Criticisms: The intervals in between when the participants were asked to recall the story was different and therefore not entirely reliable. As the experiment was a natural experiment it meant that it lacked control of other factors which may have affected the results.
Demand characteristics would have suggested that the participants were supposed to react and they may also have acted in a way that the experimenter wanted them to. These both add up to a lack of internal validity. Schemas are very vague.
Loftus and Palmer (1974)
Aims: Language used in EWT can alter memory. Leading questions could distort accounts of events, therefore making them unreliable.
Procedures: Participants were shown slides of a car accident involving a number of cars and then were asked to describe what happened as if they were eyewitnesses. They were then asked specific questions, including “About how fast were the cars going when they (hit/smashed/collided/bumped/contacted) each other?”
The independent variable was the wording of the question and the dependant variable was the speed reported by the participants. A week after the experiment, they were asked “Did you see broken glass?”. There was no broken glass.
Findings: The verb used affected what they participants said. Those who were asked the ‘smashed’ question, thought that the cars were going faster than those who were asked the ‘hit’ question. Smashed: 41mph and hit: 34mph.
The speeds reported in descending order was smashed, collided, bumped, hit and contacted.
Conclusion: The question contained information about what the answer should be and therefore this language can have a distorting effect on eyewitness testimony, which can lead to inaccurate accounts. It is possible that the original memory had been reconstructed, but it is impossible to conclude that the original memory may have been replaced or experienced interference.
Criticisms: It does not have mundane realism because people would react to a car crash in real life completely differently and therefore lacks ecological validity.
It was an artificial experiment since it was held in a laboratory. It also may have given the participants clues as to what it was about and they may have acted to how they thought the experimenter wanted them to. Lacks internal validity.
Conclusion: The question contained information about what the answer should be and therefore this language can have a distorting effect on eyewitness testimony, which can lead to inaccurate accounts. It is possible that the original memory had been reconstructed, but it is impossible to conclude that the original memory may have been replaced or experienced interference.
Criticisms: It does not have mundane realism because people would react to a car crash in real life completely differently and therefore lacks ecological validity.
It was an artificial experiment since it was held in a laboratory. It also may have given the participants clues as to what it was about and they may have acted to how they thought the experimenter wanted them to. Lacks internal validity.
Procedures: Participants were given sets of trigrams to learn and then tested on their recall. They had to recall them after 3, 6, 9, 12 or 18 seconds. They also had an interference task, counting backwards, in threes from a random number. The independent variable was the time delay and the dependant variable was how good the recall was.
Findings:
After 3 seconds: 80%
After 6 seconds: 50%
After 18 seconds: Less than 10%
Conclusions: They had proved their hypothesis, there was very little left of the trace after approx. 20 seconds. It also proved that there was a distinct difference between the LTM and the STM.
Criticisms: It lacks mundane realism because the likelihood of the recall of trigrams in real life probably wouldn’t happen. The trigrams are not meaningful. Other research has shown that more meaningful things are remembered.
Bahrick et al (1975)
Aims: They aimed to test VLTM. They wanted to see whether long term memory was infinite.
Procedures: Participants included 392 American ex-high school students aged 17-74. Recall was tested in four ways.
- Free recall of the names of as many of their former classmates.
- A photo recognition test.
- A name recognition test.
- A name and photo matching test.
Findings:
90% accuracy in face and name recognition after 34 years.
80% accuracy for name recognition after 48 years.
40% accuracy for face recognition after 48 years.
60% accuracy for free recall after 15 years.
30% accuracy for free recall after 30 years.
Conclusion: Classmates were rarely forgotten once recognition cues had been given. This supports the idea that people have VLTM. Recognition was better than recall.
Criticisms/Comments: This is a field experiment and therefore it can be generalised to the real world and this means it has high ecological validity. There would have been a great opportunity for rehearsal, increasing the rate of recall and therefore the results cannot be generalised to other types of information.
Bartlett (1932)
Aims: To investigate the effect of schema of participant’s recall of a story. A schema includes expectations, attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes.
Procedure: 20 English participants took part in a natural experiment. They were presented with a range of stories, or folk tales, from different cultures, making it difficult for Western participants to understand their significance. They were then asked to recall the stories are periods of time.
Findings: Participants’ recall of the story got shorter and shorter after multiple presentations. Participants often added their own Western words to substitute words in the story and so ‘canoe’ went to ‘boat’.
Conclusion: Accuracy was rare in recall. Participants were actively reconstructing using their existing schemas. Memory is influenced by our existing knowledge, which in turn is created by the culture in which we live.
Criticisms: The intervals in between when the participants were asked to recall the story was different and therefore not entirely reliable. As the experiment was a natural experiment it meant that it lacked control of other factors which may have affected the results.
Demand characteristics would have suggested that the participants were supposed to react and they may also
vnitive Psychology
STM and LTM differ in terms of:
- Duration: How long a memory lasts.
- Capacity: How much can be help in the memory.
- Encoding: Transferring a memory into code, i.e. a trace.
STM & LTM have different capacities
STM can hold about seven items. Seven, plus or minus two.
It’s also been suggested that we use ‘chunking’ to combine individual letters or numbers into larger, more meaningful units.
Encoding
In STM, we try to keep information active by acoustically encoding things.
In LTM, encoding is generally semantic, it’s more useful to code words in terms of their meaning, rather than what they sound or look like.
Models of Memory
Atkinson and Shriffin created the MULTI-STORE MODEL.
- A sensory store
- A store-term store
- A long term store
- A sensory memory
- If you pay attention to it, or think about it, the information will pass into STM. Some information might be passed into LTM.
Support for the Model
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The Primacy Effect: Research shows that people remember items from the beginning of a list better than those in the middle and that’s because people will have rehearsed more. If interference is introduced, the whole effect disappears, as the model disappears.
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The Recency Effect: Items at the end of the list are recalled better because whilst items are being rehearsed at the beginning, the items at the end are still in STM.
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Korsakoff’s Syndrome: (amnesia developed due to chronic alcoholism) provide support for the model. They can recall the last items in a list (unimpaired recency effect), suggesting an unaffected STM. However, their LTM is very poor. This supports the model by showing that STM and LTM are separate stores.
Limitations of the Model
- People do not always need rehearsal to remember things.
- It suggests only one LTM store and only one STM store which has been disproved by other research.
Baddeley and Hitch developed the WORKING MEMORY MODEL
- The central executive, it has a limited capacity and controls two ‘slave’ systems.
- The visuo-spatial sketchpad.
- The articulatory-phonological loop (holds speech based info.) It contains a phonological store (the inner ear) and the articulatory process (the inner voice).
Support
- ‘interference tasks’ support the model. Doing two things at once is very difficult. Both tasks are using the articulatory-phonological loop, which has limited capacity.
Criticism
Craik and Lockhart (1972) developed LEVELS OF PROCESSING THEORY
- Physical processing occurs at a shallow level and analyses information because of its physical properties.
- Phonemic processing occurs at a deeper level. It focuses on the sound of the word.
- Semantic processing is the meaning of something.
Explanation
- Processed at a deeper level should mean recollection is better.
- Elaboration: explained more. Organised: categories. Distinctive: a quality to remember it by.
Criticisms
- Ignores the distinction between LTM and STM.
- Confusing effort with depth.
Forgetting
Trace Decay Theory
- Memory has a physical basis or ‘trace’.
- It decays over time, unless put into LTM.
- However, we can’t be sure that displacement isn’t taking place.
Displacement Theory
- New information physically overwrites old information.
Retroactive interference: New information interferes with the ability to recall old information.
Proactive interference: Old information interferes with the ability to hold new information.
Cues are very helpful. They can be internal (your mood) or external (context). We remember more if we are in the same situation as we were when the memory was created, cue-dependant learning.
Flashbulb Memories
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They could be events such as September 11th or Princess Diana’s death.
- They do not have to be negative, they can be positive as well.
- They are as if a photograph were taken and stuck in someone’s memory.
- They are enduring and accurate.
- They seem to contradict the idea that thorough processing in STM is needed for it too pass onto long term memory.
- They support the idea that emotional factors and distinctiveness are essential in remembering.
Repression
- Freud (1915) said that ‘repression’ was a way of protecting the ego (conscious mind) from uncomfortable memories. Motivated forgetting. Traumatic memories are more likely to be forgotten than happy ones. Anything that has been forgotten, could have been repressed.
Eyewitness Testimony
- The evidence provided by people who witnessed a particular event or crime. It relies on recall from memory i.e. the descriptions of criminals.
Reconstructive Memory
- Bartlett believed that when we remember something, we only store elements of it.
- We reconstruct the gaps in the memory with our own schemas.
- Schemas are ready stored opinions and expectations which we use for quick judgements.
- Our culture, beliefs, prejudices and previous experiences will all help us with these reconstructions.
- The way information is initially perceived and stored is affected by schema and stereotypes.
- Research has shown that people can be mistaken for their initial encoding of events, leading to a mistaken recall.
- So schemas and stereotypes are used when forming a memory but also when trying to reconstruct it.