Summary: Cognitive

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• 1 Cognitive Booklet

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• What patients data also provides supporting evidence for the multi-store model?

  HM and Clive Wearing both have brain damage which led to anterograde amnesia. After they had brain damage neither of them could form new long term memories. Both of them had functioning short term memories, but they could not rehearse information for it to pass into the long term memory. This provides evidence that the stores are completely separate and that one can function without needing the other. This evidence is also ecologically valid because it comes from a real life example.

• What specific evidence was found for the duration of the STM?

  Peterson and Peterson 1959 - They showed that the STM was limited to 20 seconds duration and without rehearsal the information decays. When recalling a list of trigrams 80% were recalled after 3 seconds but only 10% were recalled after 18 seconds. It could be argued that this is not ecologically valid because trigrams are made up of nonsense words that you would not find in real life.

• What is the case study of KF?

  KF suffered brain damage in a motorcycle accident, and unlike HM and Clive Wearing he has a fully functioning long term memory but an impaired short term memory he could only remember 2 chunks of information rather than 7+-2. This suggests that the model is flawed because it would say that you need to rehearse information in the STM for it to get to the LTM so you would expect his LTM to also be impaired by this but it is not.

• Why can we not generalise tasks used to verify the MSM?

  Because they are often artificial and are unlike tasks that you come across in everyday life, therefore lacking ecological validity, so they should be generalised to the population with caution.

• What has the multi store model been criticised for overall?

  Being simplistic and presenting a limited explanation of the memory. The model cannot explain why were remember highly emotional events in flashbulb memories with little or no rehearsal.

• What is the visuo-spatial sketchpad?

  It deals with visual and spatial information, and allows us to understand where we are in regards to our environment.

• What is the episodic buffer?

  It was added in by Baddeley in 2000, it acts as a back up store that communicates with both long term and short term memory, and it was introduced when the model was failing various tests.

• How does the case study of KF help to support the working memory model?

  He suffered brain damage in a motorbike accident, and his short term memory became impaired but it was mostly for visual information, his verbal information was fine, and this provides evidence for the fact that there are different components, one for visual(visuo-spatial sketchpad) and one for verbal (phonological loop).

• How did Baddeley and Hitch provide evidence for the visuo-spatial sketchpad?

  They asked participants to mentally trace a capital F and to follow a beam of light at the same time, and there performance was poor, but they could do it separately which supports the idea of different stores.

• What did Lieberman 1980 say regarding the visuospatial sketchpad?

  That there should be separate stores within it, one for visual and one for spatial awareness because blind people have excellent spatial awareness, but they cannot see anything therefore there should be different stores.