Psychology AS Level notes

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY- MODELS OF MEMORY
The multi- store model (Atkinson and Shiffrin)

SENSORY MEMORY- EVIDENCE FOR SENSORY MEMORY IS SPERLING
• Sperling showed grid of letters for less than a second- 4 items were recalled on average.
• Encoding= raw from the senses
• Capacity= 4 items
• Duration= around 2 seconds

SHORT TERM MEMORY-
• Encoding (Conrad)= acoustic
• Capacity (Miller)= 7 +/ 2 items
• Duration (Peterson and Peterson)= less than 30 seconds

LONG TERM MEMORY-
• Encoding (Baddelely)= semantic
• Capacity= unlimited
• Duration (Bahrik)= up to a lifetime

EVALUATION OF MULTI STORE MODEL:
STRENGTHS-
• Glanzer and Cunitz read out a list of words to prticipants and asked them to recall as many as possible. They found participants recalled more words from the start (primacy) and the end (recency) of the list. This supports the idea of LTM and STM being two unitary stores as first words were in the LTM at time of recall and the last words were in the STM.
• Case study evidence- cases of patients who have suffered brain damage to either their hippocampus and have memory deficits. The victim lost the ability to form new long term memories, but he had normal functioning STM but anything after 30 seconds was completely forgotten. He could remember memories prior to brain damage,
• Brain scanning research-MRI scans show different parts of the brain being used when certain tasks were carried out.

WEAKNESSES-
• It does not take into account the nature of the material, as more important pieces of information will more likely to be remembered, whereas less important pieces of information may be quickly forgotten.
• KF shows that visual and auditory information is processed differently as he could recall visual but not auditory information- this suggests that there are different stores within STM itself
• Most