Psychology AS AQA Memory

Nature Of STM Memory

Duration of Short Term Memory: Approx. 18 seconds.

Peterson & Peterson conducted an experiment to test the duration of STM. They used pointless trigrams (HTM, LKJ) and told participants to recall after a distractor task (To prevent verbal rehearsal). They had to wait 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 & 18 seconds. They found that barely anyone could recall after 18 seconds.

Capacity of Short Term Memory: 7+-2 chunks of information, didgits or letters.

Millers magic numbers.

Encoding or Short Term Memory: Mainly Acoustically

Baddeley tested how information is encoding in both Short Term & Long Term memory. He did this by getting participants to learn Similiar Acoustic, Dissimiliar Acoustic, Similiar Semantic and Dissimilar Semantic words.

Nature Of STM Memory

Duration of Long Term Memory: Up To A Lifetime.

Bahrick conducted an experiement using a year book and participants that had left school up to 60 years. He asked them to recall their names. He found that participants remembered most people when given a picture cue.

Capacity of Long Term: Unlimited

Encoding or Long Term Memory: Mainly Acoustically

Baddeley tested how information is encoding in both Short Term & Long Term memory. He did this by getting participants to learn Similiar Acoustic, Dissimiliar Acoustic, Similiar Semantic and Dissimilar Semantic words.

ATKINSON & SHIFFRIN

Sensory Memory: Gets information from the environment, if it is attended to, it is transferred to STM.

STM: Duration of 18 seconds, Capacity of 7+-2, Encoded acoustically. Maintenence rehearsal keeps it in STM. Elaborative rehearsal transfers to LTM.

LTM: Duration of a Lifetime, Capactity unlimited, Encoded semantically.

Strengths:

• Peterson & Peterson supports this because of their research on the duration of STM.
• Area's of the Brain. Case studies of brain injury patients suggests that its possible to damage STM but leave LTM intact. Brain scans show us what part of the brain is active when doing certain tasks. The Prefrontal cortex is active when working on a STM. Whereas the LTM is in use the hippocampus is active. It supports the multi-store model because it shows separate stores in the momory and they are located in different parts of the brain.

Weaknesses:

• Hyde & Jenkins showed that people do not always rehearse things but they can end up in our long term memory. They suggest that the amount recall depended on how the participants had processed information, not how long they rehearsed it for.

Baddeley & Hitch

 Central Executive: Takes information from the environment and sends it to the correct stores (Slave Systems).

Episodic Buffer: General store which was a later addition to the model. Memory is put to work. (Type of STM).

Phonological Loop: It loops information, much like rehearsal loop. Deals with Words and Sounsd.

Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad: Deals with visual semantics.

Strengths:

• Baddeley and Hitch found that when doing two tasks that invovle the same component it causes difficulty. It also suggests taht when different components are used, performance is not affected.
• KF brain damage is envidence becuase he was able to recall more visual information than auditory information, which supports that there are different storesin STM.

• Weaknesses:
• It doesn't consider Short Term Memory.
• The central executive can be aruged that there is more.