Key studies - Memory

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Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) - Serial Position Effect

Aim:

Examine the whether the position of words influences recall (primacy & recency effects) and see if there are two separate stores of memory (STM & LTM)

Procedure:

2 groups of participants were shown with the same list of words. One group had to recall these words immediately after the presentation, whereas the other group had to recall the words after 30 seconds. (To prevent rehearsal for the second group, they had to count backwards in threes.) Both groups were free to recall the words in any order.

Findings:

P’s that recalled immediately were able to recall the first and last few words in the list

However, P's that recalled after 30s were only able to recall the first few words in the list.

Conclusion:

When there are too many words to remember, the primacy effect results in the first words being recalled and the recency effect results in the last words being recalled.

Words that were at the start of the list that P’s recalled were because of the primacy effect (P’s are focused on memorising the first words and rehearsed them so they were transferred to LTM).

Words that were at the end of the list that P's recalled were because of recency effect (they were at the end and still fresh in the P's mind.

Words at the end of the list are only remembered if they are recalled first and then tested immediately. Delaying the recall by 30 seconds prevented the recency effect.

Evaluation:

+ The experiment shows evidence that there are two memory stores, supporting the MSM.

-  Doesn’t have any ecological validity.

- The P's weren’t randomly allocated – not a true experiment.

Peterson and Peterson (1959) – STM Duration

Aim:

To test the duration of STM when rehearsal is prevented.

Procedure:

P's were briefly shown a consonant trigram e.g. NGW. They were asked to count backwards in threes from a random number (to prevent rehearsal). After 3, 6,9,18 seconds, they were asked to recall the consonant trigram. This was repeated several times.

Findings:

80% could recall the trigram after 3 seconds, the longer the intervals, the fewer participants were able to remember the trigram. After 18 seconds, less than 10% of participants were able to remember the trigram.

Conclusion:

Duration of STM is very short (20s approx.), rehearsal is necessary to prevent decay. Information is lost through decay.

Evaluation:

- Trigrams are artificial therefore the experiment lacks ecological validity.

Baddeley et al (1975) – STM Capacity

Aim:

To see if people could remember more short words than long words in a serial recall test, and so demonstrate that pronunciation time rather than the number of…