Cognitive Booklet. 48 good questions, nicely answered!

What are some overall weaknesses of the WMM?

That a lot of evidence gathered is from case studies of those with brain damage, and this may make it difficult to generalise because they may have trouble remembering things anyway. Also a lot of the tasks used are artificial and so lack ecological validity so also may need to be generalised with caution.

How do brain scans support the theory of episodic and semantic memory?

When people are using different types of memory different areas of their brain will light up with activity in brain scans. For example Episodic memory is linked to increased activity in the hippocampus and the prefrontal lobes in the left hemisphere whereas semantic memory is linked with activity in the temporal lobe.

How does HM support Episodic and Semantic memory?

HM had his hippocampus removed and had damage to his temporal lobes. He was unable to form new long term memories specifically episodic and semantic ones. This supports the idea that the brain areas are linked to the different types of memory and so they are separate.

What did Irish et al find that provides further evidence for separate stores?

In Alzheimer's patients they are more likely to remember events from a long time ago such as their wedding which is episodic memory but they cannot often remember names of objects such as a keyboard and what that means which shows that they are separate.

What are the pro's and cons of using brain damaged patients?

It has ecological validity because they are real life scenarios, however there are individual differences and people with brain damage are more likely to react differently to people without brain damage, and this means you cannot generalise the findings as easily.

What are the overall weaknesses of episodic and semantic memory?

By regarding E and S as separate systems you are not allowing for any relationship between the stores, because clearly they can work together, because when remembering word lists, words have a semantic meaning, and can have an episodic meaning such as when and where they were learnt.
Also using word lists is not reliable because it does not take guesses into account, and if someone makes an informed guess then it would be coming from semantic and not episodic.

Why did Bartlett choose War on the Ghosts?

It was culturally unfamiliar so he could examine the transformations in the story.
It lacked any rational story order.
The dramatic nature of the story encouraged visual imagery.
The conclusion was supernatural and Bartlett wanted to see how people would react to this.

What was the procedure and results of War of the Ghosts experiment?

Twenty participants read the story through twice. They then recalled it after several seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years. 6 and a half years. Bartlett found that it was shortened after every omission. Phrases used reflected modern concepts, the story also became more coherent in form. After 6 recall sessions it was reduced from 330 words to 180. Transformations were made such as canoe to boat and hunting seals to fishing.

What theory did Bartlett propose to explain the results of War of the Ghosts.

Theory of reconstructive memory. This proposed that memory was reconstructive in nature, we don't remember all that we think we do, we draw upon previous knowledge in the form of schema's.

What is a schema?

A schema is a plan built upon past experiences of everyday life.

How can the theory of reconsturctive memory be applied to everyday life?

Loftus has done a lot of research into how eyewitness testimony is not reliable because people make things up and this theory supports this idea.
Critics have said Bartlett used the story because it was unusual to try and come up with evidence for his theory of schemas.
The tasks used to test it were artificial so it may lack validity.

What are the issues and debates of reconstructive memory?

Nature Nurture - our schemas are built upon past experiences and our culture which is all affected by our upbringing.
Comparisons - Can be made with other models and the types of encoding etc.
Psychology as a science - research with humans is complex and we may not be able to establish cause and effect conclusions about their behaviour.
Psychological knowledge within society - issues around the reliability of eyewitness testimony, this can be used to avoid miscarriage of justice.

What evidence does Mcdougall et al provide for dyslexia?

90 children into good readers, moderate readers and poor readers. Poor readers sounded out words slowly so there were less words in their short term memory. Poor readers had lower memory spans for words and slow reading rate.

What evidence does Alloway et al provide for dyslexia?

Believed it was poor working memory that caused dyslexia They can't hold all of the speech sounds for long enough in working memory to form a word. 46 kids aged 6-11 years with reading disability they showed short term working memory deficits that could cause their reading problems.

What does Smith-Spark et al believe about dyslexia?

Found adults with dyslexia had unimpaired spatial working memory but impaired verbal working memory compared to non-dyslexic participants which suggests the phonoloigcal loop may be causing problems with dyslexia.

What is Alzheimer's disease?

It is a degenerative disease It is the most common form of dementia and is most common at around 65 years of age but it can appear as early as 40.

How is Alzheimer's different to the normal ageing process?

The normal aging process results in a general loss of cognitive functioning, but Alzheimers seems to specifically deteriorate specific cognitive systems rather than the entire thing globally.

How does psychology link to Alzheimer's?

It deteriorates the memory system for new events, and also affects working memory so the central executive becomes impaired making complex tasks more difficult to co-ordinate and the visuospatial functioning also becomes impaired. The episodic memory also does not work very well, and brain matter depletes in the hippocampus and temporal cortex.

What did Baddeley do regarding research on Alzheimers'?

Did additional tests where Alzheimer's patients had to look for the letter Z among letters that did and did not look like the letter Z this is called a dual distractor task. They were also made to do a dual task procedure. They found the patients did worse on the distractor tasks and were even more impaired on the dual tasks. This suggests that is specifically impaired by Alzheimer's.

What are order effects?

Things that can affect the experiment, they an occur during repeated measures design they include Practice effect - become better at the task from repeating it and fatigue effect - becoming bored and tired so performance declines as they have to continue.

What does SOC MOI CHIN WORM stand for?

spearmans, ordinal, correlational,
mann whitney, ordinal, independent groups
Chi squared, independent measures, nominal
Wilcoxon, ordinal, repeated measures

What are the weaknesses of the HM and brain damaged patients case studies?

We cannot assume that the brain damage is the only factor contributing to the difficulties the person is having with information processing as there may be other issues affecting it.
Neuroimaging techniques may not be sensitive enough to pick up smaller damage sites such as mild traumatic brain damage, so conclusions made about memory processes may not be correct.
People with brain damage are unique and comparing them to each other is not fair, and we cannot generalise the findings of people with brain damage to the wider population.

Regarding brain damaged patients case studies how do we collect qualitative data?

It collects rich in depth and detailed data from individuals including feelings and emotions. In interviews they also respond to open ended questions.

How do we collect quantitative data from brain damaged patients?

scores on memory tests, and other tests such as brain scans produce quantitative data which can be statistically tested.

What is the case study of HM?

HM had surgery when he was 26 in 1953 to try and help his severe epilepsy they removed his MTL(medial temporal lobe) on both sides of his cerebral cortex, but this led to amnesia, he still had a functioning STM but he could not pass things from his STM into his LTM. It helped to show how the working memory functions as it is believed the MTL and the hippocampus are linked with short term memory difficulties.

What is the context of Baddeley 1966b and what happened in the other 2 experiments?

He carried out 3 experiments to seethe difference between the STM and the LTM.
Experiment 1 - Tried to test LTM using words on a tape recorder, but realised participants were also using their STM which was a confounding variable.
Experiment 2 - introduction of an interference task, cancelled out effects of STM so they were only using their LTM for recall. He changed it so that the word lists were presented on a slide show instead of a tape recording to help any participants who couldn't hear well.

What were the 4 word lists in Baddeley's experiment?

List A was acoustically similar words, man, cap,cab.
List B was acoustically dissimilar words, pit, few, cow.
List C was semantically similar words, great, large, big.
List D was semantically dissimilar words, good, huge, hot.

What design was Baddeley's study?

Independent groups. In list A there were 15, in list B there were 20, 16 in condition C and 21 in condition D. This meant there were 72 students in total.

What was the procedure of Baddeley?

In the testing stage words were presented in a set order, one word every 3 seconds by a slide projector, They had 40 seconds to write the words down in the correct order, this was repeated 4 times.
They then did an interference task in which they copied down digits, this was to make sure they were only using their LTM. In the retest stage P's were asked to write down as much of their 10 word list as they could remember in order. During this they were shown words on cards in different orders.

What were the results of Baddeley's 1966b experiment?

There were significant differences in recall between condition A and B, but words on the semantically dissimilar list (list D) were recalled more accurately than words on the semantically similar list (list C).

What were the conclusions of Baddeley?

LTM is different to STM as they both employ different encoding systems. STM using acoustic coding whereas LTM uses semantic coding.
STM is impaired by acoustic similarity whereas LTM is impaired by semantic similarity.

What were the strengths of Baddeley 1966b?

The use of controls, the words in the four lists were matched to the frequency of occurrence in everyday life. Also an interference task was used to make sure that it was only the LTM being used for recall and not STM. Cause and effect statements could be justified which increased the internal validity. Uses standardised procedure which allows replication so we can test the reliability. Quantitative data could be checked with statistical tests which makes sure it is significant. These sort of tests require no personal interpretation so are more scientific and rigorous.

What are the weaknesses of Baddeley 1966b?

Learning word lists is not similar to real life memory tests so cannot be generalised to real life which lowers the ecological validity.
The sample was narrow because they were all young and from a university so they would be smart, so it could be argued you cannot generalise it to the wider population.
Independent groups design may also lead to individual differences affecting the results in the 4 conditions. E.g. mood and attention level may have affected the DV.

What was the aim of Sebastian and Hernandez Gil?

To investigate the development of the phonological loop in children from the ages of 5-17.

How many volunteers were there for S+HG, where were they from and what design was it?

570, Madrid Spain and independent groups.

How were the participants tested in S+HG?

Participants were read increasing sequences of digits to recall, they were read out at one digit per second and they were increased at one digit per sequence.

What was the mean digit span for 5 year olds, 6-8 year olds, 9-11 year olds, 12-14 year olds, 15-17 year olds including standard deviation?

pre school - 5 year olds - 3.76 (.52)
6-8 y/o - 4.34 (.58)
9-11 y/o - 5.13 (.81)
12-14 y/o - 5.36 (.84)
15-17 y/o - 5.83(.84)

Frontotemporal dementia mean digit span?

4.22

Healthy older people mean digit span?

4.44

What was the summary conclusion for S+HG?

That digit span increases with age, the starting point being age 7 when children are able to sub-vocalise.

What is the generalisability like for S+HG?

it can be seen as high because it is a large sample of 570, so can be representative of wider society.
Although some people may argue that it is limited because all of the participants are from Madrid in Spain so it is not generalisable to other cultures.

Is S+HG reliable?

Yes because it is high in control, all of the digits read out at 1 per second so it can be easily replicated.

Is S+HG valid?

It has low ecological validity because a digit span memory test is not something that we would see in real life, so it is not representative.

What is the full conclusion of S+HG?

That it is useful because it allows us to understand the development of the phonological loop so we are able to help children who may have difficulties with learning written or spoken information.

How does the concept of episodic memory help patients with dementia?

Dementia patients are more likely to have problems with their episodic memory but they are also more likely to remember events that happened a long time ago better than ones that happened recently. So it helps us to understand that people with dementia may feel more comfortable talking about events that happened a long time ago.

How does the concept of short term memory help patients with dementia?

The MSM says that the STM has a duration of around 30 seconds and that it encodes information acoustically, so this has led psychologists to believe that family and carers should write things down for the patient to replace their STM. Also when asking questions they should try to be very specific and possibly use photographs to try and cue memories.

How does the concept of Working memory help patients with dementia?

The WMM suggests that is difficult to perform two visual tasks at the same time and two verbal tasks at the same time, so psychologists suggest that information should be presented without any background noise and with only one person speaking at once so that the information is easier for the person to process.

How is the concept of rehearsal helpful to dementia patients?

In dementia patients the area of the brain that allows information to be rehearsed has been damaged so they have to have things repeated to them. Psychologists say that family and friends should repeat things frequently and break down new activities, also keep visual aids around for things that need to be remembered, photographs, notice boards etc.

Cognitive Booklet

48 important questions on Cognitive Booklet