a level psychology paper 1 2023 Q13 comparisons of themes essay (12)
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Course
Unit 9 - Psychological skills
Institution
PEARSON (PEARSON)
essay on 12 marker in section E of paper 1 2023 issues and debates, specifically about comparisons of themes in cognitive psychology.
3 PEELs and a conclusion for top band marks.
Paper 1 2023 section E
Q13) Marco has been suffering with memory processing issues that cause him to become
confused. He is not always able to understand situations and becomes frustrated with the
people around him.
Marco was arrested on 2 previous occasions for aggressive behaviour. He was also once
found by police in a car park at 3am unable to find his way home.
Recently, Marco got into a fight with a man who he thought was laughing at him. When the
police arrived, the man said he was not laughing at Marco, but Marco told the police that the
man was lying. The police arrested Marco. When they interviewed him, Marco struggled to
remember exactly what happened.
The police requested a doctor to examine Marco while he was in custody. The doctor decided
to refer him for a brain scan for his memory processing issues.
Evaluate how well knowledge from cognitive psychology could explain Marco’s situation. (12)
Tulving’s theory of long term memory could explain Marco’s memory processing issues. This
theory states that long term memory (LTM) is subdivided into 3 components: episodic,
semantic and procedural memory. Semantic memory is an explicit memory storing words,
facts, meanings, rules, concepts. Tulving (1986) found through brain scans on 6 volunteers
that the back cortex was active when semantic memory was used, whereas the frontal lobes
were the most active when episodic memory was used. This suggests that the 2 LTM stores
of memory are separate as they are located in different parts of the brain. Marco being
arrested on 2 occasions for aggressive behaviour may show that his semantic memory may
not be functioning properly and his recall of semantic memories may be erratic since he may
not have been able to recall the rules around safety and not harming others. This may have
resulted in him not being able to restrict his aggressive impulses and behaving aggressively
on 2 previous occasions. This implies that Marco’s memory processing issues may be
concentrated on his semantic memory. One strength of LTM for explaining Marco’s memory
issues is that the brain scans conducted by Tulving were reliable and objective as they don’t
involve subjective interpretation from the researcher, therefore they can be regarded as
scientifically credible. This suggests that the theory of LTM can be applied to Marco’s case.
On the other hand, brain damage may explain Marco’s confusion and memory issues. This
is because damage to the amygdala may result in Marco being unable to interpret social
situations and restrict his aggressive impulses. This may result in Marco displaying 2
occasions of aggressive behaviour and not always being able to understand situations
because he may not be able to interpret social situations and may not know how to act in a
more socially acceptable manner.
Reconstructive memory may explain Marco’s fight with the man. This theory devised by
Barlett (1932), proposes that retrieval of stored information is an active process of
reconstruction on the basis of what usually happens and is influenced by cultural norms and
previous experiences. Schemas are packets of stored information about a specific event or
object. Allport and Postman (1947) showed through serial reproduction that participants
would often recall the white man they saw in a trailway as dressed in a respectable manner,
whilst the black man as roughly dressed, even though in reality the 2 men had opposite
roles. This shows that participants may have schemas about white men being expected to
be more respectable and black men as being less respectable. Marco may have had an
existing schema about the man who he had a fight with based on his previous experiences
involving men with similar features who laugh in a provokable way. This means that Marco
may have drawn on his schema to recall the situation and hence told the police that the man
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