He found the average span for the digits was 9.3 items, while it was 7.3 for letters. Jacobs suggested it was easier to recall digits because it may be because there are only 9 digits whereas there are 26 letters. Miller wrote a memorable article called the magic number seven plus or minus two. He reviewed psychological research and concluded that the span of immediate memory is 7; people can cope reasonably well with counting seven dots flashed onto a screen but not many more than this. Miller also found that people can recall 5 words as well as they can recall 5 letters- we chunk things together and can remember more.
The superior recall of items at the start of the list is called the primary effect, whilst the superior recall of the items at the end of the list is called the recency effect. This is good evidence for the multi-store model of memory because it shows the difference between the STM and the LTM. Rundus & Atkinson (1970) Rundus and Atkinson asked participants to rehearse out loud the list they were given (similar to Murdock's experiment). Tape recordings showed that words from the beginning of the list were more likely to be rehearsed than later ones. Because of the limited capacity of the STM, words from the middle of the list are thought to be lost completely or unavailable for recall.
The findings show that after 3 seconds the participants were able to recall 80% of trigrams. As the time progressed, the participants were unable to recall as many trigrams. After 18 seconds, fewer than 10% of the trigrams were recalled correctly. In conclusion, trigrams may not be relevant to everyday life; neither do they reflect everyday memory. It was possible that interference from other trigrams caused the poor recall.
The number of digits they had to recall was increased until the participant was unable to recall them accurately. His results found that the average digit span was five to nine items suggesting that the short term memory is limited. One limitation of Baddeley’s study into the capacity for the short term memory is that the study lack ecological validity. This is because the way in which the short term memory was used in the study did not correspond to how it is used in everyday life. This being said, the study does provide results in which can be analysed and as a result help to aid memory.
MATH 533 Project B Summary: a) The mean sales per week surpasses 41.5 per salesperson. This is the right assumption. Statistical evidence is sufficient to back this claim with associated probability of committing an error which is called p-value = .022. The lower limit of the 95% confidence interval is 41.654. This implies that we can be 95% confident that the average (mean) sales per week exceeds 41.5 per salesperson since 41.654 > 41.5 and therefore our confidence interval does not include 41.5.
The hard disk works sort of like a record: the record (platter) spins on a “spindle” and the arm moves to different sections on the record to read or write to it. By changing the polarity of sections of the record information, stored in binary form. Looking past the mechanical differences, long-term memory serves a similar purpose in computers and humans. Computer hard drives are slow in reading and writing, not unlike human memories, for human memory takes longer to access older memory, computer memory (hard drives) can store unlimited amounts of information for years. Human memories are more changeable than hard drive data,
The experiment produces the primary effect, where many words are recalled from the beginning of the list, and the recency effect, where many words are also recalled from the end of the list, but not so many from the middle. This study also shows that there are separate short term and long term memory stores since the primary effect occurs because the words at the beginning of the list have been rehearsed, and so are transferred into the long term memory store. However, whilst this is going on, less attention is paid to the middle words and they tend to be lost unless they have some special significance to the individual. The words at the end of the list are well recalled because they are still fresh in the memory system unless there is a distractor task which causes this information to be lost through interference, displacement, or decay. This evidence can be seen as reliable since it was scientific, conducted in a laboratory, and produced quantative data that makes it easy to summarise and compare with other data.
Short term memory allows us to hold onto information long enough to use it. It deals with new data from the sensory memory and old information retrieved from the long term memory. It has duration of 18 seconds but this can be longer if the information is rehearsed, this is usually done acoustically. The short term memory has a limited capacity so information is often lost when new data comes in, this can be reduced by ‘chunking’ information (grouping info together). Long term memory is a more permanent store; we retrieve past experiences and knowledge from it.
Within this region of the MTL/D, the long-term memory was impaired when present with information of the events, but was able to recall more information overtime versus the FL. This research has found that long term memory, too, has a significant impact on flash bulb memories, as well as on cognition and plays an integral role in everyday functioning. Hershey, Craft, Glauser, and Hale (1998) demonstrate the importance of long term memory by assessing children suffering neurological dysfunction of the temporal lobe. In a study on children with epilepsy, several recall tests were administered to fifteen participants with epilepsy and fifteen without. Results showed that children with epilepsy displayed significant deficits in recall and retaining information over a period of time.
* Example of LTM: Childhood memories Short Term Memory (STM) | Encoding | Acoustically encoded: sound area of brain is activated during processing. | Research | Conrad (1964) presented participants with a visual series of 6 letters. They were asked to recall from STM and there was a tendency to confuse letters such as ‘b’ and ‘p’, relating the majority of the errors to similar-sounding letters. Participants must have therefore been using an acoustic code, converting the visual representation of the letters into sounds. |