Capacity Differences: - The capacity of STM is proved by Jacobs (1887) to be about seven items. Jacob used the technique called the “memory span” where participants were expected to repeat letters or digits, which were presented to them in the same order (serial recall). The results showed that STM has a limited storage capacity between 5-9 items and it is determined by the size of digits/letters. In contrary to this, LTM has an unlimited storage capacity and information stored in LTM e.g. names of friends, schools attended, how to ride a bike…etc can be endless.
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Describe the procedures and findings of one study of the emotional factors in forgetting.
Repression: - Levinger and Clark9 1961) studied repression as an emotional factor of forgetting. Most information is difficult to retrieve due to the fact that it might be repressed since it might be emotionally threatening and traumatic events e.g. childhood sexual abuse. These memories are not forgotten since it can be recalled during psychoanalysis but kept out of the conscious awareness in order to protect the individual.
Procedure- The study by Levinger and Clark involved presenting word association tests and expecting participants to recall the words. Two parts of the study were performed and in part one of the study, a list of 60words were said to the participants and they were asked to give free associations to the words i.e. say what came into their minds. To make it a repeated measures experimental design, the participants experienced two conditions. Some of the words had neutral meaning e.g. tree, window…etc. and others had a high negative emotional content e.g. war, fear...etc.
Part two of the study followed shortly after part one. Participant’s recalls of the words were tested. The original neutral or negative emotionally charged words were presented to them as cues and they were asked to recall their associations.
Findings: - Levinger and Clark found that the participants had more difficulty in producing associations to the negative emotionally charged words than to the neutral words. It also took them a longer period of time since their recall was slower. The galvanic skin response data showed that the emotionally charged words created more emotional arousal, which may have led to them, being repressed into the unconscious and this made the speed of recall slow.
- Outline and evaluate one alternative model to the multi-store model of memory (e.g. working memory, levels of processing).
THE WORKING MEMORY MODEL.
The working memory model was put together by Baddeley and Hitch (1974). It deals with the short-term memory since it is the area of the memory used while working on things (STM) and recently activated parts if LTM.
Baddeley and Hitch suggested that the working memory consists of three parts:
- Central executive: This is used whiles working with difficult mental tasks such as problem solving. Information can be held for a short time whiles new information is being processed. It also acts as a sort of attention system and it is the most important part of the system as it controls all the other systems. The three slave systems are the visuo-spatial scratch pad, the articulatory loop and the primary acoustic store.
- Articulatory- phonological loop: the loop is divided into a phonological store, directly concerned with the speech perception, and an articulatory process, concerned with speech production. This is used in everyday life when reading difficult material.
- Visuo-spatial sketch pad also called the scratch pad is specialised for special and visual coding, a kind of writing pad for visual data.
The working model memory is concerned with both active processing and brief storage of information.
Evaluation of the working model
Evidence for the working memory has shown that the working memory is more than just a memory theory. Compared with the multi-store model, it is an advance over the account of the short-term memory since it is associated with both brief storage of information and active processing. This makes it very important for mental arithmetic, verbal reasoning, comprehensive and traditional tasks performed by the STM.
Every component of the working memory has limited capacity and since the working memory model can be used to predict whether two things can be made at the same time. Predictions were tested by Baddeley and Hitch (1976) to make an extensive use of the central executive. They did this by asking carrying out verbal reasoning tasks on participants to decide whether each in a set of sentences provided a true or false description of the letter pair that followed. The predictions were that:
1. Two tasks cannot be performed successfully together if they make use of the same component.
2. If two tasks make use of different components, it will be possible to perform them as well together as separated.
The working model also views verbal rehearsal as an optional process that occurs within the articulatory or phonological loop. This makes it more realistic than the central importance of verbal rehearsal in the multi-store model.
On the contrary, not much information is known about the central executive and although it has a limited capacity, this capacity has not been measured accurately. It is also argued that the central executive is "modality-free" (i.e. it does not rely on any specific way of receiving information, such as sound or vision). It is also used in different processing operations but the precise details and its functioning are unknown.