A01

• Define capacity

  The amount of information a memory store can hold.
• Define coding

  The format in which the information is stored.
• Define duration

  The amount of time the information is stored.
• Name and outline (procedure and findings) the study which investigated the duration of LTM

  Bahrick et al. (1979):

  - 400 participants aged between 17 and 74 years were shown a set of photos and list of names (some random and some from old yearbooks)

  - asked to identify ex-school friends

  - those who'd left high school in last 15 years identified 90% of faces and names

  - those who'd left 48 years previously identified 80% of names and 70% of faces

  - suggests that memory for faces is long lasting
• Name and outline (procedure and findings) the study which investigated the duration of STM


  Peterson and Peterson (1959):

  - participants given nonsense trigrams (e.g. ZFB)

  - had to count backwards in threes from a large three-digit number (to prevent mental rehearsal) for varying periods of times

  - correct recall of trigrams after 3 seconds - 80%

  - correct recall of trigrams after 18 seconds - 3%

  - suggests STM duration is about 18 seconds
• Name and outline (procedure and findings) the study which investigated the coding of STM and LTM

  Baddeley (1966):

  - gave different lists of words to 4 groups of participants to remember

  - group 1: words sounded similar (e.g. cat, cab, can)

  - group 2: words sounded different (e.g. pit, few, cow)

  - group 3: words with similar meanings (e.g. great, large, big)

  - group 4: words with different meanings (e.g. good, huge, hot)

  - participants were shown original words and asked to recall them in correct order

  - when recalled immediately (recall from STM), they did worse with acoustically similar words

  - when recalled after 20 mins (recall from LTM), they did worse with semantically similar words

  -suggests that information is coded acoustically in STM and semantically in LTM
• Name and outline (procedure and findings) the study which investigated the capacity of STM using digit span

  Jacobs (1887):

  - 4 digits read out and participants had to recall these out loud in correct order

  - if recalled correct researcher reads out 5 digits and so on until participants cannot recall order correctly = individual's digit span

  - mean span for digits - 9.3 items

  - mean span for letters - 7.3 items