Evaluations - A03

• Support for MSM - Korsakoff syndrome damages parts of the brain and is sometimes developed in chronic alcoholics. This condition has little effect on the LTM but severely impacts the STM, suggesting that STM and LTM are separate unitary stores and function completely independently. Thus increasing the validity.
• Support for MSM - KF suffered brain damage in a motorcycle accident. Had little effect on his LTM but led to poor performance on many STM tasks. This suggests that the LTM and STM are separate as if they were combined then KF would have lost or retained all of his memory functioning. Thus this case study supports idea that there is a clear distinction between each stores, increasing its validity.
• Support for MSM - Glazner and Cunitz's study on primacy and recency effects showed that when participants asked to recall a list of words, they are more likely to recall the first few (primacy effect) and the last few (recency effect) and forget the middle words. Words at the beginning were transferred through rehearsal into the LTM and words at the end were still in the STM which aided recall. Demonstrates information can be stored in separate stores rather than in a single store thus increasing validity.
• Limitation for MSM - Clive Wearing contracted a viral infection which caused extensive brain damage. He lost his long term declarative memory (had no memory of his wedding) however he still had his long term procedural memory (able to play piano). This demonstrates that our LTM can be further broken down which isn't acknowledged by the MSM reducing its validity.
• Limitation for MSM - Brown and Kulik found that flashbulb memories were a special type of memory that required no rehearsal to be stored in the LTM. Contradicts MSM's views that information must be rehearsed to be transferred in the LTM thus reducing the validity.