Coding psychologists

• Baddely concluded that Short-Term Memory is acoustically coded
• Baddely concluded that Long-Term memory is semantically coded
• Strengths of Baddely -

  • high external reliability due to methodology of lab experiment - likely to get similar results if repeated
• Weaknesses of Baddely -

  • independent groups design - no control over participant variables, one group may be naturally better at memory than another
  • does not reflect a real life situation - people are unlikely to be asked to remember seemingly meaningless words. We may say it lacks ecological validity, and so findings may have limited application
• Baddeley


  • gave word lists to four groups of participants
  • group 1 - acoustically similar words
  • group 2 - acoustically dissimilar words
  • group 3 - semantically similar words
  • group 4 - semantically dissimilar words
  • Participants had to recall words in the correct order, did worst on acoustically similar words when asked to recall straight away
  • Participants did worst on semantically similar words when asked to recall them after twenty minutes