Baddeley (1966b) [APRC]

Baddeley (1966b) [APRC]

1. Background

   • Baddeley was interested to see how pp’s would cope with words presented as ACOUSTICALLY SIMILAR or SEMANTICALLY SIMILAR
   • He also included control groups for each condition; ACOUSTICALLY DISSIMILAR and SEMANTICALLY DISSIMILAR

2. Aim

   • To investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic word similarity on learning and recall in short term and long term memory

3. Procedure

   • Sample: Males and females from the university subject panel (volunteer)
     • 72PP's Split into four groups; A = 15PP's B = 20PP's C = 16PP's D = 21PP's
   • ACOUSTICALLY SIMILAR - SAME SOUND acoustically dissimilar (control) - DIFFERENT SOUND
   • SEMANTICALLY SIMILAR - SAME MEANING semantically dissimilar (control) - different meaning
   • The participants then performed a distraction task - to read aloud 8 numbers and record them on paper in sequential order, this was repeated 6 times
   • There are four "trails" in which they had to recall the order of the words, the words were visible throughout however not in the correct order
   • After the final trail the pp's get a 15 minute break and perform an unrelated interference task. Then they are asked to recall the list again. This fifth trial is unexpected however the words are still on display and it's only the order that matters
   • Each group views a slideshow of a set of 10 words. Each word appears for 3 seconds.

4. Results

   • Experiment 3 shows that LTM might be based on the meaning of words (semantic) or their sound(acoustic) Both showed successful recall in LTM
   • When STM is blocked, it was hard to learn the semantically similar words which suggests STM has acoustic encoding
   • LTM was not affected by acoustic similarity and shows that LTM and STM are indeed affected differently by differentypes of coding
   • It has also been shown by this experiment, that LTM and STM do work together in order to process information

5. Conclusions

   • It is clear from this study that LTM is different to STM
   • The aim of this study was to identify if LTM is affected if tere is acoustic similarity more than there is semantic similarity, AND THIS WAS NOT THE CASE