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STM and LTM

1. Research: Bahrick et al (1975) investigated LTM in a natural setting

   • Method: 392 people were asked to list names of ex-classmates. The participants were placed in independent groups to do a photo recognition test and a name-recognition test
     • Results: Within 15 years of participants leaving school, 90% were able to recognise names and faces, however after 48 years, name recognition was around 80% accurate and photo recognition about 40% accurate
       • Conclusion: We have very long term memories with real-life settings
         • Evaluation: The experiment has high ecological validity due to it being a field experiment, however it has low internal validity as it is hard to control variables in the experiment and the experiment and the results can not be generalised.

2. Jacobs (1887) studied the capacity of STM

   • Method: Participants were given a string of digits/letters which were increased until participants failed to recall the sequence correctly
     • Results: On average, participants recalled 9 numbers and 7 letters (is this because there are 10 numbers and 26 letters in the alphabet?)
       • The experiment is artificial and lacks ecological validity (lab experiment)