Godden and Baddeley

Godden and Baddeley

1. Aim

   • To investigate whether a natural environment can act as a cue for recall

2. Procedure

   • 18 participants from a university diving club
   • Learn a list of 38 unrelated two or three syllable wordds underwater or on dry land and then recall them either underwater or on dry land
   • Radnomly allocated 1 of 4 conditions
     • Context-cued
       • Learn and recall on dry land
       • Learn and recall under water
     • No context cue
       • Learn underwater, recall on dry land
       • Learn on dry land, recall underwater
   • Took place in an open water site in Oban, Scotland
   • 2 participants dropped and replaced for technical reasons
   • Conducted over 4 days
   • Each diver experienced each condition after a 24 hour delay, following a scheduled dive to ensure all participants were cold and wet
   • All fully kitted in diving gear
   • Underwwater wore breathing and comunication devices
   • On land, breathing apperatus removed
   • Tested 2 at a time
   • Submerged up to 20 feet underwater and played a tape recording of the word list
   • Words presented in blocks of three, with a four second interval between blocks
   • Each list presented twuce, and after a four minute delay, the participants had to write the words, in any order, in two minutes
   • All participants used a pencil to write down the words on a weighted clipboard sealed with plastic

3. Results

   • Recall was around 50% higher when it took place in the same environment as learning
   • Mean
     • Learn and recall on dry land
       • 13.5
     • Learn and recall under water
       • 11.4
     • Learn underwater recall dry land
       • 8.4
     • Learn dry land recall underwater
       • 8.6

4. Conclusion

   • Environment can act as a contextual cue for recall

5. Evaluation

   • Strengths
     • Realistic, open water environment
       • Greater generalisability to real-life situations than lab research
     • As participants were tested in pairs, it's unlikely they would have cheated
   • Weaknesses
     • Lack of control
       • Equipment failure
       • Inconsistent diving location
       • Lack of standardisation
       • Timing
       • Fitness
       • Weather/dive conditions
       • Noise levels
     • Cheating is still a possibility as researchers were not present
     • No change of environment couldve allowed adittional rehearsal
     • Change of environment could have experienced interference in memory
       • Later experiment
       • No difference due to interference task
   • Practical applications
     • Reinstate learning context for examinations
     • Taking witnesses back to the scene of the event