A Level Psychology AQA - Short and Long Term Memory AO1

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  • Created by: Becca1304
  • Created on: 26-02-21 11:38
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  • Short and Long term Memory AO1
    • capacity
      • Capacity concerns how much data canm be held in a memory store. STM is a limited capacity store whereas LTm has a potentially infinite capacity
      • Capacity of STM can be assessed using digit span. Joseph Jacobs (1887) used this technique to assess STM capacity.
        • He found that the average span for digits was 9.3 items and 7.3 for letters.
          • Jacob suggests that lower letter span may be because there are only 9 digits and 26 letters
      • George Miller (1956) wrote a memorable articl called the magic number seven plus or minus 2, in which he reviewed psychological research
        • Concluded that the span of immediate memory is about 7 items - sometimes a bit more, sometimesa bit less.
        • He noted that people can count seven dots  flashed on a screen but not many more.
          • The same is true if you are asked tor ecall musical notes, letters and even words.
        • Miller also found that people can recall 5 words as well as they can recall 5 letters - we chuink things together and can then remember more
    • Duration
      • LTM potentiall lasts forever but STM doesn't last very long - it has a short duration, unless you repeat the items over and over
      • Duration of STM - LLoyd Peterson and Margeret Peterson (1959) studied the duration of STM, using 24 students
        • Each participant was tested over 8 trials. On each trial a participant was given a consonant syllable and a 3 digit number
          • They were asked to recall the consonant syllable after a retention interval of 3,6,9,12,15,18 seconds. During the retention interval they had to count backwards from their 3 digit number
            • On average, they were 90% correct over 3 secs, 20% after 9secs, and only 2% after 18secs
              • This suggests that STM has a very short duration - less than 18 seconds- as long as verbal rehearsal is prevented
      • Duration of LTM: Harry Bahrick et al (1975) tested 400 people of various ages (17-74) on their memory of classmates
        • A photo recognition test consisted of 50 photos, some from the individual's high school year book.
        • In a free-recal test they were asked to list the names they could remember of those in their graduating class
        • Those who were tested within 15 years of graduation were about 90% accurate in identifying faces. After 48 years, this declined to about 70%.
          • Free recall  was about 60% accurate after 15 years, dropping to 30% after 48 years.
    • Coding
      • Information that we store has to be written in memory in some form - it is described as a "code" in which it is held in the form of sounds (acoustic), images (visual)  or meaning (semantic)
      • Acoustic and semantic coding - the following words are acoustically similar, but semanticall different: cat , cab , can , cad , cap , mad , max , mat , man , map.
        • The following words are the opposite - semantically similar but acoustically different: great, large, big, huge, broad, long, tall, fat, wide, high
      • Alan Baddeley (1966a and 1966b) used word lists like those above to test the effects of acoustic and semantic similarity on STM and LTM
        • He found that participants had difficulty remembering acoustically similar words in STM but not LTM, whereas semanticall similar words posed little problem in STM, but led to muddled LTMs
          • This suggests that STM is largely encoded acoustically whereas LTM is largely encoded semantically

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