THE COGNITIVE APPROACH - KEY STUDIES Flashcards
What was the aim of Baddeley’s classic study?
to investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic word similarity on short term and long term memory
What was Baddeley’s procedure?
Laboratory experiments using an independent groups design of 72 male and female participants
There were four lists of ten words, either acoustically or semantically similar or dissimilar
Each group learnt one list and hand to recall it after different length interference tasks
Each list of words were the same length and had the same frequency of use in everyday language so all had the same difficulty to remember
In the short term memory, acoustically similar words were harder to remember yet not difference in the long term memory (short term memory encodes acoustically)
Semantically similar words were more difficult to remember in the long term memory
What are the strengths of Baddeley’s study?
Used both men and women in the sample, making it more generalisable as represents memory encoding of both genders
They removed confounding variables, for example the words were all the same length and had the same frequency of use, making it more valid as only the encoding affected memory
Easy to replicate making it more reliable as it was a standardised laboratory experiment
What are the weaknesses of Baddeley’s study?
the sample is quite small once split into four groups meaning any anomalies would skew the results making it less representative (18 per group)
Lacks ecological validity as recalling a list of random words is not how memory is used in everyday life
What was the aim of Steyvers and Hemmer’s contemporary study?
to measure the contributions of episodic and semantic memory to recall objects in naturalistic scenes
What was Steyvers and Hemmer’s procedure?
Laboratory experiment using an independent groups design of 96 students
Phase one: assessed their prior knowledge, first group listed words associated with a photo of a scene (eg kitchen, dining room) and second group names objects they could see in the photo
Phase two: third group saw an image of 10 ‘expected’ and 10 ‘unexpected’ objects based on phase one for 2 or 10 seconds, did an interference task and then recalled the objects
Error rate for expected objects was 9%, and was 18% for unexpected objects
First item guessed by the first group led to 85% accuracy by the third group which decreased to 65% for the 16th object
What are the strengths of Steyvers and Hemmer’s study?
High external validity as reflects real life use of memory and uses an active reconstructive process
Had a large sampling making it more representative and generalisable, as reflects memory of the population
What are the weaknesses of Steyvers and Hemmer’s study?
it was a laboratory experiment so lacks ecological validity as too controlled and unrealistic, and only shown photos not the actual room
They used an independent groups design so participant variables and individual differences would have affected the results making the groups not comparable (one group may have had naturally better memory) decreasing validity
What was HM’s case study?
To treat his severe epilepsy, William Scoville removed his hippocampus from the temporal lobe which cured his epilepsy but left him with amnesia
Anterograde amnesia - couldn’t form new memories but could learn new skills
Retrograde amnesia - couldn’t retrieve memories from 19 months to 11 years prior to the surgery
Couldn’t move memories from the short term memory to the long term memory, supporting that they are separate stores
However, he could learn new skills (mirror drawing task) despite not remembering learning them, suggesting that long term memory is more complex than MSM suggests
He wasn’t studied prior to the surgery therefore his previous experiences or participant variables hadn’t been controlled for
What was the aim of the cognitive practical?
to investigate whether schemas help to recall episodic memory
What was the procedure of the cognitive practical?
Independent measures design of opportunity sample (18 participants from 7- 48 years old)
Groups randomly allocated by random number generator
Participants were brought to a quiet room where they were given either story one (matched schema) or story two (didn’t match schema)
They had 30 seconds to read the story, then interference task where they had to say the alphabet backwards
Then had to recall the story, and we counted how many correct words they remembered
What were the strengths of the cognitive practical?
Ensuring they did it in a quiet room removed any extraneous variables (eg nose) making it more valid as only their schemas or episodic memory were aiding recall
This also made it more reliable as every person did it in the same environment
Using an independent measures design ensured that the story was new to every participant, and therefore they couldn’t remember a version of the story from before
What were the weaknesses of the cognitive practical?
Individual characteristics and participant variables could have affected their recall of the story, for example if someone’s memory is naturally better than another, making it less valid
Quite a small sample of 18, making the results less generalisable as any anomalies could have skewed the results
