Outline and evaluate research into the duration, capacity and encoding of information in short term memory (12 marks) Peterson and Peterson (1959) carried out an experiment involving duration in the STM, essentially to test how long it lasts when rehearsal is prevented. Participants were shown three letters together (consonant trigram), they were then asked to count backwards in threes from a specified number to prevent rehearsal of the letters. After pauses of 3-18 seconds, going up in 3s, participants were asked to recall the original trigram. This was repeated several times using different trigrams. The findings show that after 3 seconds the participants were able to recall 80% of trigrams.
KF showed very poor digit span (usually less than 2 items), but good performance on tasks that seemed to indicate an intact long-term store. For example, he was still able to store new information. In fact he could learn a 10 word sequence in fewer trials than normal controls and still retained seven of the 10 items some months later. The multi-store model predicts that this should not be possible since an intact STM is required to transfer information to LTM. We have enormous amounts of information in LTM even though we have probably not rehearsed much of it.
Peterson and Peterson investigated the duration of the Short Term Memory in 1959. This demonstrated that rehearsing is vital to retain information in the Short Term Memory. A lab experiment was conducted in which 24 participants had to recall trigrams (meaningless three-consonant syllables, e.g. TGH). To prevent the participants rehearsing the trigrams they were asked to count backwards in threes from a specified random number until they saw a red light appear.
They found that the estimated speed was effected by the verb used in the question; smashed had the highest speed while contacted had the lowest speed. This shows that EWT is inaccurate due the leading questions which can affect the witness’s answers to things. The same psychologists did another experiment using the same methodology (which was fairly similar) expect they only used two verbs; smashed and hit. After a week had passed they asked the participants to come back and where asked if they saw any broken glass in the video. The group that got question with the verb ‘smashed’ stated they saw glass even though there wasn’t any.
Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) came up with the theory of the “Serial Positioning experiment”. They gave participants in their experiment three lists of words to remember. It resulted in participants remembering the first list of words (known as Primacy effect), and the last list of words (known as Recency effect), completely forgetting the middle list. This experiment supports the idea of the Multi Store Model as it states that the LTM and the STM are unitary stores (they cannot subdivide into different components). Glanzer and Cunitz suggested that the first list of words
Outline and evaluate research into STM and LTM. 12 Marks One key study into STM was researched by Peterson and Lloyd to 24 students that went to their university. Whereby an experimenter said a constant syllable to the participant followed by a 3 digit number – and immediately after hearing the syllable the participant had to count backwards in 3’s or 4’s until told to stop. Then the participant was asked to recall the syllable. They found that participants remembered about 90% when there was only a second interval; but this dropped to 2% when an 18 second interval was emplaced.
There are three types of memory which are sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. “In 1956, US psychologist George Miller found short term memory is nearly always very close to seven. Nonetheless, in 2001, American psychologist Nelson Cowan argued that the capacity of short-term memory is much less than seven.”(Jarrett, 2011, p.148) Although chunking word seems like beneficial for remembering, not all the memory can be recalled voluntarily as some of the memories were locked by us and it called repression. However, there are something might cause them to unlock at a later time. “In 1915, Sigmund Freud first study repression which is the process of pulling thoughts into the unconscious and preventing painful or dangerous thoughts from entering consciousness; seemingly unexplainable naivety, memory lapse or lack of awareness of one’s own situation and condition.”(Furnham, 2012, p.145) On the other word, it is the defense mechanism to protect us.
This difference was observed 40 days after the death and in some participants, still continued after six months. This supports the idea that stress may affect the immune system as they lymphocyte activity was significantly lower, meaning that the immune system has less defence, later resulting in illness. This study however is not completely reliable as it does not consider other factors to do with bereavement which can lower the immune system. These factors can include eating less, sleeping less, economic issues. Therefore, cannot be used singularly as each person will have a different experience and their body will work in different ways under these circumstances.
Abstract This experiment investigated the performance of memory recall for 20 participants, based on two levels of processing. The 20 participants were divided into two groups, the Color Group (shallow processing) and the Build Group (deep processing). It was hypothesized that the Build Group would be able to recall more words than the Color Group based on the results from a prior experiment conducted by Craik and Tulving (1975). The findings of the said experiment showed that participants whom used deeper levels of processing had better memory recall. The results from this study supported the hypothesis; participants in the Build Group were able to recall more words than participants in the Color Group.
Describe the evidence for the distinction between STM and LTM The multi store claims that STM and LTM are separate and distinct stores. Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) illustrate this by creating a laboratory experiment. They gave their participants a series of words and presented them one at a time to test their free recall. However, there were two conditions and these were that they first had to recall words immediately once they had been presented and condition 2 was that the participants were given a distractor task after the words had been presented and had to count backwards in threes before 30 seconds before they were asked to recall the words. Their findings show that the outcome was that people were better at recalling the words both at the beginning and the end of the list more easily than those in the middle.