Working Memory Model
Multi-store Model
Research Methods
EWT
Memory Improvement
100
Who proposed the Working Memory Model in 1974?
Baddeley & Hitch (1974)
100
Who proposed the Multi-Store Model of Memory in 1968?
Atkinson and Shiffrin
100
What is the purpose of the aim?
An aim is a general statement that describes the purpose of the study, so that people have an idea of what the study is about.
100
True or False. Children have been found to be more willing than adults to make a positive ID but they are often of the wrong person (Dekle et al. 1996)
True
100
What are the techniques that have been devised to improve memory called?
Mnemonics
200
What are the three components of the working memory model?
Central Executive, Phonological Loop and Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad
200
What are the three stores in the MSM?
SM, STM and LTM
200
What is the advantage of using a field experiment over a lab experiment?
Participants are less likely to show demand characteristics because in the first part of the experiment they are unaware they are taking part and so are likely to respond more genuinely. In real life settings research has high validity because the findings can be generalised to other similar situations.
200
Yarmey (1984) Showed young and elderly adults a film of a staged event and then asked questions about what they had seen. True or False: 20% of elderly adults (but 80% of young adults) failed to mention a key detail (attacker had a knife in hand).
FALSE: 80% of elderly adults (but only 20% of young adults) failed to mention a key detail (attacker had a knife in hand). Younger children did not seem to be able to do this. Young children are poor at source monitoring.
200
What is the difference between an acronym and an acrostic?
Acronyms (ROYGBIV) Acrostic (poem or sentence i.e. Planets)
300
What are the two sub-components in the phonological loop?
Phonological store (inner ear) and articulatory process (inner voice)
300
Explain a study that supports the idea that there are two memory stores (STM and LTM).
Primacy and recency effect. Murdock (1962) gave 103 psychology students lists of words to free recall (in any order) in 90 seconds. Typically words at the start of the list and especially those at the end tended to be recalled most often. This was explained by words at the start being rehearsed from STM into LTM creating a stronger trace and those at the end still being present in STM when recall begins. Evidence for two separate stores. HM was unable to create new long term memories (anterograde amnesia) and lost some of his existing LTM retrograde amnesia). However his STM remained intact with a normal capacity and duration, limited only by his inability to rehearse.
300
State one strength and one weakness of using an opportunity based sampling method.
Strength is that it is is cheap, quick and practical. Weakness is that it is prone to bias.
300
Poole and Lindsay (2001) engaged children aged 3 – 8 in a science demonstration. Parents of the children then read them a story, which contained some of the elements of the science demonstration but also some novel information. What did they find when they questioned the children after?
They had incorporated much of the new info. Into their original memory. (The children were asked to think carefully about where they got their information (called source monitoring) and some of the older children revised their account of the science demonstration.) Younger children did not seem to be able to do this. Young children are poor at source monitoring.
300
Explain what is meant by the Method of Loci.
Identify a set of places that you can imagine walking through, e.g. rooms in your house. Number of places used depends on what needs to be remembered. Convert each item that needs remembered into a mental image and place it mentally in a location. When you are ready to recall, you imagine walking through the various locations you used. The locations act as retrieval cues because you already know them well.
400
What is a weakness of the WWM?
Little is known about how the central executive works or evidence from brain studies suggesting the central executive is not unitary. The model doesn’t account for musical memory because participants can listen to instrumental music without impairing performance on other acoustic tasks.
400
What is a weakness of the MSM?
The model is too simplistic, Given the multitude of different memories we store it is unlikely that LTM is a unitary store. When considered more closely case studies of amnesiacs suggest that both STM and LTM are far more complex than the multi-store model suggests. Flow of information is assumed to be one way, but it seems likely that our LTM is able to assist our STM suggesting a ‘reverse flow.’
400
What does the term extraneous variable mean? Give an example.
Extraneous variables are anything other than the independent variable that could affect the dependent variable. They could include situational variables such as how the researcher asked a question, or participant variables such as gender or eye-sight.
400
What did Flin et al (1992) find when they asked children and adults questions about an incident they had witnessed – one day after the event and then five months after it?
Recall was similar for adults and children after one day, but significantly worse for children after a five-month delay.
400
Give two examples of visual mnemonics and explain how they work.
Keyword method - For associating bits of information i.e. picturing the two things together. A (weird) example... Horse in Spanish is ‘caballo’ pronounced “cab-eye-yo” Picture a horse with a giant eye on it’s back Conjuring up the visual image should help recall the word. The peg word system, one is a bun, two is a shoe etc
500
What is a strength of the WWM?
A single component STM is unable to explain the case of KF, who, following a motorbike accident suffered impairment of his STM. Shallice & Warrington (1974) showed that although his memory for verbal material was poor his memory for visual information was unaffected. Baddeley (1986) dual task got participants to complete two tasks simultaneously: 1. To remember a list of numbers (a so called digit span task) 2. To answer true or false to a number of problems such as BA A follows B (true or false)
500
Identify the difference in capacity, duration and encoding between the STM and LTM.
Capacity of STM is limited ie. Miller’s (1956) ‘magic number seven plus or minus two. Capacity of LTM is infinite. Duration of STM is less than 18 seconds. Duration of LTM can be a lifetime. Encoding in STM is acoustic. Encoding in LTM is semantic.
500
What are the three types of experimental design? Explain what they mean.
Independent groups, Matched Pairs and Repeated Measures
500
Describe the Loftus (1979) weapon focus experiment and what explain what it tells us about the effect of anxiety and EWT.
Participants asked to sit outside a lab where they thought they were hearing genuine exchanges between people inside the lab. Condition 1: Heard amicable discussion about equipment failure. A man with greasy hands holding a pen came out. Condition 2: Heard hostile discussion, followed by sound of breaking glass and overturned furniture. A man came out covered in blood and holding a knife. Participants given 50 photographs and asked to ID man who came out the lab. People who witness the peaceful scene were more accurate than people who witnessed the violent scene. Anxiety elicited by the weapon narrowed the focus of attention for the witness and took attention away from the face of the man.
500
HOW memory techniques work is important to know. Explain what is meant by the dual-coding hypothesis.
EG Keyword+Image method: Pavio (1971) Proposed words and images processed separately Based on studies of patients with damage to temporal lobes and could not process images According to Pavio, concrete words, which can be made into images are double encoded in memory. Once as verbal symbol, once as image-based symbol Double coding increases likelihood of remembering!..... Link to WMM
M
e
n
u