classic study Flashcards
my classic study for cognitive psychology is __ in __.
Baddeley 1966
outline the aims
to establish how our STM and LTM are encoded ie acoustically or semantically .
His study had high reliability as he used a standardised procedure. give details.
there were 4 conditions, semantically similar ie big large huge, semantically dissimilar tin cow toe can pen few, acoustically similar pen pot pin pick, acoustically dissimilar hill dog pen rat, each group received a different word list with 10 words. words were presented one at a time for 3 seconds by a projector and also shown around the room, they had 1 minute to recall the word list in the correct order, this was repeated 4 times. then a 15 minute intervention task involving the recall of 8 digits. unaware of the 5th recall.
what was the sample used.
Men and women from the Cambridge University subject panel (mostly students); they were volunteers. There were 72 altogether, a mixture of men and women. There were 15-20 in each condition
give strengths of his study 3
high internal validity - control of extraneous variables ie sight/ hearing impairments/ distractions so we can establish cause and effect
high reliability - standardised procedure, easily replicated to test the consistency of findings. also agree with Petersons research that STM is encoded acoustically.
good application - WMM and revision techniques in schools
give weakness of his study 3
lacks mundane realism - low external validity as the tasks don’t represent how memory works in real life conditions ie when remembering what’s on the shopping list
low reliability - ppts are aware of the study therefore risk of demand characteristic or order effects ie boredom
low generlisabilty - from Cambridge uni mainly students, higher IQ students. doesn’t explain individual differences ie dyslexia and dementia patients. cannot establish that this is how memory works in adults in the working world. low classes, underprivileged.
Give 2 qualitative and 2 quantitative results
Performance was overall better on the semantic condition than on the acoustic one. Acoustically similar words were harder to recall than acoustically dissimilar words. Semantically similar words were harder to recall than semantically dissimilar words.
Around 40% of people recalled acoustically similar words correctly in trial 2 compared to 60% for acoustically dissimilar words
Around 50% of semantically similar words were recalled in trial 4 compared to 85% of semantically dissimilar which was a significant difference
None of the conditions showed any significant further forgetting between trial 4 and the retest
what is the application of baddeleys study
used in schools to help maximise learning by using posters, as LTM is encoded semantically.
