Research on Coding

• Who conducted the research and when?

  Baddeley (1966)
• Procedure-

  Baddeley gave different lists of words to four groups of participants to remember

  - Group 1: Acoustically similar words

  - Group 2: Acoustically dissimilar words

  - Group 3: Semantically similar words

  - Group 4: Semantically dissimilar words

  Participants were shown the original words and asked to recall them in the correct order.
• Findings-

  - When they had to do this recall task immediately after hearing it they tended to do worse with acoustically similar words (STM recall)

  - If participants were asked to recall the world list after a time interval of 20 minutes (LTM recall) they did worse with the semantically similar words
• Conclusion-

  This suggests that information is coded semantically in LTM
• Strengths of the study-

  - Since the study was standardised and can easily be replicated, it presents high reliability.

  - It has beneficial implications for real-life scenarios; for instance, students can use these findings to strategise their revision techniques better).
• Weaknesses of the study-

  - It was carried out on British students, which makes it ethnocentric. Therefore the research does not consider cross-cultural differences and limits the generalisability of the findings

  - The sample included 72 participants, which is not representative of the population and limits the generalisability of the findings.

  - Given that it is a laboratory study, has low ecological validity; it is unlikely that the procedure is used in everyday life.