Memory

To see if people could remember more short words than long words

• Reading speed measured
•  they were presented with 5 words on a screen
•  words were either one-syllable words or polysyllabic words
•  they were asked to write down the five words

• Participants could recall more short than long, 
• able to recall as many words as articulated in 2 seconds, 
• strong positive correlation between reading speed and memory

• Immediate memory span represents the number of items that can be articulated in roughly 2 seconds

• Short words are more familiar to us so easy to remember
• Baddeley responded by showing importance of pronounciation.

 To test how long STM lasts without rehearsal

• Participants shown a consonant trigram (CPW, NGW)
• Participcants asked to count backwards in threes to stop rehearsal
• After intervals of 3,6,9.. or 18 secs participants were asked to recall
• Repeated several times using different trigrams

• Participants able to recall 80% after 3 sec
• Fewer trigrams recalled as time lengthend 
• After 18s, less than 10% recalled

• After 3s the trigrams begin to become decayed and so STM is roughly 3s

• Trigrams arent everyday things to remember
• Interference from earlier trigrams caused poor recall

To explore the effects of acoustic and semantic encoding

• Participants were divided into 4 groups, five words drawn from each category
  • Acoustically similar words( e.g. man, mad, map)
  • Acoustically dissimilar words (e.g. pen, day, few)
  • Semantically similar words (e.g. great, big, large)
  • Semantically dissimilar words (e.g. hot, old, late)
• After hearing five words, were asked to recall them

• Acoustically similar words were harder to recall in CORRECT order (55%) than dissimilar (75%)
• Similarity of meaning had very little effect

• These findings support that STM relies more on sound than meanining

• Experimental method shows a casual link to between type of coding and accuracy of recall
• Conclusion from this study may not reflect the complexity of encoding.

To establish VLTM & to see any difference between recognition and recall 

• Graduates from a high-school in America over a 50-year period were found
• 392 graduates shown pictures from high-school yearbook
• Recognition group, each picture had a list of names, they had to match them up
• Recall group: participants were simply asked to name the people without a list

• In the recognition condition participants were:
  • 90% correct after 14yrs,  80% correct after 25yrs
  • 75% correct after 34yrs,  60% correct after 47yrs
• Recall group
  • 60% after 7yrs, 20% after 47yrs

• People can remember certain types of info for almost a lifetime
• VLTM is better when measured by recognition than recall

• Unclear whether drop-off in accuracy after 47yrs limits duration or a decline in memory with age
• Study used meaninful stimulus material and tested people's memories from their own lives

To explore the effects of acoustic and semantic coding in LTM

• Participants were divided into 4 groups, ten words drawn from each category

•  
  • Acoustically similar words( e.g. man, mad, map)
  • Acoustically dissimilar words (e.g. pen, day, few)
  • Semantically similar words (e.g. great, big, large)
  • Semantically dissimilar words (e.g. hot, old, late)
• After an interval of 20 minutes, which they did another task to do, they were asked to recall words 

• Recall was much worse for semantically similar (55%) than dissimilar (85%)
• Recall was the same for acoustically similar and dissimilar words

• LTM primarily uses semantic coding (this was compared to STM encoding

• Experimental method allows casual link between coding using in LTM and accuracy of recall.

• Paying attention
• Use of elaborative rehearsal (making links with other information, make it meaningful!)
• Organization
• Avoiding interference effects (retro - new info interfering, pro - old info interfering)
• Using the encoding specificity principle (context-dependent retrieval)
• Using mnemonics
  •  (ROYGBIV - primary colours, 'Richard of York gave battle in vain')
  • Loci - locations act as retrieval cues because you know them so well
  • Peg-word method (words are used to add imagination to the objects - peg's act as cues)
• Spacing your studies
• Context-dependent retrieval - (Godden & Baddeley)
  • Divers learnt 40 unrelated words either on land or 15 m underwater
  • Recall was tested in the same or the other location 
  • Those who learnt in same location remembered the most (12.5) on average
  • Findings support encoding specificity principle
  • Been used in practical applications. e.g. some skills used by divers are practised underwater.