Encoding, Capacity and Duration

Encoding-

Encoding is the way in which information is processed so that i can be stored in our memory. Information enters the brain via the senses, it's then sorted in various forms such as visual codes, acoustic forms and semantic forms.

Researcher #1 -

Baddeley conducted two experiments in 1996 to investigate the type of encoding which is prefered by the long term memory and by the short term memory.

He used four different types of lists to do this:

• acoustically similar (e.g. meet, feet and greet)
• semantically similar (e.g. neat, clean and tidy)
• acoustically dissimilar
• semantically dissimilar

People who took place in the STM experiment were asked to recall one of the lists of words they werewere given immediately. But, to test for LTM the participants were asked to recall the words after a times delay.

Baddeley found that words which sounded similar were remembered least well in STM. However, in LTM, the words remembered least well were those with similar meanings.

Researcher #2 -

In 1964, Conrad conducted an experiment to determin how STM is encoded.

Participants were presented with sequences of six constanents and then asked to recall the sequences. Conrad found that letter with similar sounds (e.g. P, D, T) were more difficult to remember correctly than letters with different sounds (e.g…