AO3 Evaluation Lena is a junior doctor in a hospital A&E department. Recently a patient was admitted by ambulance and a paramedic handed him over with these words: ‘This is Sam, 25-year-old male, respiratory rate is 18, heart rate is 130, blood pressure 115 over 65, temperature 36.9, oxygen sats 96%, Coma Scale score is 13, administered 10 mg morphine 15 minutes ago.’ Lena repeated this information over and over to herself until she started treating Sam. Lena forgot Sam’s blood pressure but a nurse was able to remind her. Lena thought the morphine was administered 50 minutes ago. 1. Identify the memory store that Lena was using to remember the handover information. (1 mark) 2. Explain one reason why Lena forgot some of the information. (2 marks) 3. Explain one reason why Lena thought the paramedic said ‘50 minutes’ rather than ‘15 minutes’. (2 marks) 4. Describe one way in which the scenario illustrates the duration of Lena’s short-term memory. (2 marks) Apply it This topic is a goldmine of practical ways to improve your memory. The key for a student revising for exams is to improve long-term memory. The real skill, however, is not so much getting information into memory, but getting it out. We’ll have a lot more to say about this in later boosters. For now, bear in mind that longterm memory can be improved by organising the material you want to learn. For instance, use plenty of headings and bullet points at different levels. Organising material forces you to think about it more deeply, which is much better than simply reading or copying. REVISION BOOSTER What do Nelson Mandela and a sensory memory store have in common? That’s right, they’re both iconic. Key concept 1: Characteristics of three memory stores A1: Cognitive approach One strength is that knowledge of memory stores has practical applications. For example, researchers have found that a technique called ‘chunking’ increases the capacity of STM. 15 letters is more than double the average STM capacity, e.g. C A R D O G L I T P E N B U Y. But these letters can be reorganised into: CAR DOG LIT PEN BUY, which is five bigger items (‘chunks’), well within most people’s STM capacity. This shows how understanding the characteristics of memory stores can help to improve memory. Another strength is evidence of memory stores with di erent characteristics. For instance, one characteristic of memory stores is their duration. Information in the iconic store (vision) lasts for about 50 milliseconds (Sperling), in STM up to about 30 seconds (Peterson and Peterson) and in LTM up to a lifetime (Bahrick et al.). Therefore SM, STM and LTM must be separate memory stores because they differ so much in duration (and also encoding and capacity). One weakness is that a lot of research is not typical of everyday memory. Participants in studies often have to remember letters, digits and consonant syllables which have no meaning, e.g. ‘YCG’ in Peterson and Peterson’s study. But memories in everyday life are about useful things (faces, facts, places, etc.), much more meaningful than materials used in many studies. This means that the different characteristics of the memory stores may not be so clear when we use our memories in everyday life. 13 Copyright: Sample material
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