Memory
1. Outline and evaluate the different types of LTM
Long term memory can be separated into qualitatively different types: episodic memory,
semantic memories and procedural memories. Episodic memory includes memories
from events, what you have done and what experience you have had. These memories
are time stamped. Semantic memory is the meaning of everything you know, the
knowledge that is shared with others. These memories are not time-stamped.
Procedural memory is muscle memory and remembering how to do things. We can
recall these without conscious awareness or a great deal of effort. The case of Clive
Wearing supports that there are different types of LTM. Following a brain infection,
Wearing’s procedural memory seemed intact (e.g. being able to dress yourself and even
play the piano), but his episodic memory was severely damaged. When his wife left the
room and returned, even after only a few minutes, he would greet her as if they had not
seen each other for years. He kept a diary in which he constantly wrote that he was just
regaining consciousness every few minutes. This supports that there are different stores
for different types of LTM. Brain scanning studies show that different areas of the brain
are active when performing tasks involving different types of LTM. This supports that
types of LTM are physically different. Cases such as Clive Wearing are hard to use as
evidence as they are case studies (studies of one individual). There is no way to test the
memory of such individuals before their brain damage, and it is hard to use one person’s
case to apply to the entire population. This weakens the supporting evidence for types of
LTM.
2. Outline and evaluate the Multi-Store Model of Memory.
The Multi-Stor Model consists of the Sensory store, short-term memory and long-term
memory. The sensory store has a duration of less than a second, a high capacity of the
5 senses that pass information to it and coding which depends on sense eyes is visual
and eras is acoustic. The short-term memory consists of a duration of less than 30
seconds unless rehearsed, a capacity of approximately 7 chunks of information 5+/-2
and coding is acoustic. The long-term memory has a duration of up to a lifetime, an
unlimited capacity and the coding that is semantic. Supported by research comes from
Murdock’s serial position curve study, this was the primacy and recency effect -
evidence. This shows we have two types of memory: short-term and long-term memory
which supports the multi-store model of memory. However, a weakness is that the multi-
store model claims that rehearsal is the key to memory. Sometimes you remember after
just 1 rehearsal but other things you rehearse multiple times and still can;t remember.
Therefore, there must be other reasons we remember, not just rehearsal, therefore
limiting the explanation. Oversimplification of multi-store model because it says long-
term memory is a unitary store. However, we know long term memory includes memory
store, procedural, acoustic, semantic and etc. therefore, this limits the power of the
explanation.
3. Outline and Evaluate Murdock’s study (serial position curve) key study
The aim of Murdock’s study is to provide evidence for the existence of separate
short term and long term stores of the multi-store model of memory. The study is
a Laboratory study and controls the extraneous variables. It is a standardised
procedure. Pp's were 103 male and female Psychology students. 16 pp's were
presented with a list of 20 words at the rate of 1 word per second. After hearing
the words, pp's were asked to free-recall all the words from the list they could
remember, in any order. They were given 90 seconds to recall the words. The
test was repeated 80 times over the course of a few days, Murdock used a
different list of 20 words each time. The words as the end of the list were recalled
first (known as the recency effect). Words from the beginning were also recalled
quite well (known as the primary effect). Words in the middle of the list weren't
recalled very well at all. Murdock displayed his results in a graph called the serial
position curve. Murdock concluded that this study did provide evidence for the
existence of separate short and long term stores: the last words were recalled
very well because they were still in the short term store, and so they were able to
be readily recalled therefore providing evidence for the short term store (recency
effect). The first few words were recalled well as there was time, at the
beginning, for them to go through maintenance rehearsal as pp's would repeat
them in their heads. This means they had passed onto the long term store, and
so were able to be recalled therefore providing evidence for the long term store
(primacy effect). The words in the middle were not recalled very well because
they were in neither the short nor long term store. There is further support for
Murdock's results: Murdock repeated the experiment again varying the number of
words in the list as well as the presentation time and both the primary and
recency effects were present. Another study was conducted where a distractor
task was completed after hearing the words rather than recalling them straight
away. They found that the primacy effect was still present however there was no
recency effect because the distractor task occupied the capacity of their short
term store. Also, case studies of amnesia also support Murdock's study, for
example, HM and Clive Wearing. Murdock's study did provide evidence for the
existence of separate short and long term stores in the multi-store model of
memory. The study lacked ecological validity as remembering words from a list
isn't representative of what people use their memories for in real life. Murdock's
pp's were all the same age and profession so the results can't be generalised to
the target population, which in this case is everyone. The results could have
been different if the sample was more representative. Also, Psychology students
may figure out the aim of the study leading to demand characteristics which
would decrease the study's reliability. The conclusions were too simplistic - long
term memory consists of 3 stores (episodic, semantic and procedural).
4. Outline and evaluate Bartlett’s study (war of the ghosts) key study
The aim of Bartlett’s study is to see if people, when given something unfamiliar to
remember, would alter the information. To use a story from a different culture to
see how cultural expectations affect memory. Participants were asked to read a
story called ‘The War of the Ghosts’, which was a Native American legend. After
15 minutes they were asked to retell the story as accurately as possible. Then he
showed a new version to another participant and asked them to recall it a short
time later. This retelling was repeated several times during the weeks that
followed. A key feature of the study was it belonged to a culture that was very
different to the pps . His participants were from his university in the UK. Bartlett
discovered that his participants found it difficult to remember bits of the story
concerned with spirits and changed other bits of the story so that it made more
sense to them. Each time they retold the story they changed it some more. The
story was shortened, phrases were changed to fit the pps own culture e.g.
“boats” instead of “canoes”. Bartlett concluded that our memory is influenced by
our own beliefs and these beliefs and fragments make the material easier to
remember. This study is more relevant to the way we use memories in everyday
life, so it has ecological validity, however, the story was unusual and does not
reflect everyday processes. Bartlett interpreted his own data so may have
affected the way his behaviour should be interpreted. Another weakness is that
Bartlett’s own beliefs may have affected the way he interpreted the data,
therefore the results may be biased. The conclusions depend on how you
interpret the results. Bartlett analysed each example of recall and had to decide
what counted as accurate recall and what didn’t. Since he believed that recall
would be affected by cultural expectations, he may have been more likely to see
this kind of effect in the results. This means that we cannot fully trust the results
of his study.
5. Outline and evaluate the theory of reconstructive memory
Memory does not work like a video recording, meaning that our memories of an
event are often incomplete, as we only recall the important points. Reconstructive
memory suggests that in the absence of all information, we fill in the gaps to
make more sense of what happened. We do this using schemas which are our
previous knowledge and experience of a situation and we use this process to
complete the memory. This means that our memories are a combination of
specific traces encoded at the time of the event, along with knowledge,
expectations, beliefs and experiences of such an event. This theory simply
describes that memory is reconstructive rather than explaining how. It says that
memory is active and uses schemas but does not say how memory is active.
Reconstructive memory is much vague about how schemas work and where they
are located. Other theories describe the processes at work in rehearsing,
retrieving and recalling. These processes have been linked to specific parts of
the brain thanks to brain scanning and research on patients with lesions in
specific parts of the brain. Application to the testimony of eyewitnesses, who are
often heavily relied upon in court in the absence of other evidence, has been
found to be unreliable in a large number of cases. Research has found a zero
correlation between a person’s certainty that their memory is accurate and the
actual accuracy of their memory. Bartlett found in his research, ‘War of the
Ghosts’, that people distorted the story on recall to fit in with their existing
schemas. The more unusual aspects of the story were left out or changed
to fit in with their cultural norm, therefore supporting this theory.
6. Outline and evaluate interference as an explanation for factors affecting memory
The aim is to see what affect a second activity has on the accuracy of memory.
Participants were asked to learn a list of 10 words until them could remember
them with 100% accuracy. They were the shown a new list. 12 participants were
used.
There were 5 different lists shown to participants
List 1 – synonyms – words with the same meanings as the originals
List 2 – antonyms – words with the opposite meanings to the originals
List 3 – words unrelated
List 4 – nonsense syllables
List 5 – three-digit numbers
When the participants were asked to recall the original list of words, their
performance depended on the nature of the second list. The more similar the
material, the less accurate the recall. In conclusion, interference is strongest
when an intervening activity is similar. Lacks ecological validity because the
memory in real life does not usually consist of remembering lists of words. A
controlled experiment so the results are valid. The study was in a lab so other
variables have less of a chance of affecting the results. IV and DV are controlled
Not really forgetting – It is possible that interference effects are just temporary
and that the information is not actually forgotten.
7. Outline and evaluate context as an explanation for factors affecting memory.
The aim is to see if people who learn and are tested in the same environment will
recall more information than those who learn and are tested in different
environments. 18 Participants who were deep-sea divers were recruited. They
were divided into four groups. They were given 36 unrelated words either on a
beach or under 10 feet of water. All of the groups were given the same list of
words to learn:
Group 1 had to learn underwater and recall underwater
Group 2: had to learn underwater and recall on the shore
Group 3 had to learn on the shore and recall on the shore
Group 4 had to learn on the shore and recall underwater
Groups 1 and 3 recalled 40% more words than groups 2 and 4. In conclusion,
recall of information will be better if it happens in the same context that learning
takes place. Lacks ecological validity because the memory in real life does not
usually consist of remembering lists of words. The recall was short-term. If we
want to study the effect the context really has they should have asked them to
recall the information later on. The context of being underwater is not realistic –
in reality, the information people need to know for an exam is usually learnt in
multiple contexts and is not affected by one specific context.
8. Outline and evaluate false memories as an explanation for factors affecting
memory
The aim is to see if false memories could be created in pps through suggestions
in order to test the existence of repressed and false memories There were 24
participants in the study. A relative was also contacted for each pp. The pps were
given 4 short stories about childhood events that had been obtained from their
relatives. Three of the stories were true and one was false. The false story was
about getting lost in a shopping mall in their childhood and being rescued by an
elderly woman. The false information was crafted from the information given by
the relative e.g. the relative said what the child’s favourite story was etc. Each
child was asked to read each story and write down what they remembered about
each event. A week or 2 later they were interviewed about the stories. They were
interviewed a second time and then debriefed. In total there were 72 true
episodes to be remembered and pps remembered 68% of these. 6 of the pps
(25%) recalled the false story fully or partially. 19/24 participants correctly
guessed the lost in the mall memory as false. In conclusion, the research
suggests that the mere act of imagining the event has the potential to create and
implant a false memory in a person. This affects the accuracy of memory. Lacks
ecological validity because memory in real life does not usually consist of
remembering stories – the story about a mall is not a traumatic event so may
affect the results. Ethical; issue – pps may be left with implanted memories. Even
though they did a debrief at the end people may be left or have lingering sense
that it happened. This is manipulation. Had real life application for eye witness
testimony. Such research into leading questions and false e memories has
changed the way courts deal with EWT – it is no longer regarded as being a
reliable.