AO3

•  Bahrick's research used a sample of 392 American university graduates and therefore lacks population validity.
• Psychologists are unable to generalise the results of Bahrick's research to other populations, for example students from the UK or Europe. As a result, we are unable to conclude whether other populations would demonstrate the same ability to recall names and faces after 47 years.
• Furthermore, Bahrick found that the accuracy of LTM was 90% after 14 years and 60% after 47 years. His research is unable to explain whether LTM becomes less accurate over time because of a limited duration, or whether LTM simply gets worse with age. This is important because psychologists are unable to determine whether our LTM has an unlimited duration (like the MSM suggests), which is affected by other factors such as getting old, or whether our LTM has a limited duration.
• Finally, it could be argued that Bahrick's study has high levels of ecological validity as the study used real-life memories. In this study participants recalled real-life information by matching pictures of classmates with their names. Therefore, these results reflect our memory for real-life events and can be applied to everyday human memory.