This question was taken from the June 2019 AQA Psychology Past Paper 1. This Essay received 15/16 under timed exam conditions. This question used a stem, meaning 6 marks for AO1, 4 marks AO2, 6 marks AO3.
Most PIN code box s are 4 digits long and are easy to remember. In contrast, mobile
phone numbers are 11 digits long. Most people would not be able to remember a friend’s
new mobile phone number unless they were able to say it to themselves several times
without interruption.
Discuss the multi-store model of memory. Refer to the information above in your answer.
(16)
The multistore model of memory was the first attempt at creating a theoretical model of human
memory and described memory of a linear process with three unitary stores. The model suggested
that environmental stimuli arrives at the brain and enters the sensory register. This information is
stored in modality specific ways for less than half a second before the trace decays and is forgotten.
If attention is paid to a specific environmental input then it is transferred to the short term memory
where a rehearsal loop can be undertaken to keep the memory trace active. This store has a limited
capacity of between 5 to 9 items – after which the earlier memories are displaced in favour of newer
ones. It also has a limited duration of about 30seconds – after which the memory decays. Finally the
memory is encoded acoustically. If a longer or more purposeful period of rehearsal takes place then
the memory can be transferred to the long term memory. This, in comparison, has a potentially
unlimited capacity and potentially unlimited duration where memories are theoretically only
temporarily inaccessible due to retrieval failure and interference. Once long-term memory is stored
it can be retrieved into the short term memory in order to recalled.
When trying to remember PIN numbers they are well within the ability of the average person to
remember whereas when trying to remember an 11-digit phone number this is longer than most
people can achieve in short term memory (5-9 items). However these longer phone numbers can be
recalled by using the rehearsal loop ‘saying it to themselves several times’. However as is stated any
disruption to that rehearsal process (such as someone talking to you) would displace the numbers
from the STM and it would be forgotten. When doing this people will sometimes find they
remember the beginning – which has been rehearsed a lot – and then end – which is fresh in the
STM. However they may forget the middle. People can make this easier to achieve by “chunking” the
information into less overall pieces. For example knowing a mobile begins 07 or an area code is
01162 or by remembering the numbers in pairs 26 rather than 2 and 6.
There is a wealth of evidence to support the separation of the STM and LTM with experimental
studies showing that the two stores have different capacities, duration and encoding. For example
Jacobs found the capacity of STM to be 7±2, by using the serial digit span technique. Peterson &
Peterson found that when learning nonsense trigrams with a distractor task which prevented
rehearsal the duration of STM was roughly 18-30seconds. Finally Baddeley used substitution errors
to investigate the learning of material in STM and LTM showing that when using STM there were
more errors made for acoustically similar words whereas when in LTM these errors disappeared but
were replaced by error in semantically similar words. He suggested this was due to the confusion of
similarity in the mode which was being used to encode the memories. These studies shown that the
two types of memory are qualitatively different to each other, as the model suggests.
In addition case studies such as HM have shown in that the assumptions about the linear nature of
the MSM are valid. HM had his hippocampus removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy and as a
result suffered anterograde amnesia. He was able to function in the short-term memory loop of
about 30 seconds, and had most of his memories from prior to the operation intact. However he was
unable to create new long-term memories as the process by which information was transferred from
one store to another was now broken. This supports the unitary nature of the MSM and the linear
nature of committing a memory to the LTM.
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