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161 Terms

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Capacity

How many items a memory store can hold. STM = 5-9 items

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Duration

How long a memory will last

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Encoding

Process of formatting information in different ways

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Stages of MSM

  • Environmental stimuli

  • Sensory memory

  • STM

  • LTM

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Sensory store (MSM)

  • After senses detect stimuli

  • If paid attention to, transferred to STM

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STM (MSM)

  • Acoustic encoding

  • Capacity (5-9) (Jacobs)

  • Duration (15-30 seconds)

  • If rehearsed, transferred to LTM

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LTM (MSM)

  • Semantically encoded

  • Unlimited capacity

  • Lifelong duration

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Atkinson & Shiffrin

MSM

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Descriptive statistics

  • Brief informational coefficients that summarise a given data set, either a representation of the entire population or a sample of a population. 

  • Broken down - measures of central tendency + measures of dispersion

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Measures of central tendency

  • Mean

  • Median

  • Mode

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Measures of dispersion

  • SD

  • Range

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Jacobs

  • Researched capacity

  • STM (MSM)

  • Digit span

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Jacobs Aim

See how much information can be stored in STM.

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Digit span procedure

  • Presented with sequence of letters or digits.

  • Repeat back to experimenter in same order.

  • Began with 3 items, increased by 1 each time until participant consistently failed.

  • Sequence length recalled correctly on at least half the trials = Digit span.

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Jacobs conclusions

  • STM has limited capacity (5-9)

  • Capaciy not determined by nature of information but size of digit span.

  • Digit span increased with age

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Jacobs validity - generalisability - negative

- Lacks mundane realism - not representative of everyday memory demands.

- Artificial tasks may have biased results.
- Letters/digits not meaninful information so may be remembered less well.

- STM Capacity may be greater for everyday memory.

- Cannot be genaralised to real life memory.

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Quantitative data

Numerical data

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Qualitative data

Descriptive data

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Advantages of quantitative data

  • Objective = reliable + scientific

  • Good for comparisons - can be turned into statistics.

  • Allows comparisons of large groups + identifying trends.

  • Simple + can summarise data quickly.

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Disadvantage of quantitative data

  • Reductionist - lack of detail

  • Lacks validity - cannot explain circumstance

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Advantages of qualitative data

  • Holisitc, conveys meaning and individuality

  • Highly valid

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Disadvantage of qualitative data

  • Subjective

  • Unreliable

  • Hard to make comparisons

  • Hard to analyse large groups

  • Lengthy & time consuming

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Primary data

Gathered first hand by the researcher

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Secondary data

Information already published

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Brown-Peterson technique

  • Involves blocking rehearsal by getting participants to do an interference task like counting backwards in threes

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Peterson and Peterson - Brown-Peterson technique results

  • 3s – 10% forgotten

  • 9s – 70% was forgotten

  • 18s – 90% forgotten

Suggests decay occurs in STM over a period of 18-30 seconds if rehearsal is prevented supporting the rehearsal process of transfer to LTM.

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Peterson and Peterson - IV

Interference task number of seconds eg. 3,6,9,12,15

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Peterson and Peterson - DV

Number of trigrams correctly recalled after every trial

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Hypothesis

A predictable statement of what you expect to find after completing your research.

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Directional Hypothesis

One tailed - direction of the findings is predicted

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Non-directional Hypothesis

Two tailed - Direction of the findings is unknown, but a difference is predicted.

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Null hypothesis

Assumption that there is no relationship, difference or association between the two variables

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Independent groups design

- Different people in each condition of IV
- No one in more than 1 condition
- Each participant experiences IV once

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Repeated measures design

- All participants do experimental + control condition
- Experience every condition of IV

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Independent groups design - strengths

  • No order effects

  • Less demand characteristics

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Independent groups design - weaknesses

  • Participant variables

  • Needs more participants

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Repeated measures design - weaknesses

  • Order effects

  • More demand characteristics

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Repeated measures design - strengths

  • No participant variables

  • Needs fewer participants

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Fatigue effects

Order effects - participants' performance goes down through boredom or exhaustion

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Practice effects

Order effects where the participants' performance goes up through familiarity with the test

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Demand characteristics

Participants behave unnaturally because they are trying to do what they think the researchers want them to do.

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Solutions to the problem of order effects

  • Randomisation

  • Counter-balancing

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Randomisation

- Determining which condition a participant experiences by random chance (tossing a coin).

- Some might do experimental condition first, then control condition.

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Counter-balancing

Split the group into sub-groups - one sub-group does the experimental condition first, then the control, the other sub-group does it the other way round.

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Matched pairs design - weaknesses

  • Not always possible to find a participant who is a good match, especially if the experiment looks at rare cases (eg Schmolck)

  • Not always possible to operationalise them (eg Schmolck doesn't seem to have matched "educational level" very successfully, because it still made a difference to the results, causing some of the MTL patients to outperform the control group)

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Peterson and Peterson experimental design - advantages

- Repeated measures design

- removes participant variables

- can be more sure it is the interval delay affecting the trigrams correctly recalled not individual differences like shorter processing speed.

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Peterson and Peterson experimental design - disadvantages

- Repeated measures design
- Order effects + possible demand characteristics.
- After repeating the conditions, the participant might start to guess what the researcher is trying to measure and could therefore change their responses.

- Decreased validity

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Primacy/recency effect

When participants are given a list of words and asked to recall them, the first and last words on the list were recalled better than the words in the middle.

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Primary effect

Participants have rehearsed these words more and transferred them into the long term memory.

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Secondary effect

These words are still in the short term memory.

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HM

  • Case study

  • Brain injury due to surgery to relieve his seizures as a consequence of epilepsy.

  • Had part of temporal lobe (hippocampus) removed.

  • Had severe memory loss.

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HM - Supports WMM

  • New information entering STM was not entering LTM.

  • Suggests there are 2 separate stores that process information.

  • Remembered events before surgery but not after.

  • Memory stores must be located in different regions of brain.

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KF

  • Brain damage in motorcycle incident at 17.

  • STM was reduced (2 items)

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KF - supports WMM

  • Despite shortened STM, LTM remained fine.

  • Information could go straight to LTM.

  • Greater short term capacity of visual information (normal) than auditory letters + digits (2)

  • Suggests MSM is simplifying STM, there are multiple stores.

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Why was the WMM developed?

  • MSM is too simplistic, assumes STM and LTM act as one store

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Baddeley & Hitch - belief about STM

  • STM is more useful in everyday life than previously assumed. E.g. working on a maths problem, STM can keep track of where we get to in a problem.

  • Rehearsal is not the only process that occurs in STM

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Working memory model proposal about STM

Active processor made up of several stores; each section having a limited capacity.

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4 separate components to WMM

  • Central Executive

  • Phonological loop

  • Visuo spatial sketchpad

  • Episodic buffer. 

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Phonological loop

  • Slave system controlled by the Central executive.

  • Deals with sound based information and is made up of two separate components.

  • It has a limited capacity.  

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Articulatory process

  • Responsible for rehearsing verbal sounds (the inner voice)

  • Duration believed to be 2 secs.

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Phonological store

  • Responsible for receiving + storing sounds.

  • Focuses on speech perception(the inner ear)

  • Stores the words you hear in the order that they were presented.

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Visuo-spatial sketchpad

  • Inner eye

  • Responsible for visual information. (What we see + what an object looks like, light, colour, shapes + movement).

  • Spatial information relates to the location of the objects in a space + helps us to know where things are in relation to one another.

  • It can temporarily hold and manipulate visual + spatial information

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Central executive

  • Controls the slave systems.

  • In charge of what we pay attention to.

  • Has a limited capacity

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Episodic buffer

  • A back up store integrating all the components of WM + LTM.

  • Not limited or focused on one type of encoding

  • Can store + process visual + verbal STMs.

  • If WM needs to combine current information + previous LTM, EB allows this two-way communication between WM and LTM.

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Paulesu et al

  • Research to suggest there are separate components to Phonological loop.

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Paulesu et al - Findings

  • Found different parts of the phonological loop activated different brain areas.

  • Inner voice showed activity in broca’s area + the supramarginal gyrus was active during task 1 suggesting it may be linked to inner ear.

  • Therefore this research suggests that the WMM has separate components in the phonological loop.

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Paulesu et al - Procedure

  • Volunteers placed in a PET scan to measure blood flow in brain whilst performing memory tasks.

  • Participants given 2 different tasks.

  • Task 1: Inner voice + inner ear - had to memorise a series of letters.

  • Task 2: Only inner voice - had to decide if letters rhymed.

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Phonological Loop - location

- Left hemisphere (temporal lobe.)

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VSSP - location

- Right hemisphere
- Simple tasks = occipital lobe

- Complicated tasks = parietal lobe

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Episodic Buffer - location

- Both hemispheres (bilateral), particularly in the hippocampus (links to Schmolck et al study)

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Central Executive - location

Seems to be linked to the frontal lobes

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Studies of dual task performance support the separate slave systems

  • Involves doing 2 tasks at the same time.

  • Allows us to learn if certain mental functions work separately or share the same resources.

  • If each component has limited capacity + each component is relatively independent of the other components we would expect that if 2 tasks use the same component, they can’t be performed successfully together. 

  • But if two tasks used different components, it should be possible to perform them as well together as separately.

  • Reading and counting out loud at the same time are difficult as they both require the limited resources of the phonological loop.

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Working Memory - dual tasks

  • Studies show that performing two visual tasks or two verbal tasks simultaneously leads to poorer performance compared to doing them separately.

  • Suggests limited capacity within the same component of working memory.

  • Performing one visual task + one verbal task together doesn’t impair performance.

  • Supports WMM showing separate components (Visuospatial Sketchpad & Phonological Loop)

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WMM research - weaknesses - validity

  • Many of dual task studies carried out in controlled environments.

  • Many involve artificial memory tests.

  • Low ecological validity + mundane realism.

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WMM research - weaknesses - SDB

Pts know they are taking part in psychological research and may adjust answers.

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WMM research - weaknesses - visuospatial sketchpad

  • Wolbers et al research on people blind from birth.

  • Compared spatial awareness in sighted volunteers + people blind from birth.

  • Brain scans showed they could use other senses to understand spatial awareness.

  • Spatial awareness not dependent on vision, suggests Baddeley + Hitch’s idea of VSS is too simplistic.

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WMM research - weaknesses - central executive

  • Little information

  • Its role in terms of attention + decision making in WM is vage + untestable.

  • Psychologists argue it could be subdivided, suggesting WMM is incomplete.

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WMM - Real life application - Dyslexia

  • People with dyslexia have problems with WM + have phonological deficits.

  • Poor WM make it difficult to concentrate on tasks with multiple steps.

  • Holding several pieces of phonological informations makes blending words difficult.

  • May read more slowly because of difficulty associating sounds with words.

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WMM - Real life application - Dyslexia - How teachers can support

  • Split instructions into steps

  • Giving students time to process

  • Present written information concisely

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Sampling

  • Pyschologists identify a target population and recruit a representative sample.

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Generalisation

  • If sample is accurate, you can generalise results + conclusions to others in target population.

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Stratified sampling

- Researcher divides target population into sub-groups (strata) - represent the population demographic spread

- Researcher randomly selects a representative number of participants from each strata to take part in study

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Stratified sampling - strengths

  • Representative - participants matched on same characteristics of target population - increased validity.

  • Stratified detail - unbiased - researcher doesn’t influence sample - characteristics mirror target population.

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Stratified sampling - weaknesses

  • Complicated - requires accurate knowledge of characteristics of target population.

  • Time consuming - must identify relevant categories, work out percentages + randomly select appropriate participants.

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Opportunity sampling

Participants chosen based on proximity to researcher, those who happen to be available at the time.

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Volunteer sampling

Study advertised and participants volunteer to take part.

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Random sampling

Identify everyone in target population and select the number of participants needed in a way that gives whole population an equal chance of being picked (e.g: name pulled out of a hat).

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Random sampling - strengths

  • Unbiased - all members of target population have equal chance of selection, removes bias in choosing participants in conditions.

  • Easy to conduct, requires little knowledge of participants.

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Random sampling - weaknesses

  • Difficult procedure to obtain a truly representative sample of target population, requires time to produce something that would be reliable + valid.

  • Any 2 random samples drawn may have different individual characteristics, may become a confounding variable.

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Opportunity sampling - strengths

  • Practical + efficient, simple method reduces cost.

  • Convenient to conduct - participants are readily available so doesn’t take excessive time or effort.

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Opportunity sampling - weaknesses

  • Highly unlikely it will yield a representative sample of target population as sample is taken from small part of it, difficult to generalise findings.

  • Easy to bias research out of convenience, e.g: choosing participants from your own immediate environment of cultural group - subjective expectations can influence who is approached.

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Volunteer sampling - strengths

  • Simple + practical, requires less work that random sampling, participants offur time to you so requires minimal effort other than creating advertisment.

  • Ethical, participants self refer themselves, ethical and appropriate once informed consent is achieved.

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Volunteer sampling - weaknesses

  • Unrepresentative of target population, self selected samples tend to have atypical characteristics, creates volunteer bias.

  • Loss of control + randomness, some people will choose not to take part.

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Reconstruction

The idea that we alter information we have stored when we recall it, based on prior expectations or knowledge

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Confabulation

Schemas fill in gaps in memory and put pressure on our mind to remember things in a way that fits in with the schema, removing or changing details. 

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Schema theory

  • How humans process incoming information, relate it to existing knowledge, + use it.

  • Based on the assumption that humans are active processors of information.

  • If information is missing, the brain fills in the blanks based on existing schemas.

  • This can result in mistakes. 

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Accommodation - Schemas

Changing our memories to keep our schemas in tact.

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Levelling - Schemas

Removing details from memory to fit schemas.

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Sharpening - Schemas

Adding or exagerrating details to fit schemas.

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Schema

A stored experience or prior knowledge that forms a mental representation of the world - can influence how we categorise + recall information from our memory.