Memory

• One limitation of the WMM is that it was established from duel tasks studies that have been carried out in laboratories so is lacking in ecological validity
• The capacity of STM is limited to around 7 items +/-2 which was discovered by Miller.
• STM has a short duration (around 18 seconds) which means information must be rehearsed or transferred into LTM if we want to remember it long term. This was found out by Peterson and Peterson who did a study with trigrams.
• State-dependant forgetting is when the recall of information is affected by the state of the mind of the person at the time of learning
• Context dependant forgetting is when the context in which the information was learned is lost. Environmental cues can trigger retrieval.
• Baddeley and Godden studied context-dependant forgetting.
• Baddeley and Gooden completing a repeated measures study which consisted of students learning and recalling information on and off land. The number of words recalled in the same environment they leant them in was higher.
• A limitation of Baddeley and Gooden is that they didn't control extraneous variables, like time of day and different underwater locations which may have impacted memory