MEMORY

• Reconstructed memory


  The theory that memories are not exactly what was encoded, but can be influenced by pre-existing experiences and understanding (schema)
• Bartlett's study (The War of the Ghosts)


  Aimed to investigate whether memory of a story can be affected by previous knowledge and cultural background
• Bartlett's study


  • Used 20 British participants who were not told the aim of the study
  • Participants read a Native American story called "The War of the Ghosts" twice, then reproduced it at various intervals
  • Participants changed the story as they tried to remember it, even from the early stages
• Bartlett found that participants changed the story as they tried to remember it, even from the early stages of 15 minutes and throughout further reproductions
• Effort after meaning


  Participants changed the story to make it more acceptable and easier to remember
• The Allport & Postman and Bartlett studies support the idea that schemas and expectations can influence memory and lead to changes in recall
• Bartlett argued that the story had to be strange to the participants in order to observe the changes in their recall
• Encoding


  Putting information into your brain, changing information so it can be stored in the brain
• Storage


  Holding information in your brain for a period of time
• Retrieval


  Locating and bringing back information out of your brain
• Cued recall


  • Remembering a piece of information with a clue or cue
• Free recall


  • Retrieving information without cues
• Memory involves three processes: encoding, storage and retrieval
• Visual encoding


  Storing memories visually, e.g. picturing your house to count the windows
• Acoustic encoding


  Storing memories in terms of what they sound like, e.g. remembering song lyrics
• Semantic encoding


  Storing memories based on meaning and understanding of words and concepts
• Tactile encoding


  Storing memories of what things feel like
• Olfactory memory


  Memory for smells
• Short-term memories (STMs) are brief, e.g. remembering a phone number while dialing it
• Long-term memories (LTMs) last longer and can be retrieved later
• Baddeley's study on encoding


  1. Participants studied lists of words with acoustic or semantic similarity/dissimilarity

  2. Recalled words immediately (STM) or after 20 minutes (LTM)

  3. Results showed STM encoded acoustically, LTM encoded semantically
• Baddeley's study suggests short-term memories are encoded acoustically and long-term memories are encoded semantically
• Baddeley’s study was conducted within a lab where conditions could be carefully controlled so that no other factors would influence participant's ability to recall the lists
• In Baddeley’s study, one important factor that was controlled was poor hearing, which could be an extraneous variable. If participants had poor hearing they might be less likely to hear similarity in words
• One weakness is that Baddeley overlooked cases where encoding in STM is visual rather than acoustic
• Baddeley used quite artificial tasks (word lists). If different stimuli were used STM may not always be acoustic
• Another weakness is that Baddeley may not have been testing LTM at all
• Features of Sensory memory

  • Memories are encoded in a form appropriate to the sense
  • Sensory memory has a very high capacity as all the information from your world passes through your five senses
  • Information remains in your sensory memory for around half a second unless you pay attention to it
• Maintenance Rehearsal


  Silently repeating or rehearsing information will transfer it to long-term memory
• Features of Long-term memory (LTM)


  • Coding tends to be semantic rather than acoustic
  • Capacity is potentially unlimited
  • Duration is potentially up to a lifetime
• The multi-store model suggests that we have just one STM and one LTM. However, research has shown that each of these stores has separate parts
• Short-term memory (STM)


  • Encoding is acoustic
  • Capacity is 5-9 items
  • Duration is less than 30 seconds unless rehearsed
• Primacy effect is higher recall for the first few words on a list
• Recency effect is highest recall for the final few words on a list
• Murdock (1962) found that the likelihood of recall was related to the position of the word in the list, with a primacy effect and a recency effect
• Research with amnesiacs supports the conclusions of the serial position effect, as they show a recency effect but not a primacy effect (Murdock’s study)
• Bartlett's hypothesis was that if a person was given something to remember and then asked to recall the story or picture over a period of weeks or years, the recollection would be endlessly transformed (i.e. changed)
• If the information to be remembered is somewhat unfamiliar and/or unusual, people will impose their own familiar expectations and make the story more familiar over time
• Bartlett kept a record of successive recall (a protocol)
• Transformations observed by Bartlett


  • The story was shortened, mainly by omissions
  • The phrases used were changed to language and concepts from the participant's own culture
  • The recalled version soon became very fixed, though each time it was recalled there were slight variations