I've summarized all of the content from my memory videos into this revision video. If you don't understand any of the content I cover here, go to my longer videos for a full explanation. But if you just need a reminder of the key points quickly, this is the video for you. But don't just use this video.
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The Multistore Model of Memory Atkinson and Schiffer in 1968. A theoretical cognitive model of how the memory system processes information. First store. Sensory register.
Receives raw sense impressions. Attention passes info to short-term memory. Coding is modality specific.
Capacity is very large, all sense impressions in each moment. Duration very short, 250 milliseconds, but varies per store. Second store, short-term memory. Receives info from the sensory register by paying attention or from long-term memory by retrieval.
Keeps information in short-term memory by repeating, maintenance rehearsal, or passing information on to long-term memory by linking it to the info already in long-term memory. Lab-triv rehearsal. Coding is acoustic. The duration is approximately 18 seconds.
Capacity is 7 plus or minus 2 items, Miller. Information in short-term memory is lost via displacement. New information enters short-term memory, or decay, lost over time. Third store, long-term memory. Very long duration, permanent memory storage, theoretically unlimited capacity, forgotten information appears to just be unaccessible.
Long-term memory is coded semantically, in the form of meaning. To use the information, it must be passed back to short-term memory. Retrieval.
STM and LTM are separate. Glasner and Kunitz found words at the start and end of word lists were more easily recalled, suggest the first words are in long-term memory and last in short-term memory. However, the middle words were displaced.
Capacity and Duration of the Central Register Spierling found the recall of a random row of a 12-letter grid flashed for 1 20th of a second was 75%, suggest all the rows were stored in the Central Register. A large capacity. All 12 could not be written as items were forgotten too quickly.
so a short duration. Coding STM and LTM. Badly. All 10 word lists were given to 4 participant groups. Word lists were acoustically similar or dissimilar, and semantically similar or dissimilar.
Found immediate recall was worse for acoustically similar words and recall after 20 minutes were worse with semantically similar. Suggest short-term memory is coded acoustically and long-term memory is coded semantically, with similar sounds or meanings causing confusion when recalled. Capacity short-term memory. Jacobs found that recall for a list of letters averaged 7 items for letters and 9 for numbers, suggesting short-term memory store has a limited capacity of 7 plus or minus 2. However, this can be improved by chunking, making small sets, groups of items. Duration short-term memory.
Peterson and Peterson found recall of a three-letter trigram, HFR, TKD, was less than 10% after 18 seconds if performing an interference task, counting backwards, suggesting short-term memory duration is very short. 18-30 seconds max. Capacity long-term memory. Wagner created a diary, 240 events over 6 years. He tested himself on events using cues and found 75% recall for critical details after 1 year and 45% after 5 years.
Suggests long-term memory has a very large capacity, potentially limitless. Duration long-term memory. Bairack found recall of school friends'names from photographs was 90% after 15 years and still 80% for names after 48 years.
in participants ranging from 17 to 74. Suggests the duration of long-term memory is very long, potentially limitless. Cognitive tests of models of memory, like the MSM, are often highly artificial, low mundane realism, and are conducted in lab environments, low ecological validity. It may be that the findings do not generalise to how memory is used and dates their life.
There are different types of long-term memory, not one, and the working memory model explains STM as a much more active system with multiple stores. The capacity of the short-term memory store can be altered significantly. For example, age and practice. Suggests a view of a fixed short-term memory capacity is incorrect.
Types of long-term memory. Long-term memory is the storage of memories over a lengthy period of time. It's suggested that there are three types of long-term memory. These are either declarative, explicit, meaning you can access them consciously and express the memory in words, or non-declarative. This means they're not consciously recalled, they're implicit, and are difficult to explain in words.
Episodic. Experiences and events. They're time-stamped, so they have a reference to time and place.
They are declarative. They're recalled consciously. They're autobiographical.
The strength of the memory is influenced by emotion, and is associated with the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. Semantic. Facts, meanings, and knowledge. It's declarative, and recalled consciously. The strength of the memory comes from the processing depth.
It lasts longer than episodic, it's not time-stamped, and episodic becomes semantic over time. associated with the phrenal cortex. Procedural. Unconscious memories of skills, like riding a bike, often learnt in childhood. Not declarative, not recalled consciously.
More resistant to forgetting than episodic or semantic. Associated with the motor cortex and cerebellum. Evaluations.
Vergara-Kadim found three children with damage to the hippocampus, but not the parahippocampal cortices, had episodic amnesia, but attended school, spoke and learnt facts. Semantic info. This suggests semantic and episodic memory use different brain regions. Clive Waring has retrograde amnesia, so he can't remember his musical education or wedding episodic.
However, he remembers facts about his life, semantic. For example, he knows he's a musician and married. He can play the piano, procedural. Due to anterior grade amnesia, he can't encode new episodic or semantic memories.
What can gain new procedural memories in experiments via repetition. This suggests semantic, episodic and procedural memory are separate using different brain areas. Generalising the findings of ideographic clinical case studies to explain how memory works in the wider population is problematic. Other unknown issues could be unique to that individual that can explain the behaviour.
Torving's fMRI studies identified which types of long-term memory are associated with particular brain areas in healthy brains. This has allowed ideas gained from ideographic case studies to be studied via nomothetic methods. Types of long-term memory may not be truly distinct. Episodic and semantic memories are both declarative. Episodic becomes semantic over time, and we can produce automatic language, combining semantic and procedural.
The Working Memory Model Baddeley and Hitch, a theoretical cognitive model of information processing, created to replace the STM store in the MSM. The Working Memory Model is an act- active processor made of multiple stores, whereas the STM is a passive and unitary store. Central executive, the head of the model, receives sense information, controls attention, and filters information before passing on to the subsystems. Limited in capacity, four items, and capable of dealing with only one strand of information at a time. Subsystems.
The phonological loop processes sound information, acoustic coding, contains the primary acoustic store, The inner ear, storing words recently heard, and articulatory process. The inner voice, storing via sub-vocal repetition, capacity of 2 seconds. The visuospatial sketchpad, processes, so codes, visual and spatial information. Contains the visual cache, a passive store of form and colour, and the inner scribe. An inner eye, an active store of relationships and 3D space.
The episodic buffer. Added to the working memory model in 2000 as the model needed a general store to hold and combine information from the VSS, the PL, the CE and long-term memory. Badly. When asked to do two visual tasks, tracking moving lights and describing the angles of the letter F, or a visual and verbal task, it was found that performance was much better when the two tasks were not using the same processing. This suggests that the VSS and PL are separate systems and the capacity of the VSS can be overwhelmed with visual information.
Shellis and Warrington. After a brain injury, KF had selective impairment to his verbal short-term memory, but visual functioning was not affected. This suggests that the PL and VSS subsystems are separate processes located in separate brain regions. Parabakaran.
Participants in fMRIs complete tasks with integrated or separate spatial and verbal information. More activation was found in the prefrontal cortex when information is integrated and... posterior brain regions when not integrated.
This suggests the episodic buffer exists and is in the prefrontal cortex. Badly found, participants could recall more monosyllabic words than polysyllabic words. This suggests the capacity of the phonological loop is the time it takes to say the words, known as the word-length effect.
The working memory model seems more accurate than the short-term memory component of the MSN in describing how memory is used as an active processor. Psychologists often now refer to working memory instead of short-term memory. In most studies on memory tasks, there are issues with external validity. They lack mundane realism as the tasks are unrealistic, artificial. Therefore, they may not be generalized to how we use memory in day-to-day life.
Other psychologists have criticized the central executive as a concept that does not have a full explanation of its function, badly admit that the concept needs development, and including the episodic buffer is part of this. It's impossible to directly observe the process of memory described in models like the working memory model. This means inferences must be made, which are assumptions about cognitive processes. These assumptions could be incorrect.
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Explanations for forgetting. Interference. Interference theory. We forget because our long-term memories become confused, disrupted, by other information while it's coded. Proactive interference.
Old information disrupts new. Interference works forward in time when old information already stored interferes with recalling something new. Retroactive interference. New information disrupts old. Interference works backwards in time.
New information being stored interferes with the recall of old info. Similarity. Interference is more likely to occur when the two pieces of information are similar due to response competition. Time sensitivity.
Interference is less likely to occur when there's a large gap between learning. Retrieval failure due to the absence of cues. Cue-dependent forgetting.
Information is in long-term memory but forgetting happens due to the absence of appropriate cues, prompts, encoded at the same time. Encoding Specificity Principle. Context-dependent cues.
Aspects of our external environment work as cues to memory. Sight, sound, smells. Being in a different place inhibits memory, as we lack environmental cues. State-dependent cues. Aspects of our internal environment work as cues to memory.
Emotions, drugs, states of arousal. Being in a different emotional state inhibits memory, as we lack state-dependent cues. Category or Organizational Dependent Cues.
Providing cues that relate to the organization or category of memories, age, recall. The most effective cues have fewer things associated with them. The lack of organization cues inhibits memory.
Evaluations. Interference. Retroactive interference. Smith sends a questionnaire to 211 11 to 79 year olds, including a map of the area around their school with Elf Street names. found the more times an individual moved home the fewer street names could be recalled suggesting adding new street names to memory makes recalling old street names harder retroactive interference proactive interference greenberg and underwood participants were given a list of 10 word pairs to learn every 48 hours given a new list it was found the number of correctly recalled word pairs decreased the more word pairs had been learnt previously this suggests that previously learned word combinations cause confusion in the coding of the later word lists.
Proactive interference. Interference only explains forgetting when two sets of information are similar and when learned closer together in time. Time sensitivity.
This means the theory struggles to explain many day-to-day examples of forgetting. Cue-dependent forgetting. Context-dependent cues.
God and unbadly. Material learned underwater or on land. Found recall was best with divers if they'd learned in the same context, environment, as tested.
Suggesting environmental cues promote recall. State-dependent cues. Overton.
Material learned drunk or sober. Found recall was best when the same internal state. Suggests internal cues promote recall. Category-dependent cues.
Tolving and Pearlstone. Participants used free recall, answering in any order, to recall 48 words or were asked to recall to match 12 four-word categories. It was found participants recalled significantly more in the category condition.
This suggests the categories acted as cues and aided recall. As interference in cue theory may only explain a temporary loss of information, not permanent loss, they may not be a valid explanation for forgetting. Research into forgetting is practical applications.
Students can develop effective revision strategies and theories like context cues and proof recall have been used in the development of an effective police technique called the cognitive interview. Factors affecting the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Bartlett argued memory is not an accurate recording of events. It's reconstructed in recalling, reconstructive memory, and may produce errors, confabulations, that schemas influence.
Leading questions imply a particular answer. This can influence how memory is recalled, either due to an actual change to the memory, substitution bias, or due to an emotional pressure to give a particular response, response bias. Post-event contamination, discussion, the recall of events by one witness, alters the accuracy of another witness's recollection. This could be memory conformity.
The witnesses go along with others'accounts for social approval. Anxiety. A mental state of arousal that includes feelings of extreme concern and tension and physiological changes such as increased heart rate.
High anxiety levels may decrease recall due to weapons effect. Focus. With witnesses focusing their attention on the weapon, rather than the criminal's face. High anxiety levels may increase recall, as it improves alertness and awareness of the situation and surroundings.
Additionally, the intense emotions felt could improve memory encoding. Yerkes-Dodson Law of Arousal Eyewitness testimony accuracy increases as anxiety rises, as the witness becomes alert. However, at a point, anxiety becomes too high, and more stress, distraction, results in lower accuracy.
Evaluations Misleading Information Loftus and Palmer After watching a clip of a car crash, participants were asked, how fast were the cars going when they blank into each other? With the verb either smashed, collided, bumped, hit, or contacted. It was found the more extreme the verb, the faster the estimation of miles per hour. Contacted 31.8 and smashed 40.8. This suggests leading questions influence recall.
Post-event discussion. Gambit. Pairs of participants watched different videos of the same crime. It was found when pairs were able to discuss what they had seen. 71% included information that was not in their video in their eyewitness testimony.
This suggests that witnesses will change their accounts of crimes to match other witnesses'testimony. Bodner found that when participants were warned about the danger of post-event discussion, witnesses changed their eyewitness testimony less. Violent crimes cause high anxiety in eyewitnesses.
Lab-based research in eyewitness testimony that has no emotional impact on the participants can be argued to have low validity when applied to real eyewitness testimony. Anxiety Johnson and Scott Naive participants overheard 1. A normal conversation A man walks out with greasy hands and a pen or 2. Hostile conversation, breaking glass, furniture knocked over A man walks out with a bloody knife found 49% identified the man from 50 photos with a pen 33% with a knife This suggests participants were weapon-focused due to anxiety caused by the knife Uville and Cutsell found when interviewed four months after witnessing a real-life deadly shooting 13 witnesses resisted misleading information, and those with the most stress, closest to the shooter, produced the most accurate eyewitness testimony. Research on the limitations of eyewitness testimony has led to real-life applications.
One example is the development of the cognitive interview. This technique is designed to reduce the influence of schemas on the accuracy of recall. Lab-based eyewitness testimony, or leading question research, may suffer from demand characteristics. Participants pick up on the language used and feel social pressure. To give an answer they think will help the researcher.
Response bias explanation. Research that deceives participants and causes anxiety breaks ethical guidelines, protection from harm, and informed consent. Improving the accuracy of eyewitness testimony.
Eyewitness testimony is inaccurate. Numerous research studies have indicated that eyewitness testimony lacks accuracy due to factors such as anxiety, bleeding questions, and post-event contamination. Fisher defined the standard interview from observations of police interviews in Florida. Police ask, Quick! direct and closed questions.
Police let the recall. Witnesses couldn't talk freely and were frequently interrupted. Fisher and Gieselman suggested the cognitive interview as an improvement. Context reinstatement.
Mentally returning to the crime scene. Triggers environmental, emotional, contextual cues. Report everything. All details, even if they seem irrelevant, should be mentioned.
Recall from a changed perspective. Consider the perspective of other witnesses, the perpetrators, to disrupt schema. Recall in reverse order. Switch to different chronology timelines to check the accuracy of recall and challenge expectations. Fisher.
Seven detectives trained in the cognitive interview were compared with nine detectives using the standard interview. Found cognitive interview detectives produced 47% more information in real interviews after their training and 63% more information than the standard interview detectives. This suggests the cognitive interview effectively enhances the memory of witnesses in the real world.
Conkin. A meta-analysis of 42 cognitive interview studies, including over 2,500 interviews, found a significant increase in the amount of correct information recalled, however a significant increase in the amount of incorrect information recalled results in a similar accuracy rate of 85% for the cognitive interview and 82% for the standard interview. This suggests that the cognitive interview may be of limited practical use due to increased errors. Mein and Bull found each aspect of the cognitive interview produced a similar level of recall.
However, the context-free in-statement and report everything conditions produce significantly more correct recall. This suggests no one aspect is more important in the cognitive interview, but the effect of the cognitive interview is cumulative. The cognitive interview is time-consuming, requiring more work than officers have available. The cognitive interview also requires significant training and investment, diverting officers from their normal work.
The cognitive interview may not be adopted due to limited financial resources. A cost benefit analysis may argue that the cognitive interview is worth the additional resources invested in training to make a more effective police force, with a cognitive interview ultimately reducing crime and its cost to broader society. The cognitive interview is not effective in improving the recognition of suspects in identity parades and from photographs. This means a cognitive interview has limited usefulness in several everyday police activities involving eye witness testimony.
The cognitive interview is not effective in very young children, as they are egocentric. They only see the world from their own perspective. Holiday created a modified cognitive interview adapted to children's developmental level. Don't forget you can test yourself on the Memory Unit with the PsychBoost app.
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