Paper 1 Psychology - memory

• Interference


  Competing advertisements reduce their effect because of interference, better to show 3 in one day rather than have them spread out over the week
• Real-life studies


  • Rugby players who played fewer games had better recall of teams they had played against - shows interference in a non-controlled environment can explain forgetting
• Artificial research


  • Low ecological validity - The use of nonsense syllables - Not applicable to everyday memory - May overemphasise interference as an explanation
• Ceraso 1967 supports the view that interference affects availability (recall) rather than accessibility (recognition)
• Interference only explains some situations where 2 sets of stimuli are quite similar, it does not occur often in everyday life
• Individual differences


  People with greater working memory span are less susceptible to proactive interference
• Retrieval failure


  Describes how information is available but cannot be recalled due to the absence of cues
• Cues


  Things that serve as a reminder and form a meaningful link - Often are environmental cues or based on a person's mental state
• Encoding specificity principle


  1. Gave participants 48 words belonging to 12 categories; each presented as category + word

  2. Free recall = 40%

  3. Cued-recall = 60%
• Encoding specificity is circular - not a causal relationship and can't be tested
• Context-dependent forgetting


  1. Scuba divers learnt a set of words either on land or underwater

  2. Participants recalled more words in the same environment in which they learnt
• Godden and Baddeley 1980 found no context-dependent effect when using a recognition test instead of a recall test
• State-dependent forgetting


  1. Asked male volunteers to remember lists of words when they were either drunk or sober

  2. Recall was highest when participants recalled in the same state when they had learned the words
• Retrieval failure can explain interference effects and is a more important explanation for forgetting
• Retrieval cues don't always work, not useful when learning meaningful material
• Some studies involved participants being drunk or taking drugs, which could be potentially harmful
• Procedural memory


  Knowing how to do something - motor skills which through repetition and practice become automatic - unconscious recall
• Procedural and declarative memories are stored differently, as shown by patient HM
• Priming


  Automatic enhanced recognition of specific stimuli
• Priming creates doubt over existing LTM theories and proves this theory is too simplistic
• Individual differences make findings hard to generalise, but provide a solid base for further research
• Brain damage evidence is unreliable, as damage to a particular area of the brain doesn't necessarily mean that area is responsible for the type of LTM
• Short-term memory capacity


  Limited capacity, around 7 +/- 2 items
• Long-term memory capacity


  Potentially infinite capacity
• Individual differences in short-term memory capacity, with capacity increasing with age
• The capacity of the short-term memory could be even more limited than 7 +/- 2, potentially around 4 chunks
• Short-term memory duration


  A few seconds to a minute
• Long-term memory duration


  2 minutes to 100 years
• Artificial tasks used in short-term memory research may not be applicable to real life
• Bahrick's long-term memory study may have had a confounding variable, as participants may have rehearsed their memories over the years
• Coding in short-term memory

  Encoded acoustically (similar sounding words)
• Coding in long-term memory

  Encoded semantically (synonyms)
• Criticisms of the methodology used to test coding in long-term memory
• Evidence that short-term memory is not always encoded acoustically, and long-term memory is not always encoded semantically
• Real-life application


  • Belleville et al 2006 - training programmes for adults with mild cognitive impairments, demonstrated that episodic memories could be improved
• Memory


  Short and Long term memory
• Jacobs 1887 - digit span


  9.3 items, 7.3 letters
• STM


  Limited capacity
• LTM


  Potentially infinite capacity
• Individual differences - Jacobs

  • Digit span increases with age: 8 year olds recall = 6.6 digits whereas 19 year olds recall = 8.6 digits. Shows STM is not fixed.