Coding Capacity And Duration Of Memory Flashcards
What is capacity?
The amount of info that can be held in a memory store
What is duration?
The length of time information can be held in memory
What is short term memory?
The limited capacity memory store. Coding is mainly acoustic in STM and the capacity is between 5 and 9 items and the duration is between 18 and 30 sec
What is long term memory?
The permanent memory store. Coding is making semantic it has unlimited capacity and can store memory for a lifetime
What was the procedure in research of coding ?
Alan baddeley gave different lists of words to four groups of participants to remember.
Group 1: acoustically similar words
Group 2: acoustically dissimilar words
Group 3: semantically similar words
Group 4: semantically dissimilar words
Participants were shown the original words and asked to recall them in the correct order immediately and then after 20 mins
What was the findings on coding research?
Alan baddeley found that when the people were asked to recall the words immediately the did worse in in acoustically similar words this suggests words are coded acoustically in STM
After 20 mins recall people tended to do worse on semantically similar words this suggests that information is codes semantically in LTM
What are the two research on capacity?
Digit span -Joseph Jacob
Span of memory and chunking - George Miller
Outline the digit span?
Joseph Jacob developed a technique to measure the digit span. The researcher give for example 4 digit numbers and then the participant is the asked to recall these 4 digit numbers in the correct order if it’s correct the researcher then loved to 5 digit numbers and so on until the participant cannot recall the digits correctly. This determined the individuals digit span. What Jacob found was that the mean span for digits across all participants were 9.3 items and the mean span for letter was 7.3 items.
Outline the span of memory and chunking?
George Miller made observations of everyday practice. For example he noticed that thins come in 7 this suggests that the span in STM is 7 items plus or minus 2. However Miller noticed that people can recall 5 words aswell as they can recall 5 letters they do this by chunking which is grouping sets of digits or letters into units or chunks.
What is coding?
The format I which information is stored in the various memory stores
