Coding Capacity and duration of memory

Question 1

who did research on coding

Answer 1

Baddeley 1966

Question 2

what was Baddeleys research (1966) on coding

Answer 2

• gave differnet list of words to 4 gruops of partiipants to remember
• group 1: words sounded similar (acoustically similar)
• group 2 words sounded different (acoustically dissimilar)
• group 3: words with similar meaning (semantically similar)
• group 4 : words with different meanings (semantically dissimilar)
  participants asked to recall words in the correct order

Question 3

result for Baddeleys research (1966) on coding

Answer 3

when the task was done immediately (short term memory) they did worse with acoustically similar words
- when recalling after 20 minutes (long term memory) they did worse with semantically similar words
- information is coded acoustically in the STM and semantically in the LTM

Question 4

what is coding

Answer 4

the process of converting information between different forms

Question 5

strength of Baddeleys research (1996) on coding

Answer 5

1. separate memory store
   - identifies a clear difference between two memory stores
   later research showed that there are some exceptions to baddeleys findings but the idea that the STM uses mostly acoustic coding and the LTM mostly semantic still stands
   - lead to the multi store model

Question 6

limitation of Baddeley’s research(1966) on coding

Answer 6

1. artificial stimuli
   - the word list had no personal meaning to the participant
   - Baddeley’s finding may not tell us much about coding in different kinds of memory task
   - when processing more meaningful information people may use semantic coding for even STM task

Question 7

who did research on digit span

Answer 7

Jacobs (1887)
Miller (1956)

Question 8

how did Jacobs (1887) study capacity

Answer 8

• measured digit span
• researcher read out 4 digits and the participants recalled them outloud in the correct order
• if done correctly the researcher would read out 5 digits and so on until the participants could no longer recall the order correctly
• this indicated the individuals digit span
• mean span for digits was 9.3
• mean digits for letters was 7.3

Question 9

How did miller (1956) contribute to memory and chunking

Answer 9

• made observations of everyday practices
• noted that things come in 7s
• 7 notes on a musical scale, 7 days of the week, 7 deadly sins
• span of STM is 7 items + or - 2
• also noted that people can recall 5 words as easily as they can recall 5 letters, done by chunking

Question 10

strength of Jacobs study

Answer 10

1. has been replicated
   - despite this study being old and lacking adequate control and the presence of confounding variables (distractions) Jacobs finding have been confirmed by other better controlled studies since