AM
AQA A LEVEL PSYCHOLOGY MEMORY EXAM QUESTIONS AND
ANSWERS WITH COMPLETE SOLUTIONS VERIFIED
Miller (Immediate Digit Span Test)
Study of capacity of STM
Jacobs Support
Peterson and Peterson (Trigrams)
24 students given a consonant syllable and a three digit number ie. THX 512.
They were asked to recall the consonant syllable after a retention interval of 3, 6 ,
Study of duration of STM 9, 12 or 15 seconds. During this interval they had to count backwards from their
three
digit number. Participants were 90% correct after 3 seconds, 20% correct after 9 and
only 2% correct after 18 seconds.
Suggesting it is less than 18 seconds.
Bahrick (Free recall, photo recognition and name recognition tests)
400 people of various ages were tested on their memory of high school classmates.
They were given a free recall to recall as many class mates as they could. Then
Study of duration of LTM they were given 50 photos, some with people from their school year book. Bahrick
found that recall after 15 years of graduation was 90% accurate from photos, and
after 48 years was 70%. With free recall it was about 60% accurate and 30%.
Showing that it is possibly an unlimited duration for LTM.
Baddeley (Semantically and Acoustically Similar/Dissimilar words)
Baddeley had lists of acoustically similar words such as: Cat, cab, can, map, mat,
max etc.
And also semantically similar words: Huge, big, large, titanic, massive etc.
Study of encoding
He found that participants had difficulty remembering acoustically similar words in
the STM and in the LTM struggled with semantically similar words.
He concluded that STM is largely encoded acoustically whereas LTM is encoded
semantically.
Capacity of STM 7+_ 2 units
Capacity of LTM Potentially unlimited
Duration of STM 30 seconds
Duration of LTM potentially unlimited
Encoding in STM Mainly acoustically
Encoding in LTM Mainly semantically
Sensory Memory-> Attention->STM->(Maintenance rehearsal or) elaborative
MSM of memory rehearsal->LTM->(Retrieval, Interference, Decay Retrieval failure, displacement for
STM)
It attempts to explain how memory works
What does the MSM model suggest Memory Consists of multiple stores
There is a sequence between these stores
Glanzer and Cunnitz (primacy and recency effect)
HM (LTM gone)
Evidence to support the MSM
Beardsley (Prefrontal cortex for STM and Hippocampus for Ltm)
(Bahrick Peterson and Peterson, miller, baddeley)
Too simple (but easier to
Evaluate the MSM
understand) Supporting Evidence
What does the WMM suggest STM is made up of multiple stores and the MSM is too simple
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