Psychology:Memory
Short and Long-term memory:
memory- the process by which we retain information about events that have happened
in the past
capacity- the amount of information held in a memory store
duration- length of time information can be held in memory
short term memory - information that we process and recall straight away over a very
short amount of time (information that we are currently aware of). If you don't attend of
rehears it you won't remember it.
rehearsal- attending to information so it stays in your brain
long term memory- continual stage of information which is largely outside of your
awareness. (the permanent memory)
retrieval- process of locating and extracting stored memories
coding- how you code or encode a memory, the format in which information is stored.
Three types of encoding are; visual, acoustic(sound) or semantic(meanings).
Baddeley's research (1996);
Baddeley gave different lists of words to 4 groups of participants to remember;
Group 1- acoustically similar eg.cat, hat, bat
Group 2- acoustically dissimilar eg.pit, few, cow
Group 3- semantically similar eg.great, large, big, huge
Group 4- semantically different eg.hot, big, good
participants were shown the words and asked to recall them in the correct order either
immediately after hearing the words or after an interval of 20 minutes
STM condition- tested immediately after, participants did worse on acoustically similar
words
LTM condition- tested after 20 minutes, participants did worse on the semantically similar
words
conclusion- information is coded acoustically in the STM and semantically in the LTM
Digit span test:
Jacobs 1887- developed a technique to measure digit span;
, gave participants a number of digits, required to repeat these out loud, if they repeated
the amount of digits correctly, one more digit every time.
conclusion- on average 9.3 for numbers and 7.3 for letters
we also do chunking (grouping sets of digits or letters into chunks)
George miller 1956- magic number 7 as its a recurring number in life
Peterson and Peterson (1959)
tested 24 undergraduate students
each took part in 8 trials
in each trial they were given a consonant trigram to remember but also a 3-digit number
told to count backwards from that 3 digit number until told to stop
findings- after 3 seconds 80% of the trigrams were remembered correctly
after 6 seconds this fell to 50%
after 18 seconds this fell to less than 10% of the trigrams
conclusion - stm has a limited duration of approximately 18 seconds. The results show
that if we are not able to rehearse it will not be passed into the ltm
Duration of LTM;
Bahrick (1975) conducted a longitudinal study which followed 392 American participants
aged between 17 and 74
required to identify schoolmates from their high school
Those who left school in the last 15 years correctly identified 90% of faces and names
Those who left 48 years previously identified 80% names and 70% faces
Multi-store model (atkinson and shiffrin)
Short and Long-term memory:
memory- the process by which we retain information about events that have happened
in the past
capacity- the amount of information held in a memory store
duration- length of time information can be held in memory
short term memory - information that we process and recall straight away over a very
short amount of time (information that we are currently aware of). If you don't attend of
rehears it you won't remember it.
rehearsal- attending to information so it stays in your brain
long term memory- continual stage of information which is largely outside of your
awareness. (the permanent memory)
retrieval- process of locating and extracting stored memories
coding- how you code or encode a memory, the format in which information is stored.
Three types of encoding are; visual, acoustic(sound) or semantic(meanings).
Baddeley's research (1996);
Baddeley gave different lists of words to 4 groups of participants to remember;
Group 1- acoustically similar eg.cat, hat, bat
Group 2- acoustically dissimilar eg.pit, few, cow
Group 3- semantically similar eg.great, large, big, huge
Group 4- semantically different eg.hot, big, good
participants were shown the words and asked to recall them in the correct order either
immediately after hearing the words or after an interval of 20 minutes
STM condition- tested immediately after, participants did worse on acoustically similar
words
LTM condition- tested after 20 minutes, participants did worse on the semantically similar
words
conclusion- information is coded acoustically in the STM and semantically in the LTM
Digit span test:
Jacobs 1887- developed a technique to measure digit span;
, gave participants a number of digits, required to repeat these out loud, if they repeated
the amount of digits correctly, one more digit every time.
conclusion- on average 9.3 for numbers and 7.3 for letters
we also do chunking (grouping sets of digits or letters into chunks)
George miller 1956- magic number 7 as its a recurring number in life
Peterson and Peterson (1959)
tested 24 undergraduate students
each took part in 8 trials
in each trial they were given a consonant trigram to remember but also a 3-digit number
told to count backwards from that 3 digit number until told to stop
findings- after 3 seconds 80% of the trigrams were remembered correctly
after 6 seconds this fell to 50%
after 18 seconds this fell to less than 10% of the trigrams
conclusion - stm has a limited duration of approximately 18 seconds. The results show
that if we are not able to rehearse it will not be passed into the ltm
Duration of LTM;
Bahrick (1975) conducted a longitudinal study which followed 392 American participants
aged between 17 and 74
required to identify schoolmates from their high school
Those who left school in the last 15 years correctly identified 90% of faces and names
Those who left 48 years previously identified 80% names and 70% faces
Multi-store model (atkinson and shiffrin)
