Classic study (Baddeley WMM)

• Baddeley WMM Study: Aim

  Explore the effects of acoustic and semantic coding in STM and LTM to see if they are separate stores
• Baddeley WMM Study: Procedure

  - 72 participants, men and women from a psychology research unit

  - Independent group design and ordinal data

  - Assigned to 1 of 4 word list conditions:

  1) Acoustically similar words: words that sound the same, eg map, mad, man

  2) Acoustically different words: words that sound different, eg pen, day, few

  3) Semantically similar words: words that have the same meaning, eg great, big, large

  4) Semantically dissimilar words: words that have a different meaning, eg hat, old, late
• Baddeley WMM Study: Procedure (STM Study)

  - Participants were presented with 10 words at a time at the rate of one every 3 seconds

  - They were given a brief distraction task and asked to recall in the correct order, a list of 5 words taken from their pool of words

  - All the word lists in random order were shown to them

  - Not a test of recall but a test whether they could remember
• Baddeley WMM Study: Procedure (LTM Study)

  - Participants were presented with 10 words at a time at the rate of one every 3 seconds

  - They were given a 15 min distraction task and asked to recall in the correct order, a list of 5 words taken from their pool of words

  - All the word lists in random order were shown to them

  - Not a test of recall but a test whether they could remember

  - Participants were given a surprise task of recalling the correct sequence of words
• Baddeley WMM Study: Findings

  STM:

  Words with acoustically similar sounds were harder to recall than with acoustically dissimilar words, and similarity of meaning had only slight detrimental effects

  
  

  LTM:

  Recall was much worse for semantically similar words than semantically dissimilar words, it was the same recall for acoustically similar/dissimilar words
• Baddeley WMM Study: Conclusion

  Study found that participants found it easier in the STM condition to recall order of words that were not acoustically similar: concluded STM was acoustic

  
  

  LTM condition, participants found it difficult to recall the order of words that were semantically similar, acoustically similar did not have an effect on recall: Baddeley suggested LTM was encoding was semantic
• Baddeley WMM Study: Variables

  IV: Whether they heard semantically similar words or not

  Whether they heard acoustically different words or not

  DV: How many words they could remember in the correct order
• Baddeley WMM Study: Hypothesis'

  Participants who processed semantically similar words will recall less words in the correct order out of 10 than participants who processed semantically dissimilar words

  
  

  Participants who processed acoustically similar words will recall less words in the correct order out of 10 than participants who processed acoustically dissimilar words
• Baddeley WMM Study: Evaluation

  Strengths: generalisability, reliability, internal validity

  Weaknesses: generalisability, reliability, external validity
• Baddeley WMM Study: Evaluation- Strength (G)

  Generalisability:

  It is a universal cognitive function and therefore generalisable to a large amount of people.

  As we all have STM/LTM and and will encode semantically and acoustically.

  So results should apply to all.
• Baddeley WMM Study: Evaluation- Strength (R)

  Reliability:

  He used a standardised procedure and followed ethical guidelines.

  It also had high levels of control as it was a lab experiment. He controlled the time words were shown for, the same words in the groups, screening tests for hearing, clear measure of effect of IV on DV.
• Baddeley WMM Study: Evaluation- Strength (V)

  Internal Validity:

  Internal= measures what it is saying to do

  The study was a lab experiment and set out to measure the effect of Acoustically and Semantically (S/D) words on LTM and STM
• Baddeley WMM Study: Evaluation- Weakness (G)

  Generalisability:

  There may be unique elements of the participants which are specific to them which would impact results.

  Their memory may be qualitatively different, eg workers of Cambridge research unit may have 'better' memories than the average person.
• Baddeley WMM Study: Evaluation- Weakness (R)

  Reliability:

  Independent measures- individual differences could impact results

  Sample- no idea what he used, so it can't be replicated
• Baddeley WMM Study: Evaluation- Weakness (V)

  External Validity:

  Lacks mundane realism due to it being an artificial setting

  No ecological validity as they knew what the study was and all work in a research setting/unit