Process speed: ppl complete tasks at different times & speeds, likely due to speed they can process information & ability to stretched capacity of STM. Use of chunking to expand capacity of STM, Miller proposed magic number of 7 (can hold + or – 2 pieces in STM) by grouping together items so they can be processed & stored together.
Alloway – Children with dyslexia have difficulty processing & remembering speech sounds (poor WMM) & cannot hold speech sound long enough for WMM to bind them to form a word. Studied 46 children aged 6-11 with reading difficulties finding they had STM deficiencies.
MacDougall – Divided 90 children into poor, moderate & good reading ability & sig lower memory spans with slower reading rate. Good readers can articulate words quickly & have more words represented phonologically in STM. Poor readers have words move slowly to STM.
Age: Age & digit span help process. Digit span is capacity of STM without rehearsal. Sebastian & Henendez-Gil found digit span increased with age, 5 yr old had digit span at 3.76, while 17 yr old at 5.91 in Spanish children.
Schemas: How we perceive an object or an event is based on Individuals interpretation based on our past experiences, attitudes and knowledge gained. Reconstructive memory suggests we all have schema’s which are influenced by our experience.
Bartlett’s war of the ghosts found that we use schema’s to fill in the gaps to suit our norms as people confabulate canoes instead of boats & story became more simplified.
Steyvers & hemmer wanted to create more ecological way to test schemas & asked ppts what they would expect to see in 5 different scenes & measured it against a control group who were asked to look at scene & describe it. Found when study was more realistic information recall of memory was good.
Gender: we all have different episodic memories, ppls perspective of events are different so they will have different ways of seeing it when 2 ppl experience the same event.
Palombo: survey assessing ID in naturalistic Autobiographical memory by testing semantic, episodic, spatial & perspective memory. Questionnaire contained 102 items which ppts scored pm a 5 point Likert scale. Findings suggest those scoring high or low on episodic scored same on semantic. Either good or bad memory recall
Men scored higher on spatial memory, supporting research that males have stronger spatial ability & can perform these tasks better than females. This is because men prefer to rely heavily on right side of the brain which has more spatial awareness (unilateral).