Classic Study: Baddeley (1966b) Flashcards
What was the aim of Baddeley’s study?
To investigate whether the recall of acoustically similar words from STM was poor and if the STM was affected by semantically similar words. We aim to apply the same procedure to see if it is the same for long-term memory.
What year did Baddeley do his study?
1966
What type of experiment and group design was baddeleys study?
Lab experiment using independent group design
How many participants were there and where were they from? What type of sample?
72 participants from Cambridge University it was a volunteer sample.
What screenings did he do beforehand?
A hearing test was given before the procedure excluding three participants. 
Describe the procedure. Baddeley
Full list of 10 words:
A: acoustically similar
B: acoustically dissimilar
C: semantically similar
D: semantically dissimilar.
The words presented aloud on a tape with one word every three seconds.
They had 40 seconds to remember the order of the words. Then were given an unexpected intervention for 20 minutes. Afterwards they had to record the 10 words again.
Describe the findings of Baddeley.
STM: AS=lower than AD
LTM: AD=Lower than AS
No significant difference in the recall of semantic lists in STM or LTM.
What was the conclusion of baddeleys study?
The long-term memory encodes semantically and the short-term memory encodes acoustically.
Evaluate Baddeley G
Small Group Sizes:
+Large sample of 72 meaning anomalies would be averaged out
-Each group had only 15 to 20 people meaning anomalies could affect the data.
Evaluate Baddeley R
Standardise Procedures:
Each participant saw the word for three seconds.
Baddeley improved his study by replicating it and getting rid of the read aloud word list to remove hearing problems as an extraneous variable.
Evaluate Baddeley A
revision techniques. For example, if long-term memory encode semantically students should use mind maps with semantic links like images.
Evaluate Baddeley V
Badly study has low ecological validity because recalling the order of the word list is an artificial behaviour. However he did improve this with a surprise factor as you’re often asked to recall information unexpectedly.
