1. Unit one memory
AQA A psychology

2. Memory
 Multi-store model (slide 3 onwards)
 Working memory (Slide 9 onwards)
 Memory improvement (slide 16 onwards)
 Cognitive interview (slide 19 onwards)
 Effects of age on EWT (slide 23 onwards)
 Effects of anxiety on EWT (slide 25 onwards)
 Misleading information and EWT (slide 28
onwards)

3. Multi-store model
By Atkinson and Shiffrin
Consists of 3 main stores:
- the sensory memory
- the short term store
- The long term store

4. Sensory store
The Sensory Memory Store is what the
information is first encoded in
Information can be held in this store for a
maximum of 2 seconds before decay
If the information is attended to within these 2
seconds then it moves to the Short Term
Store

5. Short term store
Information in the Short Term Store may be held for
between 18 and 30 seconds before it’s forgotten
This store has a capacity of 7 (plus or minus 2) chunks so
7 +/- 2 chunks
If the information in this store is rehearsed within the 18-
30 seconds then it will move to the Long Term Store
Information is encoded primarily in a Phonological format

6. Long term store
The long term store can store a potentially limitless
amount of information
It can hold this information for up to a life time
The format the information is encoded in is Semantic
(information stored by meaning)
A phrase to throw in your answer:
The long term and short term stores are Unitary

7. Evaluation
 Patients with brain damage and memory problems
strengthen the model
 Such as KF who suffered a brain injury in a motor cycle
accident
 His long term memory was fine
 But he couldn’t remember more than 2 chunks of
information at a time in the short term memory
 This flawed the model as the model states that a long term
memory is created through retrieval and rehearsal in the
short term memory which he couldn’t do but still managed
to create new long term memories

8. Evaluation
 The case of Clive wearing strengthened the
model
 His episodic buffer was damaged leading to
no new short term information to be stored
 But he still had full recollections of old
memories
 This case proves the existence of separate
stores (LTM and STM)

9. Evaluation
 Baddeley and Hitch’s Working Memory
proved that this model is too simplistic
 They proved that the short term memory
consists of other groups with in it
 This is a weakness of the model

10. The working memory
By Baddeley and Hitch
They said that the multi-store model was too
simplistic and that it didn’t go into enough detail
when explaining the short term memory
A way to remember the names of who made which
model (multi-store or working) think that:
‘Baddeley reacted Badly to the Multi-store’

11. The working memory
Consisted of three main subcomponents to the
short term memory
- Central executive
- Visuo-Spatial sketchpad
- Phonological loop

12. Central executive
It basically the ‘boss’ of the other two (visuo
and phono which are called the slave
systems)
It’s responsible for allocating processing
resources to the other two components as it
is the most important part of the model

13. Visuo-spatial sketchpad
Processes visual images
Phonological loop
Consists of another 2 factors including:
-The Phonological store
-The Articulatory control
The Phonological loop processes speech based form of
information (sounds)

14. The working memory
To test their memory model Baddeley put participants
into two groups
One group were given two visual tasks to complete
And the other group were given one visual and one
verbal task
He found that those with the task of completing one of
each task instead of two visual tasks had no problem
doing to correctly but the first group had difficulty.
This shows that when undertaking two visual tasks
participants had to compete for the limited resources
of the visuo-spatial sketch pad and provides strong
evidence of its existence and the separated
existence of the phonological loop or visuo…

15. Evaluation
 The central executive cannot be measured directly,
it must be done through the two slave systems
(weakness)
 There is also no evidence to suggest the existence
of a central executive which is ironic as it is the most
important factor of the whole model (weakness)
 This model explains patients such as KF as it goes
beyond the multi-store model’s idea of the short
term memory involving only rehearsal to convert
information into long term memories (strength)

16. Memory improvement
There are three easy ways of improvement to
remember:
 Verbal mnemonics
 Visual mnemonics
 Cues and context

17. Verbal mnemonics
Verbal mnemonics is the use of words to aid
recall
This includes Acronym Acrostic and Rhyme
Visual mnemonics
Visual mnemonics includes relating words with
numbers
e.g. one:bun two:shoe three:tree

18. Cues and context
This involves the idea that information is best recalled in the
same place as it was learned
Godden and Baddeley
They gave deep sea divers the task of learning a list of
words
They told half of the divers to learn the list on land and half of
the other divers to learn it under water
They then told the divers to recall the list in the opposite
condition to where they learned the list (so if the
memorised the it on land they tried to recall it under water)
They found that the list was most accurately recalled if the
divers were in the same place as when they learned it

19. Cognitive interview
Gieselman came up with the cognitive interview
as a way to improve the amount of
information that was recalled in eye witness
testimonies
The interview consisted mainly of 5
techniques…

20. Techniques
 The interviewee was told asked to make
themselves comfortable and relaxed
Now for the next four techniques that the person was
asked in the interview, remember: R R C C
 R eport absolutely everything you remember
 R einstate the context at the time of the event
 C hange the order in which you recall the event
 C hange your perspective

21. Gieselman
To test his interview
He took 51 volunteers
Made them watch a video of a violent crime
48 hours later half of the pp’s were interviewed
standardly and the other half, cognitively
By using the cognitive interview he found that
more relevant details were recalled and the
same amount of incorrect details were
recalled
Proving that the interview worked

22. Evaluation
 The problem with the interview is that it took time and
money to train police officers to be able to conduct the
interview
 The experiment lacked ecological validity as it took place
in a laboratory setting
 There is also the risk of demand characteristics or
personality biased with the pp’s being volunteers, effecting
reliability and generalisability
 But as a strength there was a study by Fisher et al who
used a naturalistic observation technique to study the
effectiveness of the interview, he saw that police had
gained 47% more information from using the cognitive
interview

23. Effects of age on EWT
Kent and Yuille
Asked children to identify from a set of photographs, a
person that they had previously seen that day
They found that children of 9 years old were more likely to
identify a person in the photographs, even if they had
never seen that person before than 14 year olds were
They found that this was because they didn’t want to tell
the adult in charge that they couldn’t complete the task
that they were given
It didn’t actually have anything to do with a bad memory

24. Effects of age on EWT
As was proven in a later experiment showing that
children as young as 5 could correctly point out a
person that they had seen before in a set of
photographs
Long term memories are stored in order of
meaning, children may pay attention to different
things than adults, effecting what they find to be
important
Children are more susceptible to leading questions
than adults are which will effect their memories
even further

25. Effects of anxiety on EWT
Loftus’ Weapon Focus
Loftus took volunteers and put them in a
waiting room, and told them that they were
waiting for the experiment to start
The volunteers overhear an argument going on
in the laboratory next door, they hear
shouting and chairs breaking
When door opens, a man walks out holding a
pen

26. Effects of anxiety on EWT
This is what only half of the volunteers witnesses, the
other half did the same thing only when the man
walked out of the room he was holding a bloody
knife
The volunteers were later interviewed about what they
had seen
He found that the pp’s that saw the bloody knife
remembered little else about what they had
witnessed, like the mans face for instance
Loftus said that this was because the weapon had
caused anxiety and absorbed all of their attention

27. Evaluating Loftus
 He deceived his pp’s by not telling them what would be
in the experiment meaning that they couldn’t give their
full informed consent, which raises ethical issues
 The experimenter had good control over variables with
is being a laboratory experiment
 With it being an independent group design there wasn’t
a risk of order effects
 As pp’s didn’t know that they were being experimented
on (because they were deceived by the experimenter)
the ecological validity is higher then in most laboratory
settings

28. Misleading information and EWT
Loftus and Palmer
Leading verbs
They showed pp’s a video of a car crash
Later the pp’s were split into 5 groups
Smashed group, bumped group, hit, collided,
and the contacted group

29. Loftus and Palmer
The interviewer asked each pp individually to
estimate how fast the cars were going when
they (and they either bumped, smashed,
collided, contacted, hit)
They found that the smashed group estimated
on average a speed of 10mph faster than all
other groups
This proves that the verb used can mislead and
effect peoples memories of an event

30. Loftus and Palmer
Later the same pp’s were asked about the
glass at the scene of the car crash
Only the smashed group recalled seeing any
glass
There was in fact no glass shown in the video

31. Evaluation
 The fact that it was a laboratory experiment
strengthens the control over the variables that
the experimenter had, improving validity
 But also laboratory experiments make for lower
ecological validity
 The experiment consisted of a video which isn’t
realistic
 The whole experiment lacks mundane realism