A Level Psychology Memory Notes

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  • Created by: S_webb
  • Created on: 13-11-17 23:22
  • Atkinson and Shiffrin's multi-store model consists of the sensory register, which encodes information in whatever form it was originally sensed and which has a duration of around 1/2 of a second to 2 seconds and a capacity of whatever an individual happens to be sensing at any one time; the short-term memory, itn owhich information moves from the sensory registers via attention and hwich has a capacity of 7 +/- 2 items and a duration of 18-30 seconds, information being kept within the short-term memory by rehearsal, and the long-term memory, into which information moves from the short-term memory via sufficnet rehearal, which has a capacity and a duration which are both theoretically unlimited. In the short-term memory information is encoded acoustically, whilst in the long-term memory it is encoded semantically. Information can move from the LTM to the STM via retrieval.
  • "Encoding" is the process by which information is converted into a form which makes it suitable to be contained within, or stored in, some part of the memory; "storage" is the process of actually placing new information into the memory and "retrieval" is the process of re-accessing information which has gone through storage and encoding in the past.
  • Peterson and Peterson (1959) carried out a study into the duration of STEM involving trigrams, groups of three meaningless consonants. 24 psychology students were asked to remember and subsequently recall trigrams, whilst being asked to count backwards in threes or fours from a specific number in order to prevent rehearsal. After intervals of 3 seconds, ranging from 3 to 18 seconds, participants were asked to recall trigrams: after 3 seconds 80% of them could be recalled, but after 18 seconds only 10% of them could be. The conclusion from this is that short-term memory has a limited duration, of around 18-30 seconds, when rehearsal is specifically prevented. However one concern with this study is its lack of ecological validity.
  • Sperling (1960) did a study into the sensory registers where he asked participants to look at a chart for 50 milliseconds, the chart being a 3x4 chart of letters, before asking them to recall what they had remembered. Sperling then subsequently used tones in order to direct participants to recall specific letters.Sperling found that in the former case around 3-4 letters could be recalled on average, but that in the latter case around 3-4 letters from the prompted row could in fact be recalled. This hence served as an indicator that the senosry registers for a very short time, a perfect (or at least around 75% perfect) image of anything that is seen, which then decays within around 0.5-2 seconds if not attended to.
  • Bahrick et al (1975) carried out a study revealing the very long, if not theoretically unlimited, duration of LTM. In this experiment 392 Ohioans aged 17-74 were asked to give researchers their high-school yearbooks, their recall of the said yearbooks being rested by a 50-photo photo recognition test and a free recall test of names of graudating…

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