Cognitive Psychology

Edexcel

Baddeley & Hitch (1974)

Working Memory Model - A representation of short-term memory. It suggests how STM is a dynamic processor of different types of information using different subunits coordinated by a central decision-making system.

Central executive - supervisory role:

• focuses, divides and switches limited attention

• Monitors incoming data and makes decisions to allocate slave subsystems tasks.

• Limited processing capacity and does not store information

Slave Subsystem:

Phonological loop - stored auditory information (consists of articulatory process and phonological store)

Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad - stores visual and spatial information (consists of inner scribe and visual cache)

Logie (1995)

Slave subsystems:

Visuo-spatial sketchpad is divided into 2 parts:

1. Visual cache → stores visual data

2. Inner scribe → records visual arrangement of objects and to rehearse visual information for storage

STRENGTHS OF WMM

Baddeley (1975)

Dual-task performance → performance on a visual and verbal task together was no worse than separate due to no competition between slave subsystems.

Shallice & Warrington (1970): Applied to understanding nature of amnesia

• Case study on patient KF who had a brain injury.

• KF had poor STM for auditory information but could process visual information normally. Phonological loop was damaged but VSS was intact.

• Showed amnesia does not impair all memory functioning.

WEAKNESSES OF WMM

Shallice & Warrington (1970)

• Patient KF results cannot be generalised.

Baddeley (2003)

VSS is limited to a capacity of 3-4 objects. Reductionist theory of central executive because its function and complexity is not understood well enough.

Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968, 1971)

Multi-store model → A representation of how memory works in 3 stores and describes how information is transferred, remembered and forgotten between stores.

Miller (1956)

Magic number 7 plus or minus 2

STRENGTHS OF MSM

Baddeley (1966a)

• Information is encoded acoustically and acoustic mistakes are made when recalling a list of words.

• Shows that LTM and STM are different in terms of encoding, capacity and duration

Application to improving memory

• Chunking improves the recall of words.

• Baddeley (2012) - Limited capacity of 4 chunks in episodic buffer

Application to the real world:

• Clive Wearing - could still use his STM to remember things for about 20 seconds but then he would forget everything – he could not “make new memories”. The Multi Store Model can be applied to his case, because it suggests an inability to rehearse information into LTM.

• Eyewitness Testimonies - This might happen because of inattention. If eyewitnesses are distracted, key details might not reach STM. Other details might not reach LTM if they are not rehearsed – if the victim refuses to think about or talk about the crime because it was so traumatic, they won’t rehearse the information

Glanzer & Cunitz (1966) - early study into forgetting

• Asked to recall a list of words in any order, participants tended to recall more from the beginning/end of the list and fewer from the middle. This is the primacy/recency effect.

• It happens because primacy words are well-rehearsed and encoded in LTM, recency words are still in the Rehearsal Loop; middle words are displaced by recency words because of the limited capacity of STM. This is known as the Displacement Theory of forgetting.

• This supports the MSM’s process of transferring information from STM to LTM with prolonged maintenance rehearsal.

Lloyd & Peterson (1959)

Duration of STM is between 18-30 seconds, so most information is forgotten but duration can be extended by prolonged maintenance rehearsal.

WEAKNESSES OF MSM

Shallice & Warrington (1970)

• More than 1 type of STM - good visual but poor auditory memory, proving MSM wrong.

• Reductionist theory

Tulving (1972)

• MSM view on LTM was too simplistic and inflexible.

Competing Argument → Campitelli (2015) argues that STM and LTM are integrated.

Raaijmakers & Shiffrin (2003) later proposed another type of rehearsal – Elaborative Rehearsal. This involves semantic encoding by thinking about the meaning of information. This is similar to creating mind maps and is more effective for encoding information in LTM than Maintenance Rehearsal.

Bahrick (1975)

LTM → Many classmates could recall names and faces of school classmates after 50 years.

Tulving (1972)

TYPES OF LTM:

Episodic - Personal events, time stamped, retrieved consciously with effort, autobiographical

Autonoetic consciousness: aware that a past event is real and not a dream.

Semantic - knowledge of the world, facts and definitions, recalled deliberately.

(1985) Procedural - Actions + skills, recalled without conscious awareness and with little effort, learn and respond to environment

STRENGTHS OF EPISODIC & SEMANTIC MEMORY

Case Study HM: Empirical Evidence

• Impaired episodic memory but intact semantic memory - supports different LTM stores.

Competing Argument → Lack of control over previous confounding variables reduces validity.

Belleville et al. (2006): Application to improving memory

• Worked with older people with a mild memory impairment where participants took a training programme to improve episodic memory and performed better than control group.

WEAKNESSES OF EPISODIC & SEMANTIC MEMORY

Tulving (2002) - Overlapping types of LTM

• Episodic memory as a ‘specialised subcategory’ of semantic memory

• Possible to have a functioning semantic memory and impaired episodic memory but not the other way around - COMPLEX

Bartlett (1932)

Challenged reproductive memory with reconstructive memory.

Reconstructive memory - fragments of stored information are reassembled during recall, gaps are filled by expectations and beliefs. Reconstructive memory suggests that we actively try and make sense of new information based on what we already know.

Memory - active process where fragments of information are stored.

Schema theory - a prior knowledge that affected recollection of memory which is influenced by past experiences.

Recalled memory has possibility of being altered every time it is recalled. These are called narrative gaps which are filled with our own personal experiences and understanding of the world.

WAR OF THE GHOSTS CASE STUDY:

• Showed British participants a Native American folk tale.

• Serial production, omissions shortened story

• Rationalisations - changing words or phrases to suit culture

STRENGTHS OF RECONSTRUCTIVE MEMORY

Realistic Theory and Research

• Relevant to daily life cognitive processes

Allport & Postman (1947)

• Showed participants a drawing (below) of an argument on a subway train. They were asked to describe it to another participant through serial reproduction (like Chinese Whispers).

• The black character was better dressed and more respectable than the white character but, after serial reproduction, white participants tended to reverse their appearances. Some even described the black character as holding a knife.

Loftus & Palmer (1974)

• Eye-witness testimony → Showed people do not always accurately recall what they hear or see when exposed to leading questions.

• We also incorporate our schemas (expecting broken glass after a “smash” - this is sharpening the memory). We cannot tell which parts of a memory are original and which parts are later changes and there’s no way of going back to the original.

Classic Study: Baddeley (1996b)

Aim: Showed recall of acoustically similar words from STM was poor. STM was not affected by semantically similar words and wanted to see if LTM had the same effect.

Procedure:

• 75 participants - all young servicemen who underwent hearing test to reduce effect of extraneous variables such as hearing impairments.

4 lists of 10 words:

1. A - acoustically similar words

2. B - acoustically disimilar words

3. C - semantically similar words

4. D - semantically disimilar words

• Each list was presented on tape, one word every 3 seconds.

• Participants had 40 seconds to write down as many of 10 words they could recall in correct order. Done 4 times.

• Each participant then spent 20 minutes on an unrelated task and had to recall 10 words in correct order again.

Findings:

• D.V. - Number of words correctly recalled in order

• I.V. - Different lists of words

• Differences in performances compared using Mann-Whitney U test

• Significant forgetting in lists C & D

• Recall of list A was consistently lower than list B in initial test. After 20 minutes, no significant forgetting in list A but there was in list B.

Conclusion:

• Unexpected

• List A was the only list to show no forgetting in LTM.

• This contradicts the MSM as it suggests that encoding in LTM is acoustic instead of semantic.

Contemporary Study: Sebastian & Hernández-Gil (2012)

Aim:

• Digit span increases with age

• Compare Spanish schoolchildren with elderly with dementia

Procedure:

• I.V. - Year of schooling (5-17 years old)

• D.V. - Verbal digit span

• Participants - 575 schoolchildren & 9 elderly patients with dementia

• Material - Sequences of random digits that gradually increased by one

• Participants were divided into five different age groups and then each child was read the digits independently.

• Each participant was read increasing sequences of digits to recall in the correct order with digit span recorded as the maximum digits recalled in the correct order without error.

Findings:

• Youngest age group (5 years) had significantly lower mean digit span (3.76)

• Digit span increased with age: 11 → 5.28, 17 → 5.9

• Digit span of healthy elderly people was significantly higher than 5/6 years old but similar to older children.

• Similar findings for dementia patients and healthy elderly people.

• No cultural differences until 7 and English children leveled out at 15 due to word length effect.

• Healthy Anglo-Saxon adults were significantly higher than 5-6 year olds.

Conclusion:

• Spanish children had lower digit span than English children because Spanish words are typically longer and have more syllables on average.

• Phonological loop is affected more by age than dementia.

CONCLUSION OF CONTEMPORARY STUDY: Sebastian & Hernández-Gil (2012)

Gathercole & Alloway (2008)

• Increase continues until 17 years old but levels out at 15 years old for English children

Engle & Marshall (1983)

• Words are rehearsed sub-vocally at 7 or above so there should be no difference in digit span between Spanish and English children under 7.

STRENGTHS OF CONTEMPORARY STUDY: Sebastian & Hernández-Gil (2012)

Gignac & Weiss (2015)

• Understanding specific cognitive abilities - people with longer digit span are better readers and have higher intelligence.

M.S. The use of cross-sectional groups allowed them to track the development of digit span over time without the extended duration of conducting a longitudinal study.

R - High inter-rater reliability because of standardised procedures. Digit-span techniques meant that memory was consistently recorded in terms of the longest sequence recalled. Digits were also read aloud at a constant rate.

A - Application to the real world: Digit span correlates with cognitive abilities so awareness of this can be used to create effective teaching practices.

E - Ethical because there was no deception in the study and informed consent was sought from parents. Memory tests were conducted within the process of diagnosis to ensure it was not distressing for the children. Vulnerable participants like children and fvFTD were involved so additional measures of having a right to withdraw were put in place.

WEAKNESSES OF CONTEMPORARY STUDY: Sebastian & Hernández-Gil (2012)

• The sample is only representative of Spanish speaking children in the Madrid region, so it cannot be generalised beyond this population to speakers of other languages.

• Digit sequence recall is artificial and has limited task validity as children are unlikely to learn random sequences of numbers in their day-to-day experiences.

• The study can be replicated to test verbal digit span across cultures to understand cross-cultural developmental and individual differences in phonological processing in working memory.

G - Participant variables were not controlled because of large sample of children from Madrid in Spain. The small sample of fvFTD patients made type 1 errors more likely, decreasing generalisability.

V - Low external validity because recalling random sequences of digits lacks mundane realism.

Lack of controls: Confounding Variables

• Children were not directly tested for impairments but relied on this information being shared by parents.

• The study was conducted in a school, so the realistic setting may not reflect attention in daily lives.

Strengths of Classic Study: Baddeley (1966b)

High Internal Validity

• Well-controlled procedures of using words with equal frequency.

• Avoids potentially confounding variables that would lower internal validity.

Competing Argument → Procedure did not rule out STM because participants could still rehearse words between learning trials - affecting validity of LTM recall.

Application to learning:

• Semantic encoding of LTM can help improve recall of information.

Weaknesses of Classic Study: Baddeley (1966b)

Low External Validity

• Tightly controlled - artificial and unrealistic

• Semantic encoding in the study may not represent real life

EVALUATING THE MULTI STORE MODEL (AO3)

Although H.M. and Clive Wearing seem to back up the Multi Store Model, other evidence contradicts it. Shallice & Warrington (1970) report a victim of a motorbike accident (K.F.) who could still add memories to LTM even though his STM was so damaged he couldn't repeat back more than 2 digits. MSM cannot explain this but K.F.'s unusual condition does support the Working Memory Model.

The model is based on lab experiments involving tasks like the Brown-Peterson Technique (ie. artificial, largely meaningless in real life situations.) where inference tasks are repeatedly used to block rehearsal.

Supporting Research:

• Glanzer & Cuntiz (1966) show how memories are displaced from STM when they exceed its capacity

• Face Validity - describes memory well.

Opposing Research:

• Patient K.F. shows how there are more than 1 LTM store.

• The model is based on lab experiments involving tasks like the Brown-Peterson Technique. These are quite artificial, often involving meaningless trigrams. In real life, you use your memory to recall information that is important to you and there are usually consequences if you forget. If the experiments into MSM lack ecological validity, then the model won’t explain how memory works in real life situations.

Different Theory:

• Working Memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974) replaces STM in the model and provides a more detailed explanation of rehearsal and retrieval from LTM. Most psychologists consider Working Memory to be an improvement and a refinement on the (rather simplistic) Multi Store Model.

• Reconstructive Memory is a different approach to memory involving schemas. This theory explain why we mis-remember things (false memories), which the Multi Store Model doesn't explain. However, in Working Memory it is the Central Executive that creates and retrieves schemas to help the slave systems do their jobs. This is another example of Working Memory incorporating and improving on the Multi Store Model.

• A different theory of memory is Levels of Processing Framework (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). This theory ignores separate stores altogether. It suggests that encoding a memory is about the “depth” of processing. Semantic encoding is much “deeper” than acoustic or visual encoding, making this information easier to remember. We also have much more capacity when we try to store meaningful things: most people can only store up to 9 numbers or trigrams but they can store up to 20 words. Richard Shiffrin used this idea when he introduced Elaborative Rehearsal to the MSM in 2002.

Application:

• The Multi Store Model of Memory tells us how to improve our memory in some situations. If you are an eyewitness then you need to pay close attention to encode information in STM. You then need to rehearse it. Repeating the information over and over works, but Elaborative Rehearsal is better because it encodes information semantically. For example, students should make mind maps or use colour coding to focus on meaning.

• The model may have application to helping people with dementia or brain damage. If patients struggle to rehearse new information, then writing things down and putting labels on things will help. Colour coding buttons on phones or remotes will also help because it brings in Elaborative Rehearsal.

WEAKNESSES OF RECONSTRUCTIVE MEMORY

Wrong to suggest that all memories are inaccurate or affected by schemas

• Reconstructions can be highly accurate and relatively unaffected by personal beliefs and experiences - participants from the ‘War of the Ghosts’ study often recalled ‘Something black came out of his mouth’.

Competing Argument → Bartlett’s research did not use rigorously controlled methods and lacked objectivity.

• Lack of standardised instructions - evidence lacks reliability and validity

Phineas Cage (Case Study - 1848)

• A iron rod severely damaged his left frontal lobe, which changed his personality and behaviour from hard-working and popular to restless and indecisive.

• This showed that different parts of the brain can be removed without having a fatal effect.

• It is possible that the personality changes were just temporary.

Case Study (HM)

• Experienced mild epileptic seizures as a result of bicycle accident.

• Got his hippocampus removed (located in the temporal lobes)

• HM’s epilepsy was significantly better but this was overshadowed by significant memory loss.

• Richards (1973) - His STM was only same with controls for up to 20 seconds then he had no recall

• Some of HM’s behavioural deficits may be from his severe epilepsy.

• Clearly demonstrated the localised nature of different brain functions and the role of hippocampus in studies on memory.

• Supports the MSM - Could not transfer information from STM to LTM, supporting different stores.

He suffered from

• Anterograde amnesia - loss of memories 10 years prior

• Retrograde amnesia - unable to form new long-term memories

Strengths:

1) One strength is that a pseudonym was used to protect his identity. this is a strength as it is ethical and protects his identity.
2) One strength is that Clive wearing also couldn't make new memories due to his hippocampus damaged. this is a strength because it gives the hm study external reliability as we can be confident the hippocampus is involved in the transfer of information from Stm to Ltm.

Weaknesses:

1. 1) a weakness is that the case study is idiographic as it focuses on hm only. this is a weakness as all findings about hm couldn't be generalised to the public.
   2) another weakness is that is that most data produced about hm was qualitative. this is a weakness as the researchers may have been biased by selecting certain quotes and findings, reducing internal validity.

Clive Wearing (Case Study)

• In 1985, Wearing contracted Herpesviral encephalitis, a Herpes simplex virus that attacked his central nervous system; damaged his hippocampus and his brain's frontal regions

• Since then, Wearing has been unable to store new memories, control emotions and associate memories effectively

• He developed two types of amnesia:
  1. Anterograde Amnesia - the inability to store new memories after a trauma, due to the damage to his hippocampus ( a region responsible for transferring memories from STM to LTM)
  2. Retrograde Amnesia - the inability to recall memories that were made before a trauma

STRENGTHS:

1. Very detailed
2. Method triangulation (observed, interviewed, scanned) ; this increases the credibility of the data

Link to MSM:

• It supports the idea that there is more than one memory store; there's a STM and a LTM. Wearing couldn't access his LTM due to the damage to his hippocampus but his STM was still functioning

WEAKNESSES:

Highlights MSM Weakness:

• It shows that the model is too simplistic, not all of Wearing's LTM were damaged. He could still remember his wife and how to play the piano but he couldn't remember the names of his children, this suggests that there are different types of memory within each store.
  One could say that his episodic memory was damaged whereas his procedural memory remained intact.

Individual differences in memory

● Memory can be affected by individual differences in processing speed or by schemas that guide the reconstructive nature of memory.

● Autobiographical memory is by nature individual.

Schmolck et al. (2002)

Dr Schmolck collected scores for all 9 tests. Here are some examples of her findings:

• Similar pictures: the Controls got all the answers right as did those with hippocampus damage only (H.M. score 98% for living creatures and 100% for objects); MTL+ patients performed worse: 85% for living creatures and 90% for objects

• MTL+ Group: These patients did significantly worse in all the tests (p<0.005)

• Patient H.M.: H.M. did better than the MTL+ patients but slightly worse than the other MTL patients who had damage solely to the hippocampus

• Overall: Controls scored 99%, MTL patients (excluding HM) scored 100% and MTL+ patients scored 78%

Conclusions

• There seems to be a clear link between damage to the temporal cortex generally and the loss of semantic LTM.

• Patients with damage specific to the hippocampus suffered loss of episodic memory, but not semantic memory.

• This suggests that semantic and episodic LTM are encoded in different parts of the brain, with the hippocampus/MTL dealing with episodic memory and the nearby temporal cortex dealing with semantic memory.

• H.M. performed similarly to the Controls but with odd lapses when it came to defining things, where he resembled the MTL+ group more. This suggests H.M. had very specific brain damage that wasn't quite like the others. However, there are problems with generalising from H.M. because of his unusual background. H.M spent most of his young life with debilitating epilepsy and his entire adult life in hospitals, being studied by psychologists.

STRENGTHS OF EPISODIC AND SEMANTIC MEMORY

• There is supporting evidence that LTM has two distinct stores where episodic memories are stored separately to semantic memories.

Ostergaard (1987):

• A boy with brain damage could not process episodic memories, but could make academic progress which involves semantic memories, showing the two stores are separate.

Key Question - HOW CAN PSYCHOLOGY HELP TREAT PEOPLE SUFFERING FROM DEMENTIA?

A01:

Dementia is an illness that affects 850,000 people in the UK. It is set to rise to 1 million people by 2025. The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimer’s. It tends to affect the elderly but there are 40,000 people under 65 in the UK with dementia.

The common symptoms of dementia include:

• Loss of memory

• Other cognitive deficits, like difficulty in understanding and confusion

• Depression

• Mood swings

• Exhaustion

• Ultimately, dementia is terminal

There is no cure for dementia but it is estimated that if we could delay the onset of dementia by five years, we would halve the number of deaths from dementia. Most research is into diagnosing dementia early, slowing down the onset of the disease and reducing the stress and unhappiness of sufferers.

DIAGNOSING DEMENTIA: Professor Bruno (2007)

• His patients do a word recall test from a list of 15 words.

• Normal memory should recall many of the first 4 words from the list but some patients recalled words from the middle of the list instead. These patients turned out to be much more likely to develop dementia.

• Bruno makes a distinction between “healthy” memory loss from old age and “pathological” memory loss that his test seems to detect.

• Prof. Bruno hopes tests like this will help pick up a warning sign of dementia before sufferers realise there is anything wrong with their memories.

• A lack of social stimulation is harmful because this exaggerates the impact of dementia and encourages individuals to withdraw.

COGNITIVE STIMULATION:

This therapy for dementia stimulates the mind. It involves patients getting together in groups to discuss, play games and solve puzzles. Often the activities are linked to memories, like looking at old photographs, listening to old songs or using old skills (such as skittles).

Cognitive Stimulation works best for patients in the mild to moderate stages of dementia. It can slow down the progress of the disease as well as reduce stress and loneliness.

Variations of Cognitive Stimulation involve using music or introducing patients to pets. A charming version of this is in Seattle where the 400 residents of Providence Mount St Vincent Residential Home ("The Mount") meet up with 150 kindergarten children 5 days a week. Staff report that the residents become lucid when they play with the children and join in their games and storytelling. They refer to this as “moments of grace”.

A02:

THE FEATURES OF DEMENTIA & ALZHEIMER'S

Dementia involves loss of memory but sufferers don’t lose all their memories. They often lose memories of events from in their past. Tulving’s ideas about episodic LTM apply to this. More recent episodic memories are lost first, but sufferers often keep memories from their youth or childhood right to the end.

Semantic memory seems to be lost separately, because sufferers may recognise a friend but forget their name. Schmolck et al’s study into semantic LTM applies to this, because they found semantic LTM is stored in a different part of the brain. The idea of schemas from Reconstructive Memory explains why dementia may be lifted when patients hear old songs, play childhood games or visit familiar-looking places.

Procedural memory is also affected separately. It may explain the confusion sufferers experience because they are suddenly unable to do tasks they have taken for granted, like read, tell the time or use a phone.

DIAGNOSING DEMENTIA

Displacement theory applies Prof. Bruno’s test. The primacy effect means the early items in a list are well-rehearsed and go into LTM, making them easy to recall. Middle items are displaced because there is no time to rehearse them. This happens because, according to the Multi Store Model, STM has a maximum capacity of 9 items.

If a person doesn’t experience displacement, it means that they weren’t rehearsing the primacy items. This suggests a problem with LTM which Prof. Bruno calls “pathological”.

COGNITIVE STIMULATION

Cognitive Stimulation often starts by focussing on early memories from childhood and young adulthood. Most dementia sufferers will be able to access these episodic memories. Because it fades slower, semantic memory can help link episodic memories together, enabling sufferers to retrieve more and more details from LTM. Activities also rehearse procedural memories that are fading.

The idea of Reconstructive Memory can be applied to this therapy. If memories are reconstructed using schemas, anything that reinstates schemas will help with memory. A lot of elderly people find themselves cut off from familiar things. The kindergarten at The Mount may remind sufferers of when they had children or when they were children themselves, activating schemas.

EVALUATING RECONSTRUCTIVE MEMORY (AO3)

Supporting Research:

• The idea of schemas has been supported in a lot of studies since the 1930s. Loftus carried out a range of lab experiments into reconstructive memory, all of which had tight experimental controls, standardised procedures and collected quantitative data, making them quite objective and reliable.

• Schemas also explains the puzzling phenomenon of false memories. In 2005, John Charles De Menezes was mistaken for a terrorist and shot by police after the 7/7 London Bombing. Many eyewitnesses saw the shooting but their recollections were widely different and often exaggerated. Their schemas about the appearance and behaviour of terrorists might have sharpened and levelled their memories.

Opposing Research:

• The early study by Bartlett was not at all scientific. Bartlett did not follow standardised procedures, getting his students to reproduce the story as-and-when. He had no scoring system for measuring changes in recall other than counting the number of words. This makes his research conclusions subjective.

• Bartlett’s research was particularly unrealistic, getting Cambridge University students to recall Native American ghost stories. This strange task lacks ecological validity - although Bartlett claimed the task had to be strange so as to prompt the participants to level and sharpen the details in their memories.

• The Allport & Postman study is widely misreported. You will see many Psychology text books and websites claiming this picture (below) was shown to participants and that white participants wrongly recalled the black man as holding the knife. But this was not in the original study. This seems to be a case of ‘Chinese Whispers’ happening to psychologists!

Different Theory:

• Reconstructive Memory has links to Tulving’s theories about Semantic Memory. Tulving argues our memory has semantic stores where we keep our understanding of relationships and rules – very similar to schemas. If Reconstructive Memory is true, this makes Tulving’s ideas more plausible. Moreover, semantic memory might have much more influence over episodic memory than Tulving imagined, because schemes dictate how we reconstruct our memories.

• A criticism of Reconstructive Memory compared to the other theories is that it doesn’t explain how memory is reconstructed. The other cognitive theories of memory describe the processes at work in rehearsing, retrieving and recalling. These processes have been linked to specific parts of the brain thanks to brain scanning and research on patients with lesions in specific parts of the brain. Reconstructive Memory is much more vague about how schemas work and where they are located.

Application:

• The idea of schemas helps us understand some things about patients with memory loss like Clive Wearing or people in the early stages of dementia. Though they may be confused by their amnesia, they might still remember important schemas and this could be used to calm and focus them. For example, Clive Wearing still loved his wife and loved music, which he could still play. Validation Therapy involves “going along” with delusional ideas so as not to cause distress when a patient’s schemas conflict with the real world.

APPLYING LONG TERM MEMORY (AO2)
MEMORY IN THE REAL WORLD

Episodic memory can be “jogged” by context cues – things that remind you of when/where the original memory was encoded. Godden & Baddeley (1974) tested this and found that divers who learned words underwater recalled them better underwater than back on dry land.

EVALUATING LONG TERM MEMORY (AO3)

Supporting Research:

• The Classic Cognitive Study by Baddeley (1966b) also supports the existence of semantic memory. Baddeley found that participants struggled with word lists linked by a common theme, which suggests the semantic similarity confused LTM. Unrelated word lists were not confusing. This suggests at least part of LTM works semantically.

• The Contemporary Study by Schmolck et al. (2002) also supports the idea of long term memory being located in a specific part of the brain – the temporal cortex.

• Tulving carried out a case study of Kent Cochrane (K.C.) who suffered brain damage in a motor accident in 1981. Like Clive Wearing. K.C.'s hippocampus was destroyed in the injury and he lost all episodic memory but his semantic memory is still intact.

Opposing Research:

• Squire & Zola (1998) - episodic and semantic memory depend similarly on the medial temporal lobe.

Different Theory:

• Tulving’s ideas tie in closely with Atkinson & Shiffrin's Multi Store Model of Memory, which proposes that LTM is a separate memory store from STM and that LTM is created through rehearsal. Tulving would agree, but argues there are different types of encoding, episodic and semantic.

• If Tulving’s ideas are true, this makes Reconstructive Memory more plausible. If Reconstructive Memory is true, then semantic memory might have much more influence over episodic memory than Tulving imagined, because schemas influence how we reconstruct our memories.

Application:

• The distinction between semantic memory and episodic memory helps us understand patients with memory loss like Clive Wearing, K.C. or people in the early stages of dementia.

• Cognitive Stimulation Therapy – getting them to talk about how familiar songs or activities make them feel.