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A-Level Psychology Flashcards: Memory

A-Level Psychology: Memory — Flashcard Deck

20 flashcards with spaced repetition. Press Space to flip, then rate your recall (1-4).

What These Flashcards Cover

These flashcards test your understanding of models of memory, types of memory, factors affecting memory, and the application of memory research to real-world contexts such as eyewitness testimony.

Key areas:

  • Multi-Store Model (Atkinson & Shiffrin): Three stores: sensory register (brief, modality-specific), short-term store (limited capacity ~7 items, duration ~18-30 seconds, encoded acoustically), long-term store (unlimited capacity, potentially permanent, encoded semantically). Information passes through the stores via attention and rehearsal.
  • Working Memory Model (Baddeley & Hitch): Central executive (allocates attention). Phonological loop (handles auditory information: articulatory rehearsal process and phonological store). Visuo-spatial sketchpad (handles visual and spatial information). Episodic buffer (integrates information from the other components and LTM).
  • Types of LTM: Episodic memory (personal experiences, time-stamped). Semantic memory (general knowledge, facts). Procedural memory (skills and habits, unconscious). Tulving proposed this distinction.
  • Schema Theory: Schemas are mental frameworks that organise knowledge. They guide perception, memory, and behaviour. Bartlett’s “War of the Ghosts” study showed that memory is reconstructive — people assimilate new information into existing schemas, distorting recall.
  • Factors Affecting Memory: Misleading information: leading questions (Loftus & Palmer, car speed study), post-event discussion. Anxiety: Yuille & Cutshall (real-life crime, high accuracy) vs Loftus (lab studies, reduced accuracy). The Yerkes-Dodson law suggests moderate anxiety enhances memory but high anxiety impairs it.
  • Eyewitness Testimony: Loftus & Palmer (1974): leading questions changed estimated speed and “smashed” vs “hit” affected memory for broken glass. Confidence-accuracy relationship: confident witnesses are not necessarily more accurate. Memory is reconstructive, not reproductive.
  • Cognitive Interview: Four stages: reinstate the context (return to the scene mentally), report everything (even seemingly trivial details), reverse the order (recall events in reverse chronological order), change perspective (imagine the event from someone else’s viewpoint). Enhances recall without increasing errors.

Intuition

Think of memory as a library, not a video camera. You don’t record events exactly as they happen. Instead, you take in sensory information, select what to attend to, and store it in a format that can be retrieved later. Each time you retrieve a memory, you reconstruct it — filling in gaps with your existing knowledge (schemas) and possibly incorporating new, misleading information.

The multi-store model is like a series of rooms: you pass through the sensory room (brief停留), then the short-term holding room (limited space), and finally the long-term archive (unlimited but hard to search).

Common Pitfalls

  1. Confusing the multi-store model with the working memory model. The MSM has three serial stores. The WMM has four components that work together. The WMM was developed because the MSM oversimplified the short-term store.
  2. Confusing encoding, capacity, and duration. Encoding: how information is converted (acoustic, visual, semantic). Capacity: how much can be held. Duration: how long it lasts. Mixing these up leads to incorrect evaluation of research.
  3. Overgeneralising from Loftus’s research. Most of Loftus’s studies used lab experiments with low ecological validity. Real-life memory (as shown by Yuille & Cutshall) may be more accurate than lab studies suggest.
  4. Assuming the cognitive interview is always better. The cognitive interview is time-consuming and requires a trained interviewer. It may not be practical in all real-world situations. It also increases recall quantity, but does it always increase accuracy?

Cross-References