NOT ON ALEVEL 2.3.1 classic study Flashcards
what was the classic study
1996 BADDELEY
SEMANTIC ENCODING IN THE LONG TERM MEMORY
What was the aim
he aimed to conduct a study where he showed that the recall of acoustically similar words were poorer in the long term memory compare to the semantic
procedure
design: lab experiment and independent group design
participants: 75% of the participants were young servicemen e.g. the army
method: there were four lists of 10 words each and four separate groups of participants learning one list each. Each list was presented out loud on tape, one word every three seconds and participants had 40 seconds to write down as many of the 10 words they could recall and in the order that they heard them in. This was carried out four times. Each participant then spent 20 minutes on an unrelated task and after they had to recall the 10 words in the correct order and that was not told the participants in advance
results
Each participant performance was measured by the number of words they record in the correct position in the list. On the learning trials short-term memory, Recall of the acoustically similar list was consistently lower than for the acoustically dissimilar control list. But on the Rico tests 20 minutes later for long-term memory there was no forgetting of words in the acoustically similar list and there was forgetting the acoustically dissimilar. There was no significant differences in recall of the two semantic lists on the learning trials in the recall test but there was a significant amount of forgetting on both semantic lists
conclusion
The conclusions are not what we would expect given the aims. Performance on the acoustically similar list was the only list to show no forgetting in the long term memory suggesting encoding in the long term memory is acoustic rather than semantic contradicts in several earlier studies and so because the results were so unexpected he wanted to improve the test and carried out two more experiments
