Paper 1 Key terms

• short term memory: the limited-capacity memory store. In STM, coding is mainly acoustic (sounds), capacity is between 5 and 9 items on average, duration is about 18 seconds
• Long term memory: the permanent memory store. In LTM, coding is mainly semantic (meaning), it has unlimited capacity and can store memories for up to a lifetime
• Coding: The format in which information is stored in the various memory stores
• Capacity: the amount of information that can be held in a memory store
• Duration: The length of time information can be held in memory
• Conformity: a change in a person's behaviour or opinions as a result of real or imagined peer pressure from a person or group of people (Aronson)
• Group size: Asch increased the size of the group by adding more confederates, thus increasing the size of the majority. Conformity increased with group size, but only up to a point, levelling off when the majority was greater than three
• Unanimity: The extent to which all the members of a group agree. In Asch's studies, the majority was unanimous when all the confederates selected the same comparison line. This produced the greatest degree of conformity in the naive participants
• Task difficulty: Asch's line-judging task is more difficult when it becomes harder to work out the correct answer. Conformity increased because naive participants assume that the majority is more likely to be right