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  • Age of witness can influence the accuracy of EWT

AS Level Psychology- Memory

A02

The results of the study by Baddeley &

Hitch can be seen to support the Working

Memory Model. They gave P's two tasks to

do at once, one was to repeat a list of

numbers and the other one was to answer a

set of true or false questions. They found that

while the length of the number decreased the response to the question, this was only by

seconds and the answers were still right.

This supports that there is more than one

part to short-term memory or they would

have difficulty doing two tasks at

once.

The Working Memory Model

(Baddeley & Hitch)

Multistore Model of Memory

(Atkinson & Shiffrin)

Central Executive

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Maintenance

Rehearsal

However, there are some case studies which show the flaws in this model. EVR was a patient who had a brain tumor and as a consequence, had part of their brain removed. When assessed later on, they showed the ability to perform tasks but they struggled with making decisions. This suggests that the role of the central executive is too vague in this model as it must have more than one part.

Phonological Loop

Environmental

stimuli

Short-Term

Memory

Long-Term

Memory

Episodic Buffer

Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad

Attention

Elaborative

Rehearsal

An environmental stimuli can be any information which is felt by the senses. When we pay attention to it, it is then transferred to the short

term memory which has a limited capacity and duration. However, if

we do maintenance rehearsal, the information is kept in short term

memory. If the information is elaborately rehearsed, it is

transferred into long term memory which has unlimited

capacity and duration.

The Central Executive allocates roles to the three slave systems and deals with cognitive issues such as problem solving.

The Phonological Loop has a limited capacity and processes auditory and

written information. This has two parts: The Phonological store (inner ear)

and the Articulatory process (inner voice).

The Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad is used to plan spatial tasks such

as navigation and is the 'inner eye'

The Episodic Buffer is a link between long-term memory

and the components of the short-term memory and

acts as a 'back-up' store.

The Nature of Memory

A02

  • Long-Term memory has a 2 hours unlimited duration. This is supported by Bahrick & Shepherd who gave P's their yearbook from school and 48 years later asked them to recall the names of the people in their yearbook. Recall was 70% accurate.
  • Short- Term Memory has a 15- 30 second duration. This is supported by Peterson & Peterson who gave P's a set of mixed trigrams and then once they had read them, asked the P's to count back for a set amount of time. Those who counted back for 3 seconds remembered 90% of the trigrams. Those who counted back for 18 seconds only remembered 2%.

A02

Chunking information is an easy mental process which is done to store information easily. In order to know how to store this information and how to chunk it, we must already have some knowledge about it. This would suggest that there is one store in which all information is stored.

  • The capacity of Long-Term memory is potentially Unlimited.

Glanzer & Cunitz provided support for

this model. They gave P's a list of 20

words and found that they could remember

the first and last words better than the middle ones. They stated that this is because the first words were elaboratively rehearsed and put into the long term memory while the last ones

were still in the short term memory. They

called this the primary-recency effect. This

supports that long term memory and

short term memory are different

stores.

Support for this model also comes from some case studies. KF had brain damage which was later found to affect his verbal abilities (speech) rather than his visual ones. This shows that memory is not a unitary store.

  • Short- Term memory has a capacity of 7 +/- 2 items. This is Miller's magic number and Supported by Jacobs who found that P's could cope counting 7 dots when they were flashed onto a screen. It was also found that P's could remember 5 words and words the maximum of 5 letters long due to chunking in the brain.
  • Short-Term memory uses Acoustic encoding while Long-Term memory uses semantic encoding. This is supported by Baddeley. He gave P's sets of words which where both semantically acoustically similar/ dissimilar. It was found that Acoustically similar words were better remembered in Short-Term memory while Semantically similar words where better remembered in Long-Term memory.

Key Words:

Duration- How long the memory lasts

Capacity- How much information the memory can hold at once

Encoding- The way that the information is transferred and stored.

Factors that Influence Eyewitness Testimony

Eyewitness Testimony

Loftus & Palmers Study:

Eyewitness Testimony generally has 3 stages:

  • The individual encodes information into their long-term memory.
  • They retain the information.
  • They retrieve the information from long-term memory when it is needed.

P's were asked to watch a video of a car crash. They were given a questionnaire.

One of the key questions was asking them approximately at what the speed the car was going when it (Contacted, Bumped, Smashed into) the other car. Those given the word 'Smashed' in the questionnaire gave a higher speed estimate than those given the word 'bumped' or 'contacted'.

Another question was asking if there was any

smashed glass in the accident. 16 out of 34 of those given the word 'smashed' answered yes while only 7 out of 43 of the people

given the word 'hit' said yes. This shows

that eyewitness testimony can be

influenced by wording of questions and

other factors.

A02

To support this, Parker & Carranza studied the accuracy of child accounts. They found that in a sequence of line-ups, Children were often better at picking suspects than adults. This shows that child accounts may be more reliable.

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Further support for this comes from Yarmey's study. A woman stopped Ps in the street and spoke to them briefly.

On the other hand, Real life studies have contradicted Loftus & Palmer's study. Yuille & Cutshall studied witnesses of an armed robbery in Canada and interviewed them. 4 months later, they interview the same individuals who gave accurate recall even with misleading questions.

A02

Individual differences such as age may

also influence the recall of information. Schacter found that in a lot of cases, the elderly tend to know the same amount of information as other ages but they often forget

the source of that information. This means

that while recall may be the same, the

elderly are less likely to be able to provide

the source in eyewitness testimony.

Mundane realism also proves a problem in

this study. Foster argued that if P's thought that their information would affect a real-life situation, then their recall and accuracy would be better. This could explain why the P's in Yuille & Cutshall's study gave more accurate

recall. This shows the limitations of the lab

experiment.

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