Coding Flashcards
Give a definition of ‘coding’
‘Coding’ refers to the way in which information is changed and stored in the various memory stores.
Who executed the coding experiment?
Baddeley,1966
How many participants did Baddeley have in his experiment?
A mixture of 72 men and women from the Cambridge university.
Describe the 4 lists that Baddeley gave the participants to research coding
- Acoustically similiar - words that sound the same (cat, cab, can)
- Acoustically dissimilar - words that sound different (pit, few, cow)
- Semantically similar - words that have similar meanings (great, large, big)
- Semantically dissimilar - words that have different meanings (good, huge, hot)
Describe the procedure of the coding experiment
The participants listened to 10 words (1 every 3 seconds). They then had to recall the words, in order, for 40 seconds. These two steps repeated 4 times. They then had a 20 minute break where they did a distractor task. After the distractor task, they unexpectedly had to recall the original 10 words in order.
What were Baddeley’s findings and conclusion?
Immediate recall was worse with accoustically similiar words.
Recall after 20 minutes was worse with semantically dissimilar words.
Therefore, Baddeley concluded that LTM encodes semantically and STM encoded acoustically
Give 1 strength and 1 weakness of Baddeley’s coding experiment
Strength - Identified a clear difference between the two memory stores. Later research showed that there are some exceptions to Baddeley’s finding that the idea of STM uses mostly acoustic coding and LTM uses mostly semantic coding has remained. Baddeley’s findings also led onto the multi-store memory model
Weakness - The experiment used artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material - the list had no personal meaning to the participants. Baddeley’s findings may not tell us much about coding in different kinds of memory tasks (everyday life). When processing more meaningful information, people may use semantic coding even from STM. This suggests the findings have limited application and we shouldn’t generalise the findings to different kinds of memory task