GCSE Psychology: Cognition and Behaviour — Revision Notes

Condensed for the final weeks. For the full explanation, use the Cognition and Behaviour study guide.

Memory

Processes: encoding (converting information into a usable form), storage (holding it), retrieval (getting it back).

Types of memory: episodic (personal events), semantic (facts and meanings), procedural (how to do things — riding a bike).

The multi-store model (Atkinson and Shiffrin)

sensory register  ->  short-term memory  ->  long-term memory
   <0.5 sec              ~18-30 sec            potentially lifelong
   large capacity        5-9 items             unlimited
                       (attention)          (rehearsal)

Information moves from sensory register to STM through attention, and from STM to LTM through rehearsal.

Evaluation: supported by case studies of brain-damaged patients showing separate stores, and by the primacy–recency effect. But it is too simple — it treats STM and LTM as single unitary stores, and rehearsal alone does not explain everything that reaches LTM, since emotionally significant events are remembered without any rehearsal at all.

Interference

Proactive interference — old information disrupts new. Retroactive interference — new information disrupts old.

The order in the name tells you the direction: pro means forwards, so the old memory interferes forwards onto the new.

Bartlett — reconstructive memory

Memory is not a recording; it is reconstructed at the point of recall, and shaped by schemas — mental frameworks built from experience.

In War of the Ghosts, participants recalling an unfamiliar Native American story systematically altered it to fit their own cultural expectations: unfamiliar details were omitted, the story was shortened, and elements were changed to something more familiar.

This is why eyewitness testimony is unreliable — recall is influenced by expectation, not just by what was seen.

Retrieval failure

A second explanation of forgetting, alongside interference: the memory is stored but cannot be accessed without the right cue. Recall is better when the context or emotional state present at recall matches that present at encoding — for example, remembering something more easily on returning to the room where it was originally learned. This is why interference and retrieval failure are often tested as a pair: interference explains forgetting through competition between memories, while retrieval failure explains it through a missing cue to a memory that is still there.

Perception

Sensation is the raw data from the senses; perception is the brain’s interpretation of it. The distinction underpins the whole topic.

Depth cues:

• Monocular (one eye): height in plane, relative size, occlusion, linear perspective.
• Binocular (two eyes): retinal disparity, convergence.

Visual illusions and what each shows:

Illusion	Type
Ponzo	Misinterpreted depth cues
Müller-Lyer	Misinterpreted depth cues
Rubin’s vase	Ambiguity — figure and ground
Ames room	Misinterpreted depth
Kanizsa triangle	Fiction — the brain supplies edges that are not there

The two theories of perception disagree about the role of experience:

• Gibson’s direct theory — perception is bottom-up; the visual information reaching the eye is rich enough on its own. It explains why perception is usually accurate and immediate, but not why illusions work.
• Gregory’s constructivist theory — perception is top-down; the brain makes inferences based on expectation and past experience. It explains illusions well, but struggles to explain how perception is so fast and generally accurate.

Neither is complete on its own, and saying so is the evaluation.

Development

Piaget’s stages: sensorimotor (0–2, object permanence), pre-operational (2–7, egocentrism, lack of conservation), concrete operational (7–11, conservation achieved), formal operational (11+, abstract reasoning).

Evaluation: hugely influential in education, but he underestimated children’s abilities — later studies using more child-friendly tasks, such as the naughty teddy conservation study, showed children succeeding earlier than Piaget’s method suggested. His samples were also small and unrepresentative.

Dweck’s mindset theory: a fixed mindset treats ability as unchangeable, so failure is threatening and challenge is avoided; a growth mindset treats ability as developable through effort, so challenge is welcomed. Praising effort rather than intelligence encourages a growth mindset.

Research methods

• Experiments — control, establish cause, but artificial.
• Observations — natural behaviour, but no control and possible observer bias.
• Interviews and questionnaires — self-report; risk of social desirability bias.
• Case studies — rich detail on rare cases, but unrepresentative.

Reliability — consistency on repetition. Validity — measuring what it claims to measure. Quantitative methods favour the first, qualitative the second.

Ethics: informed consent, no deception, protection from harm, right to withdraw, confidentiality, debriefing.

Exam traps

• Confusing proactive with retroactive interference.
• Saying memory is like a video recording.
• Confusing sensation with perception.
• Attributing top-down processing to Gibson (it is Gregory’s).
• Saying Piaget was simply wrong rather than that he underestimated ability.
• Describing a study without evaluating it when evaluation is asked for.

Self-test

1. Give the three stores of the multi-store model with capacity and duration.
2. Distinguish proactive from retroactive interference.
3. What did Bartlett’s War of the Ghosts show about memory?
4. Contrast Gibson’s and Gregory’s theories, and give a weakness of each.
5. What is the main criticism of Piaget’s research?

Answers: 1. Sensory register — large capacity, under half a second; STM — 5 to 9 items, about 18–30 seconds; LTM — potentially unlimited capacity and duration. 2. Proactive: old information disrupts the recall of new; retroactive: new information disrupts the recall of old. 3. That memory is reconstructive — participants omitted unfamiliar details, shortened the story and altered elements to fit their own cultural schemas. 4. Gibson says perception is direct and bottom-up, which cannot explain illusions; Gregory says it is constructed top-down from inference, which struggles to explain how fast and generally accurate perception is. 5. He underestimated children’s abilities — later studies using more child-friendly tasks found children succeeding at his tasks earlier than he reported.