Memory Stores
Forgetting & Amnesia
Reconstructive Memory
Key Memory Studies
Memory Debates & Terms
100

This memory store has a capacity of about 7 items and a duration of around 18 seconds without rehearsal.

What is Short-Term Memory (STM)?

100

This type of forgetting occurs when new incoming information pushes out older information in short-term memory because its capacity has been exceeded.

What is displacement?

100

Bartlett proposed that memories are not exact copies but are actively rebuilt using these mental frameworks.

What are schemas?

100

This study used trigrams and counting backwards to test the true duration of short-term memory.

What is Peterson & Peterson (1959)?

100

This term describes how similar a study's tasks are to real-life situations.

What is mundane realism?

200

According to Atkinson and Shiffrin, this is the first memory store that receives information from our senses, holding it very briefly.

What is the Sensory Register?

200

This condition means a person cannot form new long-term memories after a brain injury, though their short-term memory is intact.

What is anterograde amnesia?

200

When someone changes unfamiliar details in a story to make them more normal or aligned with their own experiences, this process is called...

What is familiarisation?

200

In Peterson & Peterson's study, participants remembered less than 10% of trigrams after this many seconds.

What is 18 seconds?

200

This debate describes explaining something by breaking it down into its simplest parts, like the MSM does for memory.

What is reductionism?

300

This type of encoding involves holding the meaning of information and is largely used in long-term memory.

What is semantic encoding?

300

Henry Molaison (H.M.) famously suffered from both anterograde amnesia and this type of amnesia, affecting memories from a few years before his surgery.

What is retrograde amnesia?

300

This specific type of distortion involves leaving out unfamiliar, irrelevant, or unpleasant details when remembering something.

What is omission?

300

This study involved participants reading and recalling the unfamiliar story "The War of the Ghosts."

What is Bartlett (1932)?

300

Bartlett's approach to memory, which looked at the whole person and their schemas, is considered to follow this debate's perspective.

What is holism?

400

In the Multi-store Model, this process is essential for moving information from short-term to long-term memory.

What is rehearsal?

400

When new information overwrites older information in long-term memory, such as a new phone number replacing an old one, this type of forgetting has occurred.

What is interference?

400

When remembering, someone might add details to a story to give a reason for something that didn't originally fit their understanding. This is known as...

What is rationalisation?

400

In Bartlett's study, what were the two methods used to test participants' recall of the story over time?

What are serial reproduction and repeated reproduction?

400

Give one strength of a reductionist approach to studying memory, such as using laboratory experiments.

What is that it allows for controlled conditions to isolate variables, making findings more scientific and reliable?

500

Describe the capacity and duration of Long-Term Memory (LTM) according to Atkinson and Shiffrin.

What is potentially limitless capacity and a duration from minutes to a lifetime?

500

Beyond displacement and interference, name two other reasons why we might forget information from long-term memory.

What are decay and retrieval failure?

500

Bartlett's theory suggests that memory is not an exact copy but an interpretation or reconstruction of events. What term describes this overall idea?

What is active reconstruction?

500

What did Murdock's (1962) experiment, which showed the primacy and recency effect, provide evidence for in the Multi-store Model?

What is the existence of separate short-term and long-term memory stores?

500

What is one criticism of Bartlett's methodology in the "War of the Ghosts" study regarding its scientific rigor?

What is that his procedures were not always scientific, lacking strict controls or standardized timing, and his qualitative analysis could be subjective?