Coding, capacity and duration

Coding, capacity and duration

1. Research into coding

   • Baddeley (1966): Gave different lists of words to 4 groups to remember: Group 1 - acoustically similar (e.g. cat, cab, can) Group 2 - acoustically dissimilar (e.g. pit, few, cow) Group 3 - semantically similar (e.g. great, large, big) Group 4 - semantically dissimilar (e.g. good, huge, hot) Participants were shown the original words and asked to recall them in the correct order. When they had to do this recall task immediately after hearing it (STM recall), they tended to do worse with acoustically similar words. If participants were asked to recall the word list after a time interval of 20 minutes (LTM recall), they did worse with the semantically similar words. This suggests that information is coded acoustically in STM and semantically in LTM