Psychology-Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Encoding: Made sense of.

Capacity: How much information is stored.

Duration: How long information is stored.

The sensory store

Sperling (1960)

• Participants saw a grid of digits and letters for 50 milliseconds.
• They were either asked to recall and write down all 12 items or told they would hear a tone immediately afterwards and they should write the row that the tone corresponded with.
• Recall was poorer when asked to recall the whole thing (42%)
• Recall was higher when asked to recall one row (75%)

Short term memory

Capacity: 

Joseph Jacobs (1887)

• Used digit span and found that the average span for digits was 9.3 where as for letters it was 7.3
• He suggested that it may be easier to recall numbers because there are only 9 digits where as there are 26 letters.

George Miller (1956)

• The span of immediate memory is 7. People Can cope with remembering 7 dots flashing on the screen but tend to have difficulty remembering more than 7.
• The magic number +7 and -2

A way of increasing memory is through a method of called chunking, this means chunking things into things that you remember more easily.

Duration:

=> Duration refers to how long the information can be held.

=> The duration of STM isn't very long.

Llyod and Margret Peterson (1959)

• 24 students.
• experimenter said a consonant syllable followed by a 3 digits number.
• They had to count backwards from the number in 3's or 4's until told to stop.
• They were then asked to recall the constant syllable.
• counting backwards was to stop the participant rehearsing.
• Participants remembered about 90% when there was only a 3 second interval.
• only recalled 2% when there was an 18 second interval.

Encoding

Conrad (1964) suggested that STM codes all information acoustically (according to sound)

• Participants were given a list of consonants. for example: PJNRZD for about 3/4 of a second.
• Asked to recall what they had seen.
• They found that errors were linking to letters which has a similar sound.
• This is referred to as acoustic confusion.

Long Term Memory

Duration:

=> LTM refers to memories that last any where between 2 hours and 100 years

Bahrick et el (1975)

• Asked people of various ages to put names to the faces in their high school year book.
• People had 70% accurate recall.
• This may be because the information needed to be recalled was of more importance.

Encoding:

Baddeley (1960)

• He tested the effects of acoustic and sematic similarity on STM and LTM recall.
• Gave participants a list of words which were acoustically similar…