TYPES OF MEMORY AND FEATURES OF EACH MEMORY STORE

MULTI STORE MODELTYPES OF MEMORYFEATURES OF MEMORYTHE WORKING MEMORY MODELRETRIEVAL FAILUREEYE WITNESS TESTIMONYCOGNITIVE INTERVIEWFORGETTINGINTERFERENCE

1 Mar

Written By Rebecca Sivyer

KEYWORDS

SENSORY REGISTER/MEMORY (ICONIC, ECHOIC, HAPTIC, OLFACTORY, GUSTATORY)

The Sensory Register is the initial stage of memory that captures sensory information from the environment for a brief period. It includes:

Iconic Memory: Visual sensory memory (images and visual stimuli).
Echoic Memory: Auditory sensory memory (sounds).
Haptic Memory: Tactile sensory memory (touch).
Olfactory Memory: Memory for smells.
Gustatory Memory: Memory for tastes.

SHORT-TERM MEMORY (STM)

Short-Term Memory refers to the temporary storage of information that is actively being processed. It typically holds a limited amount of information (around 7 items) for a short duration (approximately 18-30 seconds).

LONG-TERM MEMORY (LTM)

Long-Term Memory is the continuous storage of information, which can last from a few minutes to an entire lifetime. It has a much larger capacity compared to STM and can store different types of information (e.g., declarative, procedural).

TRACE DECAY

Trace Decay is a theory of forgetting in which memory traces (the physical changes in the brain that represent memories) fade and weaken over time when they are not actively rehearsed or used.

TRANSFER OF STM TO LTM

The process through which information moves from Short-Term Memory to Long-Term Memory. This typically requires rehearsal and encoding, where information is processed deeply enough to be stored for the long term.

FORGETTING THROUGH RETRIEVAL FAILURE

A type of forgetting that occurs when information is stored in Long-Term Memory but cannot be accessed. Retrieval failure often occurs due to a lack of retrieval cues or context.

LINEAR DIRECTION

In the context of memory models, a linear direction refers to the sequential process by which information moves through different memory stores—first to the sensory register, then to STM, and finally to LTM.

FORGETTING THROUGH DISPLACEMENT

Forgetting Through Displacement occurs when new information pushes out older information from Short-Term Memory due to its limited capacity.

UNITARY STORE

A Unitary Store is a memory model concept suggesting that memory is stored in a single, undifferentiated store rather than separate types (e.g., no division between STM and LTM).

MULTIPLE STORES

In contrast to a unitary store, Multiple Stores refer to models of memory that suggest distinct types of memory storage (e.g., Sensory Memory, Short-Term Memory, and Long-Term Memory), each with different characteristics.

REHEARSAL LOOP

The Rehearsal Loop is the process of repeatedly mentally repeating or verbalising information to keep it in Short-Term Memory or to transfer it to Long-Term Memory.

ENCODING

Encoding is the process of transforming sensory input into a form that can be stored in memory. It is how information is prepared to be stored in either Short-Term or Long-Term Memory.

CAPACITY

Capacity refers to the amount of information that can be held in a particular memory store. For instance, STM has a limited capacity (around 7 items), whereas LTM is thought to have a virtually unlimited capacity.

DURATION

Duration is the length of time information can be stored in a memory system. For example, STM has a short duration of around 18-30 seconds, whereas LTM can retain information for a much longer time, potentially a lifetime.

ACOUSTIC ENCODING

Acoustic Encoding is the process of converting information into sound patterns for storage in memory, often used in STM.

SEMANTIC ENCODING

Semantic Encoding is the encoding of information by its meaning, making it easier to recall. This type of encoding is more common in LTM.

VISUAL ENCODING

Visual Encoding is the process of converting visual information (e.g., images, colours) into a memory trace for storage. This type of encoding is often used in both sensory memory and STM.

TYPES OF MEMORY: Sensory Register, Short-Term Memory and Long-Term Memory.

FEATURES OF EACH MEMORY STORE: Coding, Capacity and Duration.

WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF MEMORY

The first chapter on the topic learns about the three basic stores of memory: sensory memory (or the Sensory Register), short-term memory, and long-term memory.

Please note, when students start learning about memory, they always begin with the premise that memory is divided into three stores; it isn’t; memory is vastly more complicated than that; it is, however, a good place to start. You will learn about the other stores as you learn more about memory.

SENSORY MEMORY / SENSORY REGISTER (THE FUTURE )

What surface are your feet on? Is your bottom in contact with a chair? Look around the room, did you check every item as you entered it or did you assume its contents and spatial dimensions? Can you remember every second of yesterday or only specific episodes?

Can you imagine the quality of your existence if you had to regard all of your sensory perceptions constantly; that’s all the sights, sounds, tastes, sensations, and smells that your brain updates every nano-second of consciousness!

People don’t pay attention to the vast array of sensory-stimului they experience every moment of their waking lives because they can’t, they’d go insane if they did. No human could cope with a constantly changing, unfiltered bombardment of multi-sensory data. Bewildered would be an understatement. Humans are designed to pay attention to only an atom’s worth of the available data, meaning most of their existence is ignored.

In short, the essence of Sensory Memory is how your brain conjures up its ever-changing sense of reality.

More formally, sensory memory is the unnoticed, mental representation of how environmental events look, sound, feel, smell and taste. It has five sense modalities (faculties): iconic (sight); echoic (sound); haptic (touch); olfactory (smell); gustatory (taste).

SM gives humans a representation of the world to get a sense of time, space and physicality at any given moment; otherwise, all things outside their attention (Including hypnotic states) would be void of nothingness. But not with sensory memory, as the world lurks in the background on standby.

It is only when a sensory memory is noticed or given attention. Thus, it becomes conscious that perceptions become actualities as SM enters short-term memory, and a person becomes cognisant of sight, sound, thought, etc.

NB: I’m afraid I am old school about some psychological terms, so I will be referring to AQA’s sensory register as sensory memory, as that’s what I was taught back then! But more important than nostalgia is my belief that sensory memory is a more apt term, e.g., sensory memory is where the five sense modalities register their data.

OTHER FACTS ABOUT SM

The role of SM is simple; it just snaps a temporary picture of everything we sense. Thus, each sensory modality is brief, and memory is continuously replaced by a new memory once the previous information decays. Information, once lost from SM, is gone for good, and there is no way to recover it.
SM does not participate in higher cognitive functions, so we are unaware of SM unless we pay attention to sight, sound, etc.
Information received in SM is raw and unprocessed but in high resolution and detail-oriented.
Information in SM is stored in its specific sense modality (way of sensing a stimulus). For instance, auditory information is only stored in the echoic memory, and visual information is stored in iconic memory. Different SM stores have different durations and capacities.
SM capacity and duration are mostly influenced by genetics (DNA). But mutations to the brain, nerve growth and methylation also affect sensory memory stores.
Iconic memory
The type of memory that stores images and visual information, which has been perceived for a short duration, is called iconic memory. It was the first sensory modality to be investigated in 1740.
Echoic memory
The sensory memory that briefly stores sounds and auditory information, which has been perceived for a short duration, is called echoic memory. Research suggests that this form of memory has a temporal characteristic, which means it is affected by the timing and tempo of what is heard.
Haptic Memory
The type of sensory memory that briefly stores the tactile sense of touch is called haptic memory. Experiencing pressure, itching, touch and pain throughout the body follows various pathways, which comprise the somatosensory system and are stored in haptic memory.

SHORT TERM MEMORY: (THE PRESENT)

When an item from Sensory-Memory is noticed, for example, a recognisable person, your phone ringing or something unusual (a loud bang, a dodgy stranger) it enters Short-Term-Memory (STM). The person then becomes aware/cognisant of a sensory perception. STM can, therefore, be likened to our consciousness because whenever we are aware of what we are experiencing (e.g., what we are seeing, hearing or tasting), it is in our STM.

STM is the store used for holding small amounts of information in our minds for short periods. For example, short-term memory can be used to remember a phone number that has just been recited or where we hold a conversation. In other words, you are reading right now in your STM because you are engaging with it. All other sensory perceptions in conjunction with reading will be on standby in SM until they are noticed. For instance, stop reading momentarily and pay attention to what sounds are happening in your environment. Did you notice anything? If you did, you allowed a previously unacknowledged sensory perception to enter your consciousness/STM.

STM is very limited in how much information it can hold (capacity). For example, on average, people struggle to recall more than five to nine numbers or letters in STM memory tests.

The duration (length) of short-term memory is believed to be about 18-30 seconds in neurotypical people. In other words, we don’t hold any thought or sensation for long before it disappears or gets transferred to long-term memory. For example, think about ‘cheese’ for as long as possible to test your STM duration. Try not to let your thoughts about cheese slip from your mind.

In contrast, long-term memory holds information indefinitely.

Please note: Short-Term-Memory is also sometimes referred to as primary, active and Working Memory, but there are differences in all these definitions. Short-term memory should be distinguished from Working Memory as it is vastly more complicated and will be discussed further in this topic.

By the way, are you still thinking about cheese? I thought not; I told you so!

"Short-term memory is related to the primary memory of James (1890) and is a term that Broadbent (1958) and Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) used in slightly different ways. Like Atkinson and Shiffrin, I take it to reflect the faculties of the human mind that can hold a limited amount of information in a very accessible state temporarily. One difference between the term “short-term memory” and “primary memory” is that the latter might be considered more restricted. It is possible that not every temporarily accessible idea is, or even was, in conscious awareness. For example, by this conception, if you are speaking to a person with a foreign accent and inadvertently alter your speech to match the foreign speaker’s accent, you are influenced by what was, until that point, an unconscious (and therefore uncontrollable) aspect of your short-term memory. One might relate short-term memory to a pattern of neural firing representing a particular idea. One might consider the idea in short-term memory only when the firing pattern, or cell assembly, is active (Hebb, 1949). The individual might be unaware of the idea during that activation period.

Working memory is not completely distinct from short-term memory. It is a term used by Miller et al. (1960) to refer to memory as it is used to plan and carry out behaviour. One relies on working memory to retain the partial results while solving an arithmetic problem without paper, to combine the premises in a lengthy rhetorical argument, or to bake a cake without making the unfortunate mistake of adding the same ingredient twice. (Your working memory would have been more heavily taxed while reading the previous sentence if I had saved the phrase “one relies on working memory” until the end of the sentence, which I did within my first draft; working memory thus affects good writing.) 'Working memory' became more dominant after Baddeley and Hitch (1974) demonstrated that a single module could not account for all temporary memory." - Nelson Cowan, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri.

LONG TERM MEMORY (THE PAST)

What happens to our old short-term memories? In other words, where do prior short-term memories go when attending to new short-term memories? According to research, most of our short-term memories decay or get displaced, e.g., they are pushed out of the STM store to make room for new short-term memories; the bottom line is that most are lost forever.

Thankfully, some of our STM data gets transferred to long-term memory stores. But what is long-term memory?

In short, long-term memory is the record of who we are as individuals and all we have learned; it is the backstory of our lives, personalities, experiences, and knowledge. Without LTM, we could not speak, identify objects or even walk. The world would be puzzling, chaotic and without meaning. We would relive the same moments over and over again. It would be akin to being a newborn baby where the world is without concept or schema.

Contrary to popular belief, the essence of who we are does not reside in our DNA but lives in our long-term memories - so if you are hoping to achieve eternal life by cloning or reincarnation, then you will be sadly disappointed. All you would achieve by cloning yourself is creating an identical (MZ) twin. And although MZ twins do share identical genes, they are, in fact, two distinct people with different autobiographical histories and memories. Likewise, if you end up being reincarnated after death but can’t remember your previous life and identity, then it is going to be a pretty unrewarding afterlife.

Besides, for all you know, you may have been reincarnated several times already. Still, if this is true, you won’t care about your past existences because if you can’t recall previous friends, relatives and experiences, then who are you?

Incidentally, this is why I didn’t rate the film The Matrix. if you saw it, do you remember when the traitor Cypher told Smith that he wanted to have his memory erased and be reinserted into the Matrix because "ignorance is bliss?” But Cypher would have achieved no more bliss being reinserted into the Matrix than being killed. If he did not remember his former existence, how could he benefit from the contented ignorance brought about by taking the blue pill? In reality, the blue Pill and death would have both achieved the same thing: termination of the former self.

By the way, all forms of Dementia are the brain’s inability to transfer short-term memories into long-term memories. Thus, long-term memory can be considered as the total of the self.

To sum up, if you can remember something that happened more than just a few moments ago, whether just hours ago or decades earlier, it is a long-term memory you accessed. Long-term memory also refers to the indefinite storage of memories during a lifetime. This type of memory tends to be stable and has a seemingly never-ending capacity.

Long-term memory can be subdivided into explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious).

See Types of Long-term Memory further down the page for more information on LTM.

MEMORY QUESTIONS

SENSORY MEMORY

Define sensory memory. What role does it play in processing sensory data?
Name the five types of sensory memory. How does each correspond to a sensory modality?
Why don’t humans consciously perceive all sensory input? How does the brain manage this constant influx of data?
Explain why sensory memory is described as high-resolution but brief. What happens to sensory information that is not attended to?
Which sensory memory is responsible for briefly holding visual information? What about auditory information?
What factors can affect the capacity and duration of sensory memory?

SHORT TERM MEMORY

7. One key difference between sensory and short-term memory is that:

a. Information in sensory memory fades in 1-2 seconds, while short-term memories last several hours.

b. Short-term memories can be described, while sensory memories cannot.

c. The quality and detail of sensory memory are far superior to those of short-term memory.

d. Sensory memory stores auditory information, while short-term memory stores visual information.

8. The simplest way to maintain information in short-term memory is to repeat the information in a process called:

a. Chunking
b. Rehearsal
c. Revision
d. Recall

An instructor gives her students a list of terms to memorise for their biology exam and immediately asks one student to recite them. Which terms will the student most likely recall?

a. The student won’t recall any terms because they have not used rehearsal to encode them.
b. Since there was no delay, the student will remember the terms at the end of the list (recency effect).
c. Since there was no delay, the student will remember the terms at the beginning of the list (primacy effect).
d. The student will recall only those items to which they have attached some meaning.

What is the function of short-term memory (STM)? How does it differ from sensory memory?

What is the average capacity of STM, and how much information can it hold?
Explain two ways information can be lost from STM.
In your own words, describe how attention plays a role in transferring sensory memory to STM.
How does rehearsal help maintain information in STM? Provide an example.
Which of the following bits of information would be the easiest to chunk and thus encode?
a.1982LOL
b. IEKFES
c. 278392
d. XYZZYX

Jamie wanted to contact his doctor. He looked up the number in his telephone directory. Before he dialled the number, he talked briefly with his friend. Jamie was about to phone his doctor but had forgotten the number.

10. Explain why Jamie forgot the number.

11. A mathematics teacher gives her students the following number memorise for their geometry exam and immediately asks one student to recite it.

The number is: 3.141592653589793

According to the primacy and recency effect, which will numbers will the student most likely recall?

a. The student won’t recall any terms because they have not used rehearsal to encode them.

b. Since there was no delay, the student will remember the terms at the end of the list (recency effect).

c. Since there was no delay, the student will remember the terms at the beginning of the list (primacy effect).

d. The student will recall only those items to which they have attached some meaning.

e. The students will remember numbers at the beginning because they are now in LTM and numbers at the end of the list because they are still in STM. The numbers in the middle would have been displaced.

LONG TERM MEMORY

12. What is the main difference between short-term and long-term memory?

13. Explain what happens to short-term memories that are not transferred to long-term memory.

14. In your own words, describe the role long-term memory plays in shaping who we are. Why is it considered the "record of the self"?

15. Why would the inability to transfer short-term memories to long-term memory result in conditions such as dementia?

FEATURES OF THE MEMORY STORES

Now that you have learned about the three types of memory, it is time to tell you about the features of each memory store. Memory store features are measured in capacity, duration and encoding (or coding, as AQA has now decided to call it). The main premise of this section is to prove that the three stores outlined above, e.g., SM, STM and LTM, are real and distinct from each other. More importantly, that memory is not a unitary module in the brain as previously thought before the 1960s.

You may have noticed from the specification that AQA wants you to learn the Multistore Model of Memory by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). This model was one of the first theories to suggest that memory was not a singular store in the brain and was made up of three multi-stores (hence its name). Atkinson and Shiffrin believed that if they could prove that the three stores were qualitatively different in capacity encoding duration, they would have evidence for their model. AQA wants you to learn the capacity, duration and encoding differences for SM, STM and LTM. There are two ways you can be examined regarding this. One is to answer short questions about each store's features, and the other is to use the research studies (findings and conclusions only) as A03 supporting evidence in a Multi Store Model essay.

Please note that I have included the aims, procedures, findings and conclusions (APFC) of all studies on capacity, duration and encoding for two reasons; firstly, students studying other specifications and examinations might be required to learn the APFC for A01. Secondly, even if AQA does not need the aims and procedures of these studies in A01, knowing the full research details is still helpful.

CAPACITY

How much information can Memory hold?

CAPACITY RESEARCH IN STM - APFC A01

Miller (1956) Experimental cognitive psychology research

In psychology and neuroscience, memory span is the name given to STM capacity

Memory span is the longest list of items a person can repeat back in correct order immediately after a presentation on 50% of all trials. Items may include words, numbers, or letters.

Another way in which capacity can be tested is the recency effect. We usually remember the last numbers on a list to be recalled because the last numbers are still being rehearsed in our short-term memory.

Miller’s Magic Number 7

According to research, most individuals can store between 5 and 9 items in their short-term memory. This idea was put forward by Miller (1956), who called it the magic number 7. He thought that short-term memory could hold seven plus or minus two items) because it only had a certain number of “spaces” in which items could be stored. It is also called Miller's Law, despite Miller calling the figure "little more than a joke" Cowan (2001) suggests that a more realistic figure is 4±1 items.

Evidence from various studies supports Miller’s theory, such as Jacobs’s (1887) digit span test. This used every letter in the alphabet and numbers apart from w and seven because they had two syllables. He found out that people find it easier to recall numbers rather than letters. The average span for letters was 7.3, and for numbers, it was 9.3. He postulated that this was because there were only nine numbers but 26 letters.

It seems strange that so many A’level texts use Jacobs (1887) as a research study for Miller (1956) as theories are supposed to predate the research! Maybe it should be called “ Jacob’s magic number 7 or Jacob’s law?

BEFORE WE LEAVE THE TOPIC OF STM CAPACITY, YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT

CHUNKING:

ACTIVITY: MEMORISE THE FOLLOWING DIGITS FOR ONE MINUTE AND THEN WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU REMEMBER: ITVBBCSTMLTMLOLBRBGSH

Unless you are a savant, that should have been hard, as it exceeds STM's 7+ or 2-digit capacity.

Now try breaking those 21 digits into meaningful chunks, e.g., ITV, BBC STM LTM LOL BRB GS FOR ONE MINUTE AND WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU REMEMBER.

That should have been much easier to memorise as the information was chunked into more meaningful units & didn’t exceed the critical 7+ or -2 marker.

What is chunking in STM?

Chunking refers to taking individual pieces of information and grouping them into larger units. Miller didn’t specify the amount of information that can be held in each slot, so if we can “chunk” similar information together, we can store much more information in our short-term memory. Probably the most common example of chunking occurs in phone numbers, e.g., 07781384778 is easier to remember as 0778 1384778

Grouping items into chunks of 3 can enhance short-term memory capacity, especially if the chunks are meaningful to the individual, e.g., STM and LTM are only meaningful to psychology students.

EVALUATION

Since the research by Jacobs and then Miller, it has been discovered that STM's storage capacity depends on the information being stored. For instance, the digit span is lower for long words than for short words. Generally, the memory span for verbal content (digits, letters, words, etc.) strongly depends on the time it takes to speak aloud. Certainly, digit spans are higher in languages where numbers and letters have fewer syllables (English and Mandarin), but in languages with more syllables, e.g., Arabic, the memory span is shorter.

Some researchers have therefore proposed that the limited capacity of short-term memory for verbal material is not a "magic number" but rather a "magic spell," i.e. a time.

Baddeley used this finding to theorise that one component of his model of working memory, the phonological loop, is capable of holding around 2 seconds of sound.

CAPACITY RESEARCH IN LTM - APFC A01

IMPOSSIBLE TO TEST.

Think about it!

You can’t experimentally test for this as it involves intentionally overfilling a participant’s head with memories. How could you even design such a study? Besides, it would take a lifetime. And It would be mind-blowingly boring for the participant. Could a person’s long-term memory drive (store) become full? It isn’t very likely.

CAPACITY QUESTIONS

Most PIN codes are four digits long and are easy to remember. In contrast, mobile phone numbers are 11 digits long. Most people would not be able to remember a friend’s new mobile phone number unless they could say it to themselves several times without interruption.

DURATION

How long do Memories last?

DURATION RESEARCH IN STM- APFC A01

PETERSON & PETERSON

Experimental cognitive psychology research

Aim

To investigate the duration of short-term memory.

Lloyd and Margaret Peterson aimed to test the hypothesis that information which is not rehearsed is lost quickly from short-term memory

Procedure

A lab experiment was conducted in which 24 participants (psychology students) had to recall trigrams (meaningless three-consonant syllables), such as TGH and CLS.

The trigrams were presented one at a time and had to be recalled after intervals of 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 seconds, respectively, for each trial. No two successive trigrams contained any of the same letters.

After hearing a trigram, participants were asked to count backwards in threes or fours from a specified random number until they saw a red light appear (then they recalled the trigram). This is known as the brown Peterson technique, which aimed to prevent rehearsal.

The independent variable was the time interval between hearing the experimenter say the trigram and the participant recalling the trigram (after seeing a red light), e.g. 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 seconds.

The dependent variable was the number of trigrams correctly recalled by the participants after every trial. There were six trials in total.

Findings

Their results showed that the longer each student had to count backwards, the less well they could recall the trigram accurately.

After 3 seconds, 80% of the trigrams were recalled correctly.
After 6 seconds, this fell to 50%.
After 18 seconds, less than 10% of the trigrams were recalled correctly.

DURATION RESEARCH IN LTM- APFC A01

Bahrick (1975) Field experiment

Bahrick investigate the duration of long-term memory using 392 American university graduates. The graduates were shown photographs from their high-school yearbook and for each photograph participants were given a group of names and asked to select the name that matched the photographs.

Bahrick found that 90% of the participants were able to match the names correctly and faces 14 years after graduation, and 60% were able to match the names correctly and faces 47 years after graduation. Bahrick concluded that people could remember certain types of information, such as names and faces, for almost a lifetime. These results support the multi-store model and the idea that our long-term memory has a lifetime duration (at least 47 years) and is semantically encoded.

Evaluation:

Bahrick’s research used a sample of 392 American university graduates and lacked population validity. Psychologists cannot generalise the results of Bahrick’s research to other populations, for example, students from the UK or Europe. As a result, we cannot conclude whether other populations would demonstrate the same ability to recall names and faces after 47 years.

Furthermore, Bahrick found that the accuracy of long-term memory was 90% after 14 years and 60% after 47 years. His research is unable to explain whether long-term memory becomes less accurate over time because of limited duration or whether long-term memory gets worse with age. This is important because psychologists cannot determine whether our long-term memory has an unlimited duration (like the multi-store model suggests), which is affected by other factors, such as getting old, or whether our long-term memory has a limited duration.

Finally, it could be argued that Bahrick’s study has high levels of ecological validity as the study used real-life memories. In this study, participants recalled real-life information by matching pictures of classmates with their names. Therefore, these results reflect our memory of real-life events and can be applied to everyday human memory.

DURATION QUESTIONS

Describe one way in which psychologists have investigated the duration of short-term memory. In your answer, you should include details of stimulus materials used, what participants were asked to do and how duration was measured. Four marks

ENCODING

How do Memories enter the brain?

Some students struggle with the concept of what encoding means. Basically, it means what form of code does information enter the STM or LTM memory store, e.g., :

Acoustic: Did the memory encode by sound/being heard, as in someone telling you something?

Visual: Was the memory encoded by sight/seeing something, as in seeing a face?

Semantic: Did the memory encode by meaning/gist, as in being able to repeat a story, theory or gossip in your own words as opposed to repeating it word for word? For example, most of us know the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood”, and if asked to retell the story, we would not do it verbatim because we would find it impossible to learn everything we heard by syntax (Syntax describes the correct order of words). Rather, we would learn the gist (or semantics /meaning) and retell our rendition or understanding of Little Red Riding Hood.

Lastly, semantics can almost be likened to synonyms, e.g., synonyms for the colour red are scarlet, crimson, vermilion, ruby, cherry, cerise, cardinal, carmine, wine-coloured, claret, blood red, flame, flaming, coral, cochineal, rose, rosy. etc

Incidentally, semantics are a good measure to test whether or not you understand something you have learned in class because if you can not write up a theory in your own words and need to copy the syntax from a textbook, then this should alert you to the fact that you do not understand the theory. Therefore, it is unlikely to get stored in your LTM.

By the way, Alexa, Siri, and Google don’t understand a word you type or say because they operate on syntax, not semantics, so if they can’t find an exact match to your search, they will not look for contextual clues or make the best guess as they are programmed to just search for matching words or phrases which is why you often get thrown results that don’t match your question. Humans who genuinely understand semantics don’t work like this. Suppose you ask a human, “What is that Oobodoba in the sky? The curved one, and made of strips of colour in red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet” Despite Oobodoba being a made-up word, the person you asked could likely glean from the description that you’re giving that it is a rainbow, this is also an example of semantics.

ENCODING RESEARCH IN STM & LTM - APFC A01

Research into encoding in STM & LTM
Baddeley (1966) Experimental cognitive psychology

Aim:

To explore the effects of acoustic and semantic coding in short-term memory and long-term memory

Procedures;

In the STM study, participants were asked, immediately after the presentation, to recall, in serial order, a list of five words taken from a pool of words in the following categories.

-acoustically similar words, (e.g. man, mad, map): Words that sound the same
-acoustically dissimilar words (e.g. pen, day few): Words that sound different
-semantically similar words (e.g. great, big, large): Words that have the same meaning
-semantically dissimilar words (e.g. hot, old, late): Words that have a different meaning

In the LTM study, each list of words was extended to ten, and recall was tested after twenty minutes.

Findings;

Words with similar sounds were much harder to recall using STM than words with dissimilar sounds.
The similarity of meaning had only a very slight detrimental effect on STM
When participants recalled from LTM, the recall was much worse for semantically similar words than for semantically dissimilar words
Recall from LTM was the same for acoustically similar and acoustically dissimilar words

Conclusions;

STM relies heavily on acoustic coding
LTM primarily makes use of semantic coding

Criticisms:

The use of the experimental method allows a causal link to be drawn between type of coding used in STM and LTM and the accuracy of recall, since it allows the control of extraneous variables, high in Validity and Reliability.

It is scientific in it’s approach, which also adds credibility to the research

The conclusions of this study may not reflect the complexities of encoding. Evidence from other studies shows that, in certain circumstances, both STM and LTM can use other forms of coding.

ENCODING QUESTIONS

1.Identify the main type of coding used in each of the following components of the multi-store model of memory. 2 marks

Short term memory
Long term memory

2.In an investigation into memory, participants were presented with two different lists of words. Research has suggested that the encoding and capacity of short-term memory are different from the encoding and capacity of long-term memory.

3.Explain what is meant by coding. 2 marks

After seeing the lists, participants were tested on their ability to recall the words. When tested immediately, participants found recalling the words from List A in the correct order more difficult.

When tested after 30 minutes, participants found recalling the words from List B in the correct order more difficult.

4. Using your knowledge of coding in memory, explain these findings. 4 Marks

5. Complete the missing parts of the table A, B, C and D about features of the multi-store memory model. 4 Marks

The following are all concepts relating to memory:

A  Duration
B  Capacity
C  Encoding
D  Retrieval.

6.In the table below, write which one of the concepts listed above (A, B, C or D) matches each definition. 2 marks

A researcher investigated coding in short-term memory using the same participants in both conditions.

In the first condition, he read out a list of 10 different sounding words.
In the second condition, he read out a list of 10 similar sounding words.
The researcher recorded how many words participants recalled correctly in each condition.

The table below shows the results of his study.

7.What do the mean values in the table suggest about coding in short-term memory? Justify your answer. 2 marks

A SUMMARY OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SM STM AND LTM