Research into coding, capacity and duration of memory Flashcards
Define coding
converting information between different forms of memory
Who conducted research into coding
Baddley
Outline coding research procedure
Baddley gave word lists to 4 groups of pp’s
acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar, semantically similar, and semantically dissimilar.
Showed pp’s the word lists and then asked them to recall, when recall was done immediately recall was worse for semantically similar words, but after 20 mins, recall was worse for semantically similar words.
What are the conclusions of coding research
The STM is coded acoustically and the LTM is coded semantically.
Define capacity
Capacity is the amount of information that can be retained in a memory store at one time
Who performed research into capacity
Jacobs
Outline the procedure for capacity research
Jacobs read participants 4 digits and asked them to recall the digits in the correct order. If they successfully did this, he added a digit to the list. This continued until the PPs could not longer correctly recall the list in order.
What were the findings of capacity research
The mean number of digits that pp’s could recall was 9.3 items, and the mean number of letters was 7.3 items.
Who performed research on the span of memory and chunking
Miller
Outline span of memory observations
Miller observed that features of everyday life come in 7’s, eg 7 days of the week. He suggested capacity of the STM was 7+-2 items.
Outline chunking findings
Miller noticed that people could recall 5 words as easy as they could recall 5 letters, as we group letters together in chunking processes.
Define duration
How long memories can be stored in memory stores for
Who performed research into the duration of the STM
Peterson and Peterson
Outline the procedure for STM duration research
24 students were each subject to 8 trials. In each trial, they were given a three-letter trigram to remember, as well as a random three-digit number to count back from until told to stop. They were told to stop at random intervals of 3,6,9,12,15 and 18 secs.
After 3 secs = recall 80%
After 18 secs = 3%
Conclusions of STM duration research
The duration of the STM is 18 seconds unless we use maintenance rehearsal to keep information in the STM.
Who conducted LTM duration research
Bahrick
Outline the duration of LTM research procedure
392 American pp’s. School yearbooks were obtained from pp’s or from their schools.
pp’s were assessed on:
-photo recognition from 50 photos, where some photos were of people in their yearbooks.
-free recall of names from their graduating class
Findings of LTM duration research
After 15 years of graduation, photo recognition was 90%, whereas after 48 years of graduating, this fell to 70%
After 15 years of graduating, free recall was 60% and after 48 years of graduating, this fell to 30%.
conclusions of LTM duration research
The duration of the LTM could be up to a lifetime for some information.
