Sensory Memory

SM stands for sensory memory. It is the first stage of the multi-store model of memory. Information from the senses is stored very briefly in SM, before passing to STM if we pay attention to it.

SM is actually comprised of several stores, one for each sense. The best known are the iconic store (visual) which has a duration of around 0.5 seconds, and the echoic store (auditory/acoustic) which has a duration of around 2 seconds. These allow us to retain sights and sounds for long enough for us to tune in to them and start processing them.

A typical example of sensory memory is the way that even if we haven't been listening to someone, for example a teacher, we can still hear a kind of trace or echo in our head of what they said for a second or two, allowing us to pretend that we really were listening all along! This is the echoic store in action.

References

As I said in my email, it is essential in all academic subjects that you include sources in essays and reports.

One piece of advice I have already mentioned is to keep track of your sources as you go along, as it’s much quicker than having to go back and find sources again. If you are working on the computer then just type them/paste them at the foot of your document and you can sort out the formatting later. If you are using pencil and paper, ensure you write them out when you take notes on a study – do it at the start so you don’t forget.

For all studies from the Higher course and from the textbook you will be able to copy the reference from the back of the textbook or booklet. You can also cut-n-paste references from my research studies blog.

Note that if you take info from Wikipedia (which you should be wary of doing btw), they have a useful ‘cite this page’ tool (in a box on the left ) which takes you to a list of possible styles – pick the first one, APA style.

‘Citations’: while the end section is called references, the technical name for the name and year in your text is an ‘in-text citation’. Some people also refer to the references at the end as citations, or use the term citation to mean both together (the bit in the text and the full details at the end). Just to confuse you…

One other thing: a bibliography is a background reading list whereas a reference section contains all of the works and only those works cited by the author in the text. In psychology report you have a references section, there is no need to put in background reading e.g. textbooks.

Many of you have asked about which university psychology departments I would recommend. There are a lot of things to take into account when you choose your university, and the reputation of the department is only one of them. However for your information, here are the ratings of the major Scottish psych departments from the RAE 2008 (see www.rae.ac.uk for more info). I have included Cambridge, Sheffield, Bangor and Ulster for comparison!

(Red=% of staff who are internationally acclaimed, top of their field; lilac=% who are internationally reknowned but not quite as good as the reds, and the next two numbers are the divisions below that! The number in brackets is the number of staff, full time equivalent, who were included.)

St Andrews (33.90) 20 45 35 0

Glasgow (26.00) 20 40 40 0

Edinburgh (38.51) 15 45 35 5

Aberdeen (26.00) 5 45 40 10

Dundee (22.00) 5 30 50 15

Stirling (24.20) 5 10 55 30

Strath (17.00) 0 30 45 25

Heriot Watt (9.20) 0 5 30 65

Glasgow Cal (18.70) 0 10 40 50

Abertay (10.00) 0 15 40 45

Bangor (39.00) 20 45 25 10

Ulster (27.00) 5 20 45 30

Sheffield (40.45) 15 45 35 5

Cambridge (24.00) 35 50 15 0

RI: Sections

Here's a brief summary of the sections in an RI write-up, and how many marks they are worth:

Abstract: 5
Introduction: 10
Method: 8
Results: 8
Discussion: 12
References: 3

Plus 4 marks for style and presentation, taking the total to 50.

RI: Pitfalls

As you begin the process of writing up your RI (and practice RI), I would like to hightlight some common pitfalls: places where people often mess up and lose marks unneccesarily...

• Missing out the references section, or putting in a mixture of references and bibliography (book list e.g. Higher Psychology textbooks).
• Major flaws in the results section, e.g. missing or unclear graphs, not labelling tables and graphs, not explaining what statistics have been used, failing to put raw data and calculations into an appendix.
• Incorrect or incomplete hypotheses - your teacher can check these for you.
• Not sticking to the SQA 'brief' - this document describes what you should do in your study. If you don't follow it, you could lose several marks.
• Failing to include a conclusion, and suggestions for future research studies.
  

None of these flaws is big on its own, but collectively they could bring a mark down from an 'A' to a 'C'.

Top ten psychology studies

Here's a link to a site which has a lot of interesting 'top tens' and other accessible articles.
In this one they present a selection of 10 great psychology studies, and invite you to vote for the best one. You should be familiar with at least some of these from our course so far!

http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/02/top-ten-psychology-studies.php

Notice board

Hi, since I spent all of...hmm, half an hour at least making the Psychology notice board looking nice for open day, I invite you all to come up to C8 and look at it! If you can't find the time, here is a picture of what it looks like:

If you can guess the theme, you win a stress dot ;)