Memory- Duration

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Duration

DURATION-

  • LTM- unlimited
  • STM- measured in seconds

Case studies-

  • Bahrik et al
  • Peterson and Peterson

Evaluation-

  • Marsh et al
  • Nairne et al

Validity

  • Only one type of memory (semantic memory) tested
  • Not actually testing duration- displacement instead
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Bahrick et al and Peterson and Peterson

Bahrik et al

  • Tested LTM
  • Asked people of various ages  to put names to faces in high school yearbook from their class
  • 48 years on, 70% can match names to faces
  • 30% can freely recall all names

Peterson and Peterson

  • Tested STM
  • Experimenter said 3 letters to the participant
  • Participant had to count down from 500
  • After a certain amount of time, the experimenter would stop them and ask them to recall the 3 letters

Evaluation of Peterson and Peterson

  • Distraction activity- (counting down) deplaced the letters so therefore is not testing STM
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Capacity

Capacity

  • LTM unlimited
  • STM less than 7 chunks

Case studies

  • Miller 7+/-2
  • Simon- size of chunk matters

Evaluation

  • Jacobs- age differences in age span

Applications

  • Post codes based on chunks
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Miller and Simon

Capacity

Miller-

  • 7+/-2
  • People could cope with 7 dots flashed onto a screen, but not many more
  • Depending on the size of the chunk depends on whether it's 7+/-2

Simon-

  • Size of chunk affects ho much you can remember
  • Shorter memory span for larger chunks- e.g. 8 word phrases
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Encoding

  • LTM semantic
  • STM acoustic or visual
  • Baddeley

Evaluation-

  • Brandimote et al
  • Frost
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Baddeley

  • Tested effects of STM and LTM
  • Gave participants lists of acoustically similar or dissimilar words
  • Found acoustically similar words= STM
  • Semantically similar words= LTM
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Brandimote et al and Frost

Brandimote-

  • Found that participants used visual encoding in STM if given a visual task and prevented from doing any verbal rehersal before performing visual recall task

Frost-

  • Showed that LTM recall was relatedto visual as well as samantic catagories 
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The Multi-Store Memory (MSM)

Atkinson and Shriffin

  •  Sensory memory- evidence from Sperling
  • STM- limited capacity and duration, mainly acoustic encoding
  • LTM- unlimited capacity and duration, mainly semantic encoding

Processes

  • Attention and maintenance recall

Strengths-

  • Applicatiuons- dealing with hippocampal damage
  • Strong evidence to support claims for duration, capacity and encoding
  • Evidence from 3 stories: Serial position effect (Glanzer and Cunitz), case studies of brain damage (HM)

Application

  • Guiding people with hippocampial damage

Limitations

  • Oversimplified
  • Processing more important than maintenance rehersal- Craik and Lockhart compared shallow, phonemic and semantic processes

Validity

  • Use of words and participants usually psychology students
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Atkinson and Shriffin and Glanzer and Cunitz

Atkinson and Shriffin

  • Said that information moves from STM to LTM by rehersal- the more info is rehersed, the better remembered

Glanzer and Cunitz

  • Gave participants 20 words
  • The first few and last few were best remembered
  • THEORY- First few (a primary effect) best remembered as they were repeated, therefore transferred to LTM
  • Last few (a recency effect) best remembered- fresh in STM (approx. 20-30 seconds long)
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Case study- HM

  • Suffered from severe epilepsy, so had his hippocampus removed to try and cause it
  • He ended up with brain damage as a result
  • His personality and intellect remained intact, but he couldn't form new LT memories
  • He could remember things from before th surgery

Suggesats that hippocampus functions as a 'gateway' through which new memories pass through before entering the permenant store in the brain.

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The Working Memory Model (WMM)

Baddeley and Hitch

  • Explains why you can do two different tasks at the same time but not two similar tasks
  • Central executive- resource allocation, small capacity.
  • Phonological loop- phonological store and articulatory process, maintenance and rehersal
  • Visuo-spatial sketchpad- Visual cache and inner scribe
  • Episodic buffer- general store and intergrates information from other stores and alson from LTM

Strengths

  • Explains memory deficits of KF
  • Mainterance rehersal is only an optional process
  • Emphasises process rather than structure

Applications

  • WMM useful in diagnosis of mental illness

Limitations

  • Central executive doesn't explain anything
  • Central executive is probably several components
  • Problems with evidence from brain damaged induviduals e.g. no before and after comparison
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Eyewitness Testimony- Further Research

  • Loftus and Palmer-experiment 1, misleading information (hit vs contacted)- inaccurate recall
  • Experiment 2- (Broken glass)- misleading information changes information storage

Evaluation

  • Supporting evidence from Loftus et  al, stop/yield sign
  • Challanged by Bekerian and Bowers, misleading information affects retrieval
  • Real-life robbery (Yuille and Cutshall) accurate recall despite misleading information

Induvidual differences

  • Males and Females same (Wells and Olsen)
  • Older people have remembering surce of information but recall for event same as younger people (Schater et al) 

Applications

  • Mistaken EWT largestsingle factor in wrongful conviction

Validity

  • Lab experiments may not be taken seriously
  • Participant isn't emotionally involved 
  • Foster et al- better identification with real-life set up
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Further reaserch evidence- Loftus &Palmer, Yuille

Loftus and Palmer

Experiment 1-

  • Wanted to see if eyewitness recall if accurate and if it was affected by leading questions
  • Asked 4 fifferent groups how fast the car was going , but when asking the question, they changed the verb: smashed, hit, bumped and contacted
  • The harsher verbs had a higher estimated speed

Experiment 2- 

  • Wanted to see if leading questions leaf to a biased answer
  • Two groups witnessed a film of a car crash. 6 weeks later, they had to recall what happened. One group was asked if they saw the smashed glass (eventhought there was non) and the other was asked if there was any smashed glass
  • The group asked if they saw the smashed glass had a 40% higher say 'yes'

Yuille and Cutshall

  • Interviewed 13 people that witnessed an armed robbery in Canada
  • Interviews happened 4 months after an included misleading questions
  • Despite questions, witnesses had accurate recall that matched their initial detailed reports
  • Fuggests that post-event information might not affect memory in real life EWT
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EWT- Factors that influence accuracy

Anxiety-

  • Deffenbacher et al. meta analysis showed anxiety reduced accurate recall of EWT
  • Christianson and Hubinette- anxiety improves accuracy in real-life bak robberies

Evaluation-

  • Meta-analysis supports weapon-focus effect
  • Loftus et al. tracked eye movement to support weapon-focus effect

Age of witness-

  • Children make errors (Parker and Carranza)
  • Older less accurate when delay was one week or more (Memon et al)

Evaluation-

  • Own-age bias (Anastasi and Rhodes)
  • Due to differenial experience

Induvidual differences

  • Alcohol impairs attention (Clifasefi et al)
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Anxiety-Deffenbacher, Christianson and Hubinette,

Deffenbacher-

  • Meta-analysisof 18 studies looking at effects of anxiety on eyewitness recall. Ws clear that high levels of stress negatively impacted on accuracy of Eyewitness memory

Christianson and Hubinette- 

  • Questioned 58 real witnesses of a bank robbery,
  • Witnesses that had been threatened had more accurate recall than those who wern't

Loftus-

  • Tracked eyewitnesses' eye movement and found that they foused on the weapon rather than the person's face 
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Anxiety-Deffenbacher, Christianson and Hubinette,

Deffenbacher-

  • Meta-analysisof 18 studies looking at effects of anxiety on eyewitness recall. Ws clear that high levels of stress negatively impacted on accuracy of Eyewitness memory

Christianson and Hubinette- 

  • Questioned 58 real witnesses of a bank robbery,
  • Witnesses that had been threatened had more accurate recall than those who wern't

Loftus-

  • Tracked eyewitnesses' eye movement and found that they foused on the weapon rather than the person's face 
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Age of witness- Parker and Carranza, Yarmey

Parker and Carranza- 

  • Compared primary school children and college students in their ability to identify people after a mock crime
  • Children chose more people, wheeras college students chose less, but were more accurate

Yarmey-

  • Stopped 651 adults in public places and asked them to recall physical characteristics about a woman who earler spoken to them for 15 seconds 2 minutes earlier
  • 18-44 yeard of age were confident in recall, but 45-65 were significantly less accurate
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Cognitive interview

What is it?

  1. Report everything
  2. Recreate origional context
  3. Change order
  4. Change perspective

(Fisher and Geiselman)

Evaluation- 

  • Milne and Bull- report everything and mental rienstatement gave best recall
  • Hard to evaluate because many versions of Cl
  • Time-consuming
  • Enhanced Cl creates greater demand for interviews
  • Kohnken et al- meta analysis , 34% increase in correct recall
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Strategies for memory improvement

Mnemonic techniques-

  • Verbal- acronym, acrostic, rhymes, chunking
  • Visual imagery- Loci method and spider diagrams

Research evidence

  • Verbal mnemonics- Popular with students: effective in children with learning disabilities (Gliddent et al)
  • Visual imagery mnemonics- Loci method useful for older adults (O'Hara et al)

Explainin how they work-

  • Organisation- creating memory hooks and organising material
  • Elaborative rehersal- amount and nature of rehersal
  • Dual coding hypothesis- Paivio

Application-

  • Mnemonics used to overcome STM problems in Down Syndrome children (Broadly and MacDonald)

Limitations-

  • Most research in lab conditions rather than real-life conditions
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SFMI- Broadly and MacDonald, Paivio

Broadly and MacDonald-

  • Studied 63 children with Down Syndrome
  • Phase 1- Children were tested on a battery of tests, includiong STM skills
  • Phase 2- Children divided in to experimental groups, who recieved memory improvement techniques and a control group who did not
  • Phase 3- assesment was repeated and showed training programme improved memory skills among experimental group of children

Paivio- 

  • Proposed that words and images arre processed seperately
  • Concrete words, that can be made in to images, are double encoded in memory
  • Coded once in verbal symbolsand once in image-based symbols
  • Double coding increased likelihood that they will be rememberd
  • Paivio called this dual coding hypothesis
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