Research On Coding Flashcards
Coding
Refers to ‘the format in which information is stored in the various memory stores’
Alan Baddeley’s 4 Lists
List 1- acoustically similar words
List 2- acoustically dissimilar words
List 3- semantically similar words
List 4- semantically dissimilar words
Participants in Baddeley’s study
A mixture of 72 men and women from the Cambridge University. They were mostly students who had volunteered. No deception was used as they knew it was on memory.
How did Baddeley increase the validity of his experiment?
He used control variables. He added an interference task (writing down lists of numbers) before each trial to ‘block’ the STM and make sure only LTM was being used. He also presented words on slides because he didn’t want to disqualify people for having bad hearing.
What did Baddeley conclude from his results?
- LTM encodes semantically
- STM encodes acoustically
- LTM gets confused when it has to retrieve the order of words which are semantically similar as it gets muddled by the semantic similarities.
Was the experiment generalisable?
No, because although a large sample was used, the results are not representative of the wider population as we don’t know the culture of the students.
Was the experiment reliable?
Yes because the experiment follows a clear method which can be replicated. Baddeley used a tape recording so that the way the words were read out was the same each time. There were control groups for each set of words to improve the reliability. We can access the same words that he used to replicate the study and gain similar results.
Can the results be applied to the real world?
No because it doesn’t replicate real-life situations therefore doesn’t alter things in society hugely.
How valid was the experiment?
The study has high internal validity as it measured how different forms of information are stored in the brain, which is what it intended to do.
It doesn’t have good ecological validity as we do not often need to remember lists of similar sounding words in order on a day-to-day basis.
How ethical was the study?
The study was very ethical as no deception was used. The participants knew the true intentions of the study.
