Research on coding

• Coding in STM and LTM

  Baddley found Information is coded acoustically in STM. This is supported by his research into coding baddley gave different lists of words to 4 groups of participants Group 1 – acoustically similar

  Group 2 – acoustically dissimilar

  Group 3 – semantically similar

  Group 4 – semantically dissimilar
• Method Participants were shown the original words & asked to recall them in the correct order. •They were asked to recall the list immediately, testing the coding of short-term memory (STM) or after 20 minutes, testing the coding of long-term memory (LTM)
• He found that acoustically similar words were harder to recall as participants got confused between the similar words. Similarly semantically similar words were harder to recall due to similar meaning However acoustically dissimilar words were recalled better in STM and semantically dissimilar words in LTM.
• STM – information is coded acoustically (sound ) LTM – information is coded semantically ( meaning)
• One limitation of Baddeley’s study was that it used quite artificial stimuli rather than meaning materials. The word list has no personal meaning to participants, for this reason Baddeley's findings may not tell us much about coding in different kind of everyday memory tasks. Therefore, the findings from this study has limited application.
• A strength of baddley study is that it shows that memory is coded in 2 distinct memory stores . The idea that STM memory is mostly acoustically coded and LTM is mostly semantically has stood the test of time which has helped developed the multi store model