psychology AQA memory studies

Participants recalled fewer acoustically similar words than acoustically dissimilar words. (STM)

Found that participants could recall 5-9 items when doing an immediate recall task. (STM)

80% of Ps could recall the trigram correctly when the distractor task lasted only 4 seconds. This decreased to fewer than 10% of participants when the distractor task lasted 18 seconds. (STM)

Tested US graduates and found that US graduates who were shown classmate photos years later had 90% accuracy for remembering faces & names 34yrs after graduation. This declined after 48yrs, particularly for faces. (LTM)

Asked Ps to complete serial recall task. Found that Ps could recall words at the start and end of a list, but that memory for words of the list was poor (Supporting MSM). Words at the start of the list had been rehearsed and transferred into LTM and words at the end of the list were at STM.

Studied EVR a patient who had a brain tumour removed. He performed well on tests requiring reasoning but had poor decision making skills.  This suggests that Central Executive is not one unitary store but is made up of different components.

Gave Ps two tasks to do simultaneously. Task 1 was a reasoning task that was designed to occupy the central executive, whilst task 2 either required the Ps to repeat words "the" over and over (PL task); saying a list of random digits (PL and Central Executive) or no additional task.

Task 1 took Ps longer to complete when also doing the task that required the central executive and the phonological loop. Time taken to complete task 1 was the same weather doing the PL task as well or no extra task.  

(Found that a task of a verbal reasoning task and repeating a list of digits took longer to complete than the verbal reasoning task alone, AND longer than the verbal reasoning task and repeating the word "the". )

This shows that different parts of the slave systems have very specific roles, it shows us that the central executive has limited capacity because it took longer to complete two tasks to utilise it. 

Conducted a lab experiment on 45 students. The Ps were each shown 7 film-clips of traffic accidents. Following each clip they were given a questionnaire to complete. These were same for each Ps apart from the verb used in a key question 'About how fast were the cars going when they 'verb' into each other?' There were 5 conditions, each with a different verb (smashed, hit, contacted, bumped, collided). The researchers were interested in the speed estimates the Ps gave.  

Found that Ps who were asked "how fast the cars going when they smashed each other?" gave faster estimated speed that the Ps who were asked "how fast were the cars going when they hit each other?" 

Questioned 58 eyewitnesses of a bank robbery 

Found that witness in a bank robbery had less accurate memory for the event than witnesses who had been directly threatened during the robbery. 

This would indicate that those who were less emotionally aroused had worse recall than those who were moderately emotionally aroused.

In the initial experiment they used two situations. In both conditions the Ps would hear the discussion in a different room. In condition 1 the Ps heard the discussion and a person emerged holding a pan in a greasy hands. In condition 2 the discussion was more heated and a person emerged holding a blooded knife.

When asked to identify the man from 50 photos, Ps from condition 1 were more accurate by 49% as oppose to the 39% accuracy in condition 2.  

The Ps who observed the man with a knife were less able to identify him after, because their main focus was on the weapon, rather than the man's face. 

Children aged 3-8 were involved in a science demonstration. The parents of the children than read them a story which incorporated information from the demonstration. The children were then asked to think very carefully about where they got their information from.

Children incorporated information from the story their parent read them into their original memory of events. However, older children (aged 8) were able to revise their account when asked where the information came from. Younger children (aged 3) could not do this. 

Younger children are less reliable to act as an eye witness as they seem unable to distinguish between what they have seen and post event information , this is the effect of source monitoring, however with further questioning older children are able to retrieve accurate information. 

Used individuals from three age groups (18-25; 35-45;55-78) who were shown 24 photographs (representing the three different age groups) which they had to rate for attractiveness.After short 'filler' activity they were then presented with 48 photographs, 24 of which had been seen previously and 24 that acted as distractors. 

Found that middle ages (35-45 years old) and younger (18-25 years old) Ps were more accurate in identifying ohotos of faces they had seen than Ps who were older (55-78 years old). However, all ps were accurate in recognising faces they has seen that were of a similar age to them. 

the results showed that generally the young and middle aged group were better at recognising photographs of their own age group.

Satein & Memon did a study in Brazil using the cognitive interview techniques in place of the previous system that included torture and other from of ill treatment. 

They found that cognitive interview produced a more accurate description of the man with the gun than standard Brazilian interview techniques of interrogation and torture. There fore it can be used to reduce miscarriages of justice. 

Experimented detectives received 4 hours of training in the use of CI. 

Found that police members who had done a short training of 4 hours on the use of cognitive interview showed no increase in information obtained in questioning compared to the standard interview.

Therefore more training should be given so that the CI is more affectove. 

KF suffered brain damage resulting in amnesia. Had a digit span of only 1 or 2 items, but could still encode new memories into his LTM and recall them later. (opposing MSM: memory is not linear, and information does not need to be held in STM to enter LTM)

His short term memory auditory information was much poorer than his short term memory for visual information. Also his auditory problems were limited to verbal material, such as words and numbers, but not meaningful sounds.  (Supporting WMW:STM is divided into two systems PL+ Visuospatial Sketch Pad) 

presented Ps with a list of words that were either semantically similar or dissimilar. They had to recall the list after the delay, so the words were in LTM not STM. 

Found that after 20 mins, they did poorly on the semantically similar words. However did well in the test that was semantically dissimilar.

Therefore we encode LTM according to what they mean, so we get similar meaning things confused. 

Showed the ps a grid of digits ans letters for 50 milliseconds. Half the ps were told to recall as many of the 12 items as possible. The other half were told they would hear a tone immediately after being shown a grid and they should only recall the raw of the grid that the tone corresponded to. 

People recalled on average 4 letters, although when Sperling used partial report technique, sowed that iconic memory holds up 9 to 10 items. But decays before we can recall them all.

Therefore in duration SM can hold up information for a short amount of time, it can hold up 9-10 items, but its limited due to duration.

A meta analysis, showed 53 studies found on average an increase of 34% in the amount of correct information generated  with the CI compared with the standard interviewing techniques. 

Therefore this shows that CI is more affective than the standard interview, as there was more correct info with the CI. 

Interviewed police, found an additional problem with the CI, requires more time than is often available and that instead they prefer to use deliberate strategies aimed to limit an eyewitness's report to the minimum amount of information that the officer feels is necessary.

This shows that CI is too time consuming for police to carry out.