University of Leicester
Year 1 Psychology
Learning and Memory
Professor Graham Davies
Lecture 3
Copies of Overheads
Memory and the Cognitive Shift
The Cognitive Shift :
1910 - 1960
• Interest in learning to the exclusion of
memory, particularly in the USA
• Serial learning and paired-associate
learning
• Nonsense syllables – not stories or
events
• ‘Verbal learning’ – not memory
The Cognitive Shift:
1940 – Present Day
• Applied researchers re-discover memory
as an issue
• Memory and job performance
(Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge)
• Active versus passive learning
• Memory and amnesia
The tragic story of
Clive Wearing
• Autobiographical memory
• Semantic memory
• Procedural memory
• Short-term vs. long-term memory
The short/long term memory
distinction
• Memory span (Miller 1956)
- “Magical number seven plus or
minus two”
• Rates of forgetting
- in long-term memory (Ebbinghaus 1885)
- in short-term memory
(Peterson & Peterson 1959)
• in sensory memory
(Sperling, 1960)
The ‘modal model’ of memory
(Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968)
• Structure and control processes
• Applied to primacy and recency
effects (Murdoch, 1967)