Memory Paper 1 Flashcards
What is meant by coding?
The formant in which information is stored in the various memory stores
What is the main encoding of the STM
Mainly acoustic (by sound)
What is the main encoding of the LTM?
Mainly semantic (by meaning)
What is meant by capacity?
The amount of information that can be held in a memory store
What is the capacity of the STM?
Very limited (between 5 and 9 items on average)
What is the capacity of the LTM?
Unlimited (a lifetime)
What is meant by duration?
The length of time information can be held in memory
What is the duration of the STM?
Very limited (between 18 and 30 seconds)
What did Alan Badderly (1966) investigate?
The process of coding
How did Alan Badderly investigate the process of coding?
He gave a list of words to four groups to remember
What were the group of words the participants had to remember?
Group 1: acoustically similar (e.g. cat, can, cab)
Group 2: acoustically dissimilar (e.g. pit, few, cow)
Group 3: semantically similar (e.g. large, great, big)
Group 4: semantically dissimilar (e.g. good, huge, hot)
What was the procedure of Alan Badderley’s research?
Participants were shown the original words and asked to recall them in the correct order. When they had to do this recall task immediately after hearing it (STM recall) they did worse with acoustically similar words)
If participants were asked to recall the world list after a time interval of 20 mins (LTM recall) they did worse with the semantically similar words
What did Badderley’s research show us?
The information is coded acoustically in STM and semantically in LTM
What is one limitation of Baddeley’s study
The findings from the study have a limited application as it used an artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material; the list of words have no personal meaning to the participants which means we cannot generalise the findings
What did Joseph Jacobs (1887) investigate?
The size of capacity in STM
What was the method of Joseph Jacobs study?
Participants were presented with a string of letters or digits. They has to repeat them back in the same order . The number of digits or letters increased until the participant failed to recall the sequence correctly
What was the result of Joseph Jacobs study?
Jacobs found that the mean span for digits across all participants was 9.2 and the mean for letters was 7.3
What is the capacity of STM according to Jacobs study?
7+-2
What is one limitation of Joseph Jacobs study?
It lacks temporal validity as it was conducted long ago and research back then lacked control which decreases the validity of this study as it could’ve been affected by cofounding variables
What is on strength to counter the limitation of Joseph Jacobs study?
Further research into capacity has confirmed his findings
What did Peterson and Peterson investigate?
The duration of STM
What was the method/procedure of Petersons and Petersons study?
Participants were shown nonsense trigrams (3 random consonants e.g. CVM) and asked to recall them after either 3,6,9,12,155 and 18 seconds. During the pause they were asked to count backwards in threes from a given 3 digit number (interference task) to prevent them from repeating the letters internally
What were the results/findings of Petersons and Petersons research?
- After 3 seconds, participants could recall 80% of trigrams correctly
- After 18 seconds, participants could recall less that 10% of trigrams correctly
- STM has a very short duration unless we have the opportunity to repeat it over and over again (verbal rehearsal)
What is one strength of Petersons and Petersons research?
It is a laboratory experiment so it is likely to be reliable as the variables can be tightly controlled
What is one Limitation of Petersons and Petersons research?
It lacks ecological validity as nonsense trigrams are an artificial stimuli
What is one strength to the limitation of Petersons and Petersons research?
The artificial stimuli can be used in trying to remember things such as postcodes and number
