coding capacity and duration Flashcards
Sensory register
coding is modality specific (depends on sense), capacity is huge and duration is very short
STM
coding is acoustic, capacity is 7+-2 items and duration is 18-30secs
LTM
coding is semantic, capacity and duration potentially unlimited
what does capacity, coding, duration actually mean?
capacity = how much can be stored, coding = how it’s stored and duration = for how long.
Capacity research (STM - Miller)
Miller observed everyday practice and found that things come in 7’s such as days of week.
Chunking can improve capacity.
Coding research (STM and LTM - Baddeley)
Gave participants acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar and semantically dissimilar words.
asked to recall immediately (STM) and after 20 mins (LTM)
worse acoustically similar recall immediately and worse semantically similar recall after 20.
Duration research (STM - Peterson and Peterson)
gave participants 3 letter trigrams to remember and asked them to count back from a number at the same time (prevents rehearsal)
asked to recall trigram, found 80% accuracy after 3 secs and only 10% after 18.
Duration research (LTM - Bahrick et al)
asked participants to recall people from their high school yearbook - both photo recognition, and free recall.
after 48 years, photo recognition was 70% accurate, and free recall was 30% accurate.
AO3 - limitation of many memory studies
Use of artificial stimuli, such as trigrams = low mundane realism. Doesn’t reflect how memory works in every day life. Findings can’t be generalised beyond the study, so low ecological validity.
AO3 - Bahrick et al uses a meaningful task to the participants..
High school yearbook has personal meaning to people unlike a trigram for example, higher mundane realism, reflects how memory works in every day life. Has high ecological validity as the findings can be applied beyond the study.
