Baddeley 1966b (classic study)

Question 1

what was the aim of this study?

Answer 1

to see whether the long term memory encodes semantically or acoustically by giving participants words that are similar in the way they sound (acoustic) or by what they mean (semantically.)

Question 2

what would it mean if the participants struggled to recall the word order?

Answer 2

this means that the long-term memory get confused by similarities and therefore suggests that this is how it encodes.

Question 3

what are the independent variables for this study?

Answer 3

1. acoustically similar/dissimilar
2. semantically similar/dissimilar
3. performance before the 15 min forgetting delay and performance after.

Question 4

what are the dependent variables?

Answer 4

Score on a recall test of 10 words; words must be recalled in the correct order.

Question 5

what was the sample?

Answer 5

men and women from the Cambridge university panel (mostly students) 72 all together (15 in the acoustic sample and 16 in the semantic. )

Question 6

how many groups were participants split up into?

Answer 6

4 either; semantically similar, semantically dissimilar, acoustically similar, or acoustically dissimilar.

Question 7

what happend in the acoustically similar condition?

Answer 7

participants were given a 10 word list of words which sounded similar e.g. man, can, ban, ran etc.. the control group to match this (acoustically dissimilar) had small similar words but the did not sound the same e.g. pig, pen, few , cow.

Question 8

what happened in the semantically similar condition?

Answer 8

the words shared a similar meaning e.g. big, huge, large, great. where as the control condition (semantically dissimilar) had words that shared different meanings e.g. house, bike, food, tree.

Question 9

what happened in each group/condition ?

Answer 9

they were shown a slide show with a set of ten words (depending on the condition)

Question 10

how long did each word appear on the slide show?

Answer 10

3 seconds.

Question 11

what happened after the ptps viewed the slideshow?

Answer 11

they were given an interference tess where they had to hearing and writing down 8 numbers 3 times.

Question 12

what happened after the interference test?

Answer 12

they then had to recall the words on the slideshow in the correct order.

Question 13

how many trials are there?

Answer 13

4

Question 14

what happens after each trial to recall?

Answer 14

the ptps get better and better as the words are not the same.

Question 15

what indicates that they are measuring the order being recalled not the word?

Answer 15

the words themselves are on signs around the room

Question 16

what happens after the 4th trial?

Answer 16

participants are given a 15 minuet break and then perform an unrelated interference task.

Question 17

after the 15 minuet break and the unrelated performance task what happens?

Answer 17

an unexpected 5th and final trial where the ptps are asked to recall the order of the words

Question 18

how did the acoustically similar group perform in comparison to their control group?

Answer 18

the acoustically similar words seemed to be confusing at first but participants soon “catch up” to the control group and even overtake them. however this was not statistically significant. the LTM is not confused by acoustically similar words.

Question 19

how did the semantically similar condition perform in comparison to the control group?

Answer 19

semantically similar words were not confusing and the experimental group lags behind the control and does not catch up.

• performs much worse compared to acoustically similar group
• little forgetting takes place

Question 20

what conclusions can be made about this study?

Answer 20

• the long term memory encodes sematically at least primarially
• short term memory encodes acoustically
• this is why the LTM gets confused when it had to retrieve the semantically similar words as it was too focused on the semantics.

Question 21

reliability?

Answer 21

this is a great example of a reliable study as it has a standardised procedure that could easily repeated with no specialist equipment.
- you could use the same words in the word lists for example.

Question 22

what suggests Baddeley’s study to be generalisable?

Answer 22

because he has a sample of 72 ptps and therefore people with good and bad memories are likely to be averaged out in a sample this size.

Question 23

what suggests that Baddeley may lack generalisability?

Answer 23

there were so many condition in this study that so in each condition there was only 15-20 people which could mean an anomaly may impact the average.

Question 24

how does this study have application?

Answer 24

the main application is for other cognitive psychologist who have built on Baddeley’s research and investigated the long term memory in greater depth.

Question 25

validitiy?

Answer 25

• took trouble to improve the validity of his experiment - he used controls to do this e.g. he asked them to recall the order and had signs of the words on the walls to be sure that this wasn’t a test of memorising the word as some ptps might find certain words unfamiliar.