RESEARCH ON CODING, CAPACITY AND DURATION OF MEMORY

Question 1

coding

Answer 1

describes the format that information is stored

Question 2

duration

Answer 2

refers to how long a memory trace can be held for.

Question 3

capacity

Answer 3

refers to the maximum amount of information that can be stored.

Question 4

BADDELEY (1966) coding (acoustic and semantic)

Answer 4

• Baddeley who gave different lists of words to 4 groups of participants to remember:
• acoustically similar, acoustically dissimilar
• semantically similar, and semantically dissimilar.

Question 5

BADDELEY (1966) FINDINGS AND CONCLUSION

Answer 5

• He found that when recalling tasks immediately after, recall was worse with acoustically similar words. Yet, after 20 minutes recall was worse with semantically similar words.
• This suggests that the short term memory (STM) is encoded acoustically
• the long term memory (LTM) is encoded semantically.

Question 6

CAPACITY (DIGIT SCAN JACOBS)

Answer 6

• 4 digits to participant, then participant needs to recall them in the correct order
• if correct they move on to 5 digits and so on
• researcher does this until the participant cannot do anymore
• this then determines the individual’s digit span

Question 7

DIGIT SPAN JACOBS (1887) FINDINGS

Answer 7

• He found that the mean span
  for digits across all participants was 9.3 items and letters was 7.3.
• This suggests capacity for the STM is about 7 items (+/-2).

Question 8

duration of stm peterson and peterson

Answer 8

24 students were given a constant syllable e.g YCG to recall and a 3 digit number to count backwards from. the rention intervals varied 3,6,9,12,15 or 18 seconds

Question 9

duration of stm findings

Answer 9

• after 3 secs - average recall was about 80%.
• after 18 secs it was 3%.
• STM duration without rehersal is up to 18 seconds.

Question 10

duration of ltm bahrick

Answer 10

• studied 392 participants from ohio aged between 17 and 74
• recall tested in different ways (photo recognition test consisting of 50 photos, free recall test

Question 11

duration of ltm findings and conclusions

Answer 11

• recognition test : 90% accurate 15 years of graduation were 70% after48 years
• Free recall test : 60% accurate after 15 years dropping to 30% after 48 years
• conclusion- ltm can last a very long time

Question 12

one limitation is that an arificial stimuli is used (baddley)

Answer 12

• baddley used quite artificial stimuli rather than meaningful material, in the study the words had no personal meaning to participants so tells us little about coding for everday memory tasks
• when processing more meaningful info, people use semantic coding even for stm
• this means findings have limited applications

Question 13

one strength is baddley identified two memory stores

Answer 13

• later research shows that there are no exceptions to baddleys findings.
• but stm is mostly acoustic and LTM is mostly semantic
• this led to the development of the MSM

Question 14

one strength is jacobs study has been replicated

Answer 14

• this is an old study an may have lacked adequate control of confunding variables
• despite this findings have confirmed in later controlled studied bopp and verhaeghen
• jacobs study is valid measure of digit span

Question 15

one limitation of miller is that it over extaggers the STM capacity

Answer 15

• he may have overestimated the capacity of stm for example,
• cowan (2001) reviewed other research and concluded the capacity of stm was only about four chunks
• this suggests that the lower end of miller’s estimate is more appropriate than seven times

Question 16

one limitation of peterson study is that its a meaningless stimuli

Answer 16

• the stimulus was artificial
• for example, trying to memorise consonant syllables does not reflect most real-life memory activities where what we are trying to remember is meaningful
• therefore, this suggests that this study lacks external validity
• however- sometimes we remember meaningless things, so this study is not totally irrelevant

Question 17

One strength is that it has high ecological validity (bahrick)

Answer 17

• everyday meaningful memories (e.g ppl faces and names) were studied
• when lab studies were done with meaningless pictures to be remembered shepard found recall rates were lower.
• this means bahrick et al’s findings reflect a more real estimate of duration of LTM