Memory

• Define capacity

  How much information the brain can hold
• Define duration

  How long information can be held for
• Define coding

  The way information is transformed into a format that can be stored and retrieved when necessary
• What is the STM capacity

  5 - 9 items
• What is the STM duration

  18 - 30 seconds
• What is the STM coding

  Acoustic (sound)
• What is the LTM capacity

  Potentially infinite
• What is the LTM coding

  Semantic (meaning)
• What is the LTM duration

  Lifetime
• What study was conducted into STM capacity

  • Miller
  • participants were given a series of recall tests of digit span
  • they were asked to repeat the string of digits/letters
  • it was found that participants were mostly unable to recall after 9 digits
• What study was conducted into STM/LTM coding

  • Baddeley
  • participants were given a list of acoustically similar words
  • one group of participants were tested on the words immediately
  • one group of participants were tested on the words after a 20 minute delay
  • found that more mistakes were made when participants were tested immediately
  • this is because with STM you focus on the sound
  • same study with semantically similar words for LTM
• What study was carried out into STM duration

  • Peterson and Peterson
  • asked participants to count backwards in threes whilst trying to recall a consonant triagram
  • e.g KVF or TRP
  • only 2% could recall after 18 seconds
• What study was carried out into LTM duration

  • Bahrick
  • asked participants to name the people from their high school using a yearbook
  • they managed 70% recall after 48 years on
• What are the types of LTM

  • semantic
  • episodic
  • procedural
• Define semantic

  The meaning of things and also the memory of facts and general knowledge
• Define procedural

  The muscle memory of how to do things
• Define episodic

  Events from your life
• Define explicit memories

  • Episodic and semantic
  • memories that you have to consciously work to remember
• Define implicit memories

  • Procedural
  • memories that you remember unconsciously and effortlessly
• What are the explanations for forgetting

  • Interference
  • cue dependant forgetting
• What factors affect eyewitness testimony

  • Anxiety
  • misleading information
• What are the features of the cognitive interview

  • Context reinstatement
  • report everything
  • recall from a changed perspective
  • recall in reverse order
• What is the cognitive interview

  The cognitive interview was designed to improve the influence made on witnesses in a standard police interview as they involved too many closed and leading questions
• Which psychologists carried out a study to do with misleading information

  Loftus and Palmer
• Who carried out the study to do with context dependant forgetting

  Godden and Baddeley
• How much did the cognitive interview improve accuracy

  The cognitive interview improved recall accuracy by 34%
• What is a limitation of the cognitive interview

  • Time and cost
  • the cognitive interview requires special training for interviewers which could take lots of time to carry out
  • training interviewers can also be very costly as it is likely that different people with interpret the techniques in different ways
• Explain the central executive

  • Receives environmental stimuli and directs it to the appropriate store
  • if the information is verbal it will go to the phonological loop
  • if the information is visual it will go to the visuo - spatial sketchpad
• Explain the phonological loop

  • Deals with verbal and auditory information
  • Articulatory loop
  • phonological store
  • data processed is then sent back to the central executive or to the LTM
• What are the two sub categories of the phonological loop

  • Phonological store
  • articulatory loop
• Explain the phonological store

  • Inner ear
  • which processes the information being repeated by the articulatory loop
• Explain the articulatory loop

  • Inner voice
  • which repeats verbal information for around 3 seconds
• Explain the visuo - spatial sketchpad

  • deals with visual and spatial information
  • visual cache
  • inner scribe
  • data processed is either sent back to the central executive or to the LTM
• What two sub categories is the visuo spatial sketchpad split into

  • Visual cache
  • inner scribe
• Explain the visual cache

  Keeps the visual picture of information
• Explain the inner scribe

  recalls the arrangement of objects in a room
• Explain the episodic buffer

  • Puts together all the information provided by the central executive
  • helps to make sense of the data for the LTM
  • Can also communicate with the LTM to make sense of new information
• Evaluation for cue dependant forgetting

  • Research support - godden and baddeley
  • retrieval cues don’t always work
• Evaluation for interference

  • Research support is often artificial
• What are the two explanations for answering a leading question

  • response bias explanation
  • Substitution bias explanation