Coding, Capacity and Duration

Coding, Capacity and Duration

1. Coding

   • Baddeley
     • 4 groups of people were given lists of word groups Eg: synonyms
     • Those asked to recall quikly after memorising had difficulty recalling the words which were acoustically similar and those asked to recall after 20 minutes struggled with the semantically similar words

2. Capacity

   • Jacobs
     • Studied digit span
       • Gave ppt lists of digits or letters and once they could recall that set they moved up to the next. Eg: once they could recall the 4 digits in order they'd move to 5 digits.
     • Results: the mean average digit span was 9.3 letters and 7.3 digits
   • Miller
     • Observed everyday behaviour and found that things usually come in groups of 7. Eg: days of the week
     • He therefore concluded using Jacobs' results that the capacity of the stm was 7+/-2

3. Duration

   • Peterson and Peterson
     • Found duration of stm was 18-30 seconds
   • Bahrick
     • Found duration of ltm was forever/very long time

4. A03:

   • Baddeley - artificial materials meaning that the generalisability to real life situations is limited because the tasks lack mundane realism
   • Jacobs - this study is very old and so the results maybe outdated meaning that they lack validity
   • Miller - Cowan contradicts Millers results as he says the capacity of the stm is actually 4 chunks instead of 7+/-2
   • Peterson and Peterson - the material used was artificial and therefore it lacks mundane realism and limits the generalisability to real life situations
   • Bahrick - this study has high external validity as real life memories were studied (remembering class mates names after graduating)