Baddeley (1966)

Question 1

What was the aim?

Answer 1

To investigate acoustic and semantic word similarity on learning and word recall in short and long-term memory

Question 2

What were the results of the study?

Answer 2

• Words that were acoustically similar were recalled worse than acoustically dissimilar in initial test
• Words that were semantically similar were recalled worse that semantically dissimilar in retest

Question 3

What were the conclusions of the study?

Answer 3

• Long term memory encodes semantically (as recall of semantically similar words was impaired compared to other lists)
• Short term memory encodes acoustically (as participants found recall harder in initial phase as acoustically similar words difficult to encode)

Question 4

What are 2 strengths of Baddeley (1966b)?

Answer 4

• Standardised procedure e.g., showing 1 word every 3 seconds in same order for all ppts, which allows the study to be replicating, increasing reliability
• Large sample of 72 participants which is representative of target population , therefore increasing reliability

Question 5

What are 2 weaknesses of Baddeley (1966b)?

Answer 5

• Lacks ecological validity due to being a laboratory setting with an artificial task of learning word order which isn’t an everyday task so unnatural behaviour may be shown
• Volunteer sample of British participants who may have similar compliant personality type/ enjoy doing memory tests which isn’t representative of target population

Question 6

What are 2 strengths of laboratory experiments?

Answer 6

• Many controls and strict procedures used which allows the study to be replicated, increasing reliability
• Extraneous variables prevented from affecting the results, allowing a cause and effect to be established (between score on recall test and acoustically/ semantically similar/ dissimilar words)

Question 7

What are 2 weaknesses of laboratory experiments?

Answer 7

• Lacks ecological validity due to the artificial environment and tasks (lack mundane realism), therefore causing unnatural behaviour to be shown
• Investigator bias may affect the results as only behaviour they’re looking for will be recorded, therefore making the results unreliable