Flashcards

Key Terms

Acoustic coding - coding words in terms of their sound using information stored in long-term memory.

Amnesia - a severe loss of some kinds of long-term memory, usually as a result of brain damage.

Anxiety - a normal emotion similar to nervousness, worry, or apprehension, but if excessive it can interfere with everyday life and might then be judged an anxiety disorder.

Case study - a detailed study of a single individual.

Central executive - the key component of working memory. It is a modality-free system (i.e. not visual or auditory) of limited capacity and is similar to “paying attention” to something.

Chunking - the process of combining individual items (e.g. letters; numbers) into larger, meaningful units.

Chunks - integrated units of information.

Cognitive interview - an interview technique based on our knowledge about the way human memory works; paying attention, for example, to the use of retrieval cues.

Concepts - mental representations of categories of objects or items.

Consolidation - a physiological process involved in establishing long-term memories; this process lasts several hours or more and newly formed memories are fragile.

Declarative memory - long-term memory related to “knowing that”; it includes general knowledge and memory for personal experiences.

Dysexecutive syndrome - a condition caused by brain damage (typically in the frontal lobes) in which there is severe impairment of the functioning of the central executive component of working memory.

Echoic memory - a sensory store within the sensory register that holds auditory information for approximately 2 seconds.

Encoding - involves the transfer of information into a code, leading to the creation of a memory trace, which can be registered in the memory store.

Encoding specificity principle - the notion that the ability to remember information depends on the amount of overlap between the information in the memory trace and that present in the cues available at the time of retrieval.

Episodic buffer - a component of working memory used to integrate and store briefly information from the phonological loop and the visuo-spatial sketchpad.

Episodic memory - a form of long-term memory concerned with personal experiences or episodes.

Explicit memory - long-term memory that involves the conscious recollection of information learned previously.

External validity - the validity of an experiment outside the research situation itself; the extent to which the findings of a research study are applicable to other situations, especially “everyday” situations.

Eyewitness testimony - an account or evidence provided by people who witnessed an event such as a crime, reporting from their memory. Research suggests that this evidence may not be factually accurate.

Iconic memory - a sensory store within the sensory register that holds visual information for approximately 500 milliseconds.

Implicit memory - long-term memory that does not require conscious recollection.

Individual differences - the characteristics that vary from one individual to another; intelligence and personality are major ways in which individuals differ.

Leading question - a question that suggests the desired answer.

Learning - a relatively permanent change in behaviour, which is not due to maturation.

Long-term memory - a relatively permanent memory store with an unlimited capacity and duration, containing different components such as episodic (personal events), semantic (facts and information), and procedural (actions and skills) memory.

Memory - the mental processes involved in encoding, storage, and retrieval of information. Encoding depends on which sense provides the input; storage is the information being held in memory; retrieval involves accessing the stored information.

Memory span -an assessment of how much can be stored in short-term memory (STM) in the correct order at any time.

Mental rotation -a type of task in which participants imagine rotating two or three dimensional objects in order to perform some task. 

Meta-analysis -a form of analysis in which the findings from several related studies are combined to form an overall estimate.

Misleading information -incorrect information that may be given in good faith or deliberately (also known as misinformation); it is sometimes provided by those interrogating eyewitnesses and sometimes by cowitnesses.

Multi-store model - a model in which memory is divided into three stores; sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory. This model has been highly influential but research has shown that memory is much more complex than assumed by the model.

Mundane realism - the use of an artificial situation that closely resembles a natural situation.

Phonological loop - a component of the working memory system concerned with speech perception and production.

Phonological similarity effect - the finding that immediate recall of a word list in the correct order is impaired when the words sound similar to each other.

Proactive interference - disruption of memory by previous learning (often of similar material).

Procedural memory - long-term memory related to “knowing how”; it consists mostly of memory for motor skill and abilities.

Reading span - the largest number of sentences read for comprehension from which an individual can recall all the final words more than 50% of the time; it is used as a measure of working memory capacity.

Recency effect - better free recall of the last few items in a list with higher performance being due to the information being in the short-term store.

Rehearsal - the verbal repetition of information (often words), which typically has the effect of increasing our long-term memory for the rehearsed information.

Retrieval - the process of recovering information stored in long-term memory. If retrieval is successful, the individual remembers the information in question.

Retroactive interference - disruption of memory for previously learned information by other learning or processing occurring during the retention interval.

Schema - organised knowledge (e.g. about the world) stored in long-term memory.

Semantic coding - coding or processing words in terms of their meaning based on information stored in long-term memory.

Semantic dementia - a condition caused by brain damage in which there is extensive loss of knowledge about the meanings of words and concepts.

Semantic memory - a form of long-term memory consisting of general knowledge about the world, concepts, language, and so on.

Sensory register - it consists of several sensory stores (one in each sense modality such as vision and hearing) each holding information very briefly when relevant stimuli are presented. Each sensory register has very limited capacity.

Short-term memory - a temporary place for storing information during which it receives limited processing (e.g. verbal rehearsal). Short-term memory has a very limited capacity and short duration, unless the information in it is maintained through rehearsal.

Source misattribution - errors in long-term memory that occur when the rememberer is mistaken about the source or origin of a retrieved memory.

Storage - storing a memory for a period of time so that it can be used later.

Stroop task - a task that involves naming the colours in which words are printed. Performance is slowed when the words are conflicting colour words (e.g. the word RED printed in green).

Visual coding - encoding letters or words in terms of their visual shape.

Visuo-spatial sketchpad - a component within the working memory system designed for spatial and/or visual coding.

Weapon focus - the finding that eyewitnesses pay so much attention to a weapon that they ignore other details and so can’t remember them.

Word-length effect - the finding that word span is greater for short words than for long words.

Working memory model - the model of short-term memory proposed to replace the multi-store model. It consists of a central executive plus slave systems that deal with different sensory modalities.

Working memory system - the concept that short-term (or working) memory can be subdivided into other stores that handle different modalities (sound and visual data).

Weblinks

Introduction

Remembering and Forgetting—a programme hosted by Professor Zimbardo.The programme looks at the complex process called memory: how images, ideas, language, and even physical actions, sounds, and smells are translated into codes, represented in the memory, and retrieved when needed.

http://www.learner.org/series/discoveringpsychology/09/e09expand.html

Types of Long-term Memory

“Brainy Behavior” blog, which has lots of information on Clive Wearing (“HM”), described in the Case Study on page 27 of the textbook.

http://www.brainybehavior.com/blog/category/hippocampus/ A cartoon giving an overview of STM and LTM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaCYYYWfAMU

Working Memory Model

The goCognitive web project—includes information on the working memory model, as well as video interviews with Alan Baddeley. http://gocognitive.net/interviews/alan-baddeley-working-memory

Psychology revision: a clear summary with some explanation of the working memory model from diagrams with a music background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA-QGdqBUA0

Eyewitness Testimony

The homepage of Elizabeth Loftus; includes links to articles and books authored by her and about her work on eyewitness memory.

http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/ An account of a real-life incident, with a chance for you to have a go at identifying the perpetrator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6fRH5MLBIU A good example of a well done cognitive interview.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HwcMEwgWqQ

Most of the topics discussed in this chapter are dealt with in detail in M.W. Eysenck (2012) Fundamentals of cognition (2nd Edn). http://www.routledge.com/fundamentals-of-cognition/

Discussion Points

Throughout AQA Psychology you may have noticed self-assessment questions in orange text in the margins. These are discussion points, designed to help you think about the key issues and research in the text, and to consider how you can apply psychology to real life. Although in many cases there is no correct answer to these questions, we have provided some example discussions that could arise from thinking about some of these points. They should also help you structure your thinking on the topic in question.

1. Are learning and memory different? If so, what is the difference?

Learning and memory are very similar but not quite the same, or we would not have the two different terms. When we learn we acquire new knowledge or skills, such as knowing more psychology or learning to drive a car. Memory involves recall: the retrieval of what we have learned. So memory includes learning but is usually, in everyday life, taken to mean remembering: a conscious process of recall. In psychology, learning would be the input, the presentation of information, and then its encoding and storage, i.e. part of the memory process. Using this learning would require recall and so would count as memory in full. On the other hand, one could say that memory is a cognitive process, whereas learning is a behaviourist concept.

It is interesting to consider how much of learning and memory is unconscious, and how much we still don’t know about these rather vital behaviours. If you ask yourself “What did I learn today?” then you may think about learning in class or at work, but we also learn things about situations and people. What did you learn yesterday about someone, or about a situation? Often we are not consciously aware of this sort of learning. Then there is retrieval—why is it that when we learn things, we understand them or think we understand them, and then when we need that information it just isn't there? This is so annoying! And then sometimes we recall that information some time later when we no longer need it, or other times we never remember it. There is still a lot to find out about both learning and memory.

See also Eysenck’s AQA Psychology, pages 70–71.

2. To what extent can we apply the findings of Jacobs (1887) to everyday life?

Jacobs found that short-term memory has a capacity limited to between five and nine items. Examples of the applications of Jacobs’ findings could be any situation in which we want individuals to “take away” important information such as education, health, or road safety.

However, there appear to be some limitations to Jacobs’ work. He gave participants random information in what we now refer to as a digit-span task. This was presumably done under experimental conditions. There are several problems here with the task and the environment.

First, the task itself is rather unrepresentative of everyday memory demands. More often than not, the information we are trying to process has some meaning rather than being a random collection that is undoubtedly more difficult to recall. This means that the internal validity may be threatened by the fact that Jacobs possibly wasn’t measuring what he thought he was measuring.

Second, the environment in which the task was done is also unrepresentative of the sort of settings in which we use our memory. In reality, we rarely have the luxury of concentrating on just one task. Moreover, lots of stimuli such as noise and internal processes make demands on our processing capacity apart from the tasks we are attempting. This means our short-term capacity may be a lower number of items unless the circumstances are optimal. This means that the external validity of Jacobs’ findings is also weak so we can’t apply these findings with any confidence. However, developments of Jacobs’ findings have shown validity and reliability and have subsequently been applied to many situations.

See also Eysenck’s AQA Psychology, pages 73–74.

3. Are there any problems with using letter or digit span as a measure of the capacity of short-term memory?

In its own time this method was really useful, but we now recognise that artificial tasks such as recall of letter or digit lists do not match normal, everyday tasks. After all, when did you last have to remember a long list of meaningless numbers or letters? Some people might argue that remembering phone numbers is a comparable task, but these usually have meaning, i.e. an area code, which is one chunk, and then a short set of numbers, which we also often chunk.

The criticism of not relating to normal life is known as lacking in mundane realism, and means that we cannot assume that the findings of such research would be replicated in similar research on ordinary, everyday memory tasks. Possibly the findings would match up, but possibly they would not. So this then begs the question of how one could do such research with better mundane realism. Everyday lists include shopping lists and to-do lists, so there is the possibility of investigating how these could be adapted and used to test STM capacity, perhaps using single syllable words such as bread or beans.

A further problem we recognise now is that STM is not a simple single store but has a structure, outlined as the working memory model. This means that it would make a difference if the list to be remembered was read silently or listened to, or represented in pictorial form. The extra knowledge we have now has shown early research to have been vitally important, although rather simplistic, and in this example lacking in validity.

See also Eysenck’s AQA Psychology, page 74.

4. Why do people still believe eyewitnesses when we know memory is faulty?

It is possible that our genes programme us to accept verbal information from others, especially if these others say that they saw what happened.

We trust our own senses, which is why illusions are unsettling, and perhaps we are also predisposed to trust reports from what others’ senses are telling them. For our long-ago ancestors this sort of trust would have helped social cohesion and also survival—people would not need to see a threat with their own eyes but would accept accounts of the threat from others and take steps to protect themselves; this would be adaptive.

Of course, not all eyewitness accounts are faulty. You can find examples in the textbook of highly accurate eyewitness testimony. But in 2008 the British Psychological Society put out a statement saying yet again that such testimony should never be taken as factually accurate for the purposes of a criminal conviction. And maybe a key factor is that most people do not realise that memory is unreliable and that it is easily and unconsciously reconstructed.

See also Eysenck’s AQA Psychology, page 109.

Interactive Excerices

• 3.1 - Capacity in short-term memory - Jacobs 1887
• 3.2 - Encoding in short-term memory - Baddeley 1966
• 3.3 - The multi-store model of memory