Encoding

Encoding

1. Short Term Memory

   • Conrad
     • 2 groups of words, 1 acoustically similar, and one not. Participants had to recall in order.
     • Partcipants found it more difficult to recall letters/words that sound similar
     • Concluded we convert visual material to an acoustic code in STM
       • And that we struggle to distinguish similar sounding words
     • Strength: Well Controlled lab experiment
     • Limitation: Lacks external validity & student's don't resemble general population

2. Long Term Memory

   • Baddeley
     • 4 Groups of words, and participants had to recall.
       • Acoustically similar & dissimilar, and Semantically similar & dissimilar
     • Acoustically similar hard to recall - same as Conrad
     • Changed experiment so had more words, were prevented from rehearsing, and was a 20 minute delay before recall
     • Semantically similar words were poorly recalled
       • Concluded LTM codes were mainly semantic
     • Strength: Used familiar words in all groups, so no group was easier to remember than another
     • Limitation: Artifical stimuli rather than meaningful material
       • The lists had no meaning to participants, so we should be careful generalising the findings
         • Meaningful information could be coded semantically for STM tasks.

3. Encoding is the format in which information is stored in the various memory stores.