C. French was the senior lecturer in Psychology at goldsmiths college. Some very interesting concepts have come up.
The memory flow. Adapted from Atkins and Shiffrin, 1971
The 'working' memory concept as described in this book models the way in which we access, store and manipulate information for short periods of time.. There is a concept called the 'Central Executive' which utilises the 'Visio-Spatial Sketchpad' which 'is used for setting up and manipulating visual images' as well a the 'Articulatory Loop' which is a system that holds and utilises inner speech.
To explain the concept of the working memory further, the book gives the example of trying to count how many windows there are in your home (without physically doing it of course). Most people do this by forming a visual image of the house either from the inside or outside, and count how many there are. The visual-spatial sketchpad sets up and manipulates the image whilst the articulatory loop in involved in the process of sub vocal counting i.e. counting in your head and 'saying' them to yourself in your head.
Integrating this into the questionnaire could prove quite interesting. I want to include a question about how the test subjects decided on their most precious items, and also how they decided on their most precious people and how they might compare.
The final questionnaire in available here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/HTQN35W
There are a few quantitative questions at the start i.e. age. There is also a question about whether the subject is an only child: to balance this against whether they select a sibling as their choice to save from a burning building. There is also a set of multiple choice questions about how they came to this decision.
Below: Visualisation of the central executive and its relationship between the visual-spatial sketchpad and the articulatory loop. Interesting to see how the articulatory loop is defined as a separate entity to the sketchpad, separated by the central executive.
Below:
Memory: can be Semantic or Episodic (TULVING 1972).
Semantic: The conscious recollection of a personally experienced event i.e. meeting someone a year ago.
Episodic: memory or knowledge of the world i.e. how many inches there are in a foot.
Developing my area of interest/mediating lens: memories are 'lost' temporarily and permanently. How to retrieve them or should we retrieve them at all? Working title. Memory: Hidden in Plain Sight'. To explore further the loss that occurs between episodic and long term memory-what we select, how much influence the conscious decision to remember has on whether we remember things, emotional and historical significance.
Prospective and Autobiographical memory
Prospective: remembering to do things
Autobiographical: capacity to remember events in our own lives
Cross-referencing this with the definition of prospective memory from 'Memory in the Real World'-Gillian Cohen
Prospective memory: Stores intentions and plans. Remember to actually perform the intended actions and keep track of ongoing actions and of the actions we intend to carry out in the future.
Different people have different amounts of ability.
Case study: Older people seem to have a stronger autobiographical memory , but the evidence does not support this observation. Older people tend to 'remisce' more, so they bring forward memories to where they are quickly accessible on a regular basis. Younger people have been observed to think less about the past, are less nostalgic, so have a harder time recovering information from the past.
Case study: Older people are consistently more reliable than the young at remembering to make a phone call to the experimenter at a specific time of day. They live more structured lives, and therefore this may compensate for a possibly poorer memory.
There are various established techniques to conduct memory research. The next post will delve into these further.
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