Evaluation for Cognitive Theories of Memory and Forgetting

+ Glanzer and Cunitz's experiment, found that participants would remeber words from the beginning and end of a list of words, the words at the beginning where being rehearsed and therefore stored in LTM and those at the end where still sotred in STM. The words in the middle where forgoetten thus showing to seperate stores.

+ There are many case studies which strengthen this theory eg. the case of Clive Wearing, who's Short term memory was damaged and thus could not create any long term memories, this shows that memory is a linear system.

- However in the case of KF (Shallice and Warrington) they found after his brain damage he struggled with verbal information concerning the STM but had normal ability to process visually. This suggests the MSM could be to simplistic, this shows that STM could be more than one single store.

- However a lot of data was collected via case studies, case studies lack population validity and thus it is difficult to assume that this is how memory works based on  a few indaviduals and therfore the research cannot be generalised.

+ Research suggests that Semantic processing leads to better recall, Hyde and Jenkins found that recall of semantic processing was 50% higher than of the other two processes (Structual and phonetic) both in intentional and incidental learners.this suggests that memory is a by-product of prossecing.

- However there is opposition to this theory: Morris et al. found that phonetical processing had better recall than semantic. This suggests that different processing is used for different tasks.

- Reber et al. found that regardless the processing, words which had emotion behind them where recalled well.which suggests that there is more to memory than just maintinace and elaborative rehearsal, LOP is to simplistic. 

- Toichi and Kami found that autistic kids did not experience LOP, which could suggest that LOP could be specfic to one type of learner and therefore lacks ecological validity.

+ Evidence for STM decay, Reitman tested students, they were shown 5 words for 2 seconds, some where askerd to recall emdiatly after a short beep or after 15 seconds, recall was 24% worse after 15 seconds. Therefore Reitman concluded that listening to the tone stopped rehearsal and therefore the memory decayed.

+ Evidence for LTM decay, McKenna and Glendor, over saw workers being taught CPR, they then tested the workersknowledge after three months and after three years. Recall dropped hugely and therefor suggests that the lack of rehearsal led to the decay and loss of information in LTM.

- However Jenkins tested participants to see what affect sleep and doing other tasks would effect recall. If Trace Decay is correct then the result would be similar bewteen the groups because no one was rehearsing but jenkins found that those who slept had better recall. Therefore it could said that it the events bewteen encoding and recall which effect results not a decay of memory.

- It is very difficult to test wether certain memories have been forgotten completely and difficult to demonstrate trace decay: it is impossible to be sure that imformation has not been displaced or interfered with the trace.

+ Context Dependant: Godden and Baddeley (this is one of the key studies, you should know what they did) this experiment showed that when encoding and recall was done in the same place recall was 50% better. + Context Dependant: Smith did a similar experiment and found the results where very similar to that of Godden and Baddeley's experiment. + State Dependant: Lang found when fear was present at the encoding that recall was better if Fear was also present. All this data gives Cue Dependacy Validity.

- However all this supporting evidence has been Lab studies, therefore they lacks mundane validity reciting words from a list is something we seldom do in our day to day lives and therefore it is argued that it loses validity asa result.

- Cue depenacny also doesn't appear to be complete it only looks at rehearsal and the ideas of LTM, there is very little explanation for STM, and therefore theories such as trace decay have more substance than cue dependant forgetting, furthermore it does not explain concepts such as fashbulb memories and how certain memories are never forgotten.

+ Cue Dependancy has helped further the development of things such as