Classic Study - Baddeley Flashcards
What was the aim of Baddeley’s Study?
To investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic on learning and recall in short term and long term memory.
What was the procedure?
72 volunteer participants, a mixture of men and women recruited from the Applied Psychology Research Unit from Cambridge University.
The experiment was conducted in a laboratory and was designed to test sequential recall of acoustically and semantically similar word lists.
4 word lists were used.
Each list was presented via a projector at a rate of one word every 3 seconds.
After presentation the participants were required to complete an interference task to prevent rehearsal. They were given 8 random numbers to write down three times.
After each interference task participants had to recall the words in the correct order. This was repeated over 4 learning trials.
What were the findings?
Recall of acoustically similar sounding words was worse than the dissimilar sounding words during the initial phase of learning. Participants also recalled significantly fewer semantically similar words in the retest 20 minutes later.
What was the conclusion?
Short term memory is largely acoustic and long term memory is semantic.
What is a strength of Baddeley’s Study?
The study was conducted in a controlled laboratory environment with a standardised procedure. For example, due to the highly controlled nature of the experiment, each participant had a word list which contained the same number of words (10) and each word was shown for 3 seconds via projector screen.
Therefore, the study can be regarded as replicable.
What is a weakness of Baddeley’s Study?
The study lacks ecological validity. This is because it took place in a laboratory where individual words were shown to the participants over a projector which is an artificial situation.
This is a problem because the participants may have changed their behaviour from real life and could have tried harder to learn the words unlike their daily use of memory.
