BADDELEY

Question 1

Aim

Answer 1

To investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic word similarity/ dissimilarity on learning and recall in STM and LTM

Question 2

Sample

Answer 2

Independent groups design, male and female ppts (15-20 in each condition), recruited from the applied psychology unit

Question 3

Procedure

Answer 3

-4 lists of 10 words either semantically similar/ dissimilar or acoustically similar/ dissimilar.
- 1 word presented every 3 seconds
-afterwards they completed 6 memory tasks (reading out 8 numbers which were then written down- six times)
- repeated all of this 4 times
- Ppt then completed a 15 min interference task
- then asked to recall word list in the correct order

Question 4

Results: acoustically similar

Answer 4

• acoustically similar words were harder to learn and recall in STM compared to acoustically dissimilar
• little differences in forgetting between trial and retest which shows it doesn’t effect LTM as it encodes semantically

Question 5

Results: semantically similar

Answer 5

-semantically similar produced slower learning rate compared to semantically dissimilar
-semantically similar words had worse recall - 58% compared to 90% semantically dissimilar
- suggests LTM uses semantic encoding, the semantically similar words confused the LTM.

Question 6

Conclusion

Answer 6

STM- encodes acoustically
LTM- mostly uses semantic encoding