Baddeley (1966b) Classic Study Flashcards
Aim?
To investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic word similarity on the learning and recall in the short and long term memory
The four word lists containing 10 words were
List A - acoustically similar (cat, man, can)
List B - acoustically dissimilar (pit, few, cow)
List C - semantically similar (great, big, large)
List D - semantically dissimilar (good, deep, late)
72 men and women from the Applied Psychology Unit
therefore it isn’t very generalisable as the memories of those who are academic are unlikely to be the same as everyday people of different ages
- Participants were assigned one of the four list conditions as an independent groups design where
each list of 10 words was projected at a rate of one every 3 seconds in the correct order, the words were visible around the room
- They were asked to recall the word list in one minute by writing them in the correct order which
was repeated over four learning trials, after these, the groups were given a 15-minute interference task and then a surprise retest
The results showed that recall of the acoustically similar sounding words was
worse than the dissimilar sounding words during the initial phase of learning
Recall of similar and dissimilar sounds words was not statistically significant which demonstrates that
acoustic encoding was initially difficult but did not affect LTM recall
Participants found the semantically similar words more difficult to learn than the
semantically dissimilar sounding words and recalled significantly fewer semantically similar words in the retest
They concluded that short term encoding is largely acoustic and
long term encoding is largely semantic
Lacks mundane realism as
experimental techniques that are not typical of the way in which we use memory in every day context
Although it lacks mundane realism researchers would argue that
in order to understand memory we need to remove the context in which normal memory is used
The role of reversal is heavily relied on during the four learning trials which suggests the
memory processes are exaggerated so it lacks mundane realism
The controlled laboratory environment with a standardised procedure enhances
the reliability as the study can be replicated and similar results can potentially be obtained
The high controlled nature also allowed Baddeley to
establish a cause and effect relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable.
