This document covers every possible essay that may come up for Memory (AQA A-Level Psychology). They are simplified and easy to learn yet still have lots of detail to ensure you achieve the highest grade possible. There are abbreviations throughout that you should understand as a psychology student...
Outline and evaluate research into coding / capacity / duration in memory (8)
Duration → How long can the memory be stored for
Study: Peterson and Peterson (STM)
➔ P’s shown sets of 3 consecutive numbers/letters - recall after 3,6,9,12,15,18 sec
➔ Task between presentation / recall to prevent rehearsal (count back in 3)
➔ Recall had to be 100% accurate to be correct
➔ As delay increased, correct recall decreased - 18 secs only 10% correct recall
➔ Duration of STM is approx 20 secs when rehearsal is prevented
Study: Bahrick (LTM)
➔ Ex-students (USA) asked: 1. free recall names / 2. Recognise from a set of 50 photos
➔ Free recall: 15 years: 60% accurate / 48 years: p’s were 30% accurate
➔ Photo recognition: 15 years: 90% accurate / 48 year: 70% accurate
➔ Recognition is easier than recall
➔ LTM does have a very long, potentially lifetime duration
Evaluation: Strengths
★ High ecological validity - testing real life memory / not artificial
Evaluation: Weaknesses
★ Hard to generalise - college friends, they would’ve had lots of contact with
★ Great emotional significance - less importance may = less long memories
★ Many extraneous variables - may still be in contact with their college friends
Coding → How / what for is the memory stored in
Study: Baddeley
➔ P’s given 4 sets of words: A - acoustically similar / B - acoustically dissimilar
C - semantically similar / D - semantically dissimilar
➔ P’s asked to immediately recall words OR delay recall (30 sec intervals)
➔ Immediate: good B / bad A / same C+D
➔ Delayed: good D / bad C / same A+B
➔ STM - coding mainly acoustic as acoustically similar words were confused
➔ LTM - coding mainly semantic as semantically similar words were confused
Evaluation
★ DC’s - p’s may gues aims so behaved differently e.g didn’t put as much effort into
remembering it
★ Low ecological validity → tasks not realistic / generalised to real life
e.g lab study so artificial tasks which have no personal meaning to P’s
Capacity → How much can be stored
Study: Jacobs - digit span
➔ Random digits read out to p’s who had to read them back using serial recall
➔ List increased in length by one digit at a time
➔ Average digit span - 9.3 for numbers / 2.3 for letter
➔ STM has a limited capacity of around 5-9 items
Study: Millers magic number
➔ STM could hold 7 (+/- 2 items)
➔ We can “chunk” info together we can store a lot more info in our STM
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