Classic (Baddeley 1966)

Question 1

Aim

Answer 1

to find out if the long term memory (Ltm) encodes semantically or acoustically

Question 2

Sample

Answer 2

-Men and women from the Cambridge university panel (mostly students).
-volunteers, 72 all together, 15-20 in each condition. (15 in acoustically similar, 16 in semantically similar)

Question 3

Procedure

Answer 3

-4 groups each with different ppts (independent measure)
-group 1 had acoustically similar words, group 2 had acoustically dissimilar, group 3 had semantically similar words and group 4 had semantically dissimilar.
-each group was shown a slideshow of a set of 10 words, shown for 3 seconds each, according to their category, followed by an interference task, to block rehearsal, involving hearing then writing down 8 numbers 3 times, then recalling the words from the slideshow in order.
-There were four trials altogether, words were kept the same each time, words themselves were placed around the room so they could only concentrate on getting the order of the words right.
-After fourth trial, 15 minute break to perform unrelated distraction task. then surprised w a fish trial to recall the list again in order.

Question 4

Results

Answer 4

-recall of acoustically similar words was worse than the dissimilar words in the initial stage of learning.
-recall of semantically similar/dissimilar was not significant
-semantically similar 85% recalled at surprise test.
-semantically dissimilar 55% recalled at surprise test.
-concluding that ltm encodes semantically, as ltm gets confused when it has to retrieve the order words which are semantically similar. gets distracted by the semantic similarities and muddles them up. no problem retrieving acoustically similar works, pays no attention to how the words sound.

Question 5

Generalisability

Answer 5

-large sample of 72 so any anomalies will be averaged out, however each condition only had 15-20 ppts so an anomaly could make a difference.
-British volunteers, ethnocentric and volunteer sample would attract more people with particularly good memories who enjoy memory tests so not representative of people in general.

Question 6

Reliability

Answer 6

-standardised procedure that can be easily replicated.
-Baddeley improved the reliability of his study by getting rid of the read-aloud word list (some ppts had hearing difficulties) and replacing them with slides. everyone saw the same word for the same amount of time.

Question 7

Validity

Answer 7

-Baddeley improved the internal validity his experiment. rather than getting ppts the recall words. he asked them to recall the order to reduce the risk that some words would be harder to recall or easier for between ppts.
-poor ecological validity as recalling the order of a list pf words is completely artificial and doesn’t resemble anything you would use in the real world.

Question 8

Application

Answer 8

-main application is for other cognitive psychologists who have built on baddeleys research and investigated ltm in greater depth. use of interference task to control stm particularly influential.
- baddeley and hitch built on this new memory model- working memory.