Classic Study (BADDELEY)

• Aim of Baddeley’s study was to investigate the influence of acoustic and semantic similarity on learning and recall in short term and long term memory.
• Baddeleys experiment involved participants listening to lists of words which were either phonologically related (rhymed) or unrelated. They then had to recall them immediately afterwards and again after a delay of 20 minutes. The results showed that there was no difference between immediate recall but there was a significant difference in delayed recall. This suggests that STM has limited capacity and LTM has unlimited capacity.
• The main limitation of Baddeleys research is that he only used verbal material meaning his findings cannot be generalised to other forms of stimuli
• baddeley’s procedure included four word list groups which were acoustically similar , acoustically dissimilar , semantically similar , semantically dissimilar
• Our classic study in cognitive psychology is Baddeley
• Baddeley suggested that the central executive controls the flow of information through the system by selecting what information goes into short term memory from long term memory and then deciding where to send it next
• Strength of baddey’s study?

  Demand characteristics will be lower as participants only took part in either similar or dissimilar word lists so wouldn’t have guessed what was expected. Therefore validity should be higher as participants recall of similar and dissimilar words will be more accurate of their actual STM and LTM.
• Strength 2 of baddeleys study ?

  it is high in controls such as all words being presented on a slide projector with words changing every 3 seconds. This is a strength because it reduced effect of extraneous variables such ad participants having a different experience while being tested, increasing the validity of the findings about acoustic and semantic word similarity.
• Weakness 1 of baddeleys study ?

  Restricted sample used as only a certain type of person may have applied to research panel in Cambridge. Weakness as results may not be representative of people who didn’t apply to research panel in Cambridge and the general population.
• Weakness 2 of baddeleys study?

  Used an artificial task and setting such as university lab to measure impact of acoustic and semantic similarity of word learning. This is a weakness because it is low in ecological validity which means behaviour may not be representative of how people process semantically and acoustically similar information in the real world.
• Baddeleys study found that in LTM semantically similar words are harder to remember than words which are semantically dissimilar and that in STM acoustically dissimilar words are easier to remember than acoustically similar words.