This document lists all the key research (and the researchers) along with evaluations of each according to AQA specifications for the Memory topic. It is a summary and simplification of psychological research with key figures and names to remember to enhance your ability to reach top-level marks fo...
Short term memory
Capacity -
Jacobs, 7.3 for letters and 9.3 for digits.
: He measured this by giving a set of letters or digits to participants in increasing amounts until they
recalled the set wrong.
– Lacks temporal and internal validity as it was conducted so long ago.
Miller, 7 +/- 2 items = 5-9 items.
: He made observations that many everyday things come in sevens.
– Maybe an overestimation as Cowan reviewed other research and concluded that STM capacity is
only about 4 chunks instead.
Duration - 18-30 seconds.
Petersen & Petersen gave 24 participants a trigram and a 3-digit number to count back from. Each
time they were told to stop after an increasing amount of time and recall the trigram.
– Use of artificial stimuli lowers internal validity and mundane realism.
Encoding - Acoustic.
Baddeley tested what words participants recalled best: acoustically (dis/)similar and semantically
(dis/)similar. They did worst with acoustically similar words.
– Use of artificial stimuli lowers internal validity and mundane realism.
Baddeley & Hitch’s Working Memory Model (1974)
Encoding:
Modality free
Central
executi
ve
Encoding:
Auditory
Phonological loop
Visuos Articul
Encoding: Encoding: Episo Phonolo
patial arly
Visual and Modality dic gical
sketchp control
spatial free buffer store
ad system
Long-
term
memor
y
All subsystems have limited capacity (3-
4 chunks) an duration.
! Evaluation
+ Clinical supporting evidence of Shallice & Warrington’s case study on KF who had poor digit span
when they were read aloud to him (damaged phonological loop) but he could recall was much better
when he read them himself (good visuospatial sketchpad).
+ Baddeley showed participants had more difficulty doing two visual tasks at once rather than one
visual and one verbal as both visual tasks would use the same subsystem, making it trickier.
, -PSYCHOLOGY: Key research- PAPER 1
– However, as he is the creator of the model, researcher bias may have played a role in this
follow-up.
– Lack of clarity and detail on the Central Executive. Baddeley even agreed that despite it being
the most important part, it is not fully understood, meaning the WMM is an incomplete explanation.
Long term memory
Capacity - Unlimited.
Duration - Up to a lifetime.
Bahrick tested 392 participants on their ability to 1) recognise photos of 50 people from their
yearbook and 2) free recall names in their year.
Participants within 15 years of graduation were 90% accurate in recognition and 60% accurate in
free recall compared to those within 48 years of graduating were 70% accurate in recognition and
30% in free recall.
He, therefore, found that recall is better through recognition rather than free recall.
+ High external validity and mundane realism as real-life, meaningful memories were tested.
– Possibility of confounding variables as participants may have looked at their yearbooks since
graduating; lowered internal validity.
Encoding - Semantic.
Baddeley’s study showed they did worse on semantically similar words in the long term.
➔ Tulving’s LTM types
He argued the MSM of Memory was too simplistic so he did brain scans on participants doing various
memory tasks and found that they were recalled from different brain regions.
★ Semantic memory: Store for knowledge and meaning of concepts, Retrieved consciously,
Not time-stamped, Explicit.
- Recalled from the left side of the prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe.
★ Episodic memory: Store for personal events, Retrieved consciously, Time-stamped,
Explicit.
- Recalled from the right side of the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.
★ Procedural memory: Store for how to carry out actions, Not retrieved consciously, Not
time-stamped, Implicit.
- Recalled from the cerebellum.
+ Case study of HM had severely poor episodic memory due to amnesia but good semantic and
procedural memory, showing the storage must be separate.
+ Real-life applications, eg. Belleville showed that episodic memory can be improved in the elderly
with cognitive impairments. The trained elderly participants performed better than those untrained.
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