BPS Research Digest

Happy New Year to you all.

The British Psychological Society produce an excellent blog summarising the latest findings in Psychology - the address is here: https://digest.bps.org.uk/

You can also sign up to a weekly email here which summarises the research for you - this is a brilliant way to keep in touch with up to date research and generally makes for fascinating reading. Highly recommended.

Age & anxiety & EWT

Age & eyewitness are two big factors that affect the reliability of eyewitness testimony. We discussed a number of studies today, you need only to be able to summarise them, and then evaluate them as a whole.

Today's ppt is here and this is all well covered in the textbook. 

Types of long-term memory

Today we discussed types of long-term memory, partly derived by Tulving to offset the criticism that the multi-store-model is too simplistic. Procedural memories are how to do things ie ride a bicycle, semantic memories  are memories for facts and knowledge and episodic memories are memories for personal events.

Evidence for these three types of memories comes largely from the study of brain-injured patients who have deficits in one of these areas of memory and not another e.g HM, whose procedural memory was OK but whose semantic memory was severely damaged.

Today's ppt is here. The handout with research evidence is here. 

Evaluating the MSM

Today we polished off the Multi-Store-Model by evaluating it and discussing it's strengths and weaknesses. It is important that you are able to use the supporting/opposing evidence (Glanzer & Cunitz, case-studies etc) really well, and explain what their implications are for the model.

Today's ppt is here. 

Stats and the MSM

This week we've covered descriptive statistics (ppt here) and the multi-store model of memory (ppt here).

You need to know how to calculate the mean, mode, median and range. We went through through how to calculate the standard deviation, but you wouldn't ever have to do this in full. Don't stress if Maths isn't your strong point; the important thing is that you know what the standard deviation is (a measure of the spread of the data about the mean) and when it is used. 

Descriptive statistics

Today we looked at some descriptive statistics - ways to describe data. We defined the mean, mode and median and practised calculating them, including on an exam paper. Today's ppt is here.

Please do comment on the blog if you see any interesting articles/films/TV articles relating to Psychology. 

Capacity and Encoding

Today we discussed classic research into the capacity of STM - Jacobs & Miller. We replicated the digit span technique in class.

The capacity of LTM is understood to be unlimited.

We also looked at how information is stored in memory - this is called Coding. We looked over the Baddeley (1966) study into coding in STM and LTM.

The capacity ppt is here and the encoding ppt is here.