coding capacity and duration ao3 Flashcards
evaluation of capacity - negative
P- miller may have overestimated stm capacity
E - cowan 2001 reviewed other researched and colluded that the capacity of stm is only about 4 (plus or minus 1) chunks
E - therefore the lower end of millers estimate (5) is more appropiate than 7
L - this suggests that millers research lacks accuracy about stm capacity
evaluation of coding. - positive
P - strength of Jacobs study is that its been replicated
E -study is very old and early research in psychology often lacked adequate controls, e.g some PPs digit spans may have been underestimated because they were distracted during testing (confounding variables )
E- Despite this, jacobs findings have been confirmed by other, better controlled studies since
L - therefore this suggest that jacobs study is a valid test of digit span in stm
evaluation of duration - positive
P - barrack et al study has high external validity
E - bc the researchers investigated meaningful memories (i.e peoples names and faces)
E - when studies on ltm were conducted with meaningless pictures to be remembered, recall rates were lower e.g Shepard 1967
L- suggest that bahrick et al’s findings reflect a more “real’ estimate of the duration of ltm
evaluation of duration - negative
P - Peterson and peterosns study is that stimulus material was artificial
E - study is not completely irrelevant because we do sometimes try to remember fairly meaningless material e.g phone numbers
E - but even so, recalling consonant syllables does not reflect most everyday memory actives where what we are trying to remember is meaningful
L- means that the study lacks external validity
evaluation on coding - positive
P - baddelelys study identified a clear difference between 2 memory stores
E - Later research showed that there are some exceptions to the baddeley’s findings
E - but the idea that stm uses mostly acoustic coding and ltm mostly semantic has stood the test of Tim
L- this was an important step in understanding the memory system, leading to the multi store model
evaluation on coding - negative
P - baddelelys study was that it used quite artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material
E - for example the words lists has no personal meaning to particapents
E - meaning that baddeleys findings mya not tell us much about coding in different kinds of memory tasks, especially everyday life, when processing more meaningful information people may use semantic coding even for stm tasks
L- suggests that the findings from this study have been limited application
