Memory

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Duration of LTM - Bahrick et al 1975

Advantages

  • A strength of this study is that the findings are reliable. Further research has supported the claim that the LTM has a long duration. For example, Shepard 1967 showed pps 612 memorable pictures, one at a time. An hour later they were shown some of these pictures in a set of others and demonstrated almost perfect recognition. Four months later they were still able to recognise 50% of the photographs.
  • Another strength of this study is that it has high ecological validity. This is because it is a field experiment. Recalling school friends is not an artificial task and is actually something you might find yourself doing in everyday life. For example, when joining social networking sites such as facebook you may find yourself trying to remember your classmates names, and when somebody from school adds you, you may find yourself looking at their photo trying to place them.

Disadvantages

  • A limitation of this study is that researchers had poor control over the experiment. It was not recorded whether the participants were still in contact with anyone from school before they were tested. For all the researchers knew there could have been some school reunion the week before in which case of course the pps would remember their classmates.
  • A final limitation of this study is that the findings are ungeneralisable. The reasons for this are two fold. Firstly, this study only tells us about the duration of LTM for high school memories, not the duration of LTM in general. Secondly, the study lacks population validity as the sample were all American and so the results may not apply to other nationalities.

Evaluation

Conclusions: Findings show that classmates are rarely forgotten once recognition cues have been given. This supports the claim that the duration of LTM is potentially very long. These findings also support the claim that recognition is better than recall. It demonstrates that the LTM has a long duration  for types of information, but it cannot be concluded that it exists for all types of information

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