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Psychology - Memory

Megan Griffiths Psychology A level Englisch 86 Karten

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  1. 1How Does Our Memory Work?Scientists have been able to discover more about normal memory from those people who have suffered head trauma. Tellingly, even those who have had the most horrific head injuries rarely lose all the knowledge they have gained in a lifetime. Instead, they might suffer impairment to different parts of memory: the short or long term memory. This gives rise to the idea that our memory is made up of different components or has different functions.
    Indeed, it is better to understand our memory as if it were not a single entity. It performs so many varied tasks and deals with so many different types of information that psychologists believe it is, in fact, a collection of different information processing systems. A number of models or theories have been put forward to describe these systems.
  2. 2The Process of Memory?Memories are formed in a way that involves a number of processes. Firstly we have to have an experience and then the following happens:
    - Encoding – the process whereby we transform information received into a meaningful form that allows us to store it
    - Storage – holding or storing the information. Note, however, that some psychological changes occur in order for the information received to be stored
    - Retrieval – bringing the memory out of storage and restoring the information so that it can be used where needed
  3. 3Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)?This is one of the best known early models of memory. It assumes that memory consists of three separate ‘stores’: sensory memory (SM), short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). Research into these stores has concentrated on the type of encoding (the form in which information is represented e.g. acoustic or visual), the capacity (how much it can hold) and duration (how long it lasts) of each one. This model assumes that information must flow through the stores in a fixed linear sequence, being re-coded as it passes through each one.
    According to Atkinson and Shiffrin, rehearsal or repetition of material is the key to getting information from the STM into the LTM.
  4. 4Sensory Memory (SM)?This involves input from the environment. Sensory memory consists of a set of modality specific stores which store information coming from the environment for fractions of a second.
    All this means is that the information we wish to remember is stored in the form in which it was received, that is either in the iconic store (for visual information, such as if we have seen a poster or picture we want to recall), the echoic store (for auditory information, as in a friend telling us their phone number) or the haptic store (for tactile information – as in remembering our pin number by remembering the sequence of buttons we have to press on an ATM). Sensory information degrades very quickly, however, so anything we perceive to be important must pass from the sensory store to the short term memory where it can be rehearsed and held for slightly longer. We cannot process every piece of sensory information and most of it is ignored.
  5. 5Sperling 1960's experiments?Sperling (1960) tested iconic memory by presenting participants with grids of letters for very short periods of time (50 milliseconds). He found people could retain four items for up to one second.
    Later studies of sensory memory have confirmed Sperling’s findings and noticed slight differences in the duration of echoic and iconic sensory input (echoic sensations seem to last longer). Psychologists have concluded that sensory memory can:
    - Retain items for up to 0.5 seconds
    - Only record information passively (i.e. we can’t control it)
    - Only retain information in a relatively unprocessed form
    - In conclusion, the sensory memory is made up of separate stores for visual information, auditory information and tactile information, and only a fraction of the items registered here are ever passed on to the STM; the rest are lost.
  6. 6Short-term Memory (STM)?When psychologists study memory, they are interested in answering three questions: how much can it hold, for how long and in what form the information is stored.
    In other words, the factors of capacity, duration and encoding. The capacity of the STM has been known for a long time. Jacobs (1887) devised a technique to measure the capacity of STM. The technique has been widely used ever since, and has become known as the digit-span technique.
  7. 7Capacity?Using the serial recall technique, Jacobs found that the average STM capacity is around seven items. Later, Miller (1956) termed this the ‘magic number seven’. He also showed that capacity could be increased by chunking items together. That is, digits could be chunked into memorable dates, so a number string of: 1 0 6 6 1 9 8 4 1 9 9 7 becomes: 1066 (battle of Hastings) 1984 (a book) and 1997 (death of Diana). This has converted a meaningless number string into three meaningful ‘chunks’ which take up only three slots of precious STM capacity, in contrast to the twelve before. However, the notion of a ‘chunk’ as the basic unit of STM has been questioned by Simon (1974) who found that STM capacity was smaller for larger chunks of information (eight word phrases) than for smaller ones (single words). Size matters, we can’t hold as many large ‘chunks’ as we can smaller ones. Forgetting occurs in STM due to displacement. Once STM capacity is reached, any new information ‘displaces’ or pushes out information already stored there, which suggests that our STM has a maximum capacity.
  8. 8Duration?The duration of STM was tested by Peterson and Peterson (1959). They believed that the STM consists of a memory trace which decays if it is not rehearsed. Their experiment consisted of participants seeing trigrams (groups of three unrelated consonants, for example ‘RBQ’) and then attempting to repeat them after intervals of 3, 6, 9, 12 or 18 seconds, during which time rehearsal was prevented. The longer the time between learning and recall, the more trigrams were lost, suggesting that the memory trace did indeed decay with time. However, this experiment has been criticised because it is not possible to rule out the influence of limited capacity. The design has also been criticised since the same participants were used for each trial, and it is possible that trigrams learned on earlier trials interfered with the processing of new ones on subsequent trials.
  9. 9Research into STM capacity?Whenever you read about psychological experiments, it is always vital to examine the experiment design for possible methodological flaws or bias (as above). This is an important part of learning about How Science Works, and will inform our later study of research methods. Researchers interested in memory have investigated whether the following factors affect the capacity of the STM:
    - The influence of our LTM (whether or not we want to transfer information from the STM into our LTM)
    - Reading aloud (can this help expand the capacity of our STM?)
    Pronunciation time (does this have an impact on our auditory store in our sensory memory?)
    - Individual differences (can we generalise about memory or is this a quality that varies greatly from individual to individual, in the way that physical characteristics do?)
  10. 10Research into STM duration?- Rehearsal (does rehearsing – repeating – information to ourselves prolong the length of time we can remember it for?)
    - Intention to recall (if we want to recall something because it has significance or importance for us – such a friend’s phone number, a birthday or a special event – does that increase the length of time we can remember it?)
    - Amount of information to be recalled (can we remember many items for a short time or one item for a long time – or are these factors not related in this way?)
    Atkinson and Shiffrin's research into the duration of STM found that items could be remembered for 15-30 seconds, although more typically for a duration of up to 18 seconds.
  11. 11Research into STM encoding?Encoding (the way in which information is stored) in the STM has also been investigated. Conrad (1964) found that, on STM tasks, participants made acoustic errors, i.e. they substituted letters which sound alike rather than ones which look alike, even when the letters were presented visually. This experiment shows that the STM encodes acoustically: that is, regardless of the original format of the information we want to remember, it is encoded into acoustic data when transferred into the STM.
  12. 12Long-term Memory (LTM)?The capacity of the LTM seems to not have an upper limit to what we can store. The LTM is highly organised and consists of a number of different memory systems. Because of its seemingly limitless capacity, forgetting in LTM does not often occur due to displacement (as it does in the STM). However, it can occur when similar types of information are stored, causing confusion. This is known as interference.
    Tulving (1972) proposed that there were the following types of long term memory:
    - Episodic - a part of the long-term memory responsible for storing information about events (i.e. episodes) that we have experienced. It involves conscious thought, eg. memory of birthday party.
    - Procedural - a part of the long-term memory that is responsible for knowing how to do things that are automatic. For example, procedural memory would involve knowledge of how to drive a car.
    - Semantic - a part of the long-term memory responsible for storing information about the world that involves conscious thought. This would include things like knowing about the meaning of words.
  13. 13Bahrick et al (1975)'s duration study?Establishing the duration of LTM is also problematic since it can last a whole lifetime. Bahrick et al (1975) found that participants tested on recall of photographs of their classmates, performed well even at around 34 years after graduation, although they did better on recognition tasks where they had to match a photo to a name, rather than recall tasks in which they simply had to list their classmates without the aid of picture cues. However, there was a decline in performance of this test after about 47 years. Unlike most studies of memory, this used meaningful stimulus material (memories from participants’ own lives) rather than unrelated lists of letters or words; this could indicate that information which is emotionally/personally significant to us is easier for us to remember.
    However, it was difficult to establish whether the decline in memory after 47 years reflected the limits of LTM duration or a more general decline in memory processing with age.
  14. 14Impact on duration of the LTM?Researchers have investigated whether the following factors have an impact on the duration of the LTM:
    - The depth of learning (does how well we think we have learnt something make a difference to the length of time we can remember it for?)
    - The pattern of learning (does the learning method impact on the LTM duration?)
    - The nature of the material to be remembered (do we remember some kinds of information in our LTM more easily than others, and if so, why is this?)
    Encoding in LTM is believed to be mainly semantic (that is, according to meaning).
    Baddeley (1966) found participants performing LTM tasks made more errors when recalling lists of semantically similar words (such as big and huge) than when recalling lists of semantically dissimilar ones.
    However, it is also known that the LTM can use acoustic and visual encoding as well as semantic.
  15. 15Evidence for a Distinction between STM and LTM?That the STM and LTM are two distinct stores has been shown using tasks where participants are given words and then allowed to recall them in any order (this is known as free recall). When the frequency of recall of each word is plotted against its position in the list, a characteristic serial position curve is produced. This describes the fact that words at the beginning and end of the list are retained well but those in the middle of the list are often lost. This is because participants start to rehearse the words at the beginning of the list until the capacity of their STM is exceeded. These words have therefore been processed in the LTM (this is the primacy effect). However, words at the end of the list are remembered because they are still active in STM (this is the recency effect).
  16. 16Glanzer and Cunitz (1966)'s experiment?Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) gave participants a distractor task after presenting them with a word list which they then had to recall. The task was designed to prevent rehearsal of the last few items on the list. They found that the recency part of the curve was lost whilst the primacy part remained unaffected: immediate recall of the words gave a standard serial position curve, whereas recall after a 30 second delay and the distraction tasks successfully disrupted the recency effect. The fact that researchers were able to manipulate the ability of one memory store whilst leaving the other intact provides support for there being two separate stores or a functional dissociation in memory.
  17. 17Milner's 1966 neurophysiological case study?Further support comes from neurophysiological case studies on people who have suffered brain damage. A patient known as HM (Milner, 1966) underwent surgery to remove his hippocampus on both sides in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. This left him with severe anterograde amnesia (which meant that he could not store new memories). His STM was left intact and he could retain verbal information for about 15 seconds. However, he could not transfer information into his LTM or, if he could, he could not retrieve it. Blakemore (1988) describes his memory for new events, faces, phone numbers and places as settling in his mind for just a few seconds before trickling away again.
    Brain scanning studies also support this distinction. Squire et al (1992) used PET scans to show that the pre-frontal cortex of the brain is active during STM tasks while the hippocampus is active during LTM tasks.
  18. 18Evaluating the Multi-Store Model?In order to evaluate the Multi-Store Model of memory, it is necessary to compare studies which both support and challenge the model. Evidence from laboratory studies on primacy/recency and from case studies of brain damaged patients provides good support for a functional dissociation or a distinction between STM and LTM. There is also support from neurophysiological studies which show that different areas of the brain are active when participants are performing STM and LTM tasks.
  19. 19Criticisms of the multi-store model?However, there are a number of criticisms of the model. One of the main criticisms is that the model is oversimplified and does not take into account the full complexity of memory. Evidence that the model is oversimplified comes from the study of a patient known as KF (Shallice and Warrington, 1970). KF suffered brain damage in a motorcycle accident which severely impaired his STM but left his LTM intact. The Multi-Store Model would predict that this could not happen since all information in LTM must pass through STM. The fact that he could make new long-term memories (providing the information was presented visually) refutes this idea and thus one of the core assumptions of the Multi-Store Model.
  20. 20Rucktin Et Al's criticisms of multi-store model?Further evidence refuting the notion that information only flows one way through the system is provided by Ruchkin et al (1999) who found that participants’ brain activity when recalling words or pseudo-words (nonsense words) was different. Evidently, when processing words, they were activating information stored in LTM. This suggests that LTM must be activated before certain stages of STM processing can occur. Another criticism is that the role of rehearsal has been overstated. Theorists today believe that memory is an active process and that simple repetition of information to be remembered is the least effective strategy of all. Craik and Tulving (1975) found that better retention in LTM was achieved when participants processed information semantically (by meaning). This means that people had better LTM retention when they gave meanings to otherwise meaningless data – as with the meaningless number string becoming meaningful dates in an earlier task.
  21. 21Brown and Kulik (1977)'s criticisms of the multi-store model?Additionally, Brown and Kulik (1977) have shown that memories for events which were highly emotionally charged, extremely traumatic or personally significant in some way are imprinted in LTM with little effort at all to remember them having taken place. Such memories have become known as flash-bulb memories, since the emotion surrounding the event seems to evoke a special mechanism causing the memory to be imprinted on LTM without rehearsal.
    You can remember your thoughts, feelings, where you were and what you were doing during 9/11. You can also think about personal/emotionally significant times or moments in your own life (these can be either good or bad), such as a wedding, a funeral, a special birthday, important childhood event or other personal event, then it is highly likely that you can recall what happened, what was said and so on, even if the event happened a long time ago. This shows that for your LTM, storing ‘emotional’ memories such as these is relatively easy and straightforward in a way in which storing passwords, PIN numbers, phone numbers and so on is not.
  22. 22Evaluating Memory Research?Much of the work on the Multi-Store Model is laboratory based. This allows good control of variables and ensures that research can be replicated, thus increasing reliability. However, many of the tasks used were not things participants would normally be asked to do in real life (e.g. learning trigrams or nonsense words). Therefore, this questions the ability of such experiments to represent memory for everyday situations. In other words, they lack ecological validity. Further work has concentrated on looking at memory as an active and interactive process as well as looking at the possibility of separate stores for different types of information within STM and LTM.
  23. 23Reliability?Psychologists must ask themselves the following whenever they design their research: if another psychologist repeated any piece of research, following the same methodology, would he or she obtain the same results? It is expected that if research is reliable, then the answer to this question would be: yes.
    In other words, reliable research and the data that results from it is that which conforms to the scientific method and the principle of repeatability. In general, quantitative data is more reliable than qualitative, if we follow this definition of reliability.
  24. 24Validity?The next question psychologists ask themselves when evaluating research is this: how far does this data give us a true or valid picture of the subject of research? In order to answer this question, psychologists must do some analysis of the methodology used to obtain the data. For example: how well does the method used match the research subject in question? Is it appropriate for the topic? Was the research carried out ethically and correctly? This is how a psychologist evaluates whether or not data is valid.
    When we next meet an example of psychological research, don’t forget to ask yourself whether the design is both reliable and valid.
  25. 25The Working Memory Model?In 1974 Baddeley and Hitch developed a model of STM, called working memory. It was an alternative to the short-term store as referred to in Atkinson and Shiffrin's 'multi-store' memory model (1968). Baddeley and Hitch argued that the STM as seen in relation to the Multi-Store Model was far too simple an explanation. Baddeley and Hitch were interested in the function (what is it for?) rather than structure (what is it like?) of the STM. They argued that the working memory is STM, and instead of all information going into one single store, there are different systems for different types of information. They proposed that a more useful view of the STM was as a working memory with sub-components designed to perform a series of different functions. This idea emphasises the fact that the STM is an active store used to hold information both from sensory memory and from LTM whilst working for present use. It is also involved in reasoning, understanding and learning. The Working Memory is the process that takes place when we continually focus on material for longer than only STM will allow.
  26. 26Alan Baddeley's investigations into working memory?Alan Baddeley and his colleagues have carried out a number of investigations which show that working memory consists of several components. These are:
    - Central executive – This is involved in all tasks requiring attention. It allocates resources to the other stores and acts as the controller for working memory.
    - Visuo-spatial sketchpad (also known as the inner eye) – This holds visual information such as size, shape and colour. It consists of two sub-components; an active rehearsal mechanism called the inner scribe which is linked to a passive visual store called the visual cache. The visuo-spatial sketchpad is assumed to be responsible for manipulating visual images.
    - Phonological loop (inner voice) – This holds verbal information in speech-based form. Again, it has two sub-components; an active articulatory loop which maintains auditory information by sub-vocal repetition, and a passive storage system known as the phonological store.
  27. 27Dual process tasks?To illustrate how the components work, imagine you have been asked to count the number of windows in your house, from memory. Think about the front of the house where you live right now.
    The image of your house is retrieved from your LTM and held in the visual cache where it can be manipulated and rotated, whilst you use the articulatory loop to count the windows sub-vocally (in other words, you do this silently rather than out loud, unless perhaps you are alone).
    Much of the research into working memory has been carried out using an experimental method known as the dual task technique, which has been designed to show that two tasks can be carried out simultaneously with little or no effect on performance of either task, providing they use different components of STM. On the other hand, performance of two tasks that do use the same components of STM will be adversely affected in the dual task, which can show researchers which parts of memory are used for completing which kind of tasks. What follows is an example of two dual process tasks to show this in practice.
  28. 28Experiment Interpretation?Psychologists researching memory have concluded from experimentation of this kind that the same memory stores are being accessed in alphabet recitation and letter writing (verbal/language processing skills), whereas the kind of memory required for walking is found in a very different store, meaning that in this dual process task no interference can take place.
    Further evidence has suggested that the capacity of the phonological loop is determined by time rather than number of items. Baddeley et al (1975) found that the capacity of the phonological loop is the number of words that can be articulated in 1.5 seconds.
    There is further substantial evidence to support the idea that we can’t perform two tasks which require the same processing system. Baddeley et al (1973) found that participants could not correctly identify top or bottom angles of imagined capital letters at the same time as performing a light-tracking task, since both tasks used the visuo-spatial sketchpad. However, they had no problem with the tracking task at the same time as performing a verbal task.
  29. 29PET scan studies?Studies using PET scans which measure blood flow through and, therefore, determine the activity of different parts of the brain at a given time also lend support to the idea of separate sub-systems in working memory. Some researchers believe that the visual cache stores form (shape) and colour information and the inner scribe processes spatial and movement information. Klauer and Zhao (2004) found more activity on the left side of the brain when performing visual working memory tasks and more on the right side when performing spatial tasks. This supports the idea of separate subsystems within the visuo-spatial sketchpad since they appear to have different functions and are located in different areas of the brain.
    Using a similar technique, Bunge et al (2000) found greater activity in the pre-frontal cortex when performing two working memory tasks than when performing only one. This supports the idea that the central executive (the pre-frontal cortex) works harder to allocate memory resources appropriately in dual-task conditions, thus also supporting the hypothesis that there are
  30. 30Evaluation of the Working Memory Model? (Advantages)The Working Memory Model has a number of advantages over the Multi-Store Model. It explains our ability to carry out tasks such as mental arithmetic by holding information both from sensory memory (e.g. the factors in the sum) and long term memory (the knowledge of how to solve it) whilst being able to manipulate it. It also offers a new interpretation of the study of the patient KF. He had damage to just the verbal part of his short term memory, which is why he could still retain information that was presented visually.
    There is also a large amount of empirical evidence. The dual process tasks of Baddeley and Hitch (1974) demonstrate the existence of various sub-systems in working memory, and there are many studies which demonstrate the functions of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad.
    Eg, Baddeley and Hitch (1974) found that participants could perform almost as well on a dual task (e.g. reciting a list of digits and a reasoning task) as they could when completing the tasks separately, even though reciting the digits should use up the limited capacity of their STM.
  31. 31Working memory model - real life applications?The Working Memory Model has had useful applications to real-life. Working memory capacity has been shown to be linked to reading comprehension and note-taking (Engle et al, 1999) and phonological loop deficit has been identified as an underlying factor in children with dyslexia, thus potentially linking research in cognitive psychology with issues in developmental or educational psychology.
  32. 32Evaluation of the Working Memory Model? (Disadvantages)A weakness of the model is that the central executive has been more difficult to investigate and, though tasks have been devised which demonstrate the function of the central executive (Baddeley, 1996), its exact role remains unclear.
    Here, the Working Memory Model doesn't offer a complete understanding and it doesn't explain the role of LTM activation in processing information. With this in mind the original model was updated by Baddeley (2000) with the concept of the Episodic Buffer. The Episodic Buffer acts as a 'backup' store which communicates with both LTM and the components of the working memory. Baddeley described this model as a system that stores information that is fed by the visual, spatial, verbal (sub-systems) and perception, that links to the central executive and plays an essential role in conscious awareness. The buffer part of this concept is how information is temporarily held in a multi-dimensional way. Episodic is how information is put together in chucks or episodes which in turn links to the central executive and is responsible for our conscious awareness.
  33. 33Evaluation of the Working Memory Model? (Ecological validity)Finally, much of the work on this model has used laboratory studies which are well controlled and produce reliable results. However, these experiments can lack ecological validity since the tests participants are asked to perform are rather artificial and do not represent memory in everyday life. This reminds us that appropriate experiment design is key, and trying to replicate real-life memory in experimental conditions (where possible) increases the validity of the resulting data.
  34. 34Explanations for forgetting?Why do we ‘forget’? As we have seen from some of the previous points made in this unit, there are many explanations or attempted explanations regarding how memory works, but how does psychology explain forgetting. There two main explanations given as to why we 'forget'.
    - First, we forget because the information that was stored in our memories is no longer available – which sounds a bit like leaving the office, going out to lunch and not being available until you get back. But this explanation is not too dissimilar to that idea – the information is not available when you need it but it may be accessible at a later date
    - Secondly, the memory or information that has been forgotten has been permanently forgotten and, as such, any physical traces of the memory cease to be. In such instances the information is not available at all.
  35. 35How do we forget?In terms of how we forget, it is argued that this is very much dependent upon whether what has been forgotten was stored in the long term or short term memory. In the 1930s to 1950s psychologists of the time would argue that what caused forgetting was something called interference. This was based on the notion that memory can be interfered with in some way by what we have learnt previously or by what we learn in the future. The suggestion therefore being that the memory can become combined with some other information or confused by distorted memories. According to interference theory, memories can interfere with each other and cause forgetting.
    1. Proactive interference (pro=forward) - the inability to be able to learn something new because something that had been learnt previously (an old memory) interferes with the learning of something new (a new memory).
    2. Retroactive interference (retro=backward) - forgetting something learnt previously because of learning a new task. The later learning interferes with earlier learning.
  36. 36Underwood and Postman (1960) study: AimsTo investigate and test how retroactive interference affects learning.
    (Proactive and retroactive interference is thought to be more likely to occur where the memories are similar. Baddeley (1999) found that people sometimes forgot things and found it difficult to remember certain information if elements of what was being remembered were similar. For example, trying to remember the name of a place you visited that is very similar to the name of somewhere else.)
  37. 37Underwood and Postman (1960) study: ProcedureParticipants were split into two groups. Half of the group (Group A) had to learn and remember a list of paired words, e.g. cat/tree, jelly/moss, book/tractor. They were then asked to learn a second list of paired words e.g. cat/glass, jelly/time. Here the paired words were different to the first list. The other half of the group (Group B), the control group, had to learn the first list of words only and not given the second list. All of the participants were then asked to recall the words on the first list.
  38. 38Underwood and Postman (1960) study: FindingsThe recall of Group B was more accurate than that of Group A.
  39. 39Underwood and Postman (1960) study: ConclusionWhat is being suggested by the findings of this experiment is that having to learn a second list interfered with the ability to recall the first list and is therefore an example of retroactive interference.
  40. 40Underwood and Postman (1960) study: EvalutionThis was a laboratory study and therefore artificial.
    Baddeley (1990) states that the tasks given to participants were too close to each other and, in real life; these kinds of events are more spaced out.
    More recent research (Anderson, 2000) has tried to address the issues raised above by investigating actual 'real-life' occurrences and the outcome of these studies support for interference theory.
    Whilst it is generally accepted is that interference does play a part in forgetting, the extent of this part is not definitive.
  41. 41Retrieval Failure?Retrieval failure is when information in the long-term memory cannot be accessed or retrieved, and the reason for this is because the ‘retrieval cues’ are not present at the time.
    New memories will be stored with details and information associated with it, and these are retrieval cues. Eg. seeing something or smelling something that is associated with the memory; this can trigger off a cue/s (external/context). Experiencing an emotion, feeling or mood can also act as a cue (internal/state).
    Laboratory based experiments suggest that in terms of long term memory, memories are more likely to be retrievable if appropriate retrieval cues are present. These cues act as a trigger or clue that enables an individual to gain access to the memory. Tulving (1974) argues that information from a memory is more likely to be retrievable if the actual cue was present at the time of encoding. So, if a man proposed to a woman when their favourite song was playing in the background, both are more likely to remember details of that event when they hear the song (the retrieval cue) again.
  42. 42Eyewitness Testimony?EWT refers to an account given by an individual of an event or occurrence they have witnessed. Inaccurate EWT can have serious consequences, leading to wrongful convictions and even the death penalty in the US. For example, Rattner (1988) reviewed 205 cases of wrongful arrest and found that this was due to mistaken EWT in 52% of cases. So there is a lot of evidence to why EWT is unreliable.
    The problem is that memory is not a static record of an event. Unlike photographic or CCTV evidence, memory is an active process, and there is evidence that our previous experiences, the stereotypes we hold and the emotion we felt at the time of an event, can change the way in which that memory is laid down. If that were not bad enough, post-event information can change our memories of an event. It is therefore very difficult to know which is the original memory and which is the one that has been altered by the passage of time and the overlay of your later life experiences (eg information about the same events which you receive from other sources, or your changed emotions about the event in quest
  43. 43Alteration of memory example?For example, suppose you have a memory of your fifth birthday party, and one day (as an adult) you are discussing this with your mother. You talk about a gift you received from Uncle Frank and how much you liked it at the time. However, your mother says ‘no, that was from Uncle Steven; Uncle Frank didn’t come to your fifth party.’
    Now your memory for the event has been challenged with the post-event information given to you by your mother. You will now return your memory of your fifth birthday party to your LTM in an altered form i.e. with Uncle Steven giving you the gift instead.
    The fact that you are inclined to believe your mother’s version of events rather than your own is an indication that the authority of other sources of information can have a huge impact on how we record events and our subsequent interpretation of them; in this case, because you were a child at the time of your fifth birthday party, once you are also an adult you consider your adult mother’s memory of the same event more authoritative.
  44. 44Alteration of memory?This alteration of memory after the event has far reaching implications for the accuracy of EWT. If witnesses were given wrong or misleading information during questioning, perhaps by a source they considered more authoritative (for whatever reason), it could have the potential to change their recollection of an event. One of the most prolific researchers into EWT is an American psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus, she wanted to examine the influence of (mis)leading information in relation to this. Her findings indicated that memory of an event that had been witnessed can be extremely flexible. Loftus suggested that if a person was exposed to new information during the interval between witnessing an event and recalling it, the new information may affect what they were able to recall and the accuracy of it. In other words the original memory can be modified, altered or supplemented.
  45. 45Study by Lofus and Palmer 1974?In a study by Loftus and Palmer (1974), Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction, they devised an experiment to find out if leading questions could bias how a witness answers. They showed participants a film of a car accident and then asked them how fast the cars were travelling when they hit each other. All participants were asked the same question except that the verb ‘hit’ was replaced with ‘smashed’, collided, ‘bumped’ or ‘contacted’. Their findings showed that the word used in questioning affected the estimations of speed given by the participants.
    When asked one week later if they had seen any broken glass in the original film, participants who had been given the word ‘smashed’ were more likely to answer ‘yes’, even though there had been no glass in the film at all!
  46. 46Lofus and Palmer explanations for memory alteration?- Response-bias factors: The information provided may have simply influenced the answer a person gave (a 'response-bias') which in itself was not actually false but the words used influenced or generated a bias in terms of the person’s response. For example, when a witness is trying to recall the amount of force exerted by one person in relation to another in a physical altercation, their account can be influenced or biased by the words used to describe the occurrence – such as the difference between someone being ‘slapped’ and being ‘struck’.
    - The memory representation is altered: The critical verb changes an individual’s perception of the accident. Critical verbs could result in someone having a perception of an incident that is more serious than the actual incident itself and this is then stored in the individual’s memory of the incident. e.g. ‘the victim suffered a broken nose’ when compared to ‘the victim suffered a facial fracture’.
  47. 47Misleading Post-Event Information: Author/DateLoftus (1975) ‘Barn Study’
  48. 48Misleading Post-Event Information: AimsTo see if false information given post-event can change the original memory.
  49. 49Misleading Post-Event Information: ProcedureParticipants were asked about the speed of a white sports car after watching a film showing this car travelling along a road. Half the participants were asked about the car passing a stop sign whereas the other half were asked about it passing a barn.
  50. 50Misleading Post-Event Information: Findings17% in the ‘barn’ group reported seeing a barn in the film compared to only 3% in the ‘stop sign’ group. There had been no barn in the original film.
  51. 51Misleading Post-Event Information: ConclusionsThe ‘barn’ group had added the misleading post-event information to their original memory, whereas the non-barn group had not.
  52. 52Misleading Post-Event Information: EvaluationsThis was a laboratory study and therefore artificial; it lacked ecological validity.
    There were high demand characteristics (this means that there was a high demand that participants act the way they think they should within the context of this study).
    Deception was used: the researchers were not able to give away the precise nature of study beforehand, but participants were debriefed afterwards.
  53. 53The Effects of Misleading InformationMisleading information can cause inaccurate recall of events because it leads to a phenomenon known as ‘source misattribution’. In other words, participants who are given post-event information that is not consistent with their original memory (e.g. being asked about a barn instead of a stop sign) get confused as to where they encountered each item. In the study above, some of the participants misattributed the source of the barn and thought they had seen it in the original film, whereas in fact the source of the barn was the misinformation of the researchers who were deliberately feeding the participants false information. Loftus concludes that this is because the original memory is overwritten or altered and is replaced by the new, false memory, which the participants now believe to be the correct record of events.
  54. 54Tomes and Katz 1997 misattribution errors?However, not all people are equally prone to source misattribution errors. Tomes and Katz (1997) have found that people with poorer general recall for an event are more susceptible to misleading information, as are people who score highly on tests of imagery vividness and empathy with other people. This research therefore links the psychology of memory to social and behavioural psychology, reminding us of the connections that are frequently made between different subdivisions of the subject.
    Also, Loftus found that people are not easily misled by blatantly wrong information. She showed participants sets of slides in which a red purse was stolen from a handbag. Later, she gave participants an account of the theft which contained deliberate errors. One of the errors referred to the purse as being brown in colour. Most of the participants were not misled by the error relating to the colour of the purse. This shows that people are not always affected by misleading information, especially when the information refers to central rather than peripheral details of an event.
  55. 55Evaluation of Research on Misleading InformationLoftus has made an important contribution to our understanding of the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony. It seems clear from her research that memory for events can be altered in the light of misleading information. However, her studies have been criticised for artificiality. It is also possible that participants in experiments are less accurate than real-life witnesses because they know inaccuracies will not lead to serious consequences, and because the artificiality of the situation has meant that the memory is not powerfully imprinted on their LTM.
    Foster et al (1994) tested this first possibility in a study where participants were shown a video of a bank robbery and subsequently asked to identify the robber in an identity parade. One group of participants were led to believe that the robbery was a real event and that their responses would influence the trial, while the second group were told that it was a simulation. Identification of the robber was more accurate for the first group, suggesting that consequences and context are an important factor for witnesses.
  56. 56Evaluation of Research on Misleading Information (Method of testing)It has also been suggested that the method of testing witnesses’ recall could be a factor in explaining some of Loftus’ findings. For example, she often used forced-choice tests where participants had to pick one slide from a choice of two. Koriat and Goldsmith (1996) have shown that witness accuracy can be dramatically increased if tests do not rely on forced-choice format and if witnesses are allowed to leave out a question if they feel unsure (that is, they are not forced to make a choice). It is also the case that witnesses can produce far more accurate memories if they are given the appropriate cues.
    Loftus has been further criticised for her explanation of the effects of post-event information. She believes that the original memory is re-written by the incorporation of misleading information: the original memory is deleted and replaced by the new, false memory. Other researchers have disputed this and believe that the original memory is still available, even though it has been obscured by the new information.
  57. 57Bekerian and Bowers study and conclusion?Bekerian and Bowers (1983) replicated Loftus et al (1978)'s study where a car is shown stopping at either a ‘stop’ or a ‘give way’ sign. Participants are then asked questions which are consistent or inconsistent with what they have seen. In the recognition phase of the study, the participants were presented with the pairs of slides in chronological order (i.e. the order they were first shown). This was not like the first study where Loftus showed them in any order. In the first, recall was poor but in the replication, recall for those given misleading information was as accurate as a control group who were given non-leading information.
    Bekerian and Bowers concluded that the original memory had not been lost. This was because using slides in the correct order provided enough cues to reactivate the original memory regardless of having been given misleading information after the event. However, others have failed to replicate this result, so it remains unclear whether the memory trace is in fact destroyed or whether it is only obscured and can later be retrieved.
  58. 58Encoding: Effect of SchemasFrederick Bartlett (1932) showed that, instead of storing an exact replica of events, we store what he termed a ‘reconstructive memory’ based on our interpretation of events. This interpretation is created using knowledge that we have already stored in our memory, which is stored in discreet entities called schemas. Schemas help us to make sense of the world. If we had to analyse every new event or object from scratch, it would take ages to process the information and would be a waste of resources. Schemas enable us to process new information according to what we have already stored about previous similar situations and help us to fill in any ‘gaps’ in the information available to us.
  59. 59Example of encoding of schemaFor example, let’s suppose your friend tells you that the film he saw last night was good but he missed the start because the service at the ‘Taj Mahal’ was slow. You somehow know that ‘service’ and ‘Taj Mahal’ refer to an Indian restaurant without really giving it a second thought. This is because you have a restaurant schema stored in your memory to which you can refer, and you are able to ‘fill in the gaps’.
  60. 60Negative schemas (stereotypes)?In particular, schemas we have stored about other groups of people, often containing negative information, are called stereotypes. Brewer and Treyens (1981) investigated the effects of schemas on visual memory. They asked individual participants to wait in a room for 35 seconds. The room was designed to look like an office and contained 61 objects, some of which were consistent with an office schema and some of which were not. In a later unexpected recall test, they found that participants were most likely to recall the typical office items and less likely to recall items inconsistent with an office schema, such as the pliers. They also found that errors in recall typically involved substituting schema-consistent items, i.e. falsely recalling things like pens and a telephone, which fit in with an office schema but were not actually present in the office. Eight participants recalled the bizarre item, the skull, which shows that we do use schemas when encoding information but will also pay attention to highly bizarre or atypical details.
  61. 61Schemas applied to EWT?List (1986) applied schemas to EWT. She asked people to rate various events in terms of their probability in a shoplifting scenario. She then devised a video showing eight different acts of shoplifting, with low and high probability.
    She then showed the video to a new set of participants and tested their recall one week later. She found they were more likely to recall and often made more substitution errors with high-probability events.
    Based on research such as this, Cohen (1993) has suggested five ways that schemas can lead to reconstructive memory:
    1. We tend to ignore elements of an event that don’t fit in with our currently activated schema
    2. We can store the central features of an event without having to store the exact details
    3. We can make sense of what we have seen by ‘filling in’ (inferring) missing information
    4. We distort memories of events to fit in with prior expectations (e.g. robber who wore cap, seen to wear balaclava)
    5. We may use our schemas to provide us with a best guess if we can’t recall the exact information
  62. 62The Impact of Stress and Anxiety on EWT and Memory RecallEvidence about the effects of anxiety and stress on the accuracy of EWT is contradictory. Laboratory studies suggest that anxiety can impair recall whereas real-life studies often show that the anxiety of an event can enhance recall. This may be because events are so traumatic that they are ‘seared’ into LTM, making memories highly accurate and long-lasting (though of course, from a behavioural psychological perspective, potentially hugely damaging to an individual and potentially requiring therapeutic intervention in order to neutralise them as far as possible).
  63. 63Impact of stress study by Clifford and Scott (1978)In a study by Clifford and Scott (1978) they had a group of people watch a film of a violent attack. They found that people remembered fewer of the 40 items of information about the event than a control group who saw a less violent and stressful version. Witnessing a real violent crime, it can be assumed, is likely to be more stressful and as such it could be suggested that the level of memory accuracy may be diminished somewhat due to the anxiety/stress of witnessing a real situation.
    However, a study by Yuille and Cutshall (1986) suggests that we should reconsider the extent to which stress influences eyewitness memories. In their study, they found that witnesses, who had seen a real life shooting outside a shop in Canada, were able to recall and give high levels of accuracy regarding the incident. And even when witnesses were re-interviewed some 5 months later they still had a good level of recall, despite the level of stress and anxiety they had experienced at the time.
  64. 64Impact of stress on EWT by Loftus (1979)In one laboratory study, Loftus (1979) had some participants sitting outside a laboratory. The participants were led to believe that they were listening to genuine conversations inside the laboratory, followed by them witnessing a man leaving the laboratory. In one condition, participants heard a calm discussion and saw a man with greasy hands and a pen leave. In another condition, there was a heated exchange accompanied by the sound of smashing glass and furniture being turned over. The man leaving the lab was holding a bloody knife.
    Later, the group who had heard the calm exchange were much better at identifying the man from a series of photographs than the group who had heard the heated exchange. Loftus believed that the anxiety caused by seeing the weapon in the second condition had affected participants’ ability to identify the man. She called this the ‘weapons effect’ since the presence of the weapon had drawn the focus away from the face of the perpetrator onto the weapon. (An implication of this for EWT is that witnesses may be better at identifying weapons than faces.
  65. 65Impact of stress on EWT by Loftus and Burns (1982)Research by Loftus and Burns (1982) provided support for this finding. Participants saw either a film of a violent crime in which a boy was shot in the face, or a non-violent version. Those who had seen the violent version were less accurate in recalling the details of the crime, again implying that the weapons effect interferes with witnesses’ ability to recall the faces of people they have seen. However, Christianson and Hubinette (1993) questioned 110 witnesses who had witnessed genuine bank robberies. Some of the witnesses had been bank employees who had been directly threatened during the robberies. The rest were onlookers.
    - Victims gave more accurate recall of the event and remembered more details than people who had been onlookers
    - This superior recall was evident even after a 15-month interval
  66. 66Impact of stress on EWT by Loftus and Burns (1982) - FindingsTheir study shows that even though an individual/s may experience high levels of stress or anxiety during an incident, such as witnessing a crime, this does not necessarily mean they will not be able to recall details of the incident with a good level of accuracy. Also, misleading questions, as addressed by Loftus and Palmer, does not necessarily have the effect suggested, as the witness may still be able to recall details, despite any attempts to redirect or mislead them. This would suggest that people (especially victims) are good at remembering highly stressful and traumatic events if they occur in real-life rather than in the artificial surroundings of a laboratory, even where they are led to believe that the events they are witnessing are real (as in the calm conversation, heated argument and bloody knife scenario).
  67. 67The Age of the WitnessIt is generally believed that children do not make as reliable witnesses as adults. This schema was most likely at work in your decision to overwrite your own memory of your fifth birthday party with that of your mother’s in our earlier example. Yet there are some crimes where only child witnesses were present (e.g. in some abuse cases). It makes sense then, for psychologists to study the accuracy of children’s testimony at each stage of the process, i.e. encoding, storage and retrieval, and also to make a careful consideration of the impact of this on children’s EWT.
  68. 68The Age of the Witness EncodingCeci and Bruck (1993) believe that children may be inaccurate at providing EWT because they lack the appropriate schemas to help them interpret a situation. However, this could make them more accurate than an adult, since without an appropriate schema, they are not susceptible to inferring information which is consistent with a particular schema but was not actually there during the event. We already know that adults are susceptible to this.
  69. 69The Age of the Witness StorageThe longer the time between the encoding of a memory and its later retrieval, the more likely retrieval is to be inaccurate. This is the case for both adults and children, although it would seem that children’s memories are more affected by a retrieval delay than are adults’ memories (Thomson 1988). The type of information stored is also a factor. For example, as storage interval increases, descriptions of people become less accurate than details of actions.
  70. 70The Age of the Witness RetrievalChildren leave out more details than adults, but relevant cues can help to jog their memory. However, children are more susceptible to leading questions than adults, so they are more likely to recall information implied by the question. Leichtman and Ceci (1995) found that if 3 and 6 year-old children were given misleading information in questions, they incorporated it into their memory. Similarly, Poole and Lindsay (2001) found that children aged 3 to 8 incorporated elements of a story read to them by their parents into their memories of a science demonstration watched earlier. When asked about the source of the information (source monitoring), older children were able to remove the post-event items. This suggests that younger children are more susceptible than older children to the effects of misleading post-event information.
  71. 71Elderly WitnessesElderly witnesses may also experience errors of recall. In a study by Yarnley (1984), participants were shown a staged event. When questioned afterwards, the study found that 80% of elderly participants failed to mention that the attacker held a knife, compared to only 20% of younger adults.
    Cohen and Faulkner (1989) conducted a similar study where participants were shown a film of a kidnapping. A narrative account of the events shown was then read to participants, with half being given an accurate account of the film and half given a misleading one. The elderly participants’ recall was found to be much more susceptible to the effects of the misleading information than that of the middle-aged participants.
  72. 72Improving the accuracy of EWT The Cognitive InterviewThe reliability of eyewitness recall has been of great concern, not surprisingly when we consider that in many instances the making or breaking of a case or the ‘catching’ of a perpetrator of a crime, is very much dependent upon an individual’s ability to recall the details of an incident or perpetrator. Fisher and Geiselmen et al (1985) suggest that one of the methods that could be used in order to retrieve the information needed, particularly in terms of getting accurate witness testimony during police questioning, is to use the cognitive interview technique. This method uses four techniques in order to retrieve the memory needed.
  73. 73Improving the accuracy of EWT The Cognitive Interview: The four techniquesCognitive reinstatement – to recreate the context: The interviewer may try to get the individual to mentally create the environment as well as placing the time within some sort of personal context at the time of the incident, such as asking the individual: what they were doing at the time or prior to the incident etc. This taps into the specific environmental cues that were present and may help remind them
    Change Perspective: The interviewer may ask the individual to recall the incident from a different perspective, such as asking the witness what they think other people may have seen. This may enable the individual to recall something from a different recall route
    Reverse Order: The interviewer may ask the individual to recount the incident in an order different to how it occurred – a difference narrative order. This may enable the individual to recall something from a different recall route
    Report everything: The interviewer would ask the individual to recollect every little detail, even the ones that may seem trivial. Irrelevant details may help to trigger more significant ones
  74. 74Does the cognitive interview work?Does the cognitive interview approach work?
    Yes, because…
    - Retrieval cues enhance and improve memory recall
    - This approach gives individuals time to recall and retrieve information with a higher degree of accuracy
    - Milne and Bull (2002) found that used singularly, the four techniques improved recall
    - Godden and Baddeley (1975), found that memory can be significantly improved when encoding and recall takes place in an environment not too dissimilar, if not the same as where the incident occurred
    But...
    - According to Geiselman (1999) this is not the best approach to use in all cases. Geiselman found that in reviewing cases where the witnesses were under the age of 6, the recall was not as accurate. This suggests that a different approach would have to be used according to whom the information was being retrieved from
    - There is also an ethical issue to be considered: using this approach to recall in detail, violent, sexual or gruesome events could be too traumatic for the witness concerned
  75. 75Cognitive interview elicits more information?In general, there are studies which show that the Cognitive Interview (CI) elicits more information than other types of questioning. However, it also seems to elicit more inaccurate information. It has also been found that the techniques of context reinstatement and reporting every detail found within the CI seem to be the most effective combination of elements in terms of eliciting accurate recall (Milne and Bull, 2002). However, it has proved to be effective with children over the age of 8 but not so useful with children under 6, perhaps because young children fail to understand the instructions (Geiselman, 1999).
    In order to minimise the amount of inaccurate information given by interviewees in a CI, Fisher (1987) recommends using an Enhanced Cognitive Interview technique in which police actively listen to the witness, minimise distractions, use open-ended questions, encourage the use of imagery and avoid making judgemental comments. Overall, researchers have found that the Cognitive Interview has been useful in increasing the accuracy of EWT.
  76. 76Strategies for Memory ImprovementResearch into memory has provided us with various techniques that we can use to improve our retention of information. The following techniques will also be useful to you when you come to revise for the exam! This section will describe how the techniques work and relate them back to the memory research that underpins them. The techniques are based on:
    - Organisation of information
    - Encoding and retrieval strategies
    - Active processing
  77. 77Organisation of InformationThe way we organise information that we wish to remember is central to remembering it effectively. Mnemonics use verbal rhymes or visual images to organise information such as processes or events which need to be remembered in order. Eg. A typical rhyme could be:
    Many Vets Eat Monkey Jam Said Uncle Nick Precisely
    Take the first letter from each of the rhyme words and you have:
    Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.
    Because LTM loves the unusual and bizarre the rhyme will be stored with little effort. You have also ‘chunked’ the nine planets into a single item (the single phrase, which is one unit of semantic sense) rather than into nine discrete entries (the nine separate names of the planets), which will thus take up only one slot of STM when you recall it.
    Some mnemonic techniques are based on visual imagery. One of the most fun visual techniques is called the method of loci (place). This allows us to remember things like shopping lists by visualising a familiar place already stored in LTM and ‘hanging’ the new information from it.
  78. 78Psychological Research into Memory in Real World ApplicationsYou may think that such individuals are born with the gift of extraordinary memory. Instead, they have simply trained their memory to such an extent that they are able to recall a great quantity of information, but being able to do this is something that any individual could also do with the same memory training. You will also now be unsurprised to learn that this memory training is the advanced application of techniques such as loci and mnemonics.
    In fact, recalling the order of a pack of playing cards is commonly undertaken by memory ‘athletes’ by using loci. A very familiar routine or route (such as those of the type described, or else a walk around a very familiar place, such as your own home) is used to hang each playing card (each of which are conceptualised as if people, using a further memorisation strategy) to a stage of the familiar route or part of the familiar place. It is particularly important to make the interactions as bizarre as possible so they are highly memorable.
  79. 79Visual imagery enhances recall??Eg. walking around your house and placing 'weird' items will help you remember them. Indeed, many studies have shown that this type of highly visual imagery enhances recall. For example, Paivio (1965) found that participants were better at recalling concrete nouns than abstract ones. He linked this to the dual coding hypothesis where concrete nouns are encoded twice, first using a verbal code and then again, using a visual image. De Bene and Moè (2003) found the use of visual imagery to especially help memory when information is presented verbally, since conjuring up a visual image can be done whilst holding the word in the articulatory loop and, therefore, making use of two separate working memory systems. Studies like these seem to show that visual imagery enhances recall, but they have been criticised for lacking realism since it is not very often that we have to learn lists of unrelated words (except perhaps when memory athletes are deliberately training themselves for competitions!).
  80. 80Bransford and Johnson (1972)'s experiment?Bransford and Johnson (1972) devised an experiment to test this theory. They asked two groups of participants to read a long paragraph and then to try and remember the main details. For one group the passage was given the title ‘Doing the Laundry’, while the other group were not given a title. The study found that the group who were given the title performed significantly better on the recall test. This suggests that understanding the material significantly improves a person’s ability to remember it. It also suggests that knowing the context of the information, i.e. ‘Doing the Laundry’, helped the participants to remember the passage because they were able to make use of their existing knowledge of doing laundry (their schema) to recall the information.
  81. 81Encoding and Retrieval StrategiesMany memory strategies are based on the encoding specificity principle (Tulving and Thompson, 1973), which states that when we acquire memories, we encode them with links to the context we were in at the time. Thus, the context becomes a retrieval cue which can help recall information stored in LTM. To illustrate this idea, Tulving and Osler (1968) gave participants lists of words, each of which was paired with cue word, e.g. ‘city–dirty’. Participants were then asked to recall the original list either by free recall or cued recall (they were presented with the cue words and had to remember the word associated with it). The findings showed that cued recall produced consistently better performance than free recall.
  82. 82The Role of Context (Godden and Baddeley (1975))A study which looked specifically at context-dependent retrieval was carried out by Godden and Baddeley (1975).
    They asked divers to learn a list of 40 unrelated words either on land or 15 feet under water. Later, half the divers recalled the words in their original context whilst the other half recalled in a different context (i.e. those who had learned the list on land recalled under water and vice versa). The findings were that those who recalled in the same context as the one in which learning had taken place remembered more words. This supports the encoding specificity principle. Information about the context must have been encoded along with the words. These cues were not available to those who recalled in a different environment, therefore, their recall was poorer. Perhaps this research into memory tells us something important about cognitive functioning: our memories are not abstractions of our experiences but are instead a more holistic picture of what has happened to us and what we have done.
  83. 83The Role of Context (Smith (1979))Similarly, Smith (1979) gave participants a list of 80 words to learn whilst sitting in a distinctive basement. The following day he tested some of the participants in the same basement, some in an upstairs room and a third group who were tested in the upstairs room but were asked to ‘imagine’ they were in the original basement room. Original room was best, imagined was second and different was last. The findings from studies such as these have implications for students doing exams, since they seem to suggest that students will do better if they recall the information in the same context in which they learned it (something that hardly ever happens), or if they attempt to ‘cue’ key information to aid recall. However, most studies report that environmental differences need to be substantial before any significant difference in recall is noticed. It has also been shown that students simply imagining the original room in which the information was learned can help with retrieval.
  84. 84The Role of an Individual’s StateThere is also evidence that physiological state or mood can affect recall. Surprisingly, Goodwin et al (1969) found that heavy drinkers who learn things in a drunken state are more likely to recall them when in a similar state. Eich (1980) has also found this effect with marijuana.
    In general, there is less conclusive evidence that mood affects recall. However, in a meta-study, a review of research studies into mood, Ucros (1989), found a moderately strong relationship between mood at the learning stage and at the retrieval stage. She also found that mood was more likely to affect memories of real-life rather than artificially constructed material, and that adults were more affected by mood dependence than children.
  85. 85Active ProcessingWe are more likely to remember material that we have actively processed by interacting with material on what Craik and Tulving (1975) called a ‘deep’ level. They identified three levels on which we can take in information: structural (what does it look like?), phonological (what does it sound like?) and semantic (what does it mean?). Craik and Tulving argued that taking in information on a structural level involves a very shallow level of processing, resulting in a memory trace that is not very robust. Deep processing (resulting in good retention) comes from understanding material semantically.
    To demonstrate this, Craik and Tulving (1975) gave participants a list of words to which they had to answer questions requiring shallow, medium or deep processing. Then surprise test. Deep words remembered best. This shows that meaningful interaction with material gives better retention and that the learning is incidental (Surprised test so made no special effort to remember the material). They performed as well as a control group who made a particular effort to remember the words on the list.
  86. 86Tyler et al (1997)'s comments on active processingHowever, Tyler et al (1979) questioned the notion of levels of processing. They believed that the semantic tasks required more effort and it was the effort required in processing the information which improved recall. To test this idea, they gave participants two sets of anagrams to solve: ‘difficult’ and ‘easy’. Participants were later given an unexpected recall test. They found that significantly more of the difficult anagram words were recalled and concluded that since all words were processed at the same level (semantically, therefore at a deep level) the better recall in the difficult anagram group must have been due to the effort put into processing them and not the depth of processing.
    Nevertheless, most studies show that the more you interact with the material and the more elaborate and organised you make it, the more likely you are to remember it in the long term.

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A level Psychology Karteikarten am Psychology - Memory, erstellt von Megan Griffiths am 06/12/2018.
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