Baddeley Word Study Flashcards
What is the AIM of Baddeleys experiment?
To investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic word similarity on learning and recall in short-term and long-term memory.
How many participants were there and and where were they recruited from?
72 male and female participants recruited from the Applied Psychology Research Unit.
How many participants were in each condition(Lists) and what were the lists called?
15-21 in each condition. There was acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar and semantically dissimilar.
How many words were in each list and how often were the words shown? What did the participants then do after all 10 words?
There were 10 words shown every 3 seconds. Once completed the participants completed 6 tasks involving memory of digits.
After completing the six tasks what do the participants then do?
They’re asked to recall the word list in one minute by writing the words in the correct order. This is repeated 4 times
After the four learning trials, participants took part in a 15 minute task of copying 8 digit numbers. What did they then do after?
They were given a surprise retest of the order of original 10 word sequence.
What were the results of the study?
Recall of the acoustically similar words was worse than the recall of the acoustically dissimilar words during the initial learning trials.
During the surprise recall test, they weren’t so different.
In the surprise recall test, recall of semantically similar words was worse than the recall of semantically dissimilar words.
What did Baddeley conclude from this experiment?
As participants’ recall of acoustically similar words was impaired in the learning trials, Baddeley concluded that encoding in the short term memory is largely acoustic.
As participants’ recall of semantically similar words was impaired in the surprised recall task, Baddeley concluded that encoding in the long term memory is largely semantic.
Explain 2 strengths of Baddeleys 1966b classic study.
> HIGH INTERNAL VALIDITY- extraneous variables were controlled meaning confidence that the IV caused the changes in the DV and reduced demand characteristics by not telling participants the full procedure so that they could not prepare for any aspect of the experiment
LABORATORY STUDY- very controlled with standardised procedure so can be easily replicated meaning the reliability can be tested
SAMPLE SIZE- Baddeley used a large sample and included both males and females enhancing the generalisability of his findings
Explain 2 weaknesses of Baddeley’s 1966b classic study.
> LOW ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY- we don’t know that this is how memory works in the real world, we don’t remember lists of words in this way.
VOLUNTEER SAMPLE METHOD- participants recruited from a psychology research panel- they may demonstrate particularly good memories as they may enjoy doing memory tests, meaning the results may not represent people in general.
SAMPLE SIZE- independent group design (participants are split into different conditions and only tested in that condition) so 15-21 tested- cant generalist to wider population.
