Coding, Capacity and Duration of Memory Flashcards
What is the coding, the capacity and the duration of STM?
- Coding is mainly acoustic
- Capacity is 7+/- items on average
- Duration of STM is 18s
What is the coding, the capacity and the duration of LTM?
- Coding is mainly semantic
- Capacity is practically unlimited
- Duration of up to a lifetime
Who studied Coding and what was the study?
- Baddeley: acoustically similar/dissimilar and semantically similar/dissimilar word lists
- When recalling from short-term memory pps did worse with acoustically similar words
- When recalling from long-term memory pps did worse with semantically similar words
Which two researchers studied Capacity and what were the studies?
Jacobs:
- researcher reads out 4 digits and pps repeats them back in correct order, if correct researcher increases amount of digits until pps makes a mistake
- found average digit span was 9.3 and for letters it was 7.3
Miller:
- observed everyday life and noted things came in 7s e.g 7 days in a week so decided capacity was 7+/- 2
- he also observed people can recall 5 words just as easily as five letter - this is called chunking
Which two researchers studied duration of memory and what were the studies?
Peterson and Peterson:
- investigated STM, students were given a consonant syllable (to remember) and a 3 digit number to count backwards from
- after 3s recall was 80% and after 18s recall was 3%
Bahrick:
- investigated LTM, 392 Americans ages 17-74
- tested photo-recognition and free recall
- pss tested within 15 years were 90% on photo-recognition and after 48 years it was 705
- free recall was 60% after 15 years and 30% after 48
What is a strength/a limitation of the study on coding?
Strength:
- idea STM is mostly acoustic coding and LTM is mostly semantic has stood the test of time. Important step in understanding the MSM
Limitation:
- Used artificial stimuli. May not tell us how coding works in real-world but rather in derived situations
