Tick three of the boxes to indicate which of the following features relate to short-term memory.

A. Encoding is mainly acoustic

B. Duration is up to a lifetime

C. Unlimited capacity

D. Duration can be extended by rehearsal

E. Capacity is limited to five to nine items

F. Encoding is mainly semantic

Long Term MemoryWhat do we keep here?

Capacity of the LTM

Capacity (amount of information which may be stored) of the long-term memory is

unknown.

It is impossible to measure and may be limitless.

The brains ability to store information is greater than the worlds most powerful

computer memory.

There is evidence, however, that items are not stored haphazardly but are

organised using hierarchies, networks and schemas – CLIVE WEARING

Duration of the LTM

Information is thought to be stored permanently- for your entire lifetime. It is now

thought possible that some memories may be genetically inherited and therefore

last longer than a lifetime.

The issue with duration in long-term memory relates to recall and forgetting.

Bahrick (1975) on the duration of LTM.

They wanted to investigate the duration of very-long-term memory (VLTM). They wanted to demonstrate that memories could endure in order to support the assumption that the duration of the LTM is infinite. They aimed to test the duration by testing recall of real-life information.

Participants included 392 American ex-high school student aged 17-74.

Recall was tested in four ways using 130 pictures from each year book:

1. Free recall of the names of as many of their former classmates as possible.2. A photo recognition test where they were asked to identify former classmates in a set

of 50 photos, only some of which were their classmates.3. A name recognition test.4. A name and photo matching test.

This tested VLTM as time since departing high school varied, for some it was as long as 57 years. It was assessed by comparing their responses with high school year books, which contain all of the names and photos of the students in that year.

The percentage recall was:

90% accuracy in NAME RECOGNITION after 14 YEARS

80% accuracy for NAME RECOGNITION after 25 YEARS

75% accuracy for NAME RECOGNITION after 34 YEARS

60% accuracy for NAME RECOGNITION after 47 YEARS

60% accuracy for FREE RECALL after 7YEARS

20% accuracy for FREE RECALL after 47 YEARS

Findings show that classmates are rarely forgotten once recognition cues have

been given. This supports the claim that people have very long term memories.

These findings also show that recognition was better than recall. It

demonstrates that VLTM exists for particular types of information, but it cannot be

concluded that it exists for all types of information

Your Task

• Complete the template of Bahrick’s research in your booklets – you can use pg 87 of textbooks

• Provide some evaluative points

Factors affecting the duration of LTM

• Childhood AmnesiaWhat’s your earliest memory?

• How duration is measuredPeople are better at recognition than recall

• Thorough LearningBahrick (1991) Study for longer – remember more, even up to 55 years later

Encoding in the LTM

Much of the research into encoding in the LTM is focussed on SEMANTIC processing. That is the LTM encodes according to meaning.

Baddeley (1966) provided research that supports the idea that encoding is done by semantics.

Acoustically similar words (e.g man, mad, map) Acoustically dissimilar words (e.g pen, day, few)Semantically similar words (e.g great, big, large)Semantically dissimilar words (e.g hot, old, late)

Findings:

• recall was much worse for semantically similar words then for semantically dissimilar words.

• Recall from LTM was the same for acoustically similar and acoustically dissimilar words.

Conclusions:

•LTM primarily makes use of semantic coding.

Recall was tested after an interval of 20 minutes.

Your Task

• Complete the gapfill in your booklet on Baddeley’s research

Factors Affecting Encoding

• Do you think LTM only encodes semantically? Why?

– Material can be represented in other ways as well – type of stimulus material can affect the way we encode in LTM.

• Examples: Acoustic? Visual? Gustatory? Olfactory? Procedural?

• Tasks:1)Complete the table in your booklets2) Plan an answer to the following question: