Old specification revision powerpoint for the cognitive psychology unit. Handy for resits.

1. Memory PSYA1
Revision powerpoint

2. RESEARCH INTO
THE NATURE OF
MEMORY

3. SHORT TERM
MEMORY

4. Capacity of STM
• 7  2 CHUNKS
• Chunks are meaningful units of information
• Evidence?
• Capacity of STM is tested by Immediate Digit Span
• A list of random digits is read out to participants and they
have to repeat them straight back
• Sequence length at which they are correct 50% of the time is
digit span

5. Duration of STM
• 18 SECONDS
• Evidence?
• Peterson and Peterson study
• 1) Participants were asked to remember single consonant
trigram at a time (KPD)
• 2) Participants were given a task to stop them rehearsing
(counting backwards in threes)
• 3) Participants were asked to recall the trigrams after different
increasing times (3,6,9,12,15 seconds)
• WHERE RECALL WAS GOOD AFTER 3 SECONDS (about 80%),
AFTER 18 SECONDS IT HAD FALLEN (10%)

6. Encoding of STM
• ACOUSTIC (sound)
• Evidence?
• Conrad study
• He found that rhyming letters (b,t,c,p,g,e,d) were harder to
recall than non rhyming letters due to acoustic confusion
errors
• Found similar results from rhyming and non rhyming words

7. LONG TERM
MEMORY

8. Capacity and Duration of LTM
Capacity
• LIMITLESS AND IMPOSSIBLE TO MEASURE
• Evidence is N/A
Duration
• ANYTHING BETWEEN A FEW MINUTES TO A LIFETIME
• Evidence?
• Bahrick study
• He used an opportunity sample of 392 American ex-high school students aged from 17-
74 years old
• Participant accuracy was assessed by comparing responses with high school yearbooks
• Results
• 90% accuracy in face and name recognition, even in participants who left 34 years ago
• 60% in free recall after 15 years
• Shows that classmates are rarely forgotten

9. Bahrick High School Study Evaluation
Strengths
• It uses memory for classmates and therefore it is an example of
how we use memory in real life / trivial lists of words are not
remembered for nearly as long. Therefore it illustrates dangers of
lab based experiments for not being appropriate to study memory
Weaknesses
• Nature of study meant high control was not possible – could not
control how often participants looked at yearbooks or saw
classmates
• Only testing memory for people we know – may not be
representative of all types of memory as it’s possible that memory
for faces is a special type of memory

10. Encoding of LTM
• SEMANTIC (meaning)
• Evidence?
• Baddely study
• Gave participants lists of words to remember and found when
LTM
• Was tested after 20 minutes
• Lists of words that had similar meanings (huge, large, wide,
big) were more difficult to recall than non-similar meanings
(map, mad, cap, cat)

11. Evaluation into research into the
nature of memory
Strengths
• Strength of most of this lab based research is the huge control
over extraneous variables so we can infer cause and effect
Weaknesses
• Tests are using artificial stimuli (strings of consonants), which
is not much like memory as we don’t use in real life. – lack of
ecological validity
• Studies specifically ask participants to remember single words
so introduce demand characteristics as in real life we
remember things without being told to

12. MODELS OF MEMORY

13. Multistore Model – Atkinson and
Shiffrin 1968

14. AO1 - Description
1) External information enters the sensory memory
where it is stored briefly before being passed into the
STM when given attention. Here it will be stored via
an acoustic code.
2) STM has a limited capacity (7 +- 2 chunks) so
information can be lost easily by being pushed out by
new information.
3) Memories in STM can be lost with 30 seconds unless
they are rehearsed.
4) Material that is rehearsed is put into the LTM, where
it is stored semantically and can remain for a lifetime,
although can be lost at any time due to forgetting.

15. AO2 - Strengths
Supporting evidence comes from free recall experiments in
which participants are shown a list of 20 words and asked to
recall them in any order.
• Primacy effect - Participants tend to recall words at the
beginning of the list as participants have rehearsed them
and they have been passed onto the LTM.
• Recency effect – Participants tend to recall words at the
end of the list as they are still in the participant’s STM.
• When a graph of % recall is plotted against position in list
the results fall into a pattern known as the serial position
curve
• Supports view that there are separate stores

16. AO2 - Strengths
• Primacy and recency effects can be
manipulated independently
• Primacy effect is reduced when the speed of
presentation is increased as there is no time
for rehearsal
• Recency effect can be removed by giving
participants a distraction task (e.g. counting
backwards in 3s) before recall

17. AO2 - Strengths
• Case studies of brain damaged patients
• These have identified that patients can have
one of the stories unaffected and the other
damaged
• HM – had normal STM but greatly impaired
LTM
• KF – had damaged STM (digit span = 2) but
normal LTM

18. AO2 - Weaknesses
• Brain damaged patients do not entirely
support the model
• For KF, the model does not explain how
information is passed onto the LTM without
being affected by the damaged STM
• Although HM cannot learn any new facts or
events research shows that he is capable of
learning new skills (mirror drawing)

19. AO2 - Weaknesses
• Research has been criticised
• In real life we remember many things that we
don’t rehearse
• E.g. what we did at the weekend must pass to
LTM without rehearsal

20. AO2 - Weaknesses
• Information must flow in both directions from
STM to LTM for chunking to work
• Meaning must be accessed from LTM and
passed into STM
• E.g. to know that BMW is a car, the LTM must
be accessed

21. Working Memory Model – Baddely
and Hitch (1974)

22. AO1 – Description
Central executive –
• Controls activity of the working memory
• It’s function is to direct attention to tasks,
determining at any time how resources are
allocated, manages what goes on by directing
attention to the most important information at
the expense of the lesser
• Other parts are ‘slaves’ to this one
• Has a limited capacity and cannot attend to too
many things at once

23. AO1 - Description
The phonological loop –
• Auditory store which rehearses sound based information to prevent
forgetting.
• Has two parts:
- Phonological store: known as ‘inner ear’.
deals with perception of speech.
it holds the words you hear.
- Articulatory loop: known as ‘inner voice’.
it is a verbal rehearsal system, used to prevent forgetting of verbal
material by saying things over and over.
the words are silently looped, and has a duration of about 2 seconds
thus we can hold as much information as we can rehearse in 2 seconds

24. AO1 - Description
The visuo-spatial sketchpad –
• Often referred to as the ‘inner eye’
• This component can be considered a visual and spatial
version of the articulatory loop
• It deals with information by visually organising it rather like
laying items on a table
• Actual visual information is maintained in working memory
• Mental rough paper that you may use when doing mental
arithmetic
• May be able to be divided into a visual store and a spacial
one

25. AO2 - Strengths
• Dual-task performance supports the distinction
between the phonological loop and the visuo-
spatial sketchpad
• Performance of two simultaneous tasks requiring
the use of two separate stores is nearly as
efficient as performance of the tasks individually
• In contrast, when a participant tries to carry out
two simultaneous tasks that use the same
system, performance is less efficient

26. AO2 - Strengths
• Word length effect supports the role of the
phonological loop
• I.e. the tendency to immediately recall shorter
words better than long words
• Working memory explains this by saying the
articulatory loop has a limited time capacity of
2s and as short words take less time to say we
can rehearse them

27. AO2 - Strengths
• Studies of brain damaged patients and brain
scans support the existence of different parts
of the working memory
• Brain scans reveal that different brain regions
are active in sound based tasks than spatial
tasks, supporting the fact they’re separate
• Brain damaged patients can be poor at verbal
tasks but normal at spatial tasks, and vice
versa

28. AO2 - Weaknesses
• Research suggests there are individual
differences in working memory
• E.g. in attention, capacity and duration which
lead to differences in abilities such as reading,
spelling and writing
• Not clear why this occurs

29. AO2 - Weaknesses
• Also, it is not clear how the working memory
links to LTM
• Also does not explain how the LTM works
itself

30. Application of working memory
• The phonological loop can explain why if we’re watching TV
and your parent tries to talk to you, you cannot listen to
both the TV and your parent.
• This is because of the limited capacity of the phonological
loop being exceeded by the 2 tasks
• However, you can play a computer game and listen to your
mother as the computer game uses the visuo-spatial
sketchpad not the loop so the limited capacities are not
exceeded as the different components are being used.
• Mental arithmetic uses the visuo-spatial sketchpad to
mentally add numbers in your head. When doing longer
equations the capacity of the system is exceeded, making it
difficult.

31. EYEWITNESS
TESTIMONY

32. Research into
misleading the witness

33. Misleading information
• Loftus investigated whether participants were influenced by
misleading information
Barn Study
• Showed 150 participants a film of a car accident
• Divided them into 2 groups and asked them 10 questions about the
film
• The first group were given questions that were consistent with the
film they had seen e.g. how fast was the car going when it passed
the STOP sign? The second group were given the same questions
with the exception of one – how fast was the car going when it
passed the barn on the country lane? (Misleading question)
• After one week the participants were given another 10 questions.
The last question was ‘Did you see a barn?’ Only 2.7% of the first
group gave the incorrect answer YES, whereas 17.3% of the second
group answered YES.

34. AO2 – Barn Study
• Although this shows that some witnesses can
be misled, it is important to realise that over
80% of participants in the misled group gave a
correct response.

35. AO2 Barn Study
• However, a criticism is that the barn was not central to the accident.
Memory of important details may not be so easily changed; Loftus
(1979) found that participants were not susceptible to blatantly
incorrect information.
Red Purse Study
• Participants watched a slide show depicting the theft of a large RED
purse.
• They then read a professor’s account of the theft, which contained
several errors.
• Participants resisted the misleading information that the purse was
BROWN and correctly recalled the purse as being RED
• This suggests that information which is obvious and central is less
subject to distortion

36. Changing wording of the question
‘Hit’ Study
• Showed participants a film of a car accident and afterwards
asked them a crucial question ‘what speed were the
vehicles travelling when they hit?’
• The word hit was replaced with different words for
different groups
• They found that what word was used affected the
estimates of speed that participants gave
• The fastest estimate was for smashed (41 mph) and the
slowest for contacted (32 mph). A week later when
participants were asked whether they had seen any broken
glass, those in the smashed group were consistently more
likely to answer YES wrongly

37. Research into the
Effect of Anxiety
on EWT

38. Yerkes-Dodson Law AO1
• An increase in arousal improves performance
but only up to a point
• Once arousal has passed a critical point called
the optimum, performance tends to decline
• A possible interpretation of the research on
violence is that witnessing violence raises
witnesses' arousal level past optimum, leading
to poorer memory performance.

39. Yerkes-Dodson Law Study
• Loftus made participants watch a film of a crime
• Some participants saw a version with an
extremely violent scene (a young boy being shot
in the face)
• When questioned about the events in the film,
those participants who saw the non-violent
version of the film recalled much more detail of
the crime than those who witnessed the more
violent crime

40. Weapon Focus AO1
• When a person witnesses a crime in which a
weapon was used, their attention tends to
focus on the weapon so the recall less details
of the criminal
• Weapon focus usually results in poor quality
testimony, as the witness is unable to describe
much that is useful about other aspects of the
incident

41. Weapon Focus Study
• Loftus monitored the gaze of participants and
found that, when shown a film of a crime,
they tended to focus their gaze on the gun
used in the robbery
• When questioned later, these participants
were less able to identify the robber and
recalled fewer details of the crime than other
participants who saw a similar film minus a
gun

42. Elderly – Misleading Information
• Research seems to suggest the elderly are
especially susceptible to the effects of misleading
information
Silent kidnapping study
• One study compared adults (average 35 years)
and elderly participants (average 70 years) who
all watched a silent film-clip of a kidnapping
• Participants then read an inaccurate account. It
was found that elderly participants were much
more likely to be influenced by the incorrect
information

43. Elderly –Own Age Bias
• The elderly are particularly bad at face recognition.
However, this may reflect the own age bias.
• It has been found that people are most accurate at
identifying faces of their own age group
• Because individuals usually encounter members of
their own age group more regularly, they become more
expert at processing those faces
• However, most criminals (and those used in studies)
are middle aged adults so this would explain why the
elderly and the young appear the least accurate

44. Children
Two reasons the Elderly have a negative effect
on EWT:
• Suggestibility
• Language abilities

45. Children - Suggestibility
• The younger the child, the less information they provide
spontaneously
• Because of this, interviewers need to encourage children to give
more detailed responses so increasing the risk of leading questions
• Research seems to suggest that children are more influenced by
leading questions because of the power/ status of an authoritative
adult
Suggestibility Study
• In support, one study gave children and adults a story to read and
then asked them 20 questions; 15 of these questions were
misleading. They showed that children were more likely to be
influenced by the leading questions than were adults

46. Children – Language Abilities
• A child's ability to comprehend and answer the
interviewer's question is also a factor likely to
affect their recall
Language Abilities Study
• One study found that the more complex the
question, the more likely a child was to give an
inaccurate answer. This suggests one aspect of
ensuring the accuracy of a child's eyewitness
testimony is to use language appropriate to their
age

47. AO2 FOR ANY
ESSAY
EVALUATION OF
EWT STUDIES

48. Lack of Stress
• In real life the emotion and stress could make
real life witnesses more accurate
• This is supported in a study showing real life
witnesses can recall information very accurately
• The findings are contrary to those that Loftus
might lead us to expect. Such findings, which are
obtained from real-world witnesses and hence
are high in ecological validity, cast doubt on the
validity of Loftus' conclusions

49. AO2 – Lack of Stress
• Yuille & Cutshall examined the recall of real life
witnesses to a shooting in a town in Canada in
which a man had attempted to rob a gun shop
• Some months after the event, the witnesses were
interviewed. Findings were that the witnesses
were able to recall the incident in a great deal of
detail, there was a very high level of agreement
between the accounts and the witnesses’
accounts were not influenced by leading
questions

50. Lack of consequences
• It is possible that participants in experiments
are less accurate than in real life because they
know inaccuracies will not lead to serious
consequences
• Shown in Foster’s studies
• Findings once again cast doubt on Loftus’s
work

51. AO2 – Lack of Consequences
• Foster showed participants a video of a bank
robbery and were asked to identify the robber in
an identity parade
• Half the participants were led to believe that the
robbery was real and that their responses would
influence the trial
• The other half assumed it was a simulation.
• Identification was more accurate in the first
group suggesting that consequences are an
important factor

52. Cognitive interview

53. AO1
• A cognitive interview has no set questions and
there is no time limit so that witnesses don’t
feel time pressured. The interviewer remains
silent and will not interrupt the witness.
Questions will be open ended and non-
leading.
• The cognitive interview uses 4 techniques

54. Reinstate the context
• The witness needs to be returned, in their mind,
to the situation (the context) in which the event
occurred.
• Attempts will be made to recreate the original
mood & environment in the imagination of the
interviewee which may increase recall.
• The witness will be asked to think back to before,
during and after the event & recall where they
were, what they were doing, their mood etc.

55. Change sequence
• Traditional interviews might ask a witness to
recall events in the order they occurred
• Cognitive interviews will ask witnesses to
recall events in different orders including
reversing the order of events
• This should ensure that important details are
not missed out & it might help to fill in any
gaps

56. Change perspective
• The witness is asked to recall events from
another perspective e.g. what another
observer would have seen
• The witness must report what they actually
know & not be too inventive

57. Report everything
• Witnesses are encouraged to report
everything even if info seems irrelevant
• This unrestrained recall is likely to throw up
details which might otherwise be mentally
‘edited out’

58. AO1
The cognitive interview is based on 2 principles
of memory:
• Info is organised so that memories can be
accessed in a number of ways.
• Memories are context dependent, meaning
that retrieval will be more effective if the cues
present at the time of storage are reinstated.

59. Strengths – The Cognitive Interview
A strength is that it is effective:
• Geiselman found with relatively little training,
cognitive interviewers obtained up to 35%
more correct details about simulated events
than untrained interviewers with no increase
in the number of errors.
• This result was replicated in numerous studies
in which both children and adults were
witnesses

60. Weaknesses – The Cognitive Interview
• A problem with the CI in practice is that police
officers suggest that the technique requires
more time than is often available and that
instead they prefer to use deliberate strategies
aimed to limit an eyewitness's report to the
minimum amount of information that the
officer feels is necessary.
• Speed is often required to catch the criminal

61. Weaknesses – The Cognitive Interview
• The cognitive interview is a form of
communication and its success depends on the
skills of the interviewer.
• It is very easy for an inexperienced interviewer to
ask questions that might be considered as
'leading' the witness.
• The accuracy of information from the cognitive
interview may be subject to the same problems
as regular interviews where the wording of the
question might play a very significant role

62. Weaknesses – The Cognitive Interview
• The cognitive interview is most effective when
the interview follows shortly after the event.
• It becomes less effective as the passage of
time between event and recall increases

63. Weaknesses – The Cognitive Interview
• Another problem is that because context does
more to improve recall than recognition, the
cognitive interview does not help with the
recognition of a culprit, for example, from
photo fit evidence

64. Memory
Improvement
Strategies

65. Strategies
• Method of Loci
• Narrative Chaining
• Acronyms
• Chunking
• Elaboration
• A mnemonic is any structured technique that is
used to help people remember and recall
information

66. Method of Loci

67. Method of Loci AO1
• 'Loci' is Latin word meaning 'places‘
• This method of improving memory works by first
imagining a very familiar place - such as the town
where you live or your house
• Each item in the to-be-remembered list is then
'pegged' or 'hung' on various locations
• When you want to remember the items you take
an imaginary walk around the location you will
pass the memories hung at various places

68. Method of Loci - Strengths
• Research shows that significant improvements
can occur when this technique is used
• Crovitz reports one study where 2 groups of ps
were required to memorise a list of 32 words
• One group used rote learning, whilst the other
used the loci method
• Much greater recall was observed in the loci
group (78%) than the rote group (25%)
• It is the favourite method used by those involved
in memory competitions

69. Method of Loci - Strengths
• The method is effective as it uses more than one
type of code
• In linking verbal pieces of information with visual
images the loci method is using two coding
systems - verbal and visual
• According to the dual code theory our memories
are encoded using both visual and auditory codes
• The use of two codes creates a much stronger
memory than using a single one

70. Method of Loci - Weaknesses
• The technique requires ability to form
complex images
• Some people will find this easier than others

71. Narrative Chaining

72. Narrative Chaining AO1
• Unlike memorising by repetition (rote), the
narrative puts the unorganised information into
a meaningful context
• The first item to be memorised is connected to
the second, the second with the third and so on
through a story or 'narrative‘
• In combining the elements to be remembered
you end up with a 'chain' of information, where
one item or element is associated with another in
a series

73. How does it work?
• Narrative chaining is another technique that uses
mental imagery
• In this case, there is a meaningful interaction
between separate items represented in the
narrative
• This kind of interactive imagery is far more
effective than other methods where images are
used with no interaction between them
• Because of the organisation into a story each
item acts as a clue for the next one

74. Narrative Chaining - Strengths
• Research suggests that the narrative technique is a very effective
method for improving retention
• Researchers asked participants in to learn 12 lists of disconnected
words, each list containing 12 words - 144 words in all
• Participants were either told to use the narrative method (where
short stories were created using the 12 items in each list) or were
given no special instructions
• It was found that participants in the 'narrative' group recalled an
average of 94% of their items, whilst the other 'non-narrative'
group recalled an average of 14%.
• The biggest strength is that this method puts new info into a
meaningful way making it easier to remember

75. Acronyms

76. Acronyms AO1
• An acronym is a word that is formed out of the
first letter of a string of other words
• These words are typically difficult to associate
• For example, ROY G BlV can be used to remember
the colours of the rainbow - Red, Orange, Yellow,
Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet
• Another kind of acronym forms phrases out of
the first letter of each word in a list
• For example, Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain,
does the same job with colours of the rainbow as
ROY G BlV

77. Acronyms - Weaknesses
• Although acronyms can be useful, they do have
disadvantages
• Just because something is memorised it does not
mean that it is understood - remembering is not
the same as knowing
• Acronyms are very useful for rote memory, that
is, for information that is going to be recalled
exactly as it is learned
• The most permanent memories however are
based on understanding and meaning

78. Acronyms - Weaknesses
• The most permanent memories however are
based on understanding and meaning
• It may be that in order to form the acronym
you have to change the order of items in a list
• This is not helpful when the order is an
important factor

79. Acronyms - Weaknesses
• Even if an acronym can be formed, it needs
somehow to be committed to memory
• The amount of effort this sometimes takes
means that the costs of using acronyms might
not be worth the benefits you receive

80. Chunking

81. Chunking AO1
• By dividing a long string of information into meaningful
chunks it is much easier to remember them
• This technique is often used to remember telephone
numbers and postcodes
• One mnemonist, SF, managed to remember more than
80 digits as he could give meaning to groups of
numbers
• He had a detailed knowledge of running times and so if
given 3492 he remembered this as 3 minutes 49.2
seconds, a near world record for a mile

82. How does it work?
• From the multi-store model we learnt that the
capacity of STM can be increased by chunking
• The capacity of STM = 7±2 meaningful units.
by grouping info into meaningful units we can
remember more info

83. Elaboration

84. Elaboration AO1
• A more effective form of rehearsal than pure repetition is
elaborative rehearsal
• Rather than simply repeating info, we use and change it in some
way. We 'organise' the information, relate it to information already
in our memory, and make the information more meaningful
• E.g. with a telephone number, rather than repeating the number
we could make it more meaningful- maybe it is like a friend's
number already in memory but with the last two digits switched, or
maybe a rhyme could be added to it. This kind of elaboration not
only keeps information in short-term memory longer
• It seems that if we want to improve our memories, that is, to
increase the chances that we remember something, we need to
make the information as meaningful as possible

85. Elaboration - Strengths
• Elaborative rehearsal involves processing
information at a deeper, more semantic level
• Craik and Tulving found that giving the
information to be remembered more meaning
and more links to other things will help people
recall it later on
• This is called the 'levels of processing' approach -
the deeper the level, the more elaborately it is
encoded and the more secure it is

86. Elaboration - Weaknesses
• Elaboration occurs as a result of already
existing knowledge
• Therefore, the success of elaboration will be
affected by the motivation of the learner
• E.g., Morris et al (1981) found that football
fans recalled a list of football results far better
than did non-football fans