Memory Mind Map (A Level Psychology)

STM is mainly acoustic and LTM mainly semantic (Baddeley, 1966, using acoustically and semantically similar word lists).

STM holds about 7 plus or minus 2 items (Miller, 1956); Jacobs (1887) measured it with digit span. LTM capacity is potentially unlimited.

STM lasts about 18 to 30 seconds without rehearsal (Peterson and Peterson, 1959). LTM can last a lifetime (Bahrick et al., 1975, on recognising classmates' photos).

Sensory register → (attention) → short-term memory → (rehearsal) → long-term memory. Retrieval brings information back from LTM to STM.

Studies of coding, capacity and duration support separate stores. The case of HM, who could not form new long-term memories after brain surgery, suggests STM and LTM are in different brain areas.

Too simple: KF had an impaired STM for verbal but not visual information, suggesting more than one STM store. Rehearsal is not always needed to transfer information to LTM.

Directs attention and allocates tasks to the slave systems. Limited capacity.

Holds sound-based information: the phonological store (inner ear) and the articulatory process (inner voice).

Holds visual and spatial information (the inner eye).

Added by Baddeley in 2000. A temporary store that combines information from the other parts and links to LTM.

Dual-task studies show two visual tasks interfere but a visual and a verbal task do not, supporting separate slave systems. KF's case also supports it. The central executive is vaguely defined.

Memories of personal events, such as your last birthday, with details of time and place. Explicit and needs conscious effort to recall.

Knowledge of facts and meanings, such as the capital of France. Explicit.

Memory for skills and actions, such as riding a bike. Implicit: recalled without conscious effort.

Proactive interference is when old learning disrupts new; retroactive is when new learning disrupts old. McGeoch and McDonald (1931) found more interference the more similar the material.

Information is there but cannot be accessed without the right cues. Encoding specificity: cues present at learning help recall.

Godden and Baddeley (1975): divers recalled words better in the same environment, land or underwater, where they learned them. Carter and Cassaday (1998) showed the same for internal state, using antihistamines.

Loftus and Palmer (1974): participants who heard "smashed" estimated a mean speed of 40.5 mph; those who heard "contacted" estimated 31.8 mph.

Gabbert et al. (2003): 71% of participants who discussed a crime with a co-witness reported details they had not seen themselves.

Johnson and Scott (1976): in the weapon focus study, 33% identified the man holding a bloody knife, against 49% who saw him holding a pen. But Yuille and Cutshall (1986) found real witnesses to a shooting were highly accurate.

Fisher and Geiselman (1992): report everything, reinstate the context, recall in a different order and change perspective. The enhanced version adds techniques such as building rapport.