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Psychology Memory Entire Specification
This covers the entire content of Memory for A Level Psychology, these notes helped me achieve a B in my exams and will be useful for you.
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A LevelPsychology
Memory
,The Multistore Model of Memory
- Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968 developed the multistore model of memory and
suggested it is a process which passes through a number of stores during the
journey to the long-term memory.
Store 1: Sensory Register
- Stores information until the body’s processing systems decide what to do with
it. It receives information from the 5 senses: echoic store (sound), iconic store
(sight), olfactory store (smell), gustatory store (taste) and haptic store (touch).
There are separate sensory stores for each sensory input. The capacity is
said to be between 12-16 items. On average, information decays within 2
seconds.
Store 2: Short-term Memory
- Has the ability to hold a small amount of time. Its capacity and duration is
greater than the sensory memory but is smaller than the long-term memory.
Miller 1956 indicates that the capacity of the short-term memory is 5-7 items.
He asked participants to recall information, adding an extra bit as he moved
on. Starting participants with 2-3 words to recall, he built it up until they made
an error. He found most participants struggled between 5-9 words. The study
is reliable as it’s easy to copy and the results are more often than not the
same, it is a lab study therefore extraneous variables would have been
removed or controlled and also the study lacks ecological validity as the tasks
bear little resemblance to real life.
- Short-term memory duration is limited of 18-30 seconds. Peterson and
Peterson 1959 gave participants 3 letter non-sensical trigrams to learn, they
were presented visually. Participants had to recall trigrams in the correct order
after a delay of 3-18 seconds. During the delay the were asked to complete a
distraction task to prevent rehearsing. A graph was drawn which showed to be
a delay curve which demonstrates that overtime memory seems to decay.
This was a controlled study which means extraneous variables would have
been controlled however, previous trigrams may have interfered with memory
so participants may have made mistakes, which challenges the validity of the
study.
- Encoding refers to how information is processed from the senses into the
memory itself. Short-term memory encodes acoustically. Baddeley 1966 gave
participants 1 of 4 lists of words to learn, they were either acoustically similar,
acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar and semantically dissimilar. The
words were presented visually on a screen. They had to be recalled in the
, order presented. It was found the acoustically similar words had the worst
recall but, there was no difference between the semantically similar and
dissimilar words. This was a lab experiment, so it was highly controlled.
However, it lacks ecological validity as the tasks bear little resemblance to real
life and also the words had no meaning to the participants, so it was harder
for them to recall.
Store 3: Long-term Memory
- There are 3 types of long-term memories such as episodic, procedural and
semantic. Episodic memory is a type of long-term memory that relates to
experiences a person has had e.g. a birthday. Procedural memory is a type of
long-term memory which involves knowing how to do certain action or skills
e.g.to swim. Semantic memory is a type of long-term memory which involves
knowing certain facts, concepts and meanings.
- Long-term memory holds information indefinitely, having a longer duration and
larger capacity than short-term memory which is unlimited. The duration of the
long-term memory is as long as a person’s lifetime and most people cannot
recall episodes of their childhood before the age of 2, which is referred to as
childhood amnesia. Encoding is always in the form of one of the senses.
EVALUATION:
- Strengths = Model has been very influential and is still being used. Provides a
god understanding of the structure and process of memory – we can expand
on the model.
- Weakness = model is oversimplified especially on how it approaches the
short-term memory as its more complex than the model allows for it to be. It
also ignores factors such as motivation and the ability to learn.
The Working Memory Model
- Baddeley and Hitch 1974 created the model and suggested it is a response
to the over-simplification of the short-term memory in the multistore model and
is a model of the shot-term memory.
Central Executive:
- Controls the working memory model. All information is passed to the central
executive, which then decides which component should process it. The
components can only communicate via the central executive and it is able to
process information from any of the five senses.
Phonological Loop;
- Holds information the form of speech and sound. There are 2 parts to the
phonological loop: phonological store which is known as the inner ear and
deals with speech perception and, articulatory control process, known as the
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