- Processing Speed and Capacity: different due to the speed at which they process information and their ability to stretch the capacity of their STM
- Miller: magic number 7 – we can hold 7 plus or minus 2 items of information in STM
- Chunking: grouping together connected items so that they can be processed or stored together as single concepts, increasing the capacity of STM
- McDougall and Alloway (as above) support chunking
- Digit Span: memory span and capacity of STM
- Schema: file of information based on our past experiences
- How we perceive an object or event is strongly influenced by our past experiences, knowledge gained, attitudes and beliefs
- Reconstructive memory criticised for lacking ecological validity as it should be testing your prior knowledge, not knowledge learnt in a lab
- Steyvers and Hemmer (2012): wanted to see if they could create a more ecologically valid study. Asked ppts what they would expect to see in 5 different scenes (kitchen, office, hotel etc.) and measured this against a control group who were asked to look at the scenes in pictures and describe it. When the study is asking about more realistic information memory recall is good
- Episodic Memory: a memory of an event or significant moment in your life
- Palombo (2012): conducted a survey of autobiographical memory assessing individual differences in naturalistic autobiographical memory. Considered the following:
- Episodic
- Semantic
- Spatial: remembering way around an area after visiting
- Prospective: imaging events in the future and picturing it clearly
- Questionnaire contained 102 items, ppts scored on a 5 point Likert Scale
- High/low score on episodic showed same high/low score on semantic, so we either have a good or poor memory recall, regardless of memory style
- Found men scored higher on spatial memory
Individual Differences:
- Dyslexia
- Age
- Gender
- Episodic Memory
- Schemas