4.1.2 Coding

Question 1

Research on coding method

Answer 1

Alan Baddeley (1966a, 1966b) gave out 4 different lists:
Group 1 – acoustically similar (words sound similar e.g., cat, cab, can)
Group 2 – acoustically dissimilar (words sound different e.g., pit, few, cow)
Group 3 – semantically similar (words with similar meanings e.g., great, large, big)
Group 4 – semantically dissimilar (words with different meanings e.g., good, huge, hot)
Participants: A mixture of 72 men and women from the Cambridge University, mostly students, who had volunteered. Replicated his experiment 3 times, making adjustments to it each time.

Question 2

Research on coding results

Answer 2

Baddeley concludes that long term memory encodes semantically
His earlier experiments suggest short term memory encodes acoustically
LTM gets confused when it has to retrieve the order words which are semantically similar – it gets distracted by the semantic similarities and muddles them up
It has no problem retrieving acoustically similar words because LTM pays no attention to how the words sound
Baddeley improved the validity of his study by using controls. He added an interference task (writing down lists of numbers) before each trial to ‘block’ the STM and make sure only LTM was being used.
He also presented the words on slides because he didn’t want to disqualify people for having bad hearing.

Question 3

Baddeley evaluation - strengths

Answer 3

Identified a clear difference between the two memory stores
Later research showed that there are some exceptions to Baddeley’s finding but the idea that STM uses mostly acoustic coding and LTM uses mostly semantic coding has remained
Baddeley’s findings led onto the multi-store memory model

Question 4

Baddeley evaluation - weaknesses

Answer 4

The experiment used artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material
The word list had no personal meaning to the participants
So Baddeley’s findings may not tell us much about coding in different kinds of memory tasks (everyday life)
When processing more meaningful information, people may use semantic coding even from STM
This suggests the findings have limited application

Question 5

Baddeley variables

Answer 5

IV – independent variable:
Some aspects of the experimental situation that is manipulated by the researcher (or changes naturally) so the effect of the DV can be measured.
e.g., Baddeley - several IV: acoustically sounding words/non-acoustically sounding words, semantically similar words, semantically dissimilar words, immediate recall and recall after 20 minutes
DV – dependent variable:
The variable that is measured by the researcher. Any effect on the DV should have been caused by the IV.
e.g., Baddeley – number of words they were able to recall