Evaluation of MSM

Evaluation of MSM

1. Evidence

   • Clive Wearing
     • In experiments he had good recency effects but struggled with remembering things long term
       • Supports that he had normal STM but abnormal LTM - showed they were separate
   • Serial Position Curve by Glazer and Cunitz
     • Showed people remember words more if they're at the beginning of a list or the end
       • Supports STM having a short capacity and that rehearsal is needed- as words that were at the end of the list could be rehearsed more without other distracting information (recency effect) and the first items on the list were remembered because they were in the STM before its capacity got full
   • Clive Wearing
     • Criticises the model as he could still remember how to play the piano and still remember his wife
       • Suggests there are more than one types of long term memory
   • Craik and Watkins criticise the idea of rehearsal
     • Carried out a word list experiment. Found that neither STM capacity or length of time given to rehearse effected the recall
       • Suggests rehearsal doesn't necessarily lead to better recall

2. Application

   • The theory benefits students in the education system
     • Suggests that information needs to be repeated again and again (rehearsed) in order for it to get stored in the long term memory. This can be interpreted in the form of revision - giving evidence to the opinion that revising is the best way to be successful in exams
     • Can also help teaching as teachers can understand how many items of information their students can hold in their mind before their STM gets full. Helps them to develop paces of teaching - where students are allowed to note a certain amount of pieces of information before teaching proceeds

3. Critisisms

   • Credibility
     • Credible being as lots of studies into the memory stores has been conducted in the laboratory, which has high controls over variables.
   • Rehearsal is said to be too simplistic of an explanation for how information gets from one memory store to the other
     • It ignores that there may be different levels of effort between participants and some may have different ways of remembering information such as chunking or mnenomics, which can differ the results from participant to participant
   • Too simplistic of an explanation
     • There is confusion between the stores as LTM must influence what we pay attention to as we learn what gets us gratification. The MSM doesn't state any sort of interaction between how we pay attention to things and our LTM having an influence due to what we have learned

4. How Good is the Research?

   • Lab studies can also be a weakness because they lack realism. They are low in ecological validity, external validity, task validity and mundane realism.
     • Can't explain how the theory works in the real world
   • Records from amnesia patients provide good evidence between the different stores of memory as patients often show a failure in one store but the other store is working perfectly
   • Case studies are a weakness
     • It is just the account of one individual therefore the findings from these studies cannot be generalised to the entire population