Classsic study in detail- Baddeley. Flashcards
Give a brief description of Baddeley’s study
He wanted to see whether LTM and STM were actually different.
What were Baddeley’s aims?
To investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic word similarity on learning and recall in the LTM and STM.
What was the procedure for his study?
He took four lists of words that were semantically similar or dissimilar, or acoustically similar or dissimilar.
It was an independent groups design, with 20 participants per list.
Each participant was given four learning trials, followed with recall tasks.
Finally, they were given a surprise interference task and retest.
What were his results?
Baddeley found that acoustic encoding was difficult, but didn’t affect LTM recall (it wasn’t significantly different).
Semantically similar words were more difficult to learn than semantically dissimilar words, and less semantically similar words were recalled in the retest.
How did he conclude his study?
LTM is different to the STM. LTM is largely semantic and the STM is acoustic.
Evaluative strengths of the study
It was very standardized, so reliable.
This is the third of his experiment that prove this conclusion, therefor it is high in validity.
It was easy to establish a cause and effect, not just correlation.
Evaluative weaknesses of the study
It is not ecologically valid, so cannot be generalized.
This is a reductionist outlook at memory.
Lacks mundane realism.
