Types of memory

Types of memory

1. Short Term Memory

   • Capacity
     • Very limited Jacobs (1887) found that participants could remember 7 +/- 2 pieces of information in their short term memory
       • This could be increased via chunking gorouping infomation together however it is still only 7 +/- 2 chunks that can be remembered
   • Duration
     • 18-30 seconds
     • Peterson and Peterson
       • Asked participants to remember trigrams and then recall them. During the pause Participanst were asked to count backward in 3's
       • Found that after
       • Lacked mundane realism, interferance task was forcing out information in STM so also lacked internal validity as the test just measuered capacity
   • Coding
     • Found to be mainly acoustic

2. Long Term Memory

   • Duration
     • Unlimited
     • Bahrick
       • Study on VLTM
       • Tested memory of former classmates they found that after 34 years recall remained at 90% 48 years was 80%
       • They also found that recall was better with the presence of a cue e.g. yearbook
       • Evaluation
         • field experiment for higher ecological validity
         • Lack of control
           • P's could still be in contact with classmates
           • Decrease could be due to ageing in the brain rather than the passage of time
   • Coding
     • Often believed to be semantic
     • Baddeley
       • lists of acoustically similar and dissamilar and semantically similar and disimalar
       • Found that immediatly (STM) p's had diffculty remembering words that sound similar
         • Suggests that coding is mainly acoustic
       • After a 20 minute pause p's had much greater difficulty remembering semantically similar words
         • Suggests that LTM is coded semantically
     • However it could also be acoustic as we regularly recognise police sirens
   • Capacity
     • Has no upper limit
   • Types
     • Procedural
       • Knowing |How to do things it is unconscieous
     • Episodic
       • Remembering events in our lives it is conscieous
     • Semantic
       • Stores information about the world e.g. facts and figures
     • These different types were proposed by Tulving upon analysing PET scans and finding different areas of the brain light up when different LTM tasks are carried out
     • The case study of Clive Wearing supports this theory as he is incapable of transferring or Recalling any semantic or episodic information however he is able to remember to play the piano Procedural LTM
     • Belliville found that episodic memory could be improved in older people. This showed that Tulving's theory has real life applications.
     • Cohen and Squire disagree they argue that episodic and semantic stores are actually grouped together in one store called declerative memory