Baddeley (1966) Investigating Coding in STM and LTM

Question 1

Method

Answer 1

• Participants given four sets of words that were either acoustically similar (e.g. man, mad, mat), acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar (e.g. big, large, huge), or semantically dissimilar,
• The experiment used an independent group design,
• Participants were asked to recall the words either immediately or after a 20-minute task.

Question 2

Results

Answer 2

• Participants had problems recalling acoustically similar words when recalling the word list immediately,
• If recalling after an interval, they had problems with semantically similar words.

Question 3

Conclusion

Answer 3

• The patterns of confusion between similar words suggest that LTM is more likely to rely on semantic coding and STM on acoustic coding.

Question 4

Evaluation

Answer 4

• Lacks ecological validity,
• Other types of LTM (e.g. episodic and procedural) and other methods of coding (e.g. visual) which this experiment doesn’t consider,
• Experiment used an independent groups design; wasn’t any control over participant variables.