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Baddeley (1966): Coding in Short and Long Term Memory

Coding is the process whereby information is encoded (stored) in memory. Baddeley concluded that information is acoustically encoded in the STM and semantically encoded in the LTM.

Acoustic and semantic information

Acoustic and semantic information

  • Acoustic information is based on how the words sound.
    • E.g. acoustically similar words would be ball and mall.
    • The words ‘cat, dog, park’ would be acoustically dissimilar.
  • Semantic information is based on the meanings of the words.
    • E.g. the words ‘intelligent, smart, clever’ are semantically similar.
    • The words ‘house, elephant, walk’ are semantically dissimilar.
Conditions

Conditions

  • Participants were given four sets of words:
    • Acoustically similar words.
    • Acoustically dissimilar words.
    • Semantically similar words.
    • Semantically dissimilar words.
Method

Method

  • The experiment was set up with an independent group design.
    • This means that there are two groups, each with different participants who only do one of the two conditions.
  • In this case, the two conditions were:
    • Recall the sets of words immediately.
    • Recall the sets of words after a 20-minute task.
Results STM

Results STM

  • Participants in the group where they had to recall the words immediately (STM) had difficulty in recalling words that were acoustically similar.
Results LTM

Results LTM

  • Participants in the delayed by 20-minutes group (LTM) had difficulty recalling words that were semantically similar.

Baddeley (1966): Conclusions

Coding is the process whereby information is encoded (stored) in memory. Baddeley concluded that information is acoustically encoded in the STM and semantically encoded in the LTM.

Conclusion

Conclusion

  • Baddeley concluded that because the acoustically similar words were more difficult to recall immediately, the STM must rely on acoustic coding.
  • Secondly, because the semantically similar words were more difficult to recall after a 20-minute interval, LTM must rely on semantic encoding.
Ecological validity

Ecological validity

  • As this was a laboratory setting, there are issues with ecological validity.
  • It is a highly artificial scenario where people have to recall sets of words - this is not a real-life situation.
Memory and coding

Memory and coding

  • Another weakness of this study is that there are different forms of long-term memory that were not examined:
    • Episodic memory, procedural memory.
  • Additionally, there is another form of coding, (visual coding), which was not tested either.
Independent design studies

Independent design studies

  • Finally, independent design studies have a couple of weaknesses.
  • First, it is very difficult to control for the differences in people between the groups. So these differences may affect the results.
  • Second, independent designs need twice the amount of people compared to other designs, such as repeated designs studies.
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