AQA A Level Psychology Memory Review Questions and Answers

Study of capacity of STM Miller (Immediate Digit Span Test) Jacobs Support Study of duration of STM Peterson and Peterson (Trigrams) 24 students given a consonant syllable and a three digit number ie. THX 512. They were asked to recall the consonant syllable after a retention interval of 3, 6 , 9, 12 or 15 seconds. During this interval they had to count backwards from their three digit number. Participants were 90% correct after 3 seconds, 20% correct after 9 and only 2% correct after 18 seconds. Suggesting it is less than 18 seconds. Study of duration of LTM Bahrick (Free recall, photo recognition and name recognition tests) 400 people of various ages were tested on their memory of high school classmates. They were given a free recall to recall as many class mates as they could. Then they were given 50 photos, some with people from their school year book. Bahrick found that recall after 15 years of graduation was 90% accurate from photos, and after 48 years was 70%. With free recall it was about 60% accurate and 30%. Showing that it is possibly an unlimited duration for LTM. Study of encoding Baddeley (Semantically and Acoustically Similar/Dissimilar words) Baddeley had lists of acoustically similar words such as: Cat, cab, can, map, mat, max etc. And also semantically similar words: Huge, big, large, titanic, massive etc. He found that participants had difficulty remembering acoustically similar words in the STM and in the LTM struggled with semantically similar words. He concluded that STM is largely encoded acoustically whereas LTM is encoded semantically. Capacity of STM 7+_ 2 units Capacity of LTM Potentially unlimited Duration of STM 30 seconds Duration of LTM potentially unlimited Encoding in STM Mainly acoustically