cognitive

Devised the Multi-Store Model of Memory, containing the separate stores for sensory, short-term and long-term memory.

Duration of short-term memory:
Used Brown-Peterson technique of nonsense trigrams and a distraction task. Found that when rehearsal is prevented short-term memory has a duration of less than 18 seconds

Duration of long-term memory:
Used a study of high school classmates. Found that recognition was easier than recall for visual things, if they had personal significance.

Capacity of short-term memory:
Furthered Jacob’s studies (1887) using the serial digit span. Defined the capacity to be their “magic number” of 7 items, plus or minus 2, improved by “chunking”.

Encoding in short-term memory:
Concluded that because there was a 20% difference in accuracy of recall between acoustically similar (55%) and dissimilar (75%) words, STM is stored acoustically.

Encoding in long-term memory:
Because recall was worse for semantically similar words (30% less accurate than acoustically similar), it was concluded that LTM is stored semantically, i.e. by meaning.

Support of Multi-Store Model:
Primary and recency effect discovered. Words learned from the start of a list stored in LTM, words at the end still in STM and ones in the middle forgotten. Supports idea of separate stores.

Support of Multi-Store Model:
Case study of H.M. suggested different stores for long-term and short-term memory as in the MSM. He was unable to transfer new information to LTM but had the ordinary STM digit span.

Against Multi-Store model:
Case study of Clive Wearing suggested that LTM is not a single store of memory. He can remember procedures but not events, suggesting the MSM is too simplified

Designed the Working Memory Model as an explanation of STM. Consists of the Central Executive, Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad and Phonological Loop. The first controls the second two ‘slave systems’.

Support of the Working Model:
Demonstrated the separate stores as visual and verbal tasks were easily done simultaneously, suggesting they are processed in different places like in the WMM.

Leading Questions:
Researched the effects of leading questions on EWT. Concluded that post-event information could significantly affect accuracy of recall, even altering the original memory.

Misleading Information:
Used the “stop/yield” study to conclude that post-even information alters how the original memory was stored. Those given misleading questions were only 41% accurate.

Weapons Focus:
Concluded that fear or anxiety due to the presence of a weapon narrows the focus of attention. Leads to accurate recall of item of focus, but less accuracy over peripheral information.

Age and eyewitness testimony:
Children are more susceptible to post-event information and younger children cannot separate it from the original memory. This suggests children’s testimony must be viewed carefully.

Developed the Cognitive Interview Technique, consisting of four ways of eliciting information. 1) context reinstatement 2)Recall everything 3) Recall in different orders and 4) Recall from different perspectives.

Encoding Specifity Principle:
Supported this idea by finding that scuba divers who had learnt words underwater recalled it better when underwater again. Suggested cues from environment encoded with words.