Unit 1: Cognitive Psychology - Memory

Central Executive 
Is an attentional process to monitor incoming data and allocate 'slave systems' to tasks. Has a very limited capacity.

Phonological Loop
Deals with auditory information - divided into two sections - Phonilogical Store: Stores the words you hear and - Articulary Process - Words are repeated and allows maintenance rehearsal. 

Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad
Stores visual and spatial information. Subdivided into - Visual Cache: Stores visual data and - Inner Scribe: encodes the arrangement of objects in a visual field. 

Episodic Buffer
Provides as a temporary store and links to the long term memory. 

Dual Task Performance: Hitch and Baddeley 
Conducted a lab experiment. They demonstrated that peformance was slower when participants were given a task involving the central executive and the articulary loop. Peformance was less affected when then the articulary loop was in use or no extra task at all. Particpants could not peform two tasks of the same slave system but could peform tasks where two seperate systems were involved. 

Central Executive: Bunge
Used brain scans to discover that some parts of the brain were more active during dual tasks rather than single tasks. Reflection increased attentional demands. 

Phonological Loop: Baddeley 
Conducted a lab experiment. Suggested the phonilogical loop had a capacity of around 2 seconds. This was demonstrated by the word legnth affect which showed shorter words could be rememberd. This word length effect dissapears when an articulary suppression task is in place. 

Visuo-Spatio Sketchpad: Baddeley 
Participants were asked track a light while describing the letter 'F'. Participants had more difficulty doing this than a visual and verbal task. 

Evidence From Case Studies: Shallice and Warrington 
Conduced a case study of KF who's LTM was intact as was STM for visual stimuli but poor verbal STM. 

Strengths
Explanitory Power: The WMM can explain a number of research findings that cann't be explained by the MSM. E.g. the word length effect or partial memory deficiancies experienced by KF. 

Comparison With MSM: The MSM was a first step to understanding memory however the WMM developes our understanding by defining seperate stores and distinguishes between stores and processes within the STM

Limitations
Central Executive Vaguel Defined: Doesn't really explain anything and is not much evidence.

Evidence From Brain Damaged Patients May Not Be Informative: You cannont make before and after comparisons so it is unclear whether changes are caused by the damage. Also unreliable as it is a singular occurance.  

Loftus and Palmer.1 
How: 1. 45 students shown a film of a car crash. 2. Then asked critical questions including one of the speed of the car - on this questin specifically the verb was changed from 'smashed, collided, hit, bumped or contacted.' 
Found: The group who heard the verb 'smashed' estimated the highest speed of 41mph. The group who heard 'contacted' estimated an average lower speed of 30mph.

Loftus and Palmer.2
How: A different set of participants were shown a film of an accident and asked a week later if they saw any broken glass.
Found: Those who heard the question with 'smashed' were more likely to recollect broken glass. 

Loftus 
1. Shown photos of a sop or yield sign. 2. Then asked consistent or inconsistent questions. 3. When shown pairs of photos, inconsistent group were less able to pick out the original picture from the pair. 41% of the inconsistent were accurate, 75% of the consistent were accurate.

Bekerian and Bowers
1. When the same procedure was repeated but pairs of photos presented in the correct order, recall was good for both. 
Conclusion - Original stored memory was not affected by inconsistant information but retrieval was. 

Interally Valid 
They are lab experiments therefore have a high level of control over variables and participants.

Externally Valid 
Lab experiment so the external validity is low because the situation was not artificial so can not apply to EWT as well.

Emotional Response
Participants knew it was fake so did not have a real emotional response, Foster found that those who thought they were witnessing a real robbery were more accurate. 

Individual Differences 
The gender of participants made no difference in results. Older participants were less accurate as they are more prone to the effects of missleading information. 

Research Shows 
Eye wittness testimonies are not reliable. 
Police should be vague when they ask questions to avoid manipulating answers.
Mistaken eye witness testimony is the largest single factor contributing to the conviction of the innocent. 

Individual Differences 
The gender of participants made no difference in results. Older participants were less accurate as they are more prone to the effects of missleading information. 

Research Shows 
Eye wittness testimonies are not reliable. 
Police should be vague when they ask questions to avoid manipulating answers.
Mistaken eye witness testimony is the largest single factor contributing to the conviction of the innocent. 

Anxiety Has a Negetive Effect: Deffenbacher 
How: A meta analysis of 18 studies of anxiety.
Found: Many showed stress had a negative effect on anxiety. 

Anxiety Enhances Recall: Christianson and Hubinette 
How: Conducted a questionaire, spoke to 58 witnesses of bank robberies. 
Found: Those who were more emotionally aroused, who were at greater risk, had a more accurate recall than onlookers. 

The Weapon Focus Affect: Johnson and Scott
How:  Participants were in a waiting room overhearing an argument they then see one of two scenarios - a man running through with a pen and grease on his hand or - a knife and blood on his hands. 
Found: Wittnesses were 49% accurate with the pen and 33% accurate with the knife. 

Contradictory Findings Can Be Explained 
In terms of the Yerkes and Dodson law - medium levels of anxiety anhance recall but high levels decrease it. 

Research Supports Weapon-Focus Effect 
A meta-analysis by Steblay showned support. Loftus tracked eyewitnesses eye movements showing they were looking at the weapon rather than than the face. 

Real World Application: Rinolo 
Used evidence from the sinking titanic who claimed the boat split in half, they were denied due to anxiety. When the wreck was found it was split - they were correct. 

Children As Witnesses: Parker and Carranza 
How: Primary school children and college students were shown a slide sequence of mock crime. Found: Primary children were accurate in identifying the target in a line up if he was present but not when he was absent, they were also more confident when answering questions however they were more likely to make errors. 

Age Differences in Accuarcy
How: A young women stopped strangers in the street and spoke to them for 15 seconds. Two minutes later they were asked to idenify her features. 
Found: Recall was better in younger adults and worse in adults. Toung and middle ages were more confident about recall - there was a corrolation between confidence and accurate recall, 

Effects of Delay: Memon
Found that accuracy dropped in older people when the identification task was delayed for a week. 

Own Age Bias
Supior peformance in younger people may be because the faces to be recognised are younger faces. Anastasi and Rhodes found that all age groups are most accurate when the target photos are from their own age groups. 

Explaning Own Age Bias
The less contact we have with certain groups of people, the poorer our ability to discriminate between individuals in this group. 

Individual Differences: Clifasefi
Showed that mildy intoxicated people were less observant than sobre participants. 82% of the intoxicated participants failed to notice a man in a gorrilla costume walk across the screen in a video of people playing basketball whereas only 46% of sobre participants didn't notice.

Research Methods
Participants may not behave as they would in everyday life in studies that are conducted in a lab. They may not take the taswk as seriously as in real life or demand characteristics could come into play - which is unnatural. 

Report Everything
Include every single detail of the event, even if it seem sirrlevant. Aims to inrease consistancty between the actual event and the recreated situation. Leads to increase accuracy.

Mental Reinstatement of Original Context 
Mentally recreate the enviroment from the original incident. Aim is also to increase consistancy. 

Changing the Order 
Reversing the order in which events occur. Varies the route through memory to increase recall and to remove the effects of 'scrippts' (when events are filled without thinking because they occur regually).

Changing the Perspective 
Recall the incident from multiple perspectives, imagine how it would of happened from the victims perspective.

Research Into Effectiveness - 
Kohnken: Conducted a meta-analysis of 53 studies and found a 34% increase in correct recall compared to the standard interview.
Milne and Bull: Conducted a lab experiment using college students and children, found that steps 1 and 2 gave better recall than a singular compnant. They also found using one componant alone was just as effective as asking them to 'try again'. 

Difficulties in Establishing Effectiveness -
There are many versions of CI used by different police forces, this makes comparison difficult. Thames Valley use the whole procedure whereas others just use one or two componants. 

Time Problems -
The CI is more time consuming than the standard interview, police officers prefer to use strategies that limit the amont of information collected. 

Individual Differences -
The CI is effective with older witnesses who are overcautious about reporting what they saw. Mello and Fisher: Found greater improvements using the CI on older participants but there wre no differences when using the standard interview. 

Verbal Techniques:
Acronyms: Roygbiv
Acrostics: Big Elephants Can't Always Use Small Exits 
Rhymes: abcdefg...
Chunking Telephone numbers and post codes. 

Visual Techniques 
Method of Loci: Learner associates material to be learned with different locations in the house - mind palace.
Keyword Method: Words are broken into componants with images connected. 
Mind Maps: Main topic placed in the center and branching links producing a visual appearance. 

Role Of Organisation 
Participants were given 112 words to learn. Recall was 2-3 times better if ther words were presented in an organised hierarchy rather than random order.

Real-World Applications 
Studies 63 children with Down Syndrome. An experimental group received training in memory improvement techniques and showed imrpoved memory skills than the control group 

Role of Elaborative Rehearsal 
Craik and Tulving's study showed that elaborating - mind map or method of loci- leads to more enduring memory.

Dual Coding Hypothesis 
Pavio suggested that words and images are processed separately, THerfore concrete words will be remembered better because they are douvle-encoded - once as a word and once as an image.