Coding, Capacity and Duration of Memory Flashcards
What did Baddley find with regards to how stm and ltm code?
Baddley found that information in the STM store is coded acoustically where as information in the LTM store is coded semantically. He gave 4 groups 4 different word lists to remember.
Group 1-acoustically similar, Group 2-acoustically dissimilar, Group 3-semantically similar, Group 4-semantically dissimilar.
Found that more mistakes were made when recalling acoustically similar words straight after learning them, whilst more mistakes were made recalling semantically similar words after 20 minutes of learning them
What is meant by coding?
Coding refers to the format of information which is stored in each memory store.
What is meant by capacity?
Capacity refers to the volume of data that can be kept in any data store at any time.
What did jacob find with regards to the capacity of stm?
Jacob found the capacity of STM by measuring digit span.
For example, the researcher read out 4 digits and the the pp recalled the 4 digits out loud. If the pp was correct, then the researcher would read out 5 more digits and so on until the pp was wrong.
Found the mean span for digits was 9.3 items and the mean span for letters was 7.3 items.
What is meant by duration?
Duration refers to the amount of time information can be stored in a memory store.
What did Bahrick et al find with duration?
Bahrick et al studied 392 American students aged between 17-74.
He obtained the pps high school year books and tested their recall based on two tests: photo recognition and and free recall.
15 years after graduating, 90 percent accurate in photo recognition test and 60 percent accurate in free recall test.
48 years after graduating, 70 percent accurate in photo recognition test and 30 percent accurate in free recall.
Give two evaluations of capacity in memory.
- Research lacks standardisation.
In Jacob’s study, there were likely to have been confounding variables e.g hard word lists.
Shows research is unscientific. - Capacity of STM isn’t the same for everyone.
Jacob’s found that recall increased with age.
Shows this may be due to the development of strategies such as chunking.
Give two evaluations of coding in memory.
- Baddley’s study used artificial stimuli.
No meaning to pps.
No generalisability to real life. - LTM may not always be semantic.
Frost: LTM was related to visual as well as semantic categories.
Shows coding may vary according to circumstances.
Give two evaluations of duration in memory.
- Bahrick et al’ study has high external validity.
Testes pps with pictures that held real meaning to them . - Research into STM is artificial.
Memorising meaningless syllables does not reflect everyday activity.
Shows study may not have relevance to real life.
Give one way researchers have investigated the duration of STM.
Participants are given a trigram and then asked to count backwards from a certain number for a specified time. They are then asked to recall original trigram.
