Psychology Case Studies

Parker and Carranza (1989) - Children had higher rate of choosing than adult witnesses, although they were also more likely to make mistakes

Yarney (1993) - Stopped 651 adults in public places and asked them to recall the physical attributes of a young women they had just spoken to for 15 seconds just 2 minutes earlier. Young (18-29) were more confident yet not significantly different in recall than older adults (45-65).

Memon et al (2003) - When delay was short (35 mins) recall was not different between young and old. When delayed one week the older (60-82) witnesses were significantly less accurate than the younger group (16-33).

Mello and Fisher (1996) - found that report everything improves the recall of those over 72.

Milne and Bull - interview students and found the best components were report everything and mental reinstatement.

Kebbal - found that it takes considerably more time.

Memon (1994) - Police need quality training for it to be effective. 

Robertson And Robertson (1963-1973) - Six children (aged less than 3). Laura was in hospital, john was in a residential nursery, and Jane, Lucy, Thomas and Kate were looked after by the Robinsons in their home were they received a high level of emotional care. 

Skeels and Dye - Group of institutionalised children with low IQ's later improved after they were transferred to a home for mentally retarded adults (substitute emotional care). Tested by Skodak and Skeels: one group of infants transferred to a home for mentally retarded adults, while a control group remained in the orphanage. After 1.5 years the IQ's of the control group had fallen whereas the IQ's of the transferred group had risen from 64 to 92 points.

Bifulco et al. - studied 249 women who had lost their mothers before the age of 17. They found this group was twice as likely to suffer from depression or anxiety disorders when the children became adults.

Genie (Rymer)

Czech Twins (Koluchova) - Isolation until 7, unable to talk, looked after by loving sister from then, by age of 14 they had near normal intellectual and social functioning, by the age of 20 they had above average intelligence and formed excellent relationships with their foster family. 

Hodges and Tizard - Children had been placed in care at less than 4 months old. At the age of 16 those who had been adopted were securely attached to their families, which is not true of the children who had returned to the natural families. Both groups had problems with peers (i.e. less likely to have a best friend) and sought more attention from adults (sign of disinhibited attachment).

Rutter et al (Romanian orphans) - 100 romanian orphans adopted by UK families, those adopted before the age of 6 months showed normal emotional development. However, many of those who had been adopted after 6 months showed disinhibited attachments and problems with peers. 

Clive Wearing - Herpes simplex attacked hippocampus, could no longer remember more than around 30 seconds worth of information. The only person he remembers is his wife and not his kids. He can remember how to read and write and can still sight-read piano music. 

Baddeley et al (1975) - Capacity of STM, whether people could remember more short words than long words in a recall test, therefore showing pronunciation time rather than number of items determines STM capacity.

Peterson and Peterson (1959) - duration of STM, test how long STM lasts when rehearsal is prevented. 80% correct recall after 3 seconds, 10% at 18 seconds. 

Baddeley - encoding in the STM and LTM, STM relies on acoustic, LTM primarily uses semantic.

Baddeley - two tasks simultaneously: 1. to remember a list of numbers (digit span test) 2. to answer true or false to a number of problems. If STM was a unitary store both tasks would not be able to be carried out simultaneously, however this was not the case.

KF - Motorbike accident caused impairment of his STM. Shallice and Warrington (1974) showed that although his memory for verbal material was poor his memory for visual information was unaffected. 

Baddeley - Found that patients with damage to their frontal lobe had problems concentrating suggesting damage to the central executive. He also added the episodic budder making the model more complex. this suggests that the model is not complete and may still need further revision as more evidence is uncovered.