Baddeley Experiment 3 Flashcards
What was baddeleys experiment 3?
A lab experiment that was designed to test sequential recall of acoustically and semantically similar word lists
What was the aim of the experiment?
To investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic word similarity on learning and recall in STM and LTM.
How were the 4 lists payed out?
List A-10 ACOUSTICALLY SIMILAR words (man, can, cat, map)
List B-10 ACOUSTICALLY DISSIMILAR words involving more familiar everyday words to list A (pit, few, cow, mat)
List C-10 SEMANTICALLY SIMILAR words (great, large, broad, big)
List D-10 SEMANTICALLY DISSIMILAR words involving more familiar everyday words to list C (good, huge, deep, rate)
(B and d acted as baseline control groups)
How did the experiment work?
-Each list was presented via projector at a rate of one word every 3 seconds in correct order
-After, participants were required to complete 6 tasks involving memory for digits
-Were then asked to recall the words list in one minute by writing them down in order
-Repeated 4 times
-The word list in random order was visible on cards in the room (doesn’t help them since it was a sequence test not just recall of words)
-after 4 trials, groups were given 15min interference tasks of copying 8 digit sequences at own pace
-participants were then given a surprise retest of the word list sequence
What were the results?
-recall of acoustically similar words was worse to recall in STM than dissimilar words in the initial phase: this is because STM encodes acoustically.
-found that semantically similar words were more difficult to learn than semantically dissimilar words in LTM: because LTM encodes semantically
Recall of similar and dissimilar sounding words was not significantly significant
-demonstrates acoustic encoding was initially difficult but didn’t affect LTM recall.
What was the conclusion?
Participants finding it more difficult to recall list 1 in initial phase suggests STM is largely acoustic
-so acoustically similar sounding words were not difficult to encode
Later retest of list c was impaired compared to all other lists as they are semantically similar
-suggests encoding in LTM is largely, but not exclusively semantic.
Evaluation
GENERALISATION-72 participants, M and f.
recruited from applied psychology research until panel in Cambridge👎🏽(doesn’t show results of other countries)
RELIABILITY-4 list of 10 words, one word every 3 secs, 1 min to do (good consistency)
APPLICATION-use within control groups and for other cognitive psychologists to understand memory
VALIDITY-recalling words,4 learning tasks(low ecological validity)
words presented by projector(everyone expecting same thing) bassline control groups
ETHICS- good ethics in general, surprise recall tasks which may cause panic
How many people were tested?
72 participants (men and women) recruited from applied psychology research unit panel from Cambridge
What were the people assigned to?
They were assigned to one of the 4 list conditions as an independent group design
