Psychology Memory Revision Guide

Baddeley – LTM Encoding

• List of short familiar words
• Acoustically similar and dissimilar
• Semantically similar and dissimilar
• Write them down
• Words that sounded similar were harder to recall
• STM codes acoustically
• Reliable – lab
• Lacks ecological validity

Working memory model

Baddeley and Hitch 

• Explains in more detail
• Shows individual differences – people differ
• Lots of supported research
• Doesn’t account all sensory modalities
• Doesn’t go into detail about central executive

Baddely et al 

• Brief visual presentations of lists of words either short or long
• Asked to recall in serial order
• Could recall more short words than long
• Loop can hold as many items as can be said in 1.5-2 seconds
• Loop has a time limit
• Reliable - lab
• Lack ecological validity  
• Longer words are less easily to remember

Baddeley and hitch

• Dual tasks
• 1- reasoning task
• 2- reading aloud
• Could do both easily simultaneously
• STM must have different components that can process more than one type of information

Baddeley et al

• Dual task
• Tracking task and visual imagery task
• Poor at the dual task performed alone
• Both tasks needed to be done in visual-spatial sketchpad so were competing for the same limited resources

Eyewitness testimony

Misleading information – Loftus

• Film of events leading to a car crash
• Control group
• experimental group (misleading question)
• Asked questions to what they had seen
• 17% experimental group recalled a barn
• Misleading information absorbed into their memory and they believed it
• Reliable – lab
• Ecological validity
• Demand characteristics

Anxiety – Christianson and hubinette 

• Surveyed 110 people witness or victims of bank robberies
• Victims subjected to higher levels on anxiety recalled better
• High ecological validity
• Generalising
• Ethics – distress

Age – Yarmey 

• Showed young and old adults a film of a staged event then asked questions
• 80% elderly but 20% of young failed to mention key details
• Elderly cannot recall as much
• Lacks ecological validity
• Generalising
• Reliable – lab

Confabulation – list

• List of elements that could occur in a shoplifting incident
• Asked to rank them in importance
• Then showed a shoplifting videos included 8 elements
• Asked to recall
• Elements higher ranked were easy to recall
• Recalled ones that were not there
• Reliable
• Lacks ecological validity
• Wouldn’t be paying attention to the video

Cognitive interview

• Content reinstatement –weather, what you were thinking at the time
• Report everything
• Recall from a different perspective
• Recall in reverse order

Fisher et al 

• Trained real detectives to use cognitive interview
• Increased the amount of information recalled
• High ecological validity

Milne and Bull

• Tested each of the cognitive techniques
• All four singly produced more information but context reinstatement ad report everything worked effectively together

Geiseman et al 

• Showed a video of a simulated crime
• Recall in cognitive interview
• Cognitive interview prompted the most information

Memory improvement techniques

Mnemonics – system such as a pattern of letters, ideas or associations to help remember

Something

• Method of loci – associating words with places
• Method of peg word system – associating words that are similar in sounding

          Encoding and retrieval – recall better if the retrieval context is like the encoding context

Geiseman and Glenny –

• List of words
• Imagine and female or male voice
• Recall a list of new words and some old
• More successful if the voice presenting was the one they imagined
• Recalling in the same place or same environment can help

Chunking – gathering all information together

Katona

• List of numbers
• Hard to recall
• Put comas in them
• Easy to recall and see they were square numbers

Active processing –

Craik and lockhart 

• Group 1 – structural questions
• Group 2 – carry out acoustic task
• Group 3 – semantic task
• Group 4 – no task
• Group 3 performed as well as group 4 and better than 1 and 2
• Meaningful engagement can lead to better recall