aqa a level psychology memory essay plans

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AQA A-level Psychology Revision

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Long Term Memory ( AQA A Level Psychology )

Revision note.

Types of Long Term Memory

Long-term memory:, episodic memory.

• This is the part of LTM that relates to experiences a person has had or events from their life.
• A 16th birthday party
• The first time someone sees the sea
• Someone's first psychology lesson

Procedural memory

• This is the part of LTM involved in knowing how to do certain actions or skills
• Knowing how to ride a bicycle
• Knowing how to swim
• Knowing how to make a cup of tea

Semantic memory

• This is the part of LTM that involves knowing and recalling facts, concepts and meanings
• Knowing that Paris is the capital of France
• Knowing that the number 3 is between the numbers 2 and 4
• Knowing that the word 'bank' has two meanings: A place where money is stored, or the edge of a river

Capacity & Duration of Long-Term Memory

• Long Term Memory (LTM) is the part of the memory that holds information indefinitely, having a longer duration and larger capacity than Short Term Memory (STM)
• As far as is known, long-term memory has an unlimited capacity
• There is no way to test this as people often forget facts and information
• There has never been a known case of someone not being able to learn something new or retain a memory because their LTM is full

Duration of long-term memory

• Research from studies as well as anecdotal evidence suggests people can recall facts from childhood in their later life
• The duration of LTM is as long as a person’s lifetime
• The only time in a person’s life that may not be open for the recall is an early childhood
• Most people cannot recall episodes from their life before the age of two
• This known as Childhood or Infantile amnesia

Evidence for the duration of long-term memory

• Bahrick (1975) investigated the duration of LTM in several studies using a field study method
• One of his most famous experiments was asking 392 American graduates to identify people from their high school yearbook
• The participants were given a list of names and had to select the photograph that matched that name
• In some cases, the graduates were going back 47 years to their graduation and the yearbook photographs
• Those recalling from 14 years ago could accurately match the name to the face 90% of the time
• Those recalling from 47 years were accurate 60% of the time
• This suggests LTM lasts a lifetime as such strong recall after 47 years is not likely to fade too much a few decades later

  Evaluating research into duration and long-term memory

• Bahrick's study has good ecological validity as looking at old photographs and trying to recall names is a task most people do in real life
• However, Bahrick would have had less control over the variables in the study
• Some people may have had better recall as they were still in the same town and maybe still in contact with the people in the yearbook
• Others may have had poor recall as they never really knew the names of the people in the yearbook in the first place as they were less social in high school
• The study never really explains why recall becomes worse over time, is it a side effect of old age or that there is some limit to duration which impacts the memory as we get old and continue to make more memories

In the exam, never say the duration of memory is infinite or forever. Unless you have the power of immortality or are a vampire then it is limited to a lifetime.

Encoding Long Term Memory

What is encoding in long-term memory.

• Encoding is how the information is processed from the senses into the memory itself
• This is how the information will be stored and ultimately recalled
• Encoding is always in the form of a modality or one of the senses
• Long-term memory encodes semantically or by meaning
• We know this from a study by Baddeley (1966)

What is the evidence for encoding in long-term memory?

• Baddeley considered encoding in short-term memory and long-term memory but here we will look at LTM only
• Acoustically similar: words that sounded the same such as cat, bat, rat
• Acoustically dissimilar: words that did not sound the same such as laugh, bear, pencil
• Semantically similar:  words that mean the same such as large, huge, enormous
• Semantically dissimilar: words that do not mean the same such as police, computer, chair
• The words were all presented visually, on a screen as part of a slideshow
• They had to be recalled in the order presented: Free recall was not allowed
• For the long-term memory part of the experiment he asked for recall after 20 minutes
• He found the semantically similar words had the worst recall: Getting them in the correct order was incredibly difficult as they all meant the same thing
• There was no difference in LTM for the acoustically similar and dissimilar words
• From this, he concluded that LTM relied on semantic encoding to process information

How can we evaluate the research into encoding in long-term memory ?

• Once again, this is a lab experiment so is highly controlled, with extraneous variables taken care of
• However, this also means that it lacks ecological validity as the tasks do not relate to real life
• The words had little to no meaning for participants and so they were harder to recall
• Information that has to be recalled in reality often has meaning and significance, making recall easier

For encoding, there is a good chance you will be asked to discuss STM & LTM in the same question. Always try to revise the Baddeley encoding study in it's entirety

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Exemplar Essays for AQA A Level Psychology - Issues and Debates

17th October 2016

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In recent weeks we've had many requests for ‘sample essays’, so the tutor2u Psychology team has been working hard to get our new ‘Core Topic Essays’ resource ready for use. We have started with a topic which we know you all love – Issues & Debates – and have produced seven exemplar essays.

Each essay comes in two versions:

(1) With examiner style commentary

(2) Without examiner commentary, so that you can use these in your lessons.

You can download a sample of these essays here

These essays have been checked by examiners and although we are unable to say exactly what mark they would achieve (as there have been no real linear A Level Psychology exams yet), we are confident with the mark band and and that content is correct.

Also we have provided a mixture of mark band 4 and 3 essays so that students can see what they need to do to improve and what the difference is between these two levels.

The seven Issues & Debates Questions are: 1. Discuss gender bias in psychology. (16 marks) 2. Discuss cultural bias in psychology. (16 marks) 3. Discuss free will and determinism in psychology. (16 marks) 4. Describe and evaluate the nature–nurture debate in psychology. (16 marks) 5. Discuss holism and reductionism in psychology. (16 marks) 6. Discuss idiographic and nomothetic approaches to psychological investigation. (16 marks) 7. Discuss the ethical implications of research studies and theory, including reference to social sensitivity. (16 marks)

This resource will be published on 20 October 2016 and can be ordered here from our online store

A School Network Licence - which enables the digital and print distribution of the resource to all your students - costs just £35 (+VAT).

A discount on this price is available to teaching colleagues who are members of the AQA A Level Psychology Teacher Group on Facebook - a posting with the coupon code has been posted to the FB Group.

Joseph Sparks

Joseph is a Subject Advisor for Psychology at tutor2u. He is an experienced Psychology & Music Teacher, Writer, Examiner and Presenter. He is currently completing a Professional Doctorate in Education and is passionate about the impact of technology on teaching and learning.

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Aqa a level psychology

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Psychology Memory 16 Marker Example Essays Bundle

Subject: Psychology

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

19 August 2021

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This pack includes an example 16 mark essay response for each topic within the memory section of AQA psychology A-Level. These are written by myself at A/A* level (usually graded around 12-16 out of 16). In most of my answers I use the general structure of either 1 or 2 paragraphs of AO1 (description) and 4 paragraphs of AO3 (evaluation and issues and debates). Some may be structured differently due to the topic having more or less content than the others. In the cases where there are more paragraphs than required for a 16 mark question (around 6), you can choose the topics you feel comfortable discussing - I have simply provided example paragraphs for all of the options.

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FULL PSYCHOLOGY ESSAY BUNDLE

This bundle includes all of my AQA A-Level Psychology answers from a range of modules at the value of £69! (you would save over 50%)

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