Memory AO3

Memory AO3

1. Misleading Information

   • Limitations of Loftus and Palmer- lack of population anxiety and mundane realism ie no anxiety which may have increased accuracy and decrease affetc of MLI
     • Supported by real life appilcations...
     • Links to population validity...
   • Yuille and Cutshall (1986)- 13 EW of an armed robbery. interviewed 4 months later the crash and asked 2 misleading questions. Ppts gave accurate recall in comparison to original reports dispite this. Thus post event info may not really effect memory in real EWT
   • Individual Differences- Schacter et al (1991), found that compared to younger ppts elderly men have more difficulty in remembering the source of their information even though their acc memory is unimpaired. Thus they are more prone to the influences of misleading information
   • However has lead to succesful application ie Cognitive Interview

2. Retrieval Failure

   • Smith and Vela- context effects are largely eliminated when learning meaningful material. effects are shown for simple learning lists but in real life settings where we learn much more complicated material there will be complex assosociates occuring so the information is less triggered by single cues. This brings up a more developed theory: the outshining hypothesis, where a cues effectiveness is reduced by the presense of better cues ie the material it self.
   • Godden & Baddeley- contextual cues, scubas divers learn learnt set of words underwater or on land. They found that in the four experimental conditions the best recall was if they were in the same environment when they learnt the information.
     • This has real world application as Smith (1979) found that when participants thought about the room they revised in their retrieval of revision material was increased
   • The encoding specificity principle is not testable and leads to circular reasoning. in the many studies done on the ESP we state that if cues result in the recall of a word that must mean that it must have been encoded during learning. Vice versa if a cue does not produce the recollection of the test material then we assume that the cue was not coded during learning. However these are all just assumption we can not actually test whether a cue has actually been encoded as it could be that a cue was coded but did not result in increased recollection which will be interpretted as not being coded.

3. Interference

   • Lacks Ecological Valdity as ppts behaviour different compared to a natural setting
     • lab setting provides high control of variables
   • Lacks mundane Realism as research only investigates one type of memory unliike real life where one if you would learn about someone ie looks, number, verbal info etc therefore info will be encoded differently and may not be that affected by interference
   • Baddeley & Hitch (1977)- interference or time passing, real world application, rugby players asked what teams they had played over the season. Results were that time had little effect rather the number of games played during the time period. Players that were injured and thus had not play in the most recent games remembered more teams earlier in the season than those who played in all the games, thus showing the effect of retroactive interference
   • Individual Differences, Kane & Engle found that people with better working memory are less affected by interference. Thus unless they are performing a high attention demanding task as well as a typical learning task those with high working memory capacity are unaffected

4. Types of LTM

   • Tulving et al (1994)- PET scans while ppts performed various memory tasks. Episodic and Semantic reclaed in prefrontal cortex (right to left respectively)
     • Investigator Bias- unlike Cohen and Squire
   • Cohen and Squire- declarative and non-declarative memory ie episodic and semantic stored together and both can be consciously recalled unlike procedural
     • However supported by...
   • Clive Wearing- senatic memories of past were unaffected as well as precedural ie playing piano
     • Case Study- hard to generalise but has research support

5. Working Memory Model

   • KF
   • Eslinger and Damasio- Central Executive too simple, patients brain tumour removed resulted in poor decision making but intact verbal reasoning. EVR poor decision making skills but perform well on reasoning skills.
   • Baddeley et al (1976)- ppts were to track a moving light as well as a Visual or verbal task. found that ppts struggled more doing two visual tasks

6. Multi Store Model

   • Glanzer and Cunitz- Primary and recency effect was depicted when ppts given 20 words in 3 second intervals, recall was highes for first and last 5 words. This is significant as is is thought that the first few had had enough time rehearsed to stay in the LTM store and the last few were remembered well as they were acoustically processed last so displaced the middle words in our STM
   • Shallice and Warrington studied brain damaged man named KF, who had better STM for visual informantion compared to STM for auditory information. This suggests that the MSM is much too simple as the STM is not a singular unitary store, instead the WSM may better to explain memory as it has seperate slave systems depending on the type of information being processed.
   • Clive Wearing- was not able to form new LTM after a virus infected his brain. Thus his STM lasts for 30 seconds at most
     • Population Validity, this are supported by case studies which is a weakness as the brain damage

7. Cognitive Interview

   • Individual Differences
   • Kohnken et al- conducted meta analysis found and increase of 34% of more accurate info. However many of these were lab experiments as opposed to real life practices.
   • Kebbell & Wagstaff
     • Difficult to establish effectiveness as is reality only parts of the CI is used ie just reinstate context and report everything, thus how significant is the difference in recall for the whole CI
     • Requires special training
   • Further more Kohnken also found in a later study that there was 81% increase of correct info but also 61% of incorrect as well. This brings about a concern that the CI although increases the quantity of recall some may say it also decreases the quality of the information thus police will still need to treat info from CI with caution as it does not guarantee accuracy.