Research Into Multi Store Model

Question 1

Research on coding- Alan Baddeley (1966)

Answer 1

He gave different word lists to four groups of participants to remember:
- Group 1 had acoustically similar words
- Group 2 had acoustically dissimilar words
- Group 3 had semantically similar words
- Group 4 had semantically dissimilar words

Participants were shown the original list, then asked to recall the words in the correct order. For the acoustically similar/dissimilar words, acoustically similar words did worse. For the semantically similar/dissimilar words, semantically similar words did worse
This supports the theory that STM codes via sound, and LTM via meaning

Question 2

Research on capacity- Miller (1956)

Answer 2

• He made observations of every day practice
• He noted that things come in sevens e.g seven deadly sins, or seven days in a week. From this, he suggested that the capacity of STM is about 7 times (plus or minus 2)

Question 3

Research on duration- Peterson and Peterson and Peterson and Peterson and Peterson (1959)

Answer 3

• They tested 24 undergraduate students. Each took part in 8 trials
• On each trial, the student was given a trigram to remember and a 3 digit number. They were asked to count backwards from the 3 digit number until told to stop. The counting backwards was to prevent any rehearsal of the trigram
• On each trial, they were told to stop counting after different amounts of time (3,6,9,12,15,18). This is called the retention interval
• The results showed that 80% of participants could recall after 3 second interval. However, after 18 seconds less than 10% could recall
• They concluded that the STM has a very short retention if we do not repeat something over and over in our head

Question 4

Research on duration- Bahrick (1975)

Answer 4

• He studies around 400 participants, ranging from ages 17 to 74. High school yearbooks were obtained from the schools of each participant
• Recall was tested in various ways, by photo recognition, or free recall of names in their graduation class
• Participants tested within 15 years of graduation were 90% accurate in photo recognition, and 60% accurate in free recall
• Participants tested after 48 years were 70% accurate in photo recognition, and 30% accurate in free recall
• This shows that LTM can last potentially for a whole lifetime

Question 5

Evaluation of research into MSM

Answer 5

• Artificial stimuli: some of the studies (e.g Baddeley) used artificial stimuli rather than meaningful information. This may not be very realistic to everyday life (lack ecological validity), therefore making generalising quite difficult
• An issue with some of the studies could be the possibility of poor temporal validity, for example Jacobs research that was completed in 1887. Early psychology often lacked control. This would mean the results might not be valid due to confounding variables that were not controlled