Cognitive Psychology - Studies Flashcards
What was the aim of Baddeley’s study in 1966?
To find out if long term memory encodes acoustically or semantically.
What was the type of experiment that Baddeley carried out?
It was a lab experiment designed to test the recall of acoustically and semantically similar words.
What type of design was Baddeley’s study?
Independent groups design.
In Baddeley’s study (1966), what were the 4 lists?
There were 4 lists comprising of acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar and semantically dissimilar words and each list were made up of 10 words.
How were the participants of Baddeley’s study given the words?
Each list was presented aloud, on tape, and the participants were given a word every 3 seconds and were given 40 seconds to remember them. They then had to spend time doing a certain task that was unrelated.
They then had to recall the 10 words in the correct order.
What were the results of Baddeley’s study?
The recall of acoustically similar sounding words was worse than the dissimilar words during the initial trials. However, the recall of the acoustically similar lists after 20 mins was better and there was no significant forgetting. This demonstrates that acoustic encoding was difficult but didn’t affect the long-term recall. There was a significant amount of forgetting on the lists of semantically similar and dissimilar.
What was the conclusion that Baddeley came to?
The list of acoustically similar words was the only list to show no forgetting in LTM. This suggests that encoding in LTM is acoustic rather than semantic which contradicts earlier studies.
Generalisability of Baddeley’s study
Not generalisable as large sample was split into 4 groups.
Volunteer sample meant that more people with a good memory who would enjoy these tests might join in.
Sample was mostly students.
Reliability of Baddeley’s study
Standardised procedures that can be replicated - same word, same amount of time to memorise and recall.
Improved reliability for displaying the words for hard-of-hearing ppts.
Applicability of Baddeley’s study
Use of interference task to test the STM has been influential in cognitive psychology.
Validity of Baddeley’s study
High internal validity due to the degree of control - the recall of word order avoids potential confounding variables that would lower internal validity.
Low ecological validity due to artificial nature of study - tightly controlled; not realistic.
Ethics of Baddeley’s study
All ethics were read out to the participants so it was highly ethical. However it could be argued that the participants were deceived when they were asked to recall 15 minutes after the tests without being told they would have to do this.
What was the aim of Schmolck et al
(2002)’s study?
To investigate if there was a link between damage to the anterolateral temporal cortex of the brain and performance on tests of semantic memory in people with amnesia.
What was the procedure of Schmolck et al
(2002)’s study?
Researchers studied 6 amnesiacs; 1 female, 5 males.
3 had large lesions to medial temporal lobe (MTL), 2 had damage to the hippocampus (HF) and HM had hippocampal and MTL damage.
Each ppt completed nine main tests of semantic memory, on 3 to 5 occasions.
What were the results of Schmolck et al
(2002)’s study?
Pointing and naming tests: HF patients and control patients made almost no errors but MTL patients showed significant impairments.
HM performed closely on the same level as the control patients on 3 tests.
Yes/no tests: HF patients performed on the same level, MTL patients showed significant impairments.
Categorizing tests: Controls produced more examples (mean was 128.8) compared to HLT (112) and MTL patients (75.7)
