span.

  Jacobs found that the mean span for digits across all participants was 9.3 items. The mean span for letters was 7.3.
• Digital span AO3:

  • Lacking validity- One limitation of Jacobs's study is that it was conducted a long time ago. Early research in psychology often lacked adequate control. For example, some participants may have been distracted while they were being tested so they didn't perform as well as they might. This would mean that the results might not be valid because there were confounding variables that were not controlled.

  However, the results of this study have been confirmed in other research, supporting its validity.