Duration of LTM

Today we started discussing LTM and the difference between recognition and recall. It is likely that most long-term memories need some sort of cue or trigger to be recalled. Bahrick et al used memories from high school to test the visual and verbal LTM of 400 participants, and found good evidence for the life-time duration of these memories, thought there was some decline. Interestingly, names were recalled better than faces, and recognition was always better than free recall.

Today's ppt is here. After every lesson (I won't always remind you) you need to find the relevant section in your textbook and the memory booklet and use these resources to annotate your class notes.

We then went on the discuss the nitty gritty of how psychologist 'do' research, ie research methods. This will be a familiar strand throughout your two years of studying Psychology. I handed out booklets (electronic version here) which need to be brought to every lesson. I will source some floppy folders to keep them safe. We discussed aims, hypotheses and variables. The mini-sheet on hypotheses is here.

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