cognitive psychology

• what is the role of the hippocampus?

  short term memory to long term memory
• what is the role of the hypothalamus?

  release hormones
• what is the role of the amygdala?

  emotional control
• what is the role of the thalamus?


  filters sensory and motor information
• what is the role of the basal ganglia?


  filters information regarding movement
• what is the role of the corpus collosom?

  communicates between both sides of the brain, joins the right to the left hemisphere
• what is the role of the frontal lobe?

  decision making, impulse control, problem solving
• what is the role of the temporal lobe?

  auditory processes
• what is the role of the occipital lobe?


  visual processing
• what is the role of the parietal lobe?

  senses e.g. touch and our language
• what is the role of the cerebellum?

  balance and coordination
• what is the role of the brain stem?

  involuntary actions e.g. breathing
• what does the multi storage model show?

  how memories are formed and what is needed for memories to form
• define sensory memory


  the immediate, very brief recording of sensory information in the memory system, lasts for half a second and needs attention to be passed onto short term memory
• define short term memory

  activated memory that holds a few items briefly before the information is stored or forgotten. lasts for 18-30 seconds as proved by CW and has a capacity of 7+/-2. rehearsal helps to transfer to long term memory.
• define long term memory

  the relatively permanent storage of information that has the potential to be infinite. it often can be maintained for longer if information is chunked.
• how does sensory memory turn to short term memory?

  attention
• how does short term memory turn into long term memory?

  rehearsal
• explain george sperling's (1960) findings

  used a tachistoscope of 12 letters and tested whether people could recall them after 1 second. he concluded that attention is so important for sensory memory to short term memory
• explain george miller's (1957) findings

  7+/-2
• what is the primary/recency effect?

  primary: information from beginning stays longer because it is more rehearsed

  recency: information from end because the information is newer
• Clive Wearing Case Study

  Herpes virus attacked hippocampus (part of brain) and now he can't make new memories as it destroyed the rehearsal loop. This provides support that the MSM is linear and has separate stores of STM and LTM.
• Henry Molaison Case Study


  an American memory disorder patient who had his hippocampus surgically removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy, this meant he couldn't make new memories.
• Strengths of the MSM of memory

  It can be useful when learning - it explains why it is useful to practice and rehearse and allows teachers to understand why we need to learn in chunks. There has also been scientific evidence from lab studies to support the model.
• Weaknesses of the MSM of memory

  Clive Wearing- he can remember some things from LTM like playing the piano and his wife (oversimplified explanation of memory)

  Case study KF- couldn't deal with verbal info in STM but could with visual perhaps suggesting there is multiple short term memories.

  It is too simple.
• KF case study


  Suffered STM impairment following a motorbike accident. Problem with immediate recall of words being presented verbally, but not with visual information. KF has impaired articulatory loop. This goes against the MSM and is a strength for the working model.
• Working Model of Memory

  a model of attention, STM and information processing based on the idea there are 2 different types of working memory, the visual and auditory, which is governed by the 'central executive'.
• what is the central executive?

  Attentional process that monitors incoming data. Allocates data to certain slave systems. Has limited processing capacity.
• what is the phonological loop?

  Deals w/ auditory info, both written and spoken. Preserves the order info arrives. 2 Parts:

  Phonological Store

  Articulatory Process
• what is the phonological store?

  Stores the words you hear (inner ear)
• what is the articulately process?

  acts like an inner voice rehearsing information from the phonological store.
• what is the visuospatial sketchpad?

  this is the part of Working memory involved with thinking about images (shapes and colours) and their organization in space.
• what is the episodic buffer?

  Added by Baddely later on (2000)

  It's a bridge between working memory and LTM. Maintains a sense of time recording events (episodes) happening
• what is the episodic memory?


  A LTM store for Personal Events

  They're 'time stamped' (Dates)

  The memory of a single episode which includes several elements.i.e places and people
• what is the semantic memory?

  knowledge about words, concepts, and language-based knowledge and facts
• strengths of the working memory model

  -clinical evidence: KF could process visual information but had poor STM ability for verbal information.

  -dual task performance: baddely showed that participants had more difficulty doing two visual tasks rather than a visual and verbal task, because two visual tasks compete in the same slave system
• weaknesses of the working memory model

  There is information missing, especially in terms of understanding how the central executive functions and this is the most important bit of the model
• tulving (1972)


  episodic, semantic, and procedural memory, retrieval cues are used to access episodic memories, they are also more likely to be forgotten or changed.
• weaknesses of tulving (1972)

  It seems as if semantic and episodic memory both rely on each other and might not be all that separate
• strengths of tulving (1972)

  A strength of the types of long term memory is that case studies support their existence. Examples

  include the case studies of HM and Clive Wearing; they showed difficulty recalling events that had

  happened in their past (episodic memories) but their sematic memories were unaffected. HM couldn't

  recall stroking a dog but understood the meaning of 'dog'.