Baddeley 1966 (Classic Cognitive Study)

Baddeley 1966 (Classic Cognitive Study)

1. AIM: to find out if LTM encodes acoustically or semantically

   • Giving participants word lists that are ACOUSTICALLY SIMILAR or SEMANTICALLY SIMILAR. If the participants struggle to recall the word order, it suggests LTM is confused by the similarity which means that this is how LTM tends to encode.

2. IVs: (1) Acoustically similar or acoustically dissimilar. (2) Semantically similar or semantically dissimilar (3) Performance before 15 minutes or after 15 minutes.

3. DV: Score on a recall test of 10 words in the correct order

4. Sample: 72 participants (mostly Cambridge university students) 15-20 in each condition

5. METHOD: The ppt's are split into FOUR GROUPS according to the (1) and (2) IV's.

6. Each group views a slideshow set of 10 WORDS with each word appearing for 3 seconds.

   • Semantically Similar - great, large, big, huge etc.
     • Control get Semantically Dissimilar - good, huge, hot, safe etc.

7. Acoustically Similar - man, cab, can, max etc.

   • Control get Acoustically Dissimilar - pit, few, cow, pen etc.

8. All ppt's do “INTERFERENCE TEST” which involves hearing then writing down 8 numbers three times. Then they recall the words from the slideshow in order.

9. REPEATED FOUR TIMES - ppt's get better each time as words stay the same

10. Ppt's think that the experiment is over after four times, then after 15 minutes they get a SURPRISE TEST.

11. RESULTS:

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