capacity/duration/coding

What is the approach used in this topic

Cognitive

What is the key process in cognitive approach

Attention

What is memory

The brains ability to store and recall information

What are the 3 terms on how we measure memory

CAPACITY - how much information can be held

DURATION - how long the information is held for before its lost

CODING- the format in which information is stored in our memory

What is the difference between short term memory and long term memory

STM is our memory for things in our immediate past

Available to us for a short amount of time for us to use to work on active tasks

LTM is where you store proper memories

Who tested coding and how

BADDELEY

Gave lists of words that were either acoustically similar or semantically similar or neither

He found that for short tests the ppt struggled to recall acoustically similar words suggesting that STM is encoding ACOUSTICALLY

For longer tests he found that ppt struggled with semantically similar words suggesting LTM IS ENCODED SEMANTICALLY

What idea did BADDELEY use to come up with his findings

When memories are encoded if they are similar to other memories they can get confused =*interference*

The idea for BADDELEys test was that if the type of encoding was acoustic the acoustically similar words would interfere with each other and be harder to remember

Same with semantic

What evidence was found that goes against BADDELEYs research

Rothbart found evidence of acoustic coding in LTM

What is the a03 for BADDELEY

Strength

• identified a clear difference between 2 memory stores

• Idea that STM is mostly acoustic and LTM is mostly semantically has stood the test of time

• RESEARCH important in developing multi store model

WEAKNESS

• lack of mundane realism with the list of words.

He used artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material

When processing more meaningful info the stm may code semantically

Suggest findings have limited applications and lowers external validity

What were the 4 studies used in finding them capcacity for stm

Jacobs - digit span technique

Miller- magic number 7±2

Cowan- 4 chunks

Simon- size of chunks

What was the digit span technique and how was this information was used

Jacobs did the digit span technique

He gave ppt a random number with a certain amount of digits

He then gave another random number with an extra digit

This was repeated until the ppt forgot the number

He found that most people remembered 9.3 digits and 7.3 letters

He suggested this was because there were 9 digits and 26 letters

What did miller suggest

He found there was a magic number of 7+-2 items that can be held at any time

This suggest that people remembered between 5-9 items

He suggested we can remember 5 letters as easily as we can remember 5 words suggesting that

chunking information into more meaningful information increases the amount we can remember

How does millers research differ to Cowan

Cowan found that when memory wasn’t supported by long term knowledge that the capacity for stm was 4 chunks instead of 5-9

He removed teh ppt being allowed to rehearse or chunk information

What did Simon do

He found that the size of chunk matters as people had shorter memory for larger chunks

What is the a03 of studies of capacity

METHODOLIGAL ISSUE

Jacobs study is really old (in 1887) therefore lack of adequate control

People may have been distracted

Results may have been due to confounding variables

However later studies were done that confirmed Jacobs findings

Miller also in his research allowed ppt rehearse the information and use chunking to remember information

This could lack validity as memory is backed up by long term memory

What is the a01 of STM duration

PETERSON AND PETERSON

Have 24 ppt a nonsense trigram to remember (e.g THX) and to prevent verbal rehearsal he lost gave them a 3 digit number to count down from (e.g 512)

He found that 90% of info was remembered after 3 seconds

20% of info was remembered after 9 seconds

2% of info was remembered after 18 seconds

Suggests duration of STM is less than 18 seconds if verbal rehearsal is prevented

What is the a03 for evaluation of research into stm duration

Artificial stimuli was used - people wouldn’t usually need to remember nonsense trigrams while counting backwards from 3 digits (lacks mundane realism)

So it lacks ecological validity

However there could be some situations where remembering words and letters is handy as a skill

Retention interval might cause forgetting

• instead of forgetting the words due to lack of rehearsal (spontaneous decay) it could be the displacement of information. - the new info pushing out the old- (retention interval)

What is the a01 of LTM duration

Bahrick

A natural experiment where people of various ages were asked to put names too faces on heir high school yearbook

Found that even 48 year old could put 70%of names to faces

Shows that when material being recalled is meaningful to the ppt then duration ofLTM is significantly longer

What is the a03 of BAHRICK study

HIGH ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY

• real life memories were being studied

• More realistic

Low internal validity

• lack of control of extraneous variables such as if people had seen their classmates over the years which would have caused them to rehearse their memories