Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

1. Theories of memory

   • Multistory memory model
     • Information passes through the system from one store to another in a set order
     • Consists of three basic stores
       • Sensory
         • Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch
         • Holds information for the briefest period (0.5 seconds)
         • Limited to one sensation
         • Encoding is sense specific
       • Short term memory
         • Duration
           • 15-30 seconds
           • Decay completely if information is not attended to
           • Peterson & Peterson investigated the duration. Gave the participant a trigram and asked them to remember it after counting back in 3s from a set number. After 15-18 seconds results dropped rapidly
         • Capacity
           • Atkinson & Shiffrin stated 5-8 items of information
             • Miller defined it to 7+/-2
         • Encoding
           • Mainly acoustic (auditory/verbal)
           • Letters and words with similar sound are harder to recall
         • Retrieval
           • Based on a rapid scan of stored information
           • Rehearsal is needed to maintain the information in the store
         • Transfer
           • STM to LTM needs rehearsal, however a more cognitive effort would be more helpful, such as mnemonic
           • Sensort to STM to LTM the LTM needs to make sense of information and assign a verbal label
       • Long term memory
         • Duiration
           • Unlimited
           • Bahrick investigated how many participants could remember names of faces in a school year book. High results
             • Memory deteriorates over time but LTM for faces and names is fairly resilient
         • Capacity
           • Unlimited
           • Bradley et al showed participates 2500 objects and then paired them and asked to recall which one they saw before. High results
         • Encoding
           • Mainly semantic
           • Can depend on the rehearsal process or some form of association between new and pre-existing knowledge
         • Retrieval
           • Thought to be ore than one copy of the memory in LTM
             • Based on tip of the tongue phenomenon. Can recall a partial copy of the memory
   • The working memory model

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