Psychology Critical Analysis Questions

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Critical Analysis Questions

Psychology

1. (a)

We use our memory every day all the time and we do not think about it. Our senses (eyes, ears etc.) are constantly taking in new information and this information comes into our sensory memory, where it is held for a fraction of second in its original sensory form (sound, image etc.).

If we pay attention to this information, it is selected and a meaning is made out of it, for longer storage in short-term memory. We cannot attend to every sensation and we therefore select the most important ones. This is called selective attention. This means that we focus our attention on a limited aspect of all that we experience. Wilson (2002) concluded that our five senses take in an estimated of 11 000 000 bits of information per second, 40 of which we consciously process. We intuitively make use of all the other bits.

When selected the information we want to focus on and made sense of, it is transferred into short-term memory. Short-term memory can only keep a small amount of information for a small amount of time before it is lost or stored in long-term memory. Experiments have shown that you can remember, for example a friend’s phone number, better if you rehearse it. Then it improves the chances of the information being encoded into long-term memory.

An example of this is the serial-position effect. If a list of 20 words slowly is read out loud you are most likely to remember words near the start or in the end of the list. Words near the start of the list have made it into long-term memory, the primacy effect. Words near the end of the list are still held in short-term memory, the recency effect.

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1. (b)

There are many basic assumptions which most cognitive psychologists would make when they study cognition. Best (1986) wants to remind us that there is no single theory of cognition that is shared by all psychologists.

There are two of these in this perspective. The first one is that scientific methods involving experiments and hypothesis testing are in the best way to gather knowledge about human cognition, and the other one is that information-processing models are likely to be very useful in explaining human behaviour.

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