AS Psychology-Cognitive,Developmental&Research Meothods (AQA 'A')

COGNITIVE:

 STM, LTM, and Duration:

Memory= the process which we retain information’s about events that have happened in the past.

STM= present or immediate past.

LTM= memory of events that have happened in the past.

Duration= how long a memory lasts before it’s no longer available.

Duration of STM:

Peterson& Peterson= aim was to see how many letters people able to remember without being able to rehearse it. They were given 3 letters, for 2 seconds then immediately had to count down in three’s from a random number each time, to distract them from rehearsing. The results were that the longer the distractions intervals were the less people remembered. STM lasts around 18-20 seconds.

Duration of LTM:

Shephard= 612 pictures shown, 1 at a time. 1-hour later, same pictures shown with other unseen ones mixed in. they recognised this. 4 month later, 50% still recognised this.

Bahrick et al= asked various ages to put names to faces to their high school yearbook photos. 48 years later 70% were accurate.

Capacity and Encoding:

Capacity= a measure of how much can be held in the memory in terms of bits of information.

Miller= the STM can hold the magic 7 numbers plus or minus 2.

Miller= found that capacity of STM could be increased if information was to be put into ‘bit’ like chunks.

Simon= the size of chunk affects how much can be remembered.

Cowan= STM is likely to be limited into $ chunks, not as extensive as first thought.

Encoding= the way information is changed so it can be stored in the memory.

Acoustic coding= coding info on how it sounds (STM)

Semantic coding= coding info in terms of its meaning (LTM)

Baddeley= he tested the effects of acoustic and semantic similarity on STM and LTM recall. Results were that people had difficult remembering acoustically similar in STM but no in LTM, whereas semantically similar words crated problem for STM recall but lead to muddled LTM.

STM

LTM

Duration

Measured in mins and secs.

Measured in hours, days& years

Capacity

7 Plus or minus 2

Potentially unlimited

Encoding

Acoustic or visual

semantic

Multi-Store Model:

            AO1:

-          Designed by Atkinson and Shiffron. (1968)

-          3 different types of memory stores.

-          Each store retains a different amount of information.

-          Only if attention is paid will the information be passed to the STM.

-          Information moves in a linear way.

-          In order to create LTM memories the process of elaborative rehearsal has to take place, this is done semantically.

Evaluation of the MSM (AO2):

Strengths=

-          Is the first model of memory, has a clear explanation on structure and process.

-          Evidence for separate stores= Clive wearing case study= he lost a part of his memory, can’t remember short term things. His elaborative rehearsal doesn’t work. This is evidence that STM and LTM are separate and supports the diagram.

-          Brain scans show that different parts of…