Coding, capacity and duration Flashcards
What does coding mean ?
The format in which information is processed and stored
What is capacity ?
The amount of information that can be held by a memory store
What is duration ?
The length of time information can be held in memory
What is short-term memory ?
- limited capacity memory store
- coding is mainly acoustic
- capacity is 5-9 items
- duration around 18 secs
What is long-term memory ?
- permanent memory store
- coding is mainly semantic
- unlimited capacity
- stores memories for a lifetime
What did Baddeley study ?
- He researched coding and what type of words related to each store of memory
- he split lists of words to 4 participant groups
- group 1: acoustically similar
- group 2: acoustically dissimilar
- group 3: semantically similar
- group 4: semantically dissimilar
- He found that short term memory works better with acoustically different words
- he found that semantically different words were remembered better in the long-term memory store
What did Jacobs study ?
- he studied capacity
- was called the digit span test
- participants asked to recall the list of digits until they got one wrong
- mean score for numbers = 9.3
- mean score for letters = 7.3
What did Miller study ?
- capacity
- the magic number was ‘7’
- He believed that the STM capacity was 7 plus or minus 2
What did Peterson and Peterson study ?
- duration
- 24 student participants in 8 trials
- had to remember a constant syllable (trigram) and a three digit number to count back from
- the higher the retention interval the lower the correct recall response
What did Bahrick study ?
A
- 392 participants between 17 years old and 74 years old
- tested recall using year books
- these used photo recognition and free recall of names
- it was found that those within 15 years of graduating were 90% accurate
- those 48 years or older declined to 70%
- free recall was 60% after 15 yrs and 30% after 48yrs
What are evaluative points of coding ?
positive = separate memory stores
- Baddeley identified a clear difference between the two memory stores
negative = artificial stimuli
- Baddeley used a stimuli which cant be used to understand real life scenarios
What are evaluative points of capacity ?
Positive = a valid study
- Jacob’s study has been replicated before
Negative = overestimation
- Miller may have overestimated STM capacity
- Nelson Cowan said STM was more like 4 (plus or minus 1)
What are the evaluative points of duration ?
Positive = high internal validity
- Banrick had high IV
- investigated meaningful memories
- when studying meaningless memories there is lower recall rates
Negative = meaningless stimuli in STM study
- Peterson’s stimuli was artificial
- doesn’t reflect everyday life
- lacked external validity
