Coding, Capacity, And Duration Flashcards
What is coding?
The format in which information is stored in the various memory stores
What is capacity?
The amount of information that can be stored in the various memory stored
What is duration?
The length of time information can be held in the memory
Who researched coding?
What was their study?
Baddeley
He gave different lists of words to four groups of participants to remember
Group 1: acoustically similar (eg, cat, cab)
Group 2: acoustically dissimilar (eg. Pit, few)
Group 3: semantically similar (eg. Great, large, big)
Group 4: semantically dissimilar (eg. Good, huge, hot)
They were shown the words and asked to recall them in the right order
What were the findings of Baddeley’s study?
When they were asked to recall the words immediately (from STM), they did worse on acoustically similar words. When they were asked to recall after a 20 minute interval (from LTM) they did worse with semantically similar words
This suggests that STM is coded acoustically and LTM is coded semantically
Who researched capacity?
What was their study?
Jacob’s
Digit Span Test
The researcher reads out four digits and the participant recalls these in the correct order, if they get them right the researcher adds another digit each time until they can no longer remember
What were the findings of Jacob’s study?
The mean digit span for numbers was 9.3 items whereas for letters it was only 7.3
—> this is because there are less numbers so less to remember
What did Miller find?
The span of STM is 7 items plus or minus 2
What is chunking?
Who proposed the idea?
Grouping sets of digits or letters into units or chunks
Miller
Who studied the duration of STM?
What is their research?
Peterson and Peterson
They tested 24 students in eight trials
In each trial the students were given a trigram (consonant syllable) to remember.
They were then given a 3-digit number to count backwards from until they were told to stop - this prevented rehearsal
Each trial were told to stop after a varying amount of time 3,6,9,12,15 or 18 seconds
What were the findings of Peterson and Petersons study?
After 3 seconds, recall was about 80%, after 18 seconds it was about 3%
This suggests that the duration of STM is around 18 seconds without rehearsal
Who researched the duration of LTM?
What was their study?
Bahrick
Studies 392 participants aged 17-74
He used high school yearbooks to test recall in various ways (photo recognition and recalling names)
What were the findings of Bahricks study?
Participants tested within 15 years of graduation scored about 90% on photo recall and 60% on free recall (names)
Participants tested after 48 years scored about 70% on photo recognition and 30% on free recal
This suggests that LTM may last up to a lifetime for some material
Evaluate Baddeleys study
Strength — he identified a clear difference between the two memory stores, which helped our understanding of the memory system
Weakness — he used artificial stimuli that had no meaning to the participants so the findings may not reflect real life/ may have limited application
Evaluate Jacob’s study
Strength — it has been replicated suggesting that it is valid
Evaluate Millers study
Weakness — may have overestimated the STM capacity as other research suggests that it is lower (4 plus or minus 1)
Evaluate Peterson and Petersons study
Weakness — used artificial stimuli so study lacks external validity
Evaluate Bahricks study
Strength — high external validity as he investigated meaningful memories so his findings reflect real life and are a more real estimate of duration
