AQA Psychology A-level - Memory

Coding (Baddeley, 1966):
- Participants were given lists of words: acoustically similar/dissimilar and semantically similar/dissimilar.
- Short-term memory (STM): Performance was worse with acoustically similar words, suggesting STM codes information acoustically.
- Long-term memory (LTM): Performance was worse with semantically similar words after a $20$ minute interval, suggesting LTM codes semantically.
Capacity:
- STM: Miller ( $1956$ ) suggested the 'magic number' $7 <br>eq 2$ . He noted people can recall $5$ words as easily as $5$ letters by chunking information. However, Jacobs ( $1887$ ) measured digit span, finding a mean of $9.3$ for digits and $7.3$ for letters.
- LTM: Potentially infinite.
Duration:
- STM: Peterson and Peterson ( $1959$ ) used consonant syllables (trigrams). To prevent rehearsal, participants counted backward. They discovered STM lasts between $18$ and $30$ seconds without rehearsal.
- LTM: Bahrick et al. ( $1975$ ) studied $392$ American graduates. In a photo-recognition test of yearbooks, participants were $90\%$ accurate after $15$ years and $70\%$ accurate after $48$ years, showing LTM can last a lifetime.

Sensory Register:
- Takes in environmental stimuli. Coding is modality-specific (e.g., iconic for visual, echoic for sound). Duration is very short (<0.5 seconds), but it has a massive capacity. Attention is the key process required to move information to the STM.
Short-Term Memory (STM):
- A limited capacity store ( $7 \pm 2$ items). Information is lost through decay or displacement if not rehearsed. Maintenance rehearsal keeps info in STM; prolonged rehearsal transfers it to LTM.
Long-Term Memory (LTM):
- A permanent store for information that has been rehearsed for a long time. When we want to recall it, it must be transferred back to STM via retrieval.
Refined Evaluation: The MSM is criticized for viewing STM as a unitary store. The Working Memory Model suggests STM is more complex. Additionally, Craik and Watkins ( $1973$ ) argued that elaborative rehearsal (linking info to existing knowledge) is more important than maintenance rehearsal for LTM transfer.

Episodic Memory: Memory for personal life events (e.g., your last birthday). These are 'time-stamped' and require conscious effort to recall.
Semantic Memory: Our shared knowledge of the world, including facts, concepts, and language meanings (e.g., the taste of an orange or the capital of France). These are not time-stamped.
Procedural Memory: Memory for actions or skills (e.g., driving or playing piano). These are often unconscious (implicit) memories.
Clinical Evidence: Patient HM and Clive Wearing both had severely impaired episodic memory due to brain damage but their procedural memories (e.g., playing the piano) and semantic concepts remained relatively intact, supporting the idea of separate LTM stores.

Central Executive: The 'supervisory' role. It monitors incoming data, makes decisions, and allocates slave systems to tasks. It has a very limited processing capacity.
Phonological Loop: Deals with auditory information. Divided into:
- Phonological Store: (The 'inner ear') stores the words you hear.
- Articulatory Process: (The 'inner voice') allows maintenance rehearsal (looping sounds in your head). Capacity is roughly $2$ seconds worth of speech.
Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad: (The 'inner eye') stores visual and spatial information. Logie ( $1995$ ) subdivided it into the Visual Cache (stores visual data) and the Inner Scribe (records the arrangement of objects).
Episodic Buffer: Added in $2000$ , it acts as a temporary store that integrates information from the other components and links working memory to LTM.

Proactive Interference (PI): Occurs when older memories disrupt the recall of newer memories (e.g., calling your new partner by your ex's name).
Retroactive Interference (RI): Occurs when newer memories disrupt the recall of older memories (e.g., learning a new car registration and forgetting the old one).
McGeoch and McDonald (1931): Found that interference is strongest when memories are similar. Participants who learned a list of synonyms after an original list had the worst recall compared to those who learned unrelated items (like numbers).

Encoding Specificity Principle (ESP): Tulving suggested that for a cue to be effective, it must be present at encoding and at retrieval.
Context-Dependent Forgetting: Godden and Baddeley ( $1975$ ) studied deep-sea divers. Recall was $40\%$ lower when the environmental context (land vs. water) at learning did not match the context at recall.
State-Dependent Forgetting: Carter and Cassaday ( $1998$ ) used antihistamine drugs to create a different internal psychological state. Recall was significantly worse when the internal state at learning (drowsy vs. alert) differed from recall.

Leading Questions: Loftus and Palmer ( $1974$ ) showed participants clips of car accidents. Those asked 'How fast were the cars going when they smashed?' gave higher speed estimates (mean $40.5$ mph) compared to those asked with the word 'contacted' (mean $31.8$ mph).
Post-Event Discussion (PED): Gabbert et al. ( $2003$ ) paired participants to watch a video of the same crime from different angles. After discussing what they saw, $71\%$ of participants mistakenly recalled aspects they did not see but had heard in the discussion (memory conformity).

Negative Effect (Weapon Focus): Johnson and Scott ( $1976$ ) found that participants in a high-anxiety condition (seeing a man with a bloody letter opener) had lower recall of the man's face ( $33\%$ ) compared to a low-anxiety condition (man with a pen and grease, $49\%$ recall).
Positive Effect: Yuille and Cutshall ( $1986$ ) studied a real-life shooting. Those who reported highest stress levels were the most accurate ( $88\%$ ) compared to the less stressed group ( $75\%$ ) five months later.
Yerkes-Dodson Law: Suggests relationship between emotional arousal and performance is an 'inverted U'—memory is best at moderate levels of anxiety.

Report Everything: Include every detail, even if it seems irrelevant.
Reinstate the Context: Mentally return to the crime scene (related to context-dependent forgetting).
Reverse the Order: Recite events backward to prevent expectations and dishonesty.
Change Perspective: Imagine the scene from the viewpoint of another witness to disrupt the effect of schemas.

Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI): Fisher et al. ( $1987$ ) added features like reducing witness anxiety, minimizing distractions, and using open-ended questions.