Memory

Memory

1. Multi Store model

   • Long term memory
     • Encoding- Semantic, acoustic and visual
     • Capacity- potentially unlimited
     • Duration- potentially unlimited
       • Bahrick- asked pps to name people in their yearbooks 48 years on. There was 70% accuracy
   • Short term memory
     • Capacity- 5-9 (digit span)
       • Can be improved by chunking as shown by Simon
       • Miller- asked pps to recall long numbers, increasing in size in the correct order. He found the average digit span to be 7+/-2
     • Encoding- acoustic and visual
     • Duration- 18 seconds
       • Peterson and Peterson asked pps to recall consonant syllables they had shown. The first condition were asked to recall them after a 3 second interval, the other were asked to recall them after 20 seconds. The first condition recalled 90% of the consonant syllables correctly, the second recalled 2% correctly
   • Sensory store
     • Where environmental stimuli is, until attention is paid to it
   • Support
     • The sensory store- Sperling- showed pps a grid of 12 digits and letters for 50 milliseconds. A tone immediately after would mean that the participant would have to write down one row, no tone would mean write down all 12. When asked to recall all 12, the accuracy was poor. This shows how information in the sensory store decays rapidly
     • Serial position effect- Glanzer and Cunitz- pps were presented with 20 words. The words at the beginning and end of the list were the ones most recalled. This is because the words at the start are in the long term memory (primary effect) and the ones at the end are in the short term memory (recency effect). This supports that there are separate stores in memory
     • Beardsley- used fMRI scans and found the hippocampus was activated when LTM was being used and pre-frontal lobe was activated when STM was being used
     • HM- patient HM had his hippocampus removed because of epilepsy. As a result, he could no longer form long term memories and suffered from anterograde amnesia
   • Against
     • Clive Wearing- LTM and STM may not be unitary stores. CW had retrograde and anterograde amnesia, so could not reform new memories and couldn't remember anything before the accident, but could still play the piano perfectly and still loved his wife, despite not knowing who she was. Therefore, it is suggested our memory is split into different types of memory, e.g. declarative and procedural
     • Schather suggested there are 4 stores within LTM: semantic, episodic, procedural and perceptual-representation system

2. Working memory model

   • Central executive
     • Pays attention to environmental stimuli and then directs it to either the phonological loop or the visuo-spatial sketchpad. This only has a limited capacity
   • Phonological loop
     • Split up into the phonological store and articulatory process. This deals with auditory information
   • Visuo-spatial sketchpad
     • This is split into the visual cache and the inner scribe. Used when a spatial task needs to be planned
   • Against
     • Eslinger and Damasio- showed a brain damaged patient had no decision making skills post op, but performed well on reasoning tests. Shows that central executive may be split into other compartments
     • Before and after comparisons cannot be made on brain damaged patients as we cannot know what parts of the brain were functioning properly before the brain damage
   • Support
     • Dual task effect- Hitch and Baddeley- gave pps 2 tasks to do simultaneously. Task 1 occupied the central executive. Task 2 occupied either the articulatory loop or the articulatory loop and the central executive. Performance was worse when the same component was beings used in both tasks
     • Bunge- used fMRI scans and found the same area of the brain was activated in dual and single tasks, but increased activity when doing 2 tasks
     • Word length effect- when given a list of 3 letter words, pps remembered more than from a list of 9 letter words. This supports the idea that the phonological loop has a limited duration
     • KF- patient KF had problems with certain aspects of STM, as he remembered visual information fine, but had trouble remembering auditory information

3. Eye Witness Testimony

   • Effect of leading questions
     • Loftus and Palmer
       • Showed pps a video of a car crash. When they were questioned about what they saw, 1 question asked "How fast were the cars going when they ____", the verb being changed for each condition to "smashed", "hit" and "collided"
       • Pps who were asked the question with the word "smashed" guessed a higher speed than those who heard the word "hit"
     • Yuille and Cutshall
       • Use 13 pps who were real life witnesses to an armed robbery in Canada. They used the police report and asked the pps questions about the robbery, including 2 leading questions, which suggested an incorrect answer
       • It was found that even after 4 months, and with the leading questions, the pps recall was accurate
     • Loftus and Palmer 2
       • Used a similar technique to the first study, but this time, the pps were called back a week later and were asked the question "did you see any broken glass?"
       • There was no broken glass in the film, but the pps who heard the word "smashed" were a lot more likely to say yes that those who heard the words "hit" or "collided"
   • Effect of anxiety
     • Deffenbacher
       • Conducted a meta analysis on the effects of anxiety on recall
       • Found that there was considerable, clear evidence that stress negatively impacts eyewitness memory
     • Christianson and Hubinette
       • Questioned 58 real witnesses to armed robberies and compared those who had been threatened to those who hadn't
       • Found that those who had been threatened were more accurate in their recall than onlookers, who reported less emotional arousal. This was shown to be true 15 months later
     • Weapon focus- Loftus et al
       • Used 2 conditions for a fake armed robbery, one with a weapon and one without. In the first, a man emerged from a room holding a pen and in the other, the man was holding a bloody paper knife
       • When asked to identify the man from 50 photos, 49% of pps in the pen condition were correct, whereas only 33% in the weapon condition were correct
     • Yerkes-Dodson law
       • States that performance improves with arousal to an optimal level, but then declines from that point onwards
   • Effect of age
     • Yarmey
       • Stopped 651 adults and asked them to recall the features of a woman they had seen 2 minutes ago. Although older adults were less confident in their answers, there was no difference in recall
     • Poole and Lindsay
       • Studied children 3-8 years old who watched a science experiment. Then their parents read them a story which included information about the experiment, but with extra details. They were then asked what went on in the experiment
       • Found the children incorporated much of the information their parents had told them into the story, showing how the extra information affected their recall
     • Own age bias- Anastasi and Rhodes
       • Found that all age groups are more accurate in identifying photographs from their own age group. This is because we usually see people of our own age group more often so we are more used to seeing those faces

4. Cognitive interview

   • 1) Report everything- interviewer encourages the reporting of every single event, even though it may sound irrelevant
   • 2) Mental reinstatement- interviewer encourages interviewee to mentally recreate the environment and contacts from the original incident
   • 3) Change the order- interviewer may try alternative ways through the timeline of the incident, e.g. in reverse
   • 4) Change the perspective- interviewee is asked to recall the incident from other perspectives, such as other witnesses
   • Support
     • Kohnken et al
       • Conduced a meta analysis of 53 studies. 34% more correct information was given in CI compared to normal interview
     • Stein and Memon
       • Tested CI in Brazil using female cleaners from a university who watched an abduction on video. CI was more effective than standard interview at obtaining forensically useful information
     • Milne and Bull
       • Examined the 4 components of CI using children and undergraduates. When tested as individual components, there was no difference between CI and standard interview. When using a combination of components, recall was significantly higher
   • Limitations
     • CI is difficult to evaluate as different police forces use the interview technique differently as some use 2 components and some use all of them, so they outcomes are not comparable
     • CI requires more time than is available, so officers usually only ask for information which is actually relevent
     • CI requires a lot of training to be at a high quality and also puts a lot of demand on the interviewer as the interviewee may be distressed

5. Memory improvement techniques

   • Visual
     • Loci- links the information needed to remember to the locations in a familiar journey in a distinctive way e.g. journey from work to home
     • Key words- linking 2 terms using a common factor in each and making an image of it
     • Mind mapping- central concept is in the middle of the map, with the component ideas branching outwards from the map. This has a distinctive appearance and makes the information more memorable e.g. this
   • Verbal
     • Acronym- where a word or sentence is formed from the initial letters of words needed to remember e.g. ROYGBIV
     • Acrostic- a sentence, phrase or poem where the first letter of each word reminds you of the items needed to be remembered e.g. My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming Planets
     • Rhyme- acts as a cue to recall as if you remember one part, it prompts the other parts of the information e.g. blue and green should never been seen together without a colour in between
     • Chunking- Diving lots of information into smaller, manageable pieces to increase memory
   • Why they work
     • Organisation
       • When information is encoded into the memory, the brain organises them based on the links that can be formed between memories and experiences. A mnemonic makes a short cut, making strong links quickly and linking all the information
       • Bower showed pps 112 words to learn. When these were organised into categories, recall as 2 to 3 times better than if they were in a random order
     • Dual coding hypothesis
       • Pavio proposed words and picture are processed separately. He found that patients who had damaged their temporal lobe could process words but not images
       • Bower showed pps 100 cards, one at a time with 2 unrelated words on them. 1 group had to mentally produce an image linking the 2, the other were told to just memorise the words. Those in the first group correctly recalled 80%, but the other recalled only 45% correctly
     • Elaborative rehearsal
       • The use of elaboration and considering the meaning of the information helps it to be stored deeper. Mnemonics require elaboration, and therefore work

Imagens e arquivos do mapa