Outline and Evaluate the Working Memory Model

POSSIBLE PSYCHOLOGY QUESTIONS – UNIT 1

MEMORY

1. OUTLINE AND EVALUATE THE WORKING MEMORY MODEL

The working memory model was developed by Baddley and Hitch. It consists of the central executive which deals with information-processing tasks and decision making. This is supported by two temporary storage slave systems; the phonological loop and the visuo-spacial sketchpad.

The phonological loop holds verbal information in a speech based format and contains the articulatory control which acts as an ‘inner voice’ and circulates information and the phonological store which acts as an ‘inner ear’ as it holds spoken words for a few seconds. Evidence for this store includes Baddley’s test where people remembered short words best as it took them less than 1.5 seconds to say the word.

The visuo-spatial sketchpad holds visual and/or special information. In contains the visual cache which stores information about form and colour and the inner scribe which handles spatial information and transferral to the central executive. Evidence for this store includes Baddleys test whereby people had trouble following a beam of light with a pointer while describing the angles of a hollowed out shape as they both required the visuo-spatial sketchpad.

        In evaluation, it was commended as it didn’t show rehearsal as being the only means of transferral and there was plenty of evidence as even brain scans show different activation when using each component and KF’s case study supports the idea that Short term memory has multi store.

However, it only concerns itself with short term memory and doesn’t fully explain how short term memory links with long term memory, and some studies have found that you can listen to classical music and still read even though they both would need to use the phonological loop.

1. OUTLINE AND EVALUATE THE MULTI STORE MODEL OF MEMORY.

Atkinson and Shiffrin developed this model. It makes a distinction between the separate stores of sensory, short term and long term memory. It sees short term memory and long term memory as unitary stores in which information is passes between in a linear way and rehearsal is needed.

Sensory memory has a very short duration and so information in this store that is given attention to is passed into short term memory.

Short term memory has a limited capacity of 7 +/- 2 chunks as found by Miller through the ‘digit-span-technique’, it also has a limited duration as Peterson and Peterson found that when remembering 3 letters and counting backwards in threes the longer time the person was counting backwards the less they would remember the letters. Short term memory encodes acoustically as found by Conrad when people found it harder to remember words that sound the same.

Long term memory has an unlimited capacity. It also has an unlimited duration as Bahrick found that even years after collage people were still able to remember the names of their classmates. It encodes semantically as Baddely found people had trouble remembering words that had similar meanings.

        In evaluation, the case study of HM supports the idea of differences in capacity, encoding and duration between the stores as he was unable to retain new information but has digit span was normal, also  the case study of KF who had an impaired short term memory by an intact long term memory.

However, it is over simplified, doesn’t deal with the actual nature of the information and how people can have flash-bulb memories that skip the short term memory rehearsal, the study on Clive Wearing who lost episodic but not procedural memory suggests there’s more than one type of long term memory.

1. How do studies demonstrate that short-term memory and long-term memory are different?

A case study of KF showed an impaired STM but an unaffected LTM. Squire studied brain scans and found that different parts of the brain are active during LTM tasks and during STM tasks. It has also been found in studies into the capacity, duration and encoding of each store that these features are different for the different stores such as Peterson and Peterson who found that short term memory has a limited duration while Bahrick found the duration of long term memory to be relatively permanent. However, there could be a suggestion that the stores aren't so separate as, for example, it is easier to remember 'BBC' than some random letters such as 'DHY' because the stores are linked and so short term memory must retrieve the remembering of 'BBC' from the long term memory.

1. Outline and evaluate research into the effects of age of witnesses on accuracy of eyewitness testimony. 

There has been research into the effects of both old age and young age on the accuracy of EWT. 

As for young children, Poole and Lindsey experimented on children and found then when told to watch a science experiment and then later read a story of the experiment which included both true and extra information many of the young children had incorporated the new information into their account. Flin also found that when questioning both adults and children one day after the event both their recall was fine but after 5 months the children showed poorer recall. Parker and Carranza found that when showing both children and adults 50 pictures of suspects when the suspect was not present many of the children still simply just chose someone. Warren found that children were more likely to be influenced by leading questions than adults.

As for old people, Yarmey found that when asking elderly people about a knife attack 80% forgot to mention the knife. Cohen and Faulkner found that older people were more susceptible to misleading information and made more recall errors. Anastasi and Rhodes found evidence for own age bias as recognition rates were better if the suspects were the same age as the witness. 

In evaluation, there is a lack of ecological validity in many of the studies as they were laboratory studies such as Poole and Lindsey's. However, in their defence it could be seen as not lacking ecological validity as the participants (the children) did not know they were talking part in a study so believed it to be real. The problem with studies such as Flin's is that it was a real life situation and so there could have been a lack of control with could have affected the internal validity. In some studies there also could have been ethical issues as subjecting people even to a staged knife attack could potentially be stressful. The final problem is that of individual differences. Some elderly people may have poorer eyesight than young adults so their recall is bound to seem worse but it is simply only because they have not seen the event properly in the first place.

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