Baddeley's study

• Baddeley's study (1966)-


  exploring how different types of encoding impact short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). His study is part of research into understanding memory processes, especially how we encode information differently depending on which memory store it’s going into.
• Aim of Baddeley's study:


  Baddeley aimed to see if there was a difference in the type of encoding in short- and long-term memory.
• Method of Baddeley's study (part 1):

  There were 4 groups of participants, Each group was given lists of words to remember, categorized as follows:

  1. Acoustically Similar Words (e.g., "man," "map," "mat")
  2. Acoustically Dissimilar Words (e.g., "pen," "cow," "day")
  3. Semantically Similar Words (e.g., "big," "large," "huge")
  4. Semantically Dissimilar Words (e.g., "good," "hot," "safe").
• Method of Baddeley's study (part 2):

  • Participants were asked to recall the words immediately (testing STM) and again after a delay (testing LTM).
  • Group A heared 12 sets of five words from list A.
  • Group B did the same with list B.
  • Group C did the same thing with list C except they waited 20 mins before they recaled the words, the same applied to group D with list D.
• Results of Baddeley's study-


  Baddeley found that participants did worse than list A than list B.

  He also found that they did worse with list C than list D.
• Conclusion of Baddeley's study-


  List A has acoustically similar words whereas list B has acoustically dissimilar words. The fact that participants did worse with list A than list B suggests that STM primarily uses acoustic encoding.

  List C has semantically similar words whereas list D has semantically dissimilar words. This suggest that LTM relies on semantic encoding.
• Evaluation of baddeley's study-


  Strengths: Baddeley’s study is a controlled lab experiment, which allowed precise control over variables, strengthening the reliability of the findings.
• Evaluation of baddeley's study-


  Weaknesses: The artificial nature of the tasks (memorizing word lists) may limit ecological validity, as it doesn't fully represent how we use memory in daily life. Additionally, the sample was small and may not generalize to all populations.
• One strength of dividing LTM into different types is that brain scans have shown separate locations in the brain for each of the three types of memory.