Baddeley Flashcards
what was the aim of Baddeley’s study?
he wanted to find out whether a similar pattern happens to LTM than STM
- short term memory is affected by acoustically similar words but not semantically similar
what was the experiment design?
this was a laboratory experiment with independent groups design with 4 conditions of the independent variable
who were the ppts of the Baddeley study?
75 young servicemen (army)
what are the 4 lists?
list a - acoustically similar words
list b - acoustically dissimilar words
list c - semantically similar words
list d - semantically dissimilar words
what was the procedure?
4 groups learned one list out of 4
each list was presented aloud on tape, one word every 3 seconds.
- ppts had 40 seconds to write down as many they could remember in the order they heard them
this was carried out 4 times.
each ppt spent 20 minutes on an unrelated task (recalling sequences of numbers) and were then asked to recall the ten words in order again (unexpected)
what were the findings of Baddeley’s study?
each ppts performance was measured by the number of word they recalled in the right place in the list.
- there was no significant forgetting of words in the acoustically similar list but there was in the acoustically dissimilar list
- there was no significant differences in recall of the two semantic lists on the learning trials
what was the conclusion of the study?
performance on the acoustically similar list was the ONLY LIST to show no forgetting in LTM, suggesting that encoding in LTM is acoustic rather than semantic.
what is a strength of Baddeley’s experiment?
a strength is that they used well-controlled procedures
- A and B and C and D were matched with each other in terms of how frequently the words appear in english (equal frequency)
this meant the results could not be explained by ppts being able to remember more familiar words.
this avoids potential confounding variables = higher validity
what is the competing argument?
a limitation is that in experiment 1, an important confounding variable was not controlled. the procedure did not rule out STM as an influence on later recall from LTM because the ppts could still rehearse the words between the trials.
what is a weakness of the study?
a limitation is that they were so tightly controlled that they were artificial and thus there was not mundane realism.
- in real life STM and LTM do interact with each other so this confounding variable did not need to be erased.
how can this study be applied?
understanding the encoding in LTM is mostly semantic can help to improve long-term recall of information.
- this is useful for students revising for exams - they are advised to reorganise information and relate it to things we already know.
