Psy Test Question

Question 1

Outline the procedure of Braddeley

Answer 1

Aim - A study to see whether memory was stored acoustically or semantically
Participants - Men and women from the Cambridge university panel
Procedure - Participants were assigned to one of the 4-word lists; semantically similar, semantically dissimilar, acoustically similar, and acoustically dissimilar
The participants were shown 10 words each word was shown for 3 seconds, after seeing the words they had to write down 8 random numbers. These steps were repeated 4 times,
The participants were then given a 15 to 20 min break to do an interference task and the participants had to recall the word order after the 15-minute task this final recall is also unexpected for the participants
They had the word list in front of them throughout the study but they were in order
Findings - Similar meaning words strain the LTM as the meaning of the word are the same so they cannot sort them as there is no difference
Similar sounding words can be sorted based on the difference
So there was good performance on the acoustically similar list

Question 2

Strength of Baddeley Study

Answer 2

• Internal validity is high in this study (have no many controls)
• The words participants had to learn were matched based on how common the frequency those words occur in the English language, so participants didn’t have the excuse of recalling more familiar words
• The level of control avoids the fact that participants being able to recall words based on familiarity and researchers can be sure that the difference between the groups is based on semantic or acoustic

Question 3

Weakness of Baddeley Study

Answer 3

• Mundane realism is low (doesn’t represent real-life memory tasks well)
• Real life-long terms memories do not only consist of remembering word list that sounds or mean similar things in order
• Therefore this may suggest the encoding in the study may not reflect real life and that the role of semantic encoding may have in LTM has been exaggerated