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Lecture notes Applied Cognitive Psychology (PSY3009F)
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Lecture notes of 14 pages for the course Applied Cognitive Psychology at UCT
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Everyday MemoryCase study of Clive Wearing: suffered damage to memory parts of the brain he was a
musician.
Memory – a laboratory science?
- Ebbinghaus (1885) institutionalised the use of laboratory methods
• used nonsense syllables as stimuli in order to control for differences in
inherent meaning
• glick, thirb, breel
• in general, launched the study of memory with laboratory-like methods
• this continues to the present day
• but is it appropriate?
• Artificial conditions
• Quantitative measures
• Number of words recalled
• Items in memory tests are of little interest to participants
• No purpose from participant’s point of view
Why ‘applied cognitive psychology’?
- Neisser, 1976, 1983
... [Psychology must have] something to say about what people do in real, culturally
significant situations. What it says must not be trivial, and it must make some kind of sense
to the participants in those situations themselves. If a theory lacks these qualities - if it does
not have what is nowadays called ecological validity - it will be abandoned sooner or later.
Neisser, 1976: p 2).
• I think that memory in general does not exist It is a concept left over from a
medieval psychology that partitioned the mind into independent faculties thought
and will and emotion and many others with memory among them. Let’s give it up
and begin to ask our questions in different ways - our questions need not be
uninformed by theory or by a vision of human nature but perhaps they can be more
closely driven by the characteristics of ordinary human experience (Neisser 1983: p.
12).
• Cognitive psychology lacks ecological validity and one of the ways of doing
‘ecologically valid’ cognitive research is to do research outside laboratories - ‘Applied
Psychology‘, ‘everyday memory’
What is everyday memory?
• Real life memory studies
• Ecological validity
Offer us an opportunity to reality check results from lab experiments and expand them
• Focus on qualitative aspects of memory traces
, • Conway (1991)
• Real life memory involves personal experiences
• Memories carry significance for the individual
• Goal directed
• Personalised motives
• Selective retrieval
Autobiographical memory
• Memory for the events of your own life
• Does it conform to the same principles we find in lab studies of memory?
Functions of AM
Williams et al., 2008
1. Directive function
• Past experiences are used to help direct subsequent behaviour and decisions
• Social function
• Helps with social interactions and group cohesiveness
• Self function
• Provides a sense of identity
• who are we; where do we belong
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