Key Psychologists - memory

• Miller -

  • argues that most things come in 7's
  • He concluded that on average we can recall 7 items, with a range of 5-9 items
• Jacobs -

  • The digit span test - participants are given a set of digits and have to immediately recall them in order
  • This is repeated, adding one digit each time, until the participant can no longer accurately recall them - determining their digit span
• The mean digit span 9.3 numbers, and it is 7.3 for letters
• Evaluation of Miller -

  • one limitation of Miller's study is that he may have overestimated STM capacity
  • Cowan reviewed other research and concluded that the capacity of STM is only 4 chunks (plus or minus one)
• Evaluation of Jacobs -

  • one strength of Jacobs's study is that it has been replicated
  • his study is very old, older experiments in psychology tended to lack adequate controls - for example some participants digit spans may have been underestimated because they were distracted (confounding variable)
• Baddely -

  • presented different lists of words to groups of participants, he asked them to remember as many words as possible immediately after hearing, then twenty minutes later
• Baddely concluded that Short-Term Memory is acoustically coded
• Baddely concluded that Long-Term memory is semantically coded
• Strengths of Baddely -

  • high external reliability due to methodology of lab experiment - likely to get similar results if repeated
• Weaknesses of Baddely -

  • independent groups design - no control over participant variables, one group may be naturally better at memory than another
  • does not reflect a real life situation - people are unlikely to be asked to remember seemingly meaningless words. We may say it lacks ecological validity, and so findings may have limited application