Unit 3: Memory and learning

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: the difference between sensation and perception, the three processes of sensation (reception, transduction, transmission), the three processes of perception (selection, organisation, interpretation), and how to apply them to an ambiguous image or everyday scene.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: how attention controls what passes from the sensory register into short-term memory, the difference between selective and divided attention, and Cherry's (1953) dichotic listening research on the Cocktail party effect.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: encoding, storage and retrieval; the multi-store model (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968) with the duration, capacity and encoding of each store and the types of long-term memory; and the working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 2000).

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: the roles of the hippocampus (explicit memory and consolidation, with the Henry Molaison case study), the cerebellum (implicit procedural and conditioned memories) and the amygdala (emotional memories), and how to link each structure to a type of memory.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: the four types of forgetting named in the SCSA syllabus, retrieval failure, proactive and retroactive interference, motivated forgetting and decay theory, with examples, evidence and how to tell them apart in a scenario.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: free, serial and cued recall, recognition and relearning as ways of retrieving and measuring memory, why they differ in sensitivity, and how to calculate and interpret a savings score from Ebbinghaus's relearning method.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: the levels of processing model (Craik and Lockhart, 1972), shallow structural and phonemic processing versus deep semantic and elaborative processing, and the designated study Craik and Tulving (1975) with aim, method, findings, contribution and limitations.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: maintenance and elaborative rehearsal, why elaborative rehearsal produces more durable memories, Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve (1885) and what it shows about the role of repetition, and how to turn this into an evidence-based study plan.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: three causes of memory loss named by SCSA, trauma (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy), degeneration (Alzheimer's disease) and drug-induced damage (Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome), with their causes, effects on memory, and impacts on behaviour and emotion.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3 overview: how classical conditioning, operant conditioning and social learning theory (Bandura, 1977) explain learning, the six designated learning studies you must know, and how to compare the theories in an extended answer.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: the five elements of classical conditioning, stimulus generalisation, discrimination, extinction and spontaneous recovery, and the designated studies Pavlov's dogs (1902) and Little Albert (Watson and Rayner, 1920), with aim, method, findings, contribution and limitations.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: the antecedent-behaviour-consequence model, positive and negative reinforcement and punishment, fixed and variable ratio and interval schedules, and the designated studies Thorndike's law of effect (1898) and the Skinner box (Skinner, 1948).

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: Bandura's social learning theory (1977), the five processes of observational learning named by SCSA, modelling and vicarious reinforcement, the Bobo doll experiment (Bandura, Ross and Ross, 1961), and the strengths and limitations of the theory.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: how systematic desensitisation applies classical conditioning to treat phobias, how token economies apply operant conditioning, the steps in each, and their strengths and limitations for evaluation questions.

WACE Year 12 Psychology science inquiry: writing aims, research questions and directional or non-directional hypotheses; the variables SCSA names; experimental and non-experimental designs; convenience, snowball, random and stratified sampling; random allocation; and controlling experimenter effects and demand characteristics.

WACE Year 12 Psychology science inquiry: qualitative and quantitative data, the collection methods SCSA names, subjective versus objective data, choosing and reading graphs and tables, calculating the mean and median, interpreting Pearson's r, and evaluating research for validity, reliability and generalisability.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: attribution theory, internal (dispositional) versus external (situational) attributions, and the fundamental attribution error, actor-observer bias and self-serving bias.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: neuroplasticity, developmental versus adaptive plasticity, synaptic pruning, long-term potentiation, and how experience and brain injury reshape neural pathways across the lifespan.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, the psychological discomfort of holding inconsistent cognitions, the strategies used to reduce it, and the Festinger and Carlsmith induced-compliance study.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3 attitudes and social cognition: the tri-component (ABC) model of attitudes, attitude-behaviour consistency, attribution theory, and Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3: the hindbrain, midbrain and forebrain, the four lobes of the cerebral cortex, hemispheric specialisation, and Sperry's split-brain studies of localisation of function.

WACE Year 12 Psychology Unit 3 biological bases of behaviour: nervous system divisions, the neuron and synaptic transmission, key neurotransmitters, and Selye's General Adaptation Syndrome model of stress.